You Tell 'Em Monsignor!

Article from DR1, an English Dominican News Source (emphasis my own):

Monsignor: Governors can't be softies

The Bishop of San Francisco de Macoris, Monsignor Jesus Maria de Jesus Moya spoke out yesterday, calling for a government with more authority. "They should not be softies, but need to be capable of applying the laws and earnest", he said, as reported in Hoy.

He urged the government to deliver the RD$4 billion it had promised for the education sector during the summit held early this year. The money would be used to raise quality standards of public education.

He said that for years there has been no evidence of political will and instead there is buck-passing between the public and private sector, when both groups should join forces to solve the problems.

"A softie cannot govern, it has to be a strong and earnest person," said the bishop. He urged society to demand ethics from politicians, instead of accepting that to be a politician is synonymous with being a liar.

"See that I am almost 75 years old, and all my life I have heard that government is going to resolve the electricity problem and everything has remained the same," he said.

Monsignor de Jesus, who is rector of the Universidad Nordestana in San Francisco de Macoris, said that there has never been political will to put education first. He said this is also due to a lack of community empowerment and unity.

He criticized the great levels of inequity in the country, commenting on thousands of good public servants who make pennies, while there are others who work very little and get paid millions.

Monsignor also criticized the business sector, saying there were private groups that think the government has to do everything.

Two Good E-mails

This is the e-mail I received yesterday from "Religious Order B". I'm excited as I waited over a week to get a response.

Dear Ray,

Thanks for writing. I apologize for being slow to respond; I have been busy seven days a week lately! I am heading off to California in the morning, but I promise to be back in touch when I get back next week.

In the meantime, be well.
Br. *****

In addition, I got the tutoring job I interviewed for the other day secured for the Fall. I'm awfully surprised as I couldn't figure out from the top of my head 24 divided by 32 was 75%. I answered C, 60% and the interviewer girl just nodded and smiled and thanked me for my dumb answer...rofl. Anxiety makes us lose the most basic brain functions I think.

I'm still courting Lady Poverty as I still have no summer job, but we'll see what happens.

Why Do You Not Love Me?

Not to state the obvious, but no one likes to be rejected. I think I can say that I have fallen in love [probably] twice in my life. Though neither love was consummated in the form of a relationship, I'm grateful for having fallen in love because it's such a great feeling everyone should feel at least once. I have to be honest in saying it's not easy getting over someone who rejected you and at times the question of even being loveable has crossed my mind (I'm loveable by my family, yes, lovable by my friends yes...but loveable?).

If sexuality is an energy that cannot be humanly created or destroyed, then even celibates (actually all people) have to find a healthy way to live it and express it. I once read in an online forum excerpts (thanks to the kind person for uploading them) from Ronald Rohlheiser's book, The Holy Longing, where he explains that sexuality is different from genitality (physical sex) and that the Latin root for sex is secare, which means to "be cut off". Basically he says that at birth we are cut off, like a branch cut off from a tree that gives it life from the roots; and during our lives we live with a longing to become whole again. In its maturity, he then says, sexuality is then about true intimacy, relationship and self-giving, not just about romanticism and genitality (though genitality is certainly part of this wider spectrum). I have to read the book because I can't explain it as well as he did just from those portions.

What's my point? Basically, that love is awesome. But love (in the traditional ways we think of love), while a legitimate longing, is sometimes confused (especially when it takes the form of overly active searching) with another unfulfilled longing (naturally you can't eat cake to quench your thirst!). I'm not saying that may be the truth for your situation or for both of mine (I'm not sure what 'other longing' I might have been trying to replace), but it's something that we seem to do often even in other areas of life.

I don't hear voices or anything, but I tonight I wonder if Jesus asks Himself why I don't love Him the amount (of course not the specific way) I love the one who rejected me. I don't say this to guilt trip anyone who has been rejected because only God most intimately knows your story, but if God is said to be more loving than the most loving person you know, than how much more tender (and I don't mean this in a creepy date God way) and accepting must God's love be? He's with me through this rejection and even though I haven't totally reached the place where I can answer His question, I'm ok and accepted where I am for now.

I just received an e-mail I had been waiting for over a week, so I have to go.

