Intangible wealth
(inq7)
Typical Filipinos who violate traffic rules here in phil, cheat in
paying their taxes, employ legal short cuts, and patronize politicians
to be able to land a job or to secure a government contract. But once
they are in America, or in other developed countries, they obey all
laws, dutifully fall in line and enjoy the blessings of life by just
doing their work diligently. To forge ahead, they do not need to
peddle influence or polish their bosses.
World Bank Report. For the longest time, had been wondering, why does
the Filipino worker mightily succeed when he is in the United States,
but not when he is back home? Another heart warming fact: according to
our consul general in New York, Cecilia Rebong, the Filipino
professionals in the United States earn comparatively more than their
counterpart native Americans. Why? The answer may lie in a World Bank
(WB) report on the "Wealth of Nations."
The study shows that if the total wealth or "capital" of the United
States were distributed evenly, each person there would have access to
$512,612 in capital, compared to only $19,351 in the Philippines. That
is why INDUSTRIOUS and law-abiding earns more there than here.
To be sure, the WB explains that there are really three kinds of wealth:
(1) natural capital--"the sum of nonrenewable resources (including
oil, natural gas, coal and mineral resources), cropland, pastureland,
forested areas and protected areas";
(2) produced capital--"the sum of machinery, equipment, and structures
(including infrastructure)"; and,
(3) intangible capital that encompasses raw labor, human capital (the
sum of knowledge, skills and know-how of the population), social
capital (the level of trust among people in a society and their
ability to work together toward common goals) and the quality of
institutions essential to good governance, like an independent
judiciary, clear property rights, effective revenue collection,
nonpolitical military, credible elections and stable rule of law.
Worldwide,
natural capital accounts for only 5 percent of total wealth, produced
capital for 18 percent,
and intangible capital for 77 percent.
On the average, every one in the world has a total wealth of $90,000,
an amount available to those in Brazil ($87,000), Libya ($89,000) and
Croatia ($91,000).
This world average is much more than the Philippines' $19,351, broken
down into $1,549 natural, $2,673 produced and $15,129 intangible.
While natural resources help, they are not the most important wealth.
Singapore has zero natural capital but is credited with $79,011
produced capital plus $173,595 intangible capital for a total of
$252,607. Japan has only $1,513 natural (same as ours) but has
$150,258 produced plus $341,470 intangible for a total of $493,241.
Conclusion: The WB study shows that more than three-fourths of the
total wealth of the world is intangible. Further, the most significant
elements of intangible wealth are EDUCATION and the rule of law.
These two facts imply that while the natural resources and
infrastructure priorities of President Macapagal-Arroyo deserve some
attention, the much more important focus should be on our intangible
capital, LIKE THE PRIMACY OF EDUCATION, the promotion of the rule of
law, and the strengthening of our democratic institutions. These are
the truly lasting legacies.
.................
merry Christ mass
Emmanuel God-with-us
*********************************
intangible wealth part II
pork (tangible wealth)
inquirer.net
End the pork barrel practice now and free hundreds of billions of
pesos in taxpayers' money for use in top-priority national projects in
education,
health and medical care, and
poverty alleviation.
The pork barrel system has been a tremendous waste of public funds and
has not resulted in any visible improvement in public services or
infrastructure. It has only enriched many senators and congressmen.
Each senator is allocated P120 million in pork barrel funds and each
congressman, P60 million.
"pork barrel" is a derogatory term that describes government spending
that is intended to enrich constituents of a politician in return for
their political support, either in the form of a campaign contribution
or votes.
American writer William Safire said the term "pork barrel" derived
from a practice of pre-American Civil War days in which masters gave
their slaves salted pork in barrels. In 1919, an American journalist
wrote: "Oftentimes, the eagerness of the slaves would result in a rush
upon the pork barrel, in which each would strive to grab as much as
possible for himself. Members of Congress, in their rush to get their
local appropriation items � behaved so much like Negro slaves rushing
to the pork barrel."
Today we have a similar mental picture of Filipino legislators
rushing to the pork barrel like pigs to the feeding trough.
The congressmen, particularly, seem to have no satiety. They would
like to increase the outlay for 2008 so that they could get more
kickbacks from projects funded by pork barrel funds. And because
contractors have to pay a lot of kickbacks, they are forced to use
inferior materials in constructing, say, roads or buildings, and these
deteriorate just months after they are completed.
Because "pork barrel" was a derogatory term, legislators tried to call
it different names. During the term of President Fidel V. Ramos it was
called the Countrywide Development Fund. Now it is known as the
Priority Development Assistance Fund. But whether it is called CDF or
PDAF, the fact is that the pork barrel is a great waste of public
money. There was a time when the most popular pork barrel projects
were basketball courts and waiting sheds. Did these contribute to the
social and economic development of the country?
Projects funded with the pork barrel do not go through the usual
process of evaluation and are often overpriced.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in its book, "Pork
and Other Perks," cited a 1996 report of the Commission on Audit that
said that in some cases "the extent of overpricing reached more than
200 percent of the market prices and government-set costs."
go one step farther and put a stop to the pork barrel practice.
inquirer.net
:(
pilipinas umasenso ka...
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
justice and grace (mercy)
the image of hope... justice and mercy
The Last Judgement,
the decisive image of hope
by Benedict XVI
At the conclusion of the central section of the Church's great Credo
[...] we find the phrase: "he will come again in glory to judge the
living and the dead". From the earliest times, the prospect of the
Judgement has influenced Christians in their daily living as a
criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to
their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God's justice.
[...] As the iconography of the Last Judgement developed, however,
more and more prominence was given to its ominous and frightening
aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than the
splendour of hope, often all too well concealed beneath the horrors.
In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the
background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily
oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while
reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of
progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement,
however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally
different form.
The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its
origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the
injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so
much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be
the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world
would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of
morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to
create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish
justice.
