Surprising Grace

Here we are again at that strange, blessed in-between time, between the old year and the new. I always appreciate this interval between the busy-ness of Christmas and the welcoming of the new year – a kind of fallow space in which to gather the blessings of the year that has passed, and listen to the new hopes and dreams emerging in our hearts for the future. It is a time for gratitude, and also for renewing our commitment to what truly matters. As I looked back over this year, this passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “ Letter to a Young Poet ” spoke particularly to me: You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems. … I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its ro...

Last month I went "on retreat" to a beautiful place on a hill overlooking a lake. A group of teenagers were there at the same time on a retreat programme organised by their school. I was by turns annoyed, when the noise they were making made it difficult for me to experience the silence I was hoping for, and sympathetic, when I overheard their emotional sharing with each other about their lives, not without tears. It reminded me that teenage life is not easy! One evening I was sitting quietly by myself in the garden. The sun was setting to the west, a fiery sphere of liquid gold descending gently into the silhouettes of trees cresting the hill, coloring the veils of cloud streaming across the sky a shimmering red, yellow, orange, and purple. The glorious beauty of it touched me somewhere deep inside. If I hadn't already believed in God, I would have at that moment. Into this sacred moment, of course, barged a bunch of chattering teenagers... though the beauty of th...

My friends and I are at the age when many are starting their own families, and so it is a joy for me to see cute pictures of kids on facebook, visit them when I am in Singapore, and hear stories from friends about the early stages of motherhood. It often amazes me how motherhood seems to bring out extraordinary strength, love and resilience in people. Friends who seemed to be perfectly ordinary mortals before are now selflessly putting their own needs aside for those of their babies. Their lives revolve around their children, and their conversations are about types of milk powder, baby-led weaning, comparisons of different approaches to early-childhood education, etc. One of my friends commented jokingly the other day, "I used to like sleeping, but now it seems that sleep is for wimps." As much as I personally love sleeping, I am quite happy not to have to wake up for night feedings! Living here in the Philippines, I also see other contexts in which motherhood calls ...

In 2014, I moved to the Philippines, where I lived for little over a year. That wasn't the first time I had lived out of my native Singapore, but it was the first time I had done so in a country with a language and culture so different from my own. I couldn't have anticipated how much of a shock it would be for me to leave all that was familiar and find myself in strange territory. Someone explained to me then that what I was experiencing was a loss of power: the power I had had in my own country that came from being able to communicate in my own language, knowing how to get around, being plugged into networks of shared meaning, having a good job and the self-respect that came from it, the support of loved ones, etc. ... For a while I wondered, as I tried to pick up the pieces, what was left of me when all of that had been stripped away. I knew in theory that I was deeply loved for who I was and not for what I could do... But it was a long time before I started to really un...