SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 Watching a video by Bobby Jose Kattikad ofm Cap on the “ Cross of Christ ” ( https://youtu.be/wouU58uqS-0?si=JS1Il-fagR8Fr0Cy ) was an eye-opener to me. St. Francis of Assisi beautifully referred to the cross as "My Book". The cross is a profound "book" filled with dynamic, life-altering pages. Everything Francis understood about life, love, and sacrifice was read and absorbed from the pages of this ultimate book. By immersing himself deeply into the love of the Crucified One, he internalised its teachings so profoundly that the very wounds of Christ (the Stigmata ) were imprinted upon him. John of the Cross has read this book and found it a source of light in the darkest cells. John was imprisoned in a tiny, dark cell for nine months. Despite his intense physical and emotional suffering, he meditated deeply on the cross. From that utter darkness, the cross offered him the radiant spiritual light that eventually birthed his classic work, The Dark Night of the S...

 We have spent two thousand years cursing Judas Iscariot . His name has become synonymous with treachery itself, to call someone a Judas is to say there is no lower thing a person can be. And yet, if we sit long enough in the uncomfortable silence of honest reflection, a disturbing question surfaces. “ What would have happened without him?” The crucifixion—that event upon which the entire architecture of Christian salvation rests—required a betrayer. The authorities needed someone who knew Jesus intimately, who could identify him in the dark, who could navigate the inner geography of his movements and habits. Without Judas, the machinery of what Christians call redemption could not have turned. He was not incidental to the story. He was load-bearing. The cross stands, in some terrible sense, on his shoulders. This does not excuse him. But it transforms him, from a simple villain into something far more spiritually complex: the man chosen to do what love could not ask for openly. Wa...

  As I heard this Turkish fable , “When the axe came into forest, the trees said, the handle is one of us” what came to my mind was an figure and an event from the Gospels — Judas entering the garden to betray his master. The random violence of a stranger carries its own horror, but it is clean — it comes from outside, from the other, from the unknown. What undoes us far more completely is the wound delivered by a hand we once held. When the axe came into the forest, the trees did not tremble at its iron head. Iron was always foreign, always cold, and always enemy. What silenced them—what stilled the whole canopy in something beyond fear—was the handle. Wood from their own family: grain and fibre they recognised. Perhaps from a tree that had fallen nearby, one they had sheltered with their roots, shared soil with, stood beside through decades of seasons. The forest could not rally against the axe, because the axe was partly themselves , the apostles could not rally against Judas,...

 Jesus heals a man who was sick for 38 years—what else would you expect him to do? The man who was sick for all these years had suffered enough; the man had known no difference between a Sabbath day and other six days. The Jews accuse Jesus of working on a Sabbath. Jesus found no reason to defend or explain himself, except that he said that my father is always working, so am I. They again accused him further for calling God ‘his father’ and equating himself to God. Jesus was unapologetic. We often limit ourselves to fit in, be accepted, and be right, sometimes even to systems that are corrupt and unkind. Here the pressure on Jesus is to fit in. Jesus’ life began to be at risk, for it is said that the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him. Society is hard on people who do not fit in. Jesus continued his good works. Jesus went with the flow ; with an absolute trust in father, here in this passage is a long monologue by Jesus underlining his trust in the father, “Truly, truly, I ...

 My grandmother never called a family meeting. But whenever something important needed to be decided — a marriage, a land dispute, a child's education — she would simply start talking. To everyone. One by one, sometimes all at once, over tea, over meals, over nothing at all. Days would pass. Opinions would surface, clash, soften, and slowly — almost without anyone noticing — a direction would emerge. Nobody felt defeated. Nobody felt steamrolled. The decision, when it finally arrived, felt less like a verdict and more like weather: something that had grown naturally out of the season. She never knew the word dialogical . But she understood it completely. When we face a hard decision — especially in groups torn by difference, in families fractured by tension, in communities divided by fear — we instinctively reach for one of two tools. We either debate , or we dialogue . They look similar from the outside. People talk, others listen, words fill the air. But underneath, they are buil...

 Think of Raju who lives about forty kilometres outside Bengaluru. He wakes before sunrise, eats a small breakfast of rice and sambar, and walks to his small patch of land. He grows enough to feed his family and sells the small surplus at the weekly market. He owns no car. He flies nowhere. He buys almost nothing new. His carbon footprint, measured against the global average, is nearly invisible.  He is not saving the planet out of virtue. He is simply living within his means. And quietly, without knowing it, he is doing the rest of us an enormous favour. Here is the uncomfortable truth that nobody in a boardroom, airport lounge, or think tank likes to say plainly: the planet is still alive largely because billions of people like Raju consume very little. The atmosphere does not know your name or your bank balance. It only counts what you burn, what you throw away, what you demand. And for most of human history — and still today — the majority of people have demanded very litt...