If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is
understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God
actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and
intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the
greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is
grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim.
A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.
No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and
nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling
ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.
This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism
and theism.
Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-
worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the
image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the
Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a "longing for the
totally Other" that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed
at world history.
Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which
naturally meant the exclusion of any "image" of a loving God. On the
other hand, he also constantly emphasized this "negative" dialectic
and asserted that justice —true justice—would require a world "where
not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which
is irrevocably past would be undone."
This, would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for
him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a
resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve "the
resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to
idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit."
* * *
Christians likewise can and must constantly learn from the strict
rejection of images that is contained in God's first commandment
(cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the
Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great
the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature,
the dissimilarity between them is always greater.
In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be
carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would
like, by saying "no" to both theses—theism and atheism.
God has given himself an "image": in Christ who was made man. In him
who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an
extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer
who shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself.
This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is
a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive,
yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a
resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an "undoing"
of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright.
For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost
hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals
of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice
constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest
argument, in favour of faith in eternal life.
The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in
this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an
important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but
only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of
history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's
return and for new life become fully convincing.
To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A
world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God
can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does
so.
The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror,
but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of
hope. [...] God is justice and creates justice. This is our
consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace.
This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ.
Both these things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct
inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not
make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything
away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of
equal value.
Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of
Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel "The Brothers Karamazov."
Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet
beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had
happened. [...]
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19-31), Jesus
admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and
opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and
the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures;
the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then
becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst. We must note that in this
parable Jesus is not referring to the final destiny after the Last
Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early
Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and
resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be
pronounced. [...]
* * *
The early Church took up these concepts, and in the Western Church
they gradually developed into the doctrine of Purgatory. We do not
need to examine here the complex historical paths of this
development; it is enough to ask what it actually means.
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands
before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life
takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be
people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and
readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie,
people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within
themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of
this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such
people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would
be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.
On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure,
completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—
people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their
entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment
what they already are.
Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human
life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains
in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth,
to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is
covered over by ever new compromises with evil —much filth covers
purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-
emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.
What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge?
Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease
to matter? What else might occur?
Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea
of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each
person's particular circumstances. [...] Paul begins by saying that
Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This
foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and
built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us
even in death.
Then Paul continues: "Now if any one builds on the foundation with
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will
become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be
revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each
one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up,
he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as
through fire" (1 Cor 3:12-15).
In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take
different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that
in order to be saved we personally have to pass through "fire" so as
to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at
the table of the eternal marriage-feast.
* * *
Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both
burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The
encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze
all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us,
transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All
that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure
bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when
the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there
lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an
undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a
blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us
like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus
totally of God.
In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also
becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our
defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued
to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed,
it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion.
At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the
overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in
ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is
clear that we cannot calculate the "duration" of this transforming
burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world.
The transforming "moment" of this encounter eludes earthly time-
reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of "passage" to
communion with God in the Body of Christ.
The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because
it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things
cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question
about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of
God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear
to us all.
The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two
together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we
all work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).
Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to
meet the Judge whom we know as our "advocate", or parakletos (cf. 1
Jn 2:1).
__________
The Last Judgement,
the decisive image of hope
by Benedict XVI
At the conclusion of the central section of the Church's great Credo
[...] we find the phrase: "he will come again in glory to judge the
living and the dead". From the earliest times, the prospect of the
Judgement has influenced Christians in their daily living as a
criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to
their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God's justice.
[...] As the iconography of the Last Judgement developed, however,
more and more prominence was given to its ominous and frightening
aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than the
splendour of hope, often all too well concealed beneath the horrors.
In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the
background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily
oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while
reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of
progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement,
however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally
different form.
The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its
origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the
injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so
much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be
the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world
would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of
morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to
create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish
justice.
If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is
understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God
actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and
intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the
greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is
grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim.
A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.
No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and
nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling
ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.
This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism
and theism.
Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-
worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the
image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the
Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a "longing for the
totally Other" that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed
at world history.
Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which
naturally meant the exclusion of any "image" of a loving God. On the
other hand, he also constantly emphasized this "negative" dialectic
and asserted that justice —true justice—would require a world "where
not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which
is irrevocably past would be undone."
This, would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for
him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a
resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve "the
resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to
idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit."
* * *
Christians likewise can and must constantly learn from the strict
rejection of images that is contained in God's first commandment
(cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the
Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great
the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature,
the dissimilarity between them is always greater.
In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be
carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would
like, by saying "no" to both theses—theism and atheism.
God has given himself an "image": in Christ who was made man. In him
who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an
extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer
who shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself.
This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is
a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive,
yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a
resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an "undoing"
of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright.
For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost
hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals
of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice
constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest
argument, in favour of faith in eternal life.
The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in
this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an
important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but
only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of
history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's
return and for new life become fully convincing.
To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A
world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God
can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does
so.
The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror,
but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of
hope. [...] God is justice and creates justice. This is our
consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace.
This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ.
Both these things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct
inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not
make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything
away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of
equal value.
Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of
Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel "The Brothers Karamazov."
Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet
beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had
happened. [...]
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19-31), Jesus
admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and
opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and
the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures;
the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then
becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst. We must note that in this
parable Jesus is not referring to the final destiny after the Last
Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early
Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and
resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be
pronounced. [...]
* * *
The early Church took up these concepts, and in the Western Church
they gradually developed into the doctrine of Purgatory. We do not
need to examine here the complex historical paths of this
development; it is enough to ask what it actually means.
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands
before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life
takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be
people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and
readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie,
people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within
themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of
this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such
people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would
be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.
On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure,
completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—
people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their
entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment
what they already are.
Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human
life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains
in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth,
to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is
covered over by ever new compromises with evil —much filth covers
purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-
emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.
