Ash Wednesday, Dustification and the End of the World
Ash Wednesday and Cosmology
PROFESSOR ANTON MEEMANA
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The rich symbolism of Ash Wednesday liturgy facilitates our spiritual and moral transformation and transcendence, our constant going beyond, our endless revolutionary continuity; that is, personal transformation through existential breakthroughs, spiritual outbursts and intellectual paradigm shifts. Ash Wednesday is the liturgical reenactment of cosmology. Every good liturgy has a cosmic dimension and a cosmological meaning.
Spirituality is never a flight from earth but an authentic celebration of our earthiness, our organic connection to the earth, our bio-chemical-psycho-spiritual connectivity to the earth. In that sense, the real term for spirituality is earthuality (Thomas Berry).
Spirit is the very depth, the very interiority of matter, of dust, of soil, of clay and of ashes. Escape from dust is escape from God and equally escape from earth is escape from our true destiny. Eternal life is facilitated in and through earthly realities.
There is no creativity without earthly connectivity. Sacred dust, holy soil, divine ashes, and mysterious clay are our family members.
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Ash Wednesday, Dustification and the End of the World Sanctification of the Dust
By PROFESSOR ANTON MEEMANA
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Dusts sing of a presence that is sacred, divine and holy and that hymn is the essence its luminosity. The whole dusty earth is an enchanted kingdom. Dusts contain the splendor of God and reflect the glory of God.
God’s creativity and originality is ever active, flows and flares forth in and through dusts and ashes. His creative energy pulsates in dust. There is no such a thing as cosmic energy apart from divine energy. God is the fountain of cosmic energy. No energy can give birth to itself. No energy can create itself out of nothing. There is a Creator of all energy. This prodigious cosmic creativity, this mind-blowing and mind-buggling cosmic energy is never arbitrary or auto-generated. Cosmic energy is borrowed-energy from God.
Matter has a mysterious and a metaphysical dimension. Dustification is part and parcel of divine justification. There is no sanctification of the human person without dustification.
Evolution is dust becoming alive, vibrant and reflectively conscious. Earth is a living and pulsating organism. Divine incarnation is sanctification of dust and dustification of the Sacred. Dusts possess a psychic inwardness and a multifaceted consciousness received from and given by its Creator. The evolving and expanding universe is a celebratory event, a glorious reality. The earth is becoming increasingly alive, giggling and pulsating. So can we become as alive, bubbling, pulsating, dazzling and sparkling as our good friend earth or as exuberant, jubilant, festive and radiant as the universe which is made of dust? Human beings are made of star dust.
Dusts are divine particles, sacred building blocks, divine miracles. And divine miracles are marks of Divine love.
Ashes are divine embers, sacred blazers and holy sparks. Adorability of dust is its sacredness. There is only way to become truly human, that is, in and through infinite humility. Humility is another name for humanity for both have the same root in Latin (humus=soil). Humans are creatures of humus. The way to heaven is a dusty path.
Ash Wednesday, Dustification and the End of the World
Dustification of the Creation
By PROFESSOR ANTON MEEMANA
Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lent, is not a day for misery and self-pity, but a day for
deep repentance and radical conversion. Ash Wednesday is ready to take away our ashen
faces. Ash Wednesday is a day of aspiration, assistance, assurance and ascent towards
spiritual magnanimity.
Humans are earthly creatures through and through and our destiny is organically and
necessarily tied up with the health and happiness of the earth. We are not flying creatures
such as eagles, crows, hawks, parrots and mocking birds. This fantasy about space travels
and colonizing other planets is a very comforting illusion and can at best become an escape
from our earthly, clayish, ashy, soily, dusty and fleshy reality.
Even if we develop the technological capability to settle down in another planet, what guarantee would we have that we are not going to destroy it the way we have plundered, raped and devastated the mother earth?
What is fundamentally and very urgently required of us is transformation of our
consciousness and our daily lifestyles, not so much space exploration for exploitative
enterprises. Earth is our second skin without which human life is absolutely impossible.
Our malnourished and anorexic perspective on dust is gathering dust and it is high time to dust it
off. The one who cherishes the earth cherishes the universe entire. By the same token, the one
who destroys the earth destroys the universe entire. The enemies of the earth are the enemies
of God and the friends of the earth are friends of God too.
Filipino Nurse Wanted in the United States
 Susan Bendigo, considered a fugitive since 2008, was charged with several counts of health care fraud.
