Solitary Soul

FRIENDSHIP Mario D’Couto “In prosperity our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends.” -           John Churton Collins Aristotle once said, “The human person is a social animal” and if you’ve watched the movie “Cast Away” , you will know what I am referring to. As humans, we’re all relational beings. We need each other one way or another. To live alone would make us mad or it could lead us to do crazy things. Friendship is what makes life meaningful and yet it is important to cultivate the right kind of friendship for if we were to develop the wrong ones, it would only lead us to our downfall. This article is about how to discern the right kind of friendship and how to sustain it. The first thing that I would like to highlight is friendship, in the truest sense of the word, is willing the good of the other. Perhaps, the best example I can think of is the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible. Fi...

DOING WHAT YOU LOVE Mario D’Couto             It is said that when you do the thing you love, you will not work a single day of your life and rightly so because work becomes your enjoyment. Malcolm Forbes sums it up in the following words, “I think the foremost quality -   there’s no success without it – really is to love what you do. If you love it, you do it well and there’s no success if you don’t do well what you’re working at.”             Fr. Sajith Cyriac, in his book, “Celebrate your failures” says that one of the reasons why we fail is because we pursue things that do not resonate with our deepest selves. He quotes Steve Jobs who said, “If you don’t love it, you’ll fail.” No other decision can have a greater impact on your life than deciding to do what you love. When you do what you do, all the energy, focus, motivation and discipline you’ll ever ne...

THE BODY AS THE TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT Mario D’Couto             Matthew 21:12-13 speaks about Jesus driving out the money changers from the temple and as I read this passage from the Gospel, I was reminded of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he writes, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bough with a price. So, glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19:20). Over here St. Paul is urging and exhorting us to not abuse our bodies and to use it for God’s glory. Likewise, the temple which was supposed to be God’s dwelling place, was used for money changing and other commercial activities which consequently made the place unholy and this angered Our Blessed Lord who began to capsize the tables of the money changers and release all the pigeons from the cages that were being sold in the temple.   ...

TOWARDS A MATURE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD Mario D’Couto             We are called towards a relationship with God but what does it mean to have a mature relationship? We have just finished the season of Lent, the Holy Week and Easter and sometimes I think to myself, we do so much of fast and penance and after Easter, the fervour just seems to vanish. It kind of reminds me of the passage in the Gospel where in Our Lord says, “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Matthew 12:43-45). Mature relationship with God is based on trust rather than feelings.  ...

TOWARDS A MATURE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD – PART 2 Mario D’Couto             “Faith, not feelings, pleases God”, time and time again, we see in the Gospels that most of the miracles of our Lord were based on the faith of the people, examples such as, the woman who was healed of her haemorrhage after suffering for 12 years (Mark 5:25-34) or the healing of the centurion’s servant (Luke 7:1-10) and others, were all based on the people’s faith. In fact, we may just say that the very fact people came to Our Lord asking for help implied that they believed in Him. Now, here’s the catch. Believing or having faith in Our Lord in the hope of expecting something is not some kind of magic where because I believe that ‘this and this’ is going to happen that it was bound to happen as Robert Schuller writes in his book, “ WHAT HAPPENS TO GOOD PEOPLE WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN” , “God does not give us what we want but He gives us what we need...

TOWARDS A MATURE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD – PART 3 Mario D’Couto             The situations that will stretch your faith most will be those times when life falls apart and God is nowhere to be found. This happened to Job. On a single day, he lost everything – his family, his business, his health and everything he owned. Most discouraging – for 37 chapters, God said nothing!             So how do we praise God when we don’t understand what’s happening in our lives and God is silent? How do we stay connected in a crisis without communication? How do we keep our eyes on Jesus when they are full of tears? We need to do what Job did, “ Then he fell to the ground in worship and said , ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will depart. The lord gave and the Lod has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised. ” (Job 1:20-21)     ...

TOWARDS A MATURE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD – PART 4 Mario D’Couto             How nice it would be if being good was easy. Sometimes, I think to myself that the greatest battle is the battle within and rightly so because of our fallen nature but we have the assistance of Our dear Lord and His Blessed Mother in our quest to become the person that God our Heavenly Father wants us to be; for in as much as, we are in the world, we are and should be, not of the world.             There is a difference between ‘the world’ and ‘being worldly’ . The world in itself is not bad and whatever God created is good (Genesis 1:31). However, ‘being worldly’ is a mindset. When the things of the world become the centre of our lives, that is not good. Yet, despite our efforts in doing our best to become the person that God wants us to be, we could fall down, for even “…. the just man ...