  John 4:43-54  presents two incidents of growing in faith; journeying from desperate, hollow faith to a mature, enduring trust in Jesus. These are stories where the miracle itself becomes secondary to what one becomes because of it; highlighting that true belief often begins in desperation but must mature into trust and surrender. The people of Galilee , for whom Jesus worked most of his miracles had no honour for him; but now receives him back. A royal official , who came to Jesus just out of sheer desperation, now believes along with whole of his household.  The turning point of the narrative is when Jesus does not perform the dramatic action the official requested. He doesn't go to the house, touch the boy, or command the fever publicly. Instead, Jesus says,  "Go, your son will live"  (John 4:50). At this moment, the official is placed in a critical juncture: to trust the  Word  of Christ or to demand his own way. The text says,  "The man beli...

 Every brain begins as a blank page. Not quite empty — the hardware is there, the neurons fired at birth — but the content, the character, the very texture of who you are: none of that exists yet. It waits to be written, education is this process. And here is the unsettling truth: it gets written whether you are paying attention or not. Show me what a child sees every day, and I will show you who they will become. Neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity — the brain's lifelong ability to rewire itself in response to experience. But you don't need the word to feel the reality. Think of the child who grows up in a home where books line every wall. Reading feels natural to her, almost like breathing. Now think of the child who grows up watching his parents solve every disagreement with silence or shouting. He has no template for talking through conflict, because he has never seen it done. Neither child chose their starting point. Both were quietly, invisibly shaped by it. Roger Fe...

 The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican ( Luke 18: 9-14 ) perfectly mirrors the spiritual crisis of Blaise Meredith in the novel The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West . At the beginning of the novel, Monsignor Blaise Meredith discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. This terminal diagnosis forces a brutal reckoning: he realises that despite being a priest and a respected canon lawyer in the Vatican, he has never truly loved, suffered with others, or experienced genuine human connection. He has hidden behind the rigid rules, paperwork, and safe bureaucracy of the Roman Curia . His faith is orthodox but entirely bloodless. His primary struggle is the terrifying realisation that he is facing death without ever having truly lived. For most of his life, Meredith unknowingly embodied the spirit of the Pharisee. The Pharisee approached God "full of himself; and he went back unchanged" . Similarly, Meredith built his life in the Roman Curia on orthodox correctness and canonic...

  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus commands His disciples with a charge that has never stopped to unsettle: “ Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect ” ( Matthew 5: 48 ). The word lands like a stone thrown into still water. Circles of interpretation ripple outward. How? In what manner? By what conceivable standard? Thirteen chapters later, the answer arrives—not as an abstraction, not as a philosophical treatise, but as a parable about a king, a debt, and a man who could not do what had been done for him (Matthew 18: 21–35). The perfection Jesus spoke of on the mountain now has a name, a shape, and a practice. It is mercy . Christian perfection is not the perfection of the philosopher—the cold ideal untouched by human frailty. It is the perfection of the Father who “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5: 45). Divine perfection is not distance from the wounded. It is inexhaustible movement toward them. Mercy...

 Learning undeniably builds one’s intelligence. Learning is difficult, and real scholarship is rare. As we undergo studies, we ourselves ask, when will I get done with it: assignments, exams, dissertations, presentation and so on. And we dismiss any further learning, saying, learning is only for the most intelligent and strongest. But history proves otherwise. People who have stayed with something long enough, arrives—it is true with education too. Think of Charles Darwin . He was not considered a brilliant student. His own father fed up of him, once seems to have said, he cares for nothing but hitting stray dogs and catching rats. Darwin himself has said that his teachers and father considered him to be 'a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. And yet, this ordinary boy developed the habit of noticing. He watched. He asked questions no one else thought to ask. He kept writing down what he noticed as a boy. And He gave the evolutionary world one of its m...

 The essence of KM Gaffoor ’s Malayalam poem Yudham ( War) could be translated this way: over small things, we lose our patience and cool, we grow in anger and revenge. When the food had a little less salt, we struck the table in frustration, and pushed the plate away. When someone gave a harsh feedback we banged the door so hard. When a glass slipped and shattered, we raised our hands in punishment. Over small things — a meal, a feedback, a mistake — we became storms. ‘This is us.’ And then we, seeing the horrors of war, ask, what is war?   Why is there war? KM Gaffoor answers it plainly: ‘War is simply us, made larger .’ War is not something that happens out there, between nations and armies and strangers on maps. War is something that happens in here — in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the spaces between people who are supposed to live with each other.