What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge?
Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease
to matter? What else might occur?
Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea
of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each
person's particular circumstances. [...] Paul begins by saying that
Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This
foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and
built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us
even in death.
Then Paul continues: "Now if any one builds on the foundation with
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will
become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be
revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each
one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up,
he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as
through fire" (1 Cor 3:12-15).
In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take
different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that
in order to be saved we personally have to pass through "fire" so as
to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at
the table of the eternal marriage-feast.
* * *
Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both
burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The
encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze
all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us,
transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All
that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure
bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when
the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there
lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an
undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a
blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us
like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus
totally of God.
In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also
becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our
defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued
to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed,
it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion.
At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the
overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in
ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is
clear that we cannot calculate the "duration" of this transforming
burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world.
The transforming "moment" of this encounter eludes earthly time-
reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of "passage" to
communion with God in the Body of Christ.
The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because
it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things
cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question
about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of
God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear
to us all.
The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two
together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we
all work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).
Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to
meet the Judge whom we know as our "advocate", or parakletos (cf. 1
Jn 2:1).
__________
born in poverty
Sorry
> but i want to share some perspective
> on this view of education
> with regards to teacher and kids
> or kinder or daycare
> first of all let's clarify
> what does it really meant by kuya alex of daycare???
>
> secondly with the situations
> of culion now your community involvement
> is another planet for them...
> as we can see the poverties around
> it's noble that you'll see people doing
> what we're talking about volunteering
> or service...
> to be sure we need your help on this
> we need people like you who can
> serve these kids..... without pay.
> it will be a miracle for sure!!!
> it could be justice and grace
> or maybe judgement........... the vision of hope...
> we need your help sister or mother or father.....
>
> sorry
thanks for clarifications
our solicitations is community development and bayanihan revival or
revisiting not individualism and everybody is contributing in ways
they can, small or big, hidden or anonymous but in lights...
thanks for the community group going on now esp the family days
thanks you po
........
Hi Jong,
Sorry if I was not clear about my suggestion. I was not criticizing Alex
regarding daycare center. Not at all. If I said something offensive, I
apologize.
First of all, I spoke only for what I know about daycare center here in
America and what it means. Forgive me if I assumed you have the same
meaning and purpose of what a daycare center is in Culion.
Second, I am an experienced retired school teacher and I don't think I
need you to tell me what education is all about "with regards to teacher
and kids."
My point was, I thought some people in Culion with proper guidance and
inspiring encouragement could learn to help themselves and others since
there's not enough money to go around. That they don't need to depend on
people outside their community to give their own children a good start in
education. Forgive me for giving them more credit on their capability to
help other people. I did not think that doing community involvement is
"another planet for them" in your opinion.
Jong, you mentioned about poverty in Culion, how do you define poverty?
The way I saw it last time I was there, most people if not all, own their
houses. They're homeowners. Is this poverty? Some of them learned to be
a business entrepreneur as well. They can survive by fishing, planting
fruit trees or have a vegetable garden in their backyard, or raise
chickens and pigs.
Please do share your perspective and clarify what Alex really mean on
daycare issue.
Ate Meldy
Hawaii
P.S. Thanks Bhong for the compliments. I agree with your e-mail. It's
good to hear from you. "Mele Kalikimaka"
...............
DAYCARE CENTERS
again thanks for clarifications
it was great light
especially as a teacher
i'm very happy about that...
and to be sure it's just views in perspectives
great encouragement... nothing more...
for the poverty
i just want to have a great suggestion
try to live in the philippines
and you'll know in details what i mean of poverties....
as simple as that... what you see is just a slice of it
there are hidden sorrows...
i'm not blaming poverty as a whole either
i'm with you 200%...
so we'll end here
thanks a lot
aloha
merry new year! happy christmass!
...............
DAYCARE CENTERS
Peace be with you. Sorry, Jong, I can't "end here" just yet.
With comment like this: "Try to live in the Philippines and you'll know
in details what I mean of poverties", you have invited me to respond.
That was a great suggestion Jong, I assumed your comment is directed to
those you never lived in the Phil. and not to me who was born and raised
in Culion, who also lived and studied in Manila.
Speaking of poverty, did I tell you that I am also a Social Worker (not by
profession, just a volunteer, no pay)? I know first hand "in details"
what poverty means. Poverty is not restricted in the Philippines. Most
people in Culion or Filipinos in general has a different concept about
people in America. Americans are not all rich. America has its share of
poverty as well. In Hawaii to be exact, has many homeless people. Which
is why I think people in Culion is fortunate to own their homes. I've
seen poor people in Hawaii sleeping in public parks, beaches, under the
bridge, or under the freeway and anywhere they can put their little
belongings they have, just like the "squaters" in Manila. Hawaii is not
at all "paradise" to some people. We do have government services being
offered to help them. But there's not enough shelters for all of them.
And some of them I heard are too proud to ask for help or embarrassed to
be seen what became of them. There are some who have degrees, former
professionals. I have seen their "hidden sorrow" when I volunteer at the
homeless shelter or in our church to feed these people especially on
holidays. I can tell you so many sad and unfortunate stories about but I
don't want to make you cry on this holiday season. Please pray for them
if you can not volunteer to help them wherever you are.
If I live in Culion I would help you Alex. I would devote my time for
free to your daycare center. What I suggested is my dream to do for the
children of Culion. Maybe when I retire here. But right now I can only
suggest and give financial help whenever I can because my charity work in
Culion begins at home, with my relatives who need help with their kids
tuitions and school supplies, etc. I know some of you can relate to this.
Lastly, I want to thank all the members of the COG, especially those
active members who go to Culion to help in person. Thank you for all your
help, your dedication and love for Culion and its people. God bless you
all.
Wishing you all a Blessed and Merry Christmas....Maligayang Pasko at
Manigong Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat, mga mahal kong kababayan. As we say
in Hawaii "Mele Kalikimaka, hauoli Makahiki Hou!"