No, the US does not want more Filipino nurses. Federal authorities are simply looking for a Filipino nurse who reportedly masterminded one of the biggest health care scam.
In the America’s Most Wanted website one can see a smiling profile of a Filipina in its banner. The title of the story reads “Nurses Gone Wild: Suspect Sought in $ 4.6 Million Scheme”. They named the suspect as “Susan Bnedigo” She also goes by the name of Susan Lim and Susan Bendigo-Lim.
According to the report, last July 9, 2009, federal and state authorities arrested 20 people for their role in a Medi-Cal fraud.Medi-Cal is almost equivalent to our Philhealth.
The investigation started in May 2004 when Priscilla Villabroza and Susan Bendigo conspired to hire unlicensed workers and have them perform services to disabled Medi-Cal patients.
Even without the right skill and license, Bendiog and Villabroza billed the Medi-Cal as if the hired workers are skilled. Through VIllabroza’s Medcare Plus Home Health Providers, its sister company Excel Plus and Unicare, they were able to drain $4.6 million dollars out of the California state.
The two falsified documents and impersonate Licensed Vocational Nurse. Bendigo reportedly coached the unlicensed workers to lie about their identity, license and qualifications.
The hired workers visited the patients at home and school to provide nursing services.
Their lack of qualifications became apparent when they were not able to perform basic nursing services. One case reported that the “nurse” was unable to replace a tracheostomy tube after it fell off the neck. In another case, a worker left the vicinity when she couldn’t provide care.
Villabroza has pleaded guilt in 2008 to five counts of health care fraud and is awaiting sentencing that can run up to 50 years. Her accomplice, Bendigo, was also charged in 2008 but apparently slipped authorities and fled here.
This is a distressing report for all Filipinos who are in the US for all sorts of reason. It is most disturbing for Filipino health workers in the US who might just be associated unwittingly with the case. The ire of the public is higher since the conspiring Filipinas milked disabled patients who are mostly children with cerebral palsy and developmental disabilities.
This is dismaying for Filipino nurses in the Philippines who still keep in their heart the dream of going to the US to work someday. While the two went for the kill and amassed millions of dollars through fraud, millions of Filipinos (nurses, health workers and the families who depend of them) are deprived ultimately of the opportunity to have a better life.
Most importantly, this is embarrassing for us who pride ourselves of being caring, loving and one of the most trustworthy health workers globally. Bendigo should come out of hiding and answer for her acts and not the rest of the Filipinos all over the world.
Our True Homeland and Fatherland
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To redeem is to reveal our true identity, our true homeland. Our true homeland is to live in God at each second. Homeland is beyond one’s country of origin. The one who has found one’s homeland is well on the way to Fatherland (or Motherland). Home is God, our real home is God. All the other homes we try to dwell in are slums and shanties, tents and huts. No other home can truly satisfy our homelessness. Searching for God is longing for our real home. The deeper the search for God, the more intense the at-homeness.
We feel at home when we live and move in God. Every day we must go in search of this home. The real shelter is divine shelter. The real shade is divine shade and the divine shade will never shake. So we can have a true foretaste of heavenly joy here and now. That is the true spirit and joy of Christmas. The birth of Christ is the beginning of our heavenward journey. Right now, let us take the first step towards it.
Christmas as a Decision to Love
Christmas day is a decisive day, a day to make some tough decisions. Every decision we make is either for God or against God. There is no neutral ground. Life is never neutral. There is no third possibility. Either we live in and with God or we do not. And if we sincerely feel that we do not, then we can always go back to the divine path. Every decisive day is a joyful day if we know how to discern in God. Decision-making is not a reason for fear and trembling.
Every crisis is a spiritual opportunity for us to deepen our character and broaden our horizon; the deeper the crisis, the greater the opportunity. Every day we need to make a decision to follow Jesus Christ and each subsequent day we need to renew, reinstate and reiterate that decision for to follow Christ is an ongoing decision.
If humanity is to progress, Christ is inevitable. No one can kick him out of history. Jesus restores in us our capacity to love for he is the true lover par excellence. Jesus is the sinless one (Sebastian Moore) for he gives us back our capacity to love. Sin blocks our true nature which is to grow in love.
