Reflection by Sem. Jairus Angel C. Gregorio
Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be?
Andy Williams asks this in “Where Do I Begin (Love Story),” and strangely enough, this question fits the Gospel today. Because when we talk about love, marriage, vocation, commitment, and even celibacy, saan nga ba tayo magsisimula? Sa feelings? Sa attraction? Sa happiness? Sa compatibility? Or perhaps, as Jesus reminds us, we must begin somewhere deeper, from God’s original intention for love.
The Pharisees ask Jesus a question about divorce. On the surface, it looks like a question about marriage law. But Jesus does something more profound. He does not begin with the loopholes. He goes back to creation: “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female?” Before discussing what is permitted, Jesus asks us to remember what love was meant to be.
We live in a culture where relationships can easily become contractual. “Kapag okay tayo, stay tayo. Kapag hindi na ako masaya, I leave.” Sometimes commitment becomes conditional on convenience. We can treat people according to how well they satisfy our emotional needs. Even in religious formation, we can unconsciously bring this mentality into our vocation. We stay when things make sense. We become committed when we feel inspired. We become faithful when the community is easy to love.
But what happens when it becomes difficult? This is where the Gospel becomes more than a teaching about marriage. It becomes a question about covenant. Jesus presents love as something that cannot be reduced to emotion. Feelings matter, but feelings alone cannot sustain a covenant. Attraction can begin a relationship, but attraction cannot explain fidelity. Compatibility can make life easier, but compatibility cannot explain why someone remains when everything becomes difficult.
Love, in the Christian sense, has a moral dimension. It involves freedom, responsibility, sacrifice, truth, and fidelity. And perhaps this is why the Gospel speaks directly to us as seminarians.
We are not married, but we are also learning what it means to say “yes” to a vocation. Formation constantly asks us whether our yes is merely emotional or truly covenantal. It is easy to say yes to God when prayer feels meaningful, when community life is peaceful, when ministry gives us fulfillment, and when we feel appreciated. Mas mahirap ang yes kapag tahimik ang Diyos, kapag may conflict sa community, kapag pagod ka na, kapag questioned ang abilities mo, or when the future you imagined suddenly becomes uncertain.
There are moments when we might silently ask, “Where do I begin again?” Maybe we begin where Jesus begins: “from the beginning.” We return to the reason why we said yes in the first place. This does not mean romanticizing suffering or pretending that every difficult situation should simply be endured. Jesus does not glorify abuse, manipulation, or injustice. Christian fidelity is not blind submission. It requires truth and discernment. In marriage, vocation, and community life, commitment does not mean tolerating everything without boundaries. Genuine covenant seeks the good of the other because love is ordered toward truth, not merely toward permanence.
This distinction matters. There is a difference between staying because you are afraid to leave and staying because you freely choose to love. There is a difference between obedience and compliance. There is a difference between sacrifice and self-destruction. There is also a difference between being faithful to a vocation and simply being attached to an identity.
As seminarians, we must examine this honestly. Sometimes we may become attached to the idea of becoming a priest more than to Christ Himself. We can become attached to titles, ministries, vestments, responsibilities, recognition, academic achievements, or the image of being a good seminarian. But Jesus does not call us to preserve an image. He calls us to conversion.
That is where Saint Maximilian Kolbe becomes especially relevant. Kolbe’s life shows us that love becomes credible when it costs something. In Auschwitz, he offered his life in place of another prisoner. His priesthood was not merely something he possessed. It became something he gave. His vocation moved from the altar to the concrete reality of another person’s suffering. That kind of love challenges us. Because it is easy to talk about love in the chapel. It is harder to practice love in the community. It is easy to preach forgiveness. It is harder to forgive someone who repeatedly irritates us. It is easy to say that we love God. It is harder to love the person sitting beside us when we are tired, misunderstood, or disappointed.
Perhaps formation is precisely where our understanding of love is tested. We become, in a sense, the laboratory of our vocation. We expose our impatience, our insecurities, our competitiveness, our need for recognition, and our difficulty with vulnerability. Sometimes the person who irritates us most becomes the person who reveals something about ourselves that we did not want to see.
That is why community life matters. To walk together means learning how to listen, how to disagree without destroying communion, how to correct without humiliating, and how to receive correction without immediately becoming defensive. We cannot speak convincingly about a synodal Church if we cannot practice patient listening inside our own formation community.
The Gospel also challenges the modern idea that freedom means having unlimited options. Jesus presents another vision of freedom. Christian freedom is not simply the freedom to leave whenever something becomes difficult. It is also freedom to commit oneself to something greater than immediate desire. This is particularly important in a culture that often tells us, “Follow what makes you happy.” He asks something deeper: “What is true? What is good? What kind of person are you becoming through your choices?”
A vocation cannot be sustained by the question, “Do I still feel happy here?” because feelings change. The deeper question is, “Am I becoming more capable of loving God and others through this vocation?” There will be days when we do not feel like praying. There will be days when community feels exhausting. There will be days when formation seems repetitive. There will be days when we wonder whether we can become the person God is calling us to become.
Maybe that is when we discover whether our vocation is rooted in emotion or in freedom. “Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be?” Perhaps the Christian answer is simple: begin with the One who loved first. Begin with God. Begin with the truth that vocation is not primarily about what I want to become. It is about whom I am willing to love and serve.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe understood this in a radical way. His final act was not a dramatic attempt to prove his holiness. It was the concrete expression of a life already shaped by self-giving. He had learned that love is not measured by how intensely we feel, but by how freely we give ourselves for another. That is the challenge for us.
If we want to become priests, we must first become men capable of love. Not perfect men. Not men without weaknesses. Not men who never question. But men who can remain faithful to Christ even when fidelity becomes costly, men who can choose truth over convenience, service over recognition, communion over ego, and self-giving over self-preservation.
Because at the end of formation, beyond the academics, ministries, evaluations, titles, and responsibilities, that may be one of the most important questions we will have to answer. Where do I begin? I begin with Christ. I begin again whenever I fail. I begin with the people God has placed beside me. And I learn, slowly and painfully, that a vocation becomes credible only when love becomes concrete. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.
Amen.
By Jan Ernest Pàting
A second-year AB Philosophy student and aspirant of the Society of Saint Paul. He is currently discerning his vocation to the religious life inspired by the footsteps of the great apostle Paul.