Aloha, a hui hou (good-bye, until then). Take care. Be safe, well and
happy.
Ate Meldy
Hawaii
................
born in poverty
yes
we can the face of it all over the world
but the greatest poverty i've ever seen is the
the poverty of the heart soul body and mind
if we lost all of this
even the commands of the kings or queens
will never be heard or recognized or ponder
we will only have those blind deaf insensitive indifference
that is happening around
the corruption of..................!
ok let's just try to tell them to work without pay or incentives
and we'll live happily ever after...
that's why we cannot live a life without faith
to explain all of these...
why there so much of these corruptions!?.
can you imagine
a boy born in poverty
who is the creator of everything
he lives in poverty
yet he owns it...
to redeem that corruptions we have until now
another suggestion
can we live in a manger
culion can be one of them
we'll go fishing
planting rice and veggies
do carpentry
and carrying our crosses
by teaching our children our kids...
yes education
the biggest share of budget in our gov't
yet look at our system of edu in the phil..
another story of poverty
thanks for all
esp. to ate meldy
we really need people like you
born of poverty
> but i want to share some perspective
> on this view of education
> with regards to teacher and kids
> or kinder or daycare
> first of all let's clarify
> what does it really meant by kuya alex of daycare???
>
> secondly with the situations
> of culion now your community involvement
> is another planet for them...
> as we can see the poverties around
> it's noble that you'll see people doing
> what we're talking about volunteering
> or service...
> to be sure we need your help on this
> we need people like you who can
> serve these kids..... without pay.
> it will be a miracle for sure!!!
> it could be justice and grace
> or maybe judgement........... the vision of hope...
> we need your help sister or mother or father.....
>
> sorry
thanks for clarifications
our solicitations is community development and bayanihan revival or
revisiting not individualism and everybody is contributing in ways
they can, small or big, hidden or anonymous but in lights...
thanks for the community group going on now esp the family days
thanks you po
........
Hi Jong,
Sorry if I was not clear about my suggestion. I was not criticizing Alex
regarding daycare center. Not at all. If I said something offensive, I
apologize.
First of all, I spoke only for what I know about daycare center here in
America and what it means. Forgive me if I assumed you have the same
meaning and purpose of what a daycare center is in Culion.
Second, I am an experienced retired school teacher and I don't think I
need you to tell me what education is all about "with regards to teacher
and kids."
My point was, I thought some people in Culion with proper guidance and
inspiring encouragement could learn to help themselves and others since
there's not enough money to go around. That they don't need to depend on
people outside their community to give their own children a good start in
education. Forgive me for giving them more credit on their capability to
help other people. I did not think that doing community involvement is
"another planet for them" in your opinion.
Jong, you mentioned about poverty in Culion, how do you define poverty?
The way I saw it last time I was there, most people if not all, own their
houses. They're homeowners. Is this poverty? Some of them learned to be
a business entrepreneur as well. They can survive by fishing, planting
fruit trees or have a vegetable garden in their backyard, or raise
chickens and pigs.
Please do share your perspective and clarify what Alex really mean on
daycare issue.
Ate Meldy
Hawaii
P.S. Thanks Bhong for the compliments. I agree with your e-mail. It's
good to hear from you. "Mele Kalikimaka"
...............
DAYCARE CENTERS
again thanks for clarifications
it was great light
especially as a teacher
i'm very happy about that...
and to be sure it's just views in perspectives
great encouragement... nothing more...
for the poverty
i just want to have a great suggestion
try to live in the philippines
and you'll know in details what i mean of poverties....
as simple as that... what you see is just a slice of it
there are hidden sorrows...
i'm not blaming poverty as a whole either
i'm with you 200%...
so we'll end here
thanks a lot
aloha
merry new year! happy christmass!
...............
DAYCARE CENTERS
Peace be with you. Sorry, Jong, I can't "end here" just yet.
With comment like this: "Try to live in the Philippines and you'll know
in details what I mean of poverties", you have invited me to respond.
That was a great suggestion Jong, I assumed your comment is directed to
those you never lived in the Phil. and not to me who was born and raised
in Culion, who also lived and studied in Manila.
Speaking of poverty, did I tell you that I am also a Social Worker (not by
profession, just a volunteer, no pay)? I know first hand "in details"
what poverty means. Poverty is not restricted in the Philippines. Most
people in Culion or Filipinos in general has a different concept about
people in America. Americans are not all rich. America has its share of
poverty as well. In Hawaii to be exact, has many homeless people. Which
is why I think people in Culion is fortunate to own their homes. I've
seen poor people in Hawaii sleeping in public parks, beaches, under the
bridge, or under the freeway and anywhere they can put their little
belongings they have, just like the "squaters" in Manila. Hawaii is not
at all "paradise" to some people. We do have government services being
offered to help them. But there's not enough shelters for all of them.
And some of them I heard are too proud to ask for help or embarrassed to
be seen what became of them. There are some who have degrees, former
professionals. I have seen their "hidden sorrow" when I volunteer at the
homeless shelter or in our church to feed these people especially on
holidays. I can tell you so many sad and unfortunate stories about but I
don't want to make you cry on this holiday season. Please pray for them
if you can not volunteer to help them wherever you are.
If I live in Culion I would help you Alex. I would devote my time for
free to your daycare center. What I suggested is my dream to do for the
children of Culion. Maybe when I retire here. But right now I can only
suggest and give financial help whenever I can because my charity work in
Culion begins at home, with my relatives who need help with their kids
tuitions and school supplies, etc. I know some of you can relate to this.
Lastly, I want to thank all the members of the COG, especially those
active members who go to Culion to help in person. Thank you for all your
help, your dedication and love for Culion and its people. God bless you
all.