Sacré-Cœur!

Fr. Martin (and probably Jesuit order priests in general) has a way of making things so approachable to younger and general audiences than some other Catholic blogs I've read, he's great.

Recovering the Sacred Heart
Author: Fr. James Martin, SJAs you probably know, the Jesuit St. Claude la Colombiere was the spiritual director to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who received the visions of the Sacred Heart in Paray-le-Monial in France. In a vision, Jesus was said to have told Margaret Mary, who was having a hard time getting anyone in her convent take her seriously, that he would send her his "faithful servant and perfect friend."

[full article>>]

Toilet Spirituality

Thanks to the friends that continue praying for my little cousin and to the rest of my family providing much needed pastoral care to his immediate family.

Sometimes when I think about religious life, I think about the great joy it's given me to lead or be on retreats in both high school and college, along with my experiences in men's spirituality group. It's hard to explain, it gave me a feeling of "being part of" rather than a feeling of being there but not really there, as I feel in my home parish. If I become a religious, I want to feel authentically "part of" rather than "playing the part". There are maybe two congregations (at least definitely one) where I truly feel like that I would be able to obey with joy and not with fear or unsettled obligation.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I guess when I read about the saints' description of how their austere lifestyles fills them with explosive joy and love for Jesus or when I see how older family members express their spirituality, I find I can't relate to that. Sometimes the out pouring of spiritual emotion can be consoling and insightful, other times I just feel like it's tacky or something that offsets or intimidates me. Maybe it's not the devotions themselves that are offsetting, maybe it's just the type of people I associate with them.

I'm not doubting their authenticity, but I don't always experience prayer or joy the way they experience joy; it would be like asking the charismatic to worship like the contemplative or the golfer to enjoy tennis.

However, I think I'm offered the consolation that God doesn't make everyone experience joy and prayer in only one way. There is a retreat house about two hours away from here. And in that retreat house there's this bathroom and a toilet stall with a window and the view of the beautiful trees outside. Sometimes, without really using the stall I've stopped there for a couples of minutes to just stay there and look outside, it gave me a feeling of peace and truly being with God because I was enclosed in this tiny space with this tiny little window and no one else nearby. It just felt very safe and consoling, like time stopped and no one's expectations (not even my own) mattered.

Of course, I probably would have chosen a less weirder place than a toilet stall by a window, but that is when the feeling came to me and it is where I accepted it. It may seem like a silly thing, but as much as I may like Religious Order B, it's moments like those that make me feel like I truly belong in Religious Order A. Whether I choose the happier life path (religious life or otherwise) scares me because I don't want to live a life where I'm just playing the part, but I hold on to little moments like those that convince me that no matter how happy or hard my life turns out to be, there will be a moment where time actually stops still and nothing else will matter but being at peace.

Senselessness

It's a little difficult to remain faithful to this blog, especially since its public nature doesn't let me reveal as much about myself and also because (ok a little human pride here) I know no one reads it!

I started reading Maurice and Thérèse, a book about the series of letters written back and forth between Thérèse of Lisieux (a Carmelite French nun and later, saint) and Maurice, a long forgotten missionary seminarian of the time who had been struggling with many spiritual issues.

I have to admit Maurice doesn't sound someone I would like very much, but I'm not sure if it's because of the dramatically pious 19th Century language he uses, because he reminds me of some seminarians I see today, or maybe [worse!] because there are parts of him that remind me of myself.

It's just very interesting to see how it contrasts with Thérèse's maturity by that point, even she herself was struggling with physical ailment (tuberculosis) and the doubts of atheism.

I don't think the admission of atheism or doubt by part of religious figures is troubling. Instead, I feel it's comforting because for me it makes these people more real and authentic than the flat sometimes sugar coated hagiography in the books I've read about saints since being a little kid.

Recently I lost a little cousin (more specifically, my cousin's young child) to a tragic weather accident (an immediately fatal lightning strike). On the one hand, my mother says his burial was like his sending off into his homecoming in heaven, on the other hand, I feel like "who am I to ask anything of God and expect it if other things like these happen?" What are my mundane pleas but nothingness?

