Cut-and-paste

One of the marvels of this computer age is cut-and-paste. I could not have done this homily without control-x and control-v. Back in the days of Olivetti and Remington, we only had Snopake correction fluid. Or that white strip or correction tape we typed over to make wrong letters disappear altogether.

Cut-and-paste is convenient. It speeds up the task of writing and composing your piece. But it is not without its dangers, like lazy thinking, plagiarism, eclectic or disjointed or impulsive composing. In a way, Remington and Snopake made us think twice, feel twice before we committed things to paper. Cut-and-paste can short-circuit all that.

We need to exercise caution whenever and wherever we do cut-and-paste. We need to be careful when do cut-and-paste in our lives, our faith, and even in Easter.

Sometimes our lives can be a cut-and-paste affair. There are portions (such as memories, events, or people) that are cut out and pasted over. The human mind and body can do cut-and-paste as a way of coping with trauma. Willfully at times, we do the cutting ourselves, cutting someone out of the story of our lives and pasting others (or other things) instead. Or perhaps unwillingly, we find ourselves cut out from someone else’s story and we discover others pasted over in our stead.

Revisions are a fact of life. They are organic to our story. Cut-and-paste however can give us an illusion of the speed and ease with which change happens in our lives. In some ways, using Snopake brought us closer to reality. It takes time to backspace and correct things, that is, if we can still backspace and right the wrong. In those days, you painted the white over the wrong. You blew on the paint and waited for it to dry. The white smear stays there actually to remind you of where you strayed. Before cut-and-paste, you could see these scars on the pages of your story that is your life. Cut-and-paste can hide all these. It can be artificially instant, forgetful, and hurtfully hurried.

Even our faith can be a matter of cut-and-paste. We can cherry pick the parts that suit us and discard the ones that don’t fit our notion of faith. You see that in the way we spend our time every day or even on a rest day like Sunday. Prayer time and church commitments become dropdown menus with various options to check and uncheck.

We might justify all these by arguing that faith is something that was pasted on us by our parents and school and culture. Which is true. It was pasted on us as it was pasted on them by their parents and their school and their culture and time.

When this paste of faith just stays on the surface and is not absorbed by the deep layers of our lives, faith becomes more of a chore that burdens us than a gift that gladdens our spirit. Faith may have been pasted on us, decided for us in the beginning, but now that we are older, we can decide whether we will let this faith remain on the surface or let it lead us to a living encounter with our Lord, an encounter that becomes a source of joy and strength for our lives and community.

Easter can be cut-and-paste as well. It can be so when we cut out Easter joy and choose to paste this over with regret or resentment or guilt. It can be so when we cut out the possibilities of mercy and conversion and new life, and choose to replace these with indifference and despair.

Easter can feel like an anomaly, like a puzzle piece that won’t fit the jigsaw picture. Pope Francis tells us, “There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.” To those who suffer greatly or are in grave difficulty, he counsels us to revive the joy of faith nonetheless, to let the joy that “adapts and changes” come into our lives, like “a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that … we are infinitely loved.”

Conversely, when we cut out the sorrows in this via dolorosa and continue to live in denial of our defilement and our idols, the sin we need to die to, then Easter joy becomes a surface thing, something pasted over this via dolorosa. The readings in this vigil tonight tell us of God’s continuing faithfulness in our fallen history. Easter joy is not a result of cut-and-paste, of cutting away the indelible marks of sorrow and defeat. Easter joy endures amid the shadows, like a light that flickers in the darkness, a light that is sustained by this intuition and certainty “that we are infinitely loved.”

We are infinitely loved. Easter opens us up not so much to the possibility of infinity or eternity as to the truth of infinite love. We are loved eternally. This love never dies. Not even in death.

In a way, redemption could have been a matter of cut-and-paste as well. We could have been whited out and pasted over with less troublesome things like flowers or easter eggs. It would have been less messy. But it seems there is no backspacing with God. There is only infinite love and infinite patience, giving us the joy and the courage to keep on writing our stories with Him, never mind the smears and the scars and the endless revising.

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Fr. Jose Ramon T Villarin SJ is President of the Ateneo de Manila University.  For feedback on this column, email [email protected]