Remembering You!

I will surely miss all of you, parishioners of St. Ambrose, with the exact same feeling I miss all of the people I love back home. I am sure you also miss your loved ones if you are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

It is such a normal thing to miss those we love. The ones we love become so much part of our lives and our beings, that when they are not there to share with us physically, we feel the pinch badly. Then matters get worse when we can’t seem to get hold of ourselves and do something significant and worthwhile even just to shield the pain a little and distract ourselves. No doubt, these are difficult moments. We cannot help but wish sometimes that our loved ones can stay by our side as long and as often as possible.

Whenever the holidays are coming, holidays like Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Season and New Year, it is indeed tempting to cry in our little corners and justify all this by saying that we are grieving or that we cannot help feeling this emptiness because the one we miss are just too important to forget so easily. Then we keep wishing and praying that they would come back to us. Wonderful memories of the past replaying in our minds sometimes have a way of surfacing into our conscious mind and make us wish to have that memories be a present reality.

Undeniably, these memories can be so beautiful and soothing but sometimes they are the very blocks that stop us from moving forward. Imagine if we could all be with all those we love forever. There would be no more grief or sadness from their loss. But that is not reality. Perhaps, the yearning is a foretaste of heaven. We can never really possess God while we are on earth. We have moments of great consolation when we feel his presence and love in those who love us but even that is not forever.

Our prayer then cannot be for God to keep our precious ones with us always. Our prayer ought to be that our love be so deep and so real that it has the power to go beyond time and space and any other physical or psychological limitations.

All of you will surely be missed. Thank you for everything!