Wishing you all a Blessed and Merry Christmas....Maligayang Pasko at
Manigong Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat, mga mahal kong kababayan. As we say
in Hawaii "Mele Kalikimaka, hauoli Makahiki Hou!"
Aloha, a hui hou (good-bye, until then). Take care. Be safe, well and
happy.
Ate Meldy
Hawaii
................
born in poverty
yes
we can the face of it all over the world
but the greatest poverty i've ever seen is the
the poverty of the heart soul body and mind
if we lost all of this
even the commands of the kings or queens
will never be heard or recognized or ponder
we will only have those blind deaf insensitive indifference
that is happening around
the corruption of..................!
ok let's just try to tell them to work without pay or incentives
and we'll live happily ever after...
that's why we cannot live a life without faith
to explain all of these...
why there so much of these corruptions!?.
can you imagine
a boy born in poverty
who is the creator of everything
he lives in poverty
yet he owns it...
to redeem that corruptions we have until now
another suggestion
can we live in a manger
culion can be one of them
we'll go fishing
planting rice and veggies
do carpentry
and carrying our crosses
by teaching our children our kids...
yes education
the biggest share of budget in our gov't
yet look at our system of edu in the phil..
another story of poverty
thanks for all
esp. to ate meldy
we really need people like you
born of poverty
Saturday, August 11, 2007
banca
yes thank you po
please pray that we'll make it happened
i'm already preparing my reports and the proposals
and will try to present them on first friday of sept.
our pinoy priest will also support me on this project
actually in God's way & will he'll also be with me
this sept. for vacation to see and visit culion
with other friends so hopefully we can visit all tangays camp.
the financial support will take effect maybe late october na
after our "anihan festivals" here in kuwait
just our simple celebrations of pinoy cultural programs
with fund raisings and cultural presentations.
we do this every year.
last year we helped the flood victims
and some tribes or the ifugao minorities in baguio
we also supported some school building construction
at infanta quezon... and maybe next year the gawad kalinga
filipino communities here are very active in supporting
our country in general and in a very simple ways
that's why i tried to open up our proposals
for our help this year and that will be the tangay projects..
so we'll do the banca donations for tangay families that really
needs it... and maybe some scholarship too.
i just have some question:
i remember when i was in elementary
during that time the tangays are free to go
or attend schools
i think they are automatic scholars?...
is that still working this days?
can they still go to school for free.???
i'm not sure but can anyone enlighten us..?
anyway hope that yo can still suggest some
projects... but this is not sure yet
the final decision will be revealed
on first friday next month
and i still don't know how much will they give us...
so for now let's just pray that it'll be approved.
i'll tell them that our objective
is to preserve their cultures and their tribes.
plus education and livelihood if possible...
and ecological preservations of their islands...
this will comprise eco-tourism. they can be the guardians
of our natural resources and environment in general.
our greenpeace in culion...
thanks po sis. Josie
is sr. Evangeline in culion?
hope to meet her too
please pray that we'll make it happened
i'm already preparing my reports and the proposals
and will try to present them on first friday of sept.
our pinoy priest will also support me on this project
actually in God's way & will he'll also be with me
this sept. for vacation to see and visit culion
with other friends so hopefully we can visit all tangays camp.
the financial support will take effect maybe late october na
after our "anihan festivals" here in kuwait
just our simple celebrations of pinoy cultural programs
with fund raisings and cultural presentations.
we do this every year.
last year we helped the flood victims
and some tribes or the ifugao minorities in baguio
we also supported some school building construction
at infanta quezon... and maybe next year the gawad kalinga
filipino communities here are very active in supporting
our country in general and in a very simple ways
that's why i tried to open up our proposals
for our help this year and that will be the tangay projects..
so we'll do the banca donations for tangay families that really
needs it... and maybe some scholarship too.
i just have some question:
i remember when i was in elementary
during that time the tangays are free to go
or attend schools
i think they are automatic scholars?...
is that still working this days?
can they still go to school for free.???
i'm not sure but can anyone enlighten us..?
anyway hope that yo can still suggest some
projects... but this is not sure yet
the final decision will be revealed
on first friday next month
and i still don't know how much will they give us...
so for now let's just pray that it'll be approved.
i'll tell them that our objective
is to preserve their cultures and their tribes.
plus education and livelihood if possible...
and ecological preservations of their islands...
this will comprise eco-tourism. they can be the guardians
of our natural resources and environment in general.
our greenpeace in culion...
thanks po sis. Josie
is sr. Evangeline in culion?
hope to meet her too
Sunday, August 5, 2007
fullness of life... the Paschal mystery
THE basic belief that
“every leader and
every organization,
big or small,
must have a clear idea of what they ultimately want to accomplish,
and of the specific ways to achieve the declared goals.”
Every leader must publicly commit to and aggressively pursue
“a clear vision, mission and core values.” Moreover,
“leading by example is the best, if not the only,
way to accomplish the vision/mission.”
In short, visionary leadership by example is the best success formula.
Fullness of life.
Every leader—whether of the family,
the community,
the church or
the country—must declare a vision that answers basic questions, like: “What is my ultimate goal?
How am I going to achieve it?
Who will help me in my journey?” AND
“It is treason to lead without a vision.
Without a vision, the leader betrays God and the people.”
“fullness of life” as the “diwa, the heart, the spirit” of the vision...
love of God and love of fellow humans. No vision can be attained
unless the leader exemplifies love and selflessness
as core values.
Paschal mystery.
More than forgiveness of sin, fullness of life refers to the
“development of the human person.”
Just as redemption implies freedom from sin,
“development means deliverance from anything that enslaves.”
To enable people to enjoy fullness of life,
the leader must envision how to liberate them from
(1) ignorance,
(2) poverty,
(3) sickness,
(4) selfishness,
(5) unjust values (like ako muna, or worse, ako lamang), &
(6) sin.
In turn,
the people must be willing to undergo to this so called the
“paschal mystery.”
