After six years of monastic and intellectual formation, and having pronounced my religious vows in the Community of St John in 2005, I was given last September my first missionary assignment: Cebu City, Philippines.

Youth work is our main mission here: I soon found myself entrusted with the chaplaincy of the National Science High School, preparing youth formation courses and teaching philosophy in seminaries and convents. Brought up in enterprising Hong Kong, it is a challenge to live amidst a ‘happy-go-lucky’ people, and a grace to learn from them. Filipinos live for the present and leave the rest to God. After successive colonial occupations, they know that their identity is a treasure still to be discovered, but many often find it difficult to shake away complexes of inferiority. 

To share things of the heart with the largely English-speaking youth, I learned some rudiments of their dialect, Cebuano. Yet, the real language to learn is perhaps fatherhood. Fatherhood for a monk vowing to keep chastity until death!? Well, not a physical family, but many young people do turn to us for fatherhood. Passions can often be rife in Filipino families and fathers often very absent – and oppressive when present. Accepting who they really are, yet challenging them to personal commitments, the brothers try to show the way to the heavenly Father in order that youths discover their real personal freedom, while giving their earthly father the respect they are due.

Easter Vigil

For a brother of St John, life in the convent remains the centre of gravity. My community has an American at its head, with four Filipinos, three Frenchmen, a Mexican, and myself a Chinese speaking a British accent which sometimes badly disconcerts Filipinos!

Easter Lauds

Way of the Cross