Jesus has called us out of bondage, out of captivity, out of idolatry. The one who loves mostly is the freest innermostly. The one who loves freely lives joyfully. Christ is closer to us than we are to ourselves. In Christ, there is true freedom and there is no any other source of freedom except in Christ. Military victories cannot restore real freedom. Christ is our true freedom. To restore and to maintain freedom, people need to live like Christ.
Love indwells amongst us, takes flesh in the midst of us. Love makes its tent amongst us. Love makes a permanent abode in our slums, shanties, and shabby shelters in order never to leave us. One does not need to be a holy person to recognize it. A sinner’s recognition of this truth is the beginning of a new prospect of a new life.
It is true that people seldom change or some will never change significantly. We need to look at such people very sympathetically and not judgementally. Even if they do not want to change, they deserve our love, patience and sympathy. It is true that people are lazy, selfish, complacent, greedy, evil, cruel, vengeful, hateful, arrogant, stupid, silly, idiotic, loathsome, banal, ruthless, lustful and weak. But still we have to love them precisely because people are such.
The divinity of Jesus is not a separate reality but hidden, contained deep within his humanity. Humility is another name for humanity. Humility is not timidity or backwardness or feebleness. It is born of innermost freedom, strength and magnanimity of one’s character. Humility is the virtue of the brave, the strongest and the courageous. A weakling can never radiate it or practise it. Pride is the existential condition of the weakling. That is precisely why humility is such a rare virtue amongst us humans.
This is the conclusion of Professor Anton Meemana’s article on Christmas. It is an honor for me to have known such a remarkable and wonderful human being. Like Christ from birth up to His final years on earth the persecutions He encountered did not deter him to find the value of His birth, life and death.
Professor Meemana is very much alive after having his name constantly in the roster of established critics of the Sri Lankan government. His flight to the Philippines during the height of the methodical arrest and execution (that includes lynching) of any oppositionist was unmistakably miraculous and providential. This was despite his being an atheist, a staunch believer of the Marxist ideals and Darwin.
For more than twenty years he lived alone without any relatives in the Philippines. He found a home in many people’s heart all over the Philippine archipelago.
This final piece of his essay talks about our belongingness to something more profound than any place we can imagine.
Divine Nativity and Human Captivity
The divine nativity is the death of human captivity. The moment of his birth is the moment of a new birth for humanity and the memory of it is the memory of joy and peace, light and love. We have no future without keeping that memory alive. The glory of human existence is in its best memories. Nativity liberates us from captivity in all its myriad manifestations. Christ is the true light which yearns and burns in our hearts. Without his nativity, there is no real freedom in our lives.
The only ultimate meaning in life is to love God. The failure to do so is the origin and summit of all our misery, emptiness, and suffering. Emptiness is the absence of love in our hearts, it is the absence of fire, the lack of embers in our innermost chambers. The divine fire propels us to serve and love, to break and die, to bless and pray. Without a burning and a bleeding heart, one cannot contain the divine spark in one’s heart. All finite human love points to an infinite divine love. All our conditional love yearns and longs desperately for unconditional love and real frustration in life is not to glimpse it.
One’s interior darkness, gloominess can darken, further and add to the already existing exterior darkness. By the same token, one’s interior light can also lighten the exterior light further; more light is added to already existing light.
Jesus is the true torch bearer; that is , Jesus is the torch as well as the bearer. He is the true light and the carrier of it as well. Without divine light, love is not possible. One cannot love heart-bleedingly if one lives in darkness. The quality is love is in proportion to the light we bear and breed. He it is that loves us saves us. He saves us so that we can continue to love Him.
The Creator of the Universe and Human Destiny
God is present in our pain, in our suffering, in our daily struggles more intimately than we are present to our selves. God also struggles with us, on our behalf, when we continue to struggle in life. The good news is that the Creator of this universe, the Maker of this universe is ever present in us, amid us, amongst us, deep within us, above us, under us, beside us, over us, below us, adjacent to us, next to us and by us.
God can never abandon us, nor can he neglect us. God has no future independently of us, apart from us, without us. God’s life is necessarily tied with our lives. God encourages us, gently coarse us to take more and more risks on behalf of love. Only a courageous person can love. Every meaningful risk in life is a leap of faith. Every such risk brings us closer to God a bit more.