Leaders must demonstrate by their personal example that the vision can be attained through sacrifice and
“the only way to overcome suffering
that leads to growth is to experience the suffering …
it is the roughness of the grindstone that sharpens the blade of the sword; it is the storm that hardens the oak tree;
and it is work that develops the muscles.”
Aside from human experience, there's the Bible teaching
“…unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest (I John 12:24). For the seed or the grain to produce new shoot and fruit, it has to fall to the ground, to die and germinate new life, and give the promise of new fruit….
Sacrifice and discipline provide the passage to better, freer new life and character.”
However, in the secular field of political governance,
would our people be willing to undergo the paschal mystery of no-cross-no-glory, considering that, many times in the past, they have been manipulated to do just that without any positive results?
Even more important, is the President sufficiently trusted by our people for them to suffer now to be able to reach the promised fullness of life some day?
In short, the bottom line is credibility.
Will our people believe and follow our government leaders when they invoke the paschal mystery?
Can our leaders show by their personal example the core values
(like “discipline, integrity, self-control, the banishment of greed”) necessary to lead our people to sacrifice today to be able to enjoy fullness of life tomorrow?
Or will the people dismiss this well-intentioned vision as one more gimmick to beguile and fool them again.....
by c rosales
......
so what is our vision/mission?
our core values?
our Pashcal mystery of no-cross-no-glory.....
;;;;;;;;;;;;;
can anybody help us on tangay project/s and proposals....?
i will post it soon...
but in summary: it's like this....
the vision
Vision:- living the life of “Tangay*” (fullness of life)
Building a regulative and ennobling Tangay communities in preserving their unique identity.
Calamian Tagbanua
COMMUNITY / TRIBE & HERITAGE / ENVIRONMENT
An Indigenous tribe (Tagbanua brothers)
poor & destitute :
:- Community-based conservation program for seafaring Tagbanua tribes identified as one of the important areas for biodiversity...
:- Preservations of their tribes, cultural heritage & community including the environments...
:- DATA gathering: Film & video documentaries plus write-ups as to understand them more practically or deeply...
:- Education (scholars?) and livelihood programs...
like giving them banca. (how much a banca?)
:- Experiencing & participation in their culture & traditions in the form of eco-tourism...
HELP!!!
cause i'm going to present this proposals
in our filipino community here in kuwait
and they are willing to give us the support
they need enlightenment
how are we going to lead this community by examples...
living a fullness of life? :)
thanks
jong
kuwait
hello karen and ethan and all...
what do yo think??? give us more insights please...
thanks:)
let's interact!
also on the medical programs of ate cynth and rachelle...
sickness and health...
“every leader and
every organization,
big or small,
must have a clear idea of what they ultimately want to accomplish,
and of the specific ways to achieve the declared goals.”
Every leader must publicly commit to and aggressively pursue
“a clear vision, mission and core values.” Moreover,
“leading by example is the best, if not the only,
way to accomplish the vision/mission.”
In short, visionary leadership by example is the best success formula.
Fullness of life.
Every leader—whether of the family,
the community,
the church or
the country—must declare a vision that answers basic questions, like: “What is my ultimate goal?
How am I going to achieve it?
Who will help me in my journey?” AND
“It is treason to lead without a vision.
Without a vision, the leader betrays God and the people.”
“fullness of life” as the “diwa, the heart, the spirit” of the vision...
love of God and love of fellow humans. No vision can be attained
unless the leader exemplifies love and selflessness
as core values.
Paschal mystery.
More than forgiveness of sin, fullness of life refers to the
“development of the human person.”
Just as redemption implies freedom from sin,
“development means deliverance from anything that enslaves.”
To enable people to enjoy fullness of life,
the leader must envision how to liberate them from
(1) ignorance,
(2) poverty,
(3) sickness,
(4) selfishness,
(5) unjust values (like ako muna, or worse, ako lamang), &
(6) sin.
In turn,
the people must be willing to undergo to this so called the
“paschal mystery.”
Leaders must demonstrate by their personal example that the vision can be attained through sacrifice and
“the only way to overcome suffering
that leads to growth is to experience the suffering …
it is the roughness of the grindstone that sharpens the blade of the sword; it is the storm that hardens the oak tree;
and it is work that develops the muscles.”
Aside from human experience, there's the Bible teaching
“…unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest (I John 12:24). For the seed or the grain to produce new shoot and fruit, it has to fall to the ground, to die and germinate new life, and give the promise of new fruit….
Sacrifice and discipline provide the passage to better, freer new life and character.”
However, in the secular field of political governance,
would our people be willing to undergo the paschal mystery of no-cross-no-glory, considering that, many times in the past, they have been manipulated to do just that without any positive results?
Even more important, is the President sufficiently trusted by our people for them to suffer now to be able to reach the promised fullness of life some day?
In short, the bottom line is credibility.
Will our people believe and follow our government leaders when they invoke the paschal mystery?
Can our leaders show by their personal example the core values
(like “discipline, integrity, self-control, the banishment of greed”) necessary to lead our people to sacrifice today to be able to enjoy fullness of life tomorrow?
Or will the people dismiss this well-intentioned vision as one more gimmick to beguile and fool them again.....
by c rosales
......
so what is our vision/mission?
our core values?
our Pashcal mystery of no-cross-no-glory.....
;;;;;;;;;;;;;
can anybody help us on tangay project/s and proposals....?
i will post it soon...
but in summary: it's like this....
the vision
Vision:- living the life of “Tangay*” (fullness of life)
Building a regulative and ennobling Tangay communities in preserving their unique identity.
Calamian Tagbanua
COMMUNITY / TRIBE & HERITAGE / ENVIRONMENT
An Indigenous tribe (Tagbanua brothers)
poor & destitute :
:- Community-based conservation program for seafaring Tagbanua tribes identified as one of the important areas for biodiversity...