If he really is up in a heaven that exists, I wonder if he understands what Julian meant when she once said (and I remembered today, when battling with sense versus random senselessness) that "love was His meaning." Although I don't understand, it's enough of a statement to resist the temptation of thinking this is all just chaos.

Francis de Sales Quote

"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength."
-St. Francis de Sales

Details

My friend and I spent last night looking through our old blog archives. I had mentioned I had been blogging since sophomore year of high school and this blog was my post college blog after spending years on Facebook. I lost my high school blogs, but I still had stuff from freshman year of college I looked through with my friend. The difference between me back then and me now is almost night and day and it's been great to see the amount of both personal maturity and spiritual growth (or maybe more so spiritual awareness because of the stuff I had started discovering out there) that happened between the beginning of college and all the way up until it's conclusion.

I've written stuff (and written in certain styles) I don't agree with (I've cooled down to say the least, though it's good to have a private place to "scratch write" without inhibition) but it's still cool and interesting to see what's changed and what still runs as a common theme.

Which entries were the ones that most stood out? Not the ones that had a great big outburst of any sort or the ones that had any composition of my own (I would be a terrible professional writer by the way, I looked at a poem and cringed!) but the ones that mention some sort of detail, a red dress, a pine smell, or a verbatim quote that I had forgotten about even though I remember the events themselves.

As I study the Ignatian literature I've been reading lately, I'm realizing there's no use in simply summarizing events if what most captures us is their details. So I'm going to try to pay closer attention to those.

Contingency Plan

I installed the latest version of the Fedora Project's Linux, Fedora 11, a Linux distribution long considered Red Hat's test bed for their enterprise version of Linux, but still a distribution which I feel is as good for general desktop use like popular contenders Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Mandriva (all good distros as well, especially as Mandriva was my first back in 2005) . Anyway, as soon as I logged in for the first time, I was greeted by the following screen.

Ahh! Now would be a really bad time for my computer to die since I can't afford a new one. Also, I have a special attachment to this IBM Thinkpad because it was the first computer I had which wasn't paid for by my parents (in a sense I can say I "worked for it" or earned it since it was an incentive in exchange for my agreement to be in a triple room in a space for two people my freshman year of college) and because I have had it for such a long time.

However, if it dies, it dies an honorable death, as it saw me through my first homework assignment as a freshman all the way to my last term paper as a senior and has survived at least one bad drop. Well done, good friend!

If the hard drive fails, I can always buy a replacement one for less than $100 until I can afford a new computer. I would hate to throw this computer away as someone else who has basic computer needs (nothing fancy, i.e. the basic OpenOffice, Firefox, and occasional music and video person) could really find good use for it.

Dating and Discerning

Over at a vocation forum I frequent, my friends Jean and Natalie expressed the wonderful idea that discerning a vocation to religious life as a nun, brother, or a priest is very much like dating. You have dates and "flirt" around with different communities and eventually you find "the one". No religious community is the same as no date or person will be the same.

Today when I met with the vocation director of a certain order I'm considering, he asked me if I was dating at all. He thinks people should be open to dating since that too can come from God, but he feels that when candidates discern with a community, they're in essence "dating" or getting a feel for that community.

I spent most of my college life going back and forth between a desire to join religious life and a desire to date. I never acted on either desire (I began to get close to someone once but remained single for the remainder of college) so it was difficult to determine what I really wanted since I would inch toward each option but chicken out at the last minute.

At the same time, I don't want to spend my entire life in a perpetual stage of discernment. Discernment as a whole is gradual, but at the same time there comes a point where you have to decide between yes I want to do this and I'm going to take concrete actions to make it happen, or no, it's best that I stop this process and move on to another path in my life.

So here's hoping I find "the one"...

Dream

Last night I had a dream I was back in college, giving a tour, and somehow got so sidetracked I lost track of time (it was 6:30 pm) and needed to finish the tour in 15 minutes or shorten it. I don't remember the rest of it except that the people on the tour had left and I was alone in a building that looked like a mix between the library and Dyson, which seemed like a post-furturistic ruins. The last thing I remember was an earthquake and trying to jump an opening in the wall (the building fell over sideways or became cracked) with one of my older housemates.