Love loves reaching out, stretching out. Love thrives on endless expansion without frontiers. The one who does not love is a black hole, contaminating everything around oneself and self-destructing oneself while destroying everything and everybody else too. By nature love has to explode constantly; love must burst out, flare forth, explode and expand. What will not explode will implode, self-destruct itself. The one who loves is a supernova that gives birth to thousands of new suns, comets, planets, moons and asteroids.
Even star dust stems from God and hence contains sparks of divinity. The dust is a sacred reality. A star which was made of dust showed the wise men as to where the Christ had been born. Dust reflects the wisdom of God. God is present even in dust. The dust is the best proof that God does indeed exist. The true significance of anything is not in its size. The tiniest particle possesses a universal significance for the love of God is a cosmic event, a planetary phenomenon.
Christmas, Captivity and the Cosmic Christ Part I (Incarnation and Redemption)
by Professor Anton Meemana
On this special season that we celebrate the birth of the savior in Christian tradition, I would like to share the insights and reflection of a former atheist and now a devout believer of Christ, Professor Anton Meemana. He lived in the Philippines for more than 20 years as a political refugee from Sri Lanka. This piece that shall run for several weeks is entitled “Christmas, Captivity and the Cosmic Christ”.
Christmas is the grand feast of the wretched of the Earth. Of course, the rich can also celebrate it but only in solidarity with the poor. The true festive joy is in pouring out one’s whole self for the life and happiness of the others. Every true celebration is a communal enterprise.
True celebration requires a sense of healthy exaggeration, a sense of dazzling jubilation and a sense of shining exuberance, but never extravagances. Extravagances kill the spirit and the joy of celebration and make it superficial, dry and lifeless.
Incarnation and Redemption
Incarnation, that is, God becoming a human in Christ Jesus, hints the proper orientation of human history. History is incarnation written large. Incarnation quenches the thirst for reincarnation. Incarnation transcends and transforms the need for reincarnation. Human history is restlessly and relentlessly in search of its Incarnator, its Redeemer. In taking human flesh, God has definitely and decisively embraced and befriended history and that is the beginning of its redemption. Repetition guarantees nothing and hence God can perfectly redeem us even without reincarnation. With God there is no past, present and future. There is only eternal now and therefore there is no need for reincarnation for our salvation. Reincarnation is absorbed in incarnation. Incarnation offers the possibility for a new life right now, right at this moment, right here. There is no need to postpone it for another life, for another time. Now is the temporal eternity.
Now is the moment of our redemption and emancipation. Now is the moment of truth. The truth of incarnation permeates the entire universe with sacredness, holiness, divineness and therefore every second, every moment is holy and therefore is an auspicious moment. With and in incarnation time is sanctified and made sacred. Now is the auspicious time. Now is the beginning of a new life, a new creature, a new man and a new woman. Redemption has already been granted and all we need to do is to claim it and to be worthy of it.
Incarnation is the protective skin of humanity. Incarnation is the second birth of the universe; it is the second Big Bang of the universe. It is the motor power of history. The whole universe is an incarnated reality; it is a divinely-incarnated cosmos. Jesus’s birth affected not only human beings but also the entire universe. Jesus is the saviour of the whole cosmos, of each galaxy, of each solar system, of each star and planet, of each supernova and black hole, of each comet and asteroid and meteorite, of each human being, of each animal and plant, of each bacterium and chromosome and microcosm. The whole universe is eagerly and enthusiastically longing for its Incarnator.
Incarnation is divine flesh entering our muscles, God feeding his body to us for our life, divine blood running in our hearts, divine chromosomes entering our cells, divine red blood cells entering our bone marrows, divine lenses visioning our eyes, divine breath entering our lungs, divine enzymes entering our saliva, divine tissues entering our ligaments, divine bearings entering our knee caps and joints.
The deepest and the ultimate meaning of history stems from incarnation. History is a useless passion without incarnation. History is full of horror and terror without it. Incarnation incorporates history in its unfolding. Incarnation invests in history out of unconditional love, compassion and mercy. Incarnation investigates history out of clemency. God disincarnates from his own self in order to incarnate in our midst. God leaves his heavenly abode in order to pitch his tent amongst us.
Incarnation facilitates the process of deification. We are created to become divine, are created for the union and communion with God and nothing less than that is an absolute waste of our precious life. In this sense, a vast majority of people, without any doubt, waste their lives and have meaningless deaths. Most people may be rich, educated, famous, wealthy and self-sufficient but feel empty deeply and desperately. They are born, they buy and they die without finding as to why they are born into this world.
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