I Have Found My Inner Joy
By Jinky Ucol
Evangeline “Jinky” Ucol is from Magsaysay, Occidental Mindoro. She joined the Columban lay missionary team PH 24 with Lily Faunillan and Jake Lunor, and left for Fiji in October 2017 for a three-year mission.
At 2AM, the phone rang asking me to bless the dead. By the time I reached the hospital room, the family was grieving and the dead body was already covered. That was good timing, otherwise it would have been difficult for a first-timer like me to bless the dead person. I was a bit scared and hesitant. Questions came into mind: What do I do now? How will I show my sympathy to the family? Basic questions that we are confronted with in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).
As part of our formation program, I go to the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa under the Philippine Jesuit Prison Service for my pastoral ministry every Saturday. We usually start our day at the Reception and Diagnostic Center where we give values formation classes to new inmates considered as juvenile offenders. We facilitate this class through a group reflection on the gospel. Then we proceed to the Medium Security Compound to do some counselling with inmates who have long been held in prison or visit the inmates who, for a long time have not been visited by their families.
This is an extract from the sharing of Jose Isagani Flores, PhD, from Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental, a member of the first group of seminarians to enter the College Formation Program of the Missionary Society of St Columban in Mabolo, Cebu City, in 1994. He is on the college faculty at Colegio San Agustin, Bacolod City, where his wife, Jo Ann A. Flores, PhD, RN, is Dean of the College of Nursing. 
Fr Leonito Distor is from Marbel, South Cotabato and is the fifth of six siblings. He was installed as the First Filipino Columban Parish Priest of Our Lady of Remedies Parish, Malate, Manila on May 1, 2014. He is currently a member of the Regional Council of the Society of St Columban in the Philippines.