:- Preservations of their tribes, cultural heritage & community including the environments...
:- DATA gathering: Film & video documentaries plus write-ups as to understand them more practically or deeply...
:- Education (scholars?) and livelihood programs...
like giving them banca. (how much a banca?)
:- Experiencing & participation in their culture & traditions in the form of eco-tourism...
HELP!!!
cause i'm going to present this proposals
in our filipino community here in kuwait
and they are willing to give us the support
they need enlightenment
how are we going to lead this community by examples...
living a fullness of life? :)
thanks
jong
kuwait
hello karen and ethan and all...
what do yo think??? give us more insights please...
thanks:)
let's interact!
also on the medical programs of ate cynth and rachelle...
sickness and health...
Monday, July 30, 2007
Angels
Angels
by Mark Shea
As the existence of everything from SETI to Star Trek attests, our civilization is fascinated with the question of the existence of non-human intelligences. The Faith says that we already know of at least one such class of creature. It is called an "angel". However, our culture's response to the existence of the angelic is deeply confused.
Materialists have long scoffed at angels in their knee-jerk way, but now are (unwittingly) placing themselves in a bit of a bind in their effort to go on scoffing at God.
It's like this: the universe science is discovering is fantastically fine-tuned. If the strong nuclear force constant were not just so, either no hydrogen or nothing but hydrogen would form after the Big Bang. If the gravitational force constant were not just so stars would be too hot or too cold for life. If the electromagnetic force constant were not just so, chemical bonding for life could not occur. If the expansion rate of the universe were not just so, either no galaxies would form or the universe would collapse back to a singularity. And on and on this goes for over thirty different variables, all requiring fine tuning of such a degree that expressing the odds of getting them all right would require writing more zeros than I can fit in an 800 word article.
Because of the immense fine-tuning of the universe, sensible theists are rather understandably reminded of Paul's remarks in Romans 1 that "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." But fallen man is nothing if not ingenious, so not a few materialists have lately attempted to lick this problem of the fine-tuned universe by positing what is known as the "Multiverse" theory. According to this evidence-free theory, the ultra-super-duper fine tuning of basic physical laws which strongly suggests that You Know Who might have had a hand in the creation is just a statistical illusion. Based on absolutely no facts at all, some materialists insist the reason the universe looks ultra-fined for life is that we just happen to be lucky enough to live in the one-out-of-an-infinite-number-of-universes where all the physical laws happen to be fine-tuned enough to produce us. According to this theory, there are, in fact, an infinite number of other universes with other physical laws tuned to other variables. This is not the sort of thing that would keep you from getting shot in Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1880s ("Wal, pardner, I cain't hep it if every hand I'm dealt is four aces. We jes' happen to live in the multiverse where I always git four aces!") but it is a consolation to atheist materialists desperate to avoid You Know Who.
The problem for the atheist is this: If, for the special purpose of getting rid of God, you can say there are an infinite number of "natures" out there, why can't the Christian say the same thing?
Christianity does not really posit a three story universe (Hell, Earth, Heaven). It posits a universe with (potentially) any number of natures—and even the possibility that such natures can interact. In the Tradition, "Earth" refers to the creation we can see: not just the planet on which we live but the whole field of time, space, matter and energy to the furthest reaches of the furthest galaxy. Similarly, "Heaven" refers, not simply to God (the "Highest Heaven"), but to the realm(s) of the angels and even of the demonic "powers and principalities". Such natures are "higher" than we are in the order of nature and so the angels are traditionally pictured floating around in Heaven next to God. But, of course, there is an infinite gulf between the Creator and his angels just as there is an infinite gulf between the Creator and us (in the order of nature).
Revelation speaks of these "in between" angelic natures only insofar as it concerns us so we know only a little. The angels, which are pure intelligence without corporeal bodies, exist to praise God and to help us in our salvation. The demons are angels who have refused an affirmative to the fundamental law of existence: to worship the Triune God who is life, love, truth, goodness and beauty. They are the enemies of creation because they are the enemies of the Creator. For the purposes of our salvation, all we need to know is that.
Unfortunately, the devil being a liar, we have been fuddled. So rejecting atheistic materialism is not enough. Next week, we will look at the opposite problem from atheistic materialism: the New Age tendency to love angels more than angels want to be loved.
by Mark Shea
As the existence of everything from SETI to Star Trek attests, our civilization is fascinated with the question of the existence of non-human intelligences. The Faith says that we already know of at least one such class of creature. It is called an "angel". However, our culture's response to the existence of the angelic is deeply confused.
Materialists have long scoffed at angels in their knee-jerk way, but now are (unwittingly) placing themselves in a bit of a bind in their effort to go on scoffing at God.
It's like this: the universe science is discovering is fantastically fine-tuned. If the strong nuclear force constant were not just so, either no hydrogen or nothing but hydrogen would form after the Big Bang. If the gravitational force constant were not just so stars would be too hot or too cold for life. If the electromagnetic force constant were not just so, chemical bonding for life could not occur. If the expansion rate of the universe were not just so, either no galaxies would form or the universe would collapse back to a singularity. And on and on this goes for over thirty different variables, all requiring fine tuning of such a degree that expressing the odds of getting them all right would require writing more zeros than I can fit in an 800 word article.
Because of the immense fine-tuning of the universe, sensible theists are rather understandably reminded of Paul's remarks in Romans 1 that "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." But fallen man is nothing if not ingenious, so not a few materialists have lately attempted to lick this problem of the fine-tuned universe by positing what is known as the "Multiverse" theory. According to this evidence-free theory, the ultra-super-duper fine tuning of basic physical laws which strongly suggests that You Know Who might have had a hand in the creation is just a statistical illusion. Based on absolutely no facts at all, some materialists insist the reason the universe looks ultra-fined for life is that we just happen to be lucky enough to live in the one-out-of-an-infinite-number-of-universes where all the physical laws happen to be fine-tuned enough to produce us. According to this theory, there are, in fact, an infinite number of other universes with other physical laws tuned to other variables. This is not the sort of thing that would keep you from getting shot in Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1880s ("Wal, pardner, I cain't hep it if every hand I'm dealt is four aces. We jes' happen to live in the multiverse where I always git four aces!") but it is a consolation to atheist materialists desperate to avoid You Know Who.
