In The Middle of An Open Sea

Courage year-end reflection of Stubborn Sojourner, a brother in the community.


I am significantly healed… or so I thought. After two years of being in a healing ministry, really immersed into the realities that have happened to me when I was growing up, the root causes of my SSA issues, and being revealed the truths of who I am before the eyes of God, I thought I was significantly healed already. There are moments that I am spiritually high, but this year the Lord has brought me to more experiences of desolation than consolation. I still have to deal with my critical and controlling mother. I still have to understand my father’s attempts to make up for the lost opportunities for us to bond as father and son when I was still a child – at times I feel suffocated by his sudden burst of showing affection towards me. When temptations of lust in me are weakened, temptations of anger and outrage replace. I had to deal with my personal anxieties about my own future now that I am already 34 years old and my kid brother is already planning to get married. I had to face the demons of my past as I struggled to have a meaningful experience with an all-male choir where some members are practicing homosexuals, and in fact some of them are in gay relationships with one another.

Questions begin to rise in my heart, like – why are people living in the gay lifestyle seem happy? Am I really happy living a chaste life? Where am I going at my age? Am I still called to the priesthood, to be single forever or to have a family? Where is God calling me in all of these experiences? I began to see myself as a sojourner that has already left land, and is now in the open sea – with nothing on sight. The temptation to go back towards the land, to the more familiar route back to where I came from, is there and it becomes stronger each day. As I feel that I am in the middle of nowhere, I am more troubled in spirit than ever.

However, as I quiet myself (which I don’t normally do because of my busy schedule), in the deep chambers of my heart God is lovingly calling me into Himself, letting me understand how little and insignificant I am despite of everything that I may have done, and how great and strong and merciful is He towards me. This little ball of light is my life-saver – because I may spend my whole lifetime in the middle of the open sea, not knowing where to go or what to do, but at least I know that God wishes me to be with Him – an insignificant, ungrateful and imperfect creature that I am. God is trying to woo me into Himself, detaching me from everything, from everyone, from every idea that pops in my head – until I only have Him. May the Holy Spirit, Mama Mary, my beloved guardian angel and my beloved saints John the Evangelist, Joseph, Maximillian, Therese, and Faustina – help me until the end of my voyage towards Jesus Christ, my one and only Beloved.


ABOVE ALL (Christian worship song)

Above all powers, above all kings, above all nature and all created things, above all wisdom and all the ways of man, you were here before the world began… Crucified, laid behind the stone, you lived to die, rejected and alone, like a rose, trampled on the ground – you took the fall, and thought of me, above all.