Restart Recollection: YL5 Student Reflection

Below is a typed up transcription of the reflection I shared today in this year's first recollection entitled "Restart Recollection" representing first year med students (YL5, batch 2026). The two questions below in bold were from our Campus Ministry's head– guiding questions centered around the theme of hope.



What is your source of hope these days? How does your relationship with God affect your experiences as a medical student or vice versa?

Instead of new year’s resolutions I decided to dedicate myself on a theme. For every decision I’m faced, this theme will guide my action. And when I was asked to do this, one of the guiding questions was what’s my source of hope these days? As God’s providence would show it lines up with what my theme is: For 2022, I have chosen this year for me to be the year of “hope”. I got it from reading Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" (or “God is love”)

The quote goes "Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness." 

When I read that I knew it was going to be my theme because it reflects my current experience as a medical school and my relationship with God. 
We all are probably familiar with St. Paul’s lyrical writing on love in 1 Corinthians 13: love is patient, love is kind diba? For me I recall his words “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face”. Or for our purposes for now I see in a zoom web camera lens dimly but then (around 2-3 weeks from now), face to face.

As a medical student it can really feel like I’m looking through a clouded window– what does the MBA have to do with my medical school life? What does research, or ethics, or even questioning this past month’s cardiorespi module. To ask how immunology, MSK, head and neck etc. I realized  I was asking the wrong question– I'm in medical school of course these hard sciences are what make up med! I was probably just tired. But while reflecting I thought to myself maybe what does this have to do with me is the wrong question. 

I decided to test out a different question: what does this have to do with my relationship with God?

The examen helps immensely: Does this act bring me closer or further away from God? During our last leadership session we had to watch Ignacio de Loyola on the life of st. Ignatius of Loyola. We crafted his hero’s journey. At the end of it, I found myself in a prayerful moment, which I wrote down in my blog, that explored the different ways of relating to God– even if It’s implicit. Maybe God for someone is a person’s best or ideal version of themselves or the center of their moral compass. I don’t know, only He knows the heart. But we know Him to be a person. Still, “For now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face”

However, I have learnt that being in medical school requires a spirituality of some kind, way, shape or form. When our minds are shutting off and our bodies are retiring from all the acads work, we will always find that our spirit is still kindling. In each stage of our lives, is a wick waiting to be sparked. I recall the fiery compassion of St. Augustine, whom I journey with and have a medal I wear of him around my neck– when it all made sense to him after his long hero’s journey. In book X of his confessions, he puts it this way:

Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being, were they not in you.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.

He concludes this chapter “On your exceedingly great mercy, and on that alone, rests all my hope.”

When I read this, it struck me and I thought of what St. John writes of with the Word made flesh: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not over come it”. 

Some things I’m doing this year as the workload piles up is that I pray less in total length but I pray more frequently. 

There are these little arrow prayers that a person can send up– short prayers that we shoot up to God like an arrow. Some of my favorites are: “Come holy spirit”, or “God come to my assistance”, or simply the Holy name of “Jesus”. This short moment helps center and calm me. 

Today I had 2 exams back to back and found myself praying literally in every question because I just felt like I wanted to get over it. But then I asked myself what does this have to do with my relationship with God? I realize it’s not for me to ask God to give me the answer, what we call "making alay”– but for me to cultivate hope. Hope that even if I do not know the answer– that my intellect is clouded right now– it will all make sense later. 

This is hope for me these days as I face even tough modules that our upper year batches have already faced and conquered. Hope. To end my reflection I wanted to share again that quote of Pope emeritus Benedict XVI from his encyclical Deus Caritas (God is love)–

"Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness." 




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