The problem for the atheist is this: If, for the special purpose of getting rid of God, you can say there are an infinite number of "natures" out there, why can't the Christian say the same thing?
Christianity does not really posit a three story universe (Hell, Earth, Heaven). It posits a universe with (potentially) any number of natures—and even the possibility that such natures can interact. In the Tradition, "Earth" refers to the creation we can see: not just the planet on which we live but the whole field of time, space, matter and energy to the furthest reaches of the furthest galaxy. Similarly, "Heaven" refers, not simply to God (the "Highest Heaven"), but to the realm(s) of the angels and even of the demonic "powers and principalities". Such natures are "higher" than we are in the order of nature and so the angels are traditionally pictured floating around in Heaven next to God. But, of course, there is an infinite gulf between the Creator and his angels just as there is an infinite gulf between the Creator and us (in the order of nature).
Revelation speaks of these "in between" angelic natures only insofar as it concerns us so we know only a little. The angels, which are pure intelligence without corporeal bodies, exist to praise God and to help us in our salvation. The demons are angels who have refused an affirmative to the fundamental law of existence: to worship the Triune God who is life, love, truth, goodness and beauty. They are the enemies of creation because they are the enemies of the Creator. For the purposes of our salvation, all we need to know is that.
Unfortunately, the devil being a liar, we have been fuddled. So rejecting atheistic materialism is not enough. Next week, we will look at the opposite problem from atheistic materialism: the New Age tendency to love angels more than angels want to be loved.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
parang ayaw ko nang bumalik sa culion...
parang ayaw ko nang bumalik sa culion...
i'm not surprise to learn this statement
from someone who LOVE culion
it's really sad view of our town
but the pictures in our site
can tell some HOPE
to restore our beloved place
we'll both promote eco-tourism
and at the same time
earn some income
by saving the environment
that people will now realize
how good it is and can be a beautiful source
of income... kalikasan is where we live.
if you lost it even if you have millions
of gold it's nothing... so let's go for it
we'll start on the health
then environment as what ate cynthia & rachelle suggested...
the unique park in balala that kids used to play wala na po.
there's a new swimming ground at the back of the big church
that is one of the beauties of culion now!
kami ng mga taga balala ang dumadayo ngayon doon
wala na kasi sa panatalan...
now the quest is who's going to lead this projects
are the new leaders aware or concerned about it...?
or do we have the 'rights' to lead this objectives.?
but we already started imagine we have scholars now!
and the projects of rachelle and ate cynthia!
plus the balikatan culion. wow
we need more groups in culion
we have to stablish stable community there now
and start rebuilding culion sphere under the economy of
culion eco-tourism even just what had left for our children...
we still have mountains, sea, and landmarks...
we can still have the natural resources.. hopefully
let's plant trees now...
so the office near leonard wood park
will not be possible for us...
the park is really nice
i think that should be the main park now of culion...
a very historic place... where the oldest town of culion stand
town hall... :) plus the beautiful acasias...
let's generate incomes to culion
and one of them is eco-tourism
can anyone define
eco-tourism......?
thanks po kuya renato liwanag
mabuhay po kayo
nakakalungkot pong talaga
ang kalagayan natin doon
but we're survivors.....
hope to meet yo there...
we need to find ways in many ways
cheers
jong
q8
--- In Culion_Palawan_Online@yahoogroups.com, Renato Liwanag
wrote:
>
> hello Karen, magandang idea yan potscards,you need capital o
funding dyan,ano ba purpose ng card.pag bibili o to promote lang ng
culion.if pag bibili yes babalik ang capital mo.tanong ko lang
karen,meron naba kau committee,strickly for fund raising??dapat mag
karoon kau,alam mo sa lahat ng liwanag,ako lang tagala lumaki sa
culion,,dyan ako nag aral ng elementary at high school,kaya i know
how culion use to be.
> i was there last may during the 100th.yr ng culion and i was
disappointed,ibang iba na,,parang ayaw ko na bumalik,but i still
love culion,,,so karen count mo na ako tulong sa inyo..any way i
can,,uwi ko next month uli.visit ko sa culion..madami ako suggest na
need na ngaun ng mga bata sa culion.kawawa mga bata don.walang mapag
laruan na lugar,,beautification ng culion wala.,kung meron lang mag
lead sana madali magawa yon.dapat ang baranggay at community kahit
sa landskaping ng area nila',gawin na..siguro ngaun na iba na mayor,
mag iiba na ang culion.
>
>
salamat,from toronto,canada
>
renato t. liwanag
> Karen Fami wrote:
>
> Hello folks!
>
> We just came up with an idea of making postcards out of Jong's
> collection of pictures then sell them to Culion tourists,to be
able to
> raise fund for our lined up Projects.
>
> What do you think? We want to hear your comments. We understand we
need
> a certain amount of money to print post cards, so we need your
> suggestions.
>
> Thanks
>
> Karen Fami
i'm not surprise to learn this statement
from someone who LOVE culion
it's really sad view of our town
but the pictures in our site
can tell some HOPE
to restore our beloved place
we'll both promote eco-tourism
and at the same time
earn some income
by saving the environment
that people will now realize
how good it is and can be a beautiful source
of income... kalikasan is where we live.
if you lost it even if you have millions
of gold it's nothing... so let's go for it
we'll start on the health
then environment as what ate cynthia & rachelle suggested...
the unique park in balala that kids used to play wala na po.
there's a new swimming ground at the back of the big church
that is one of the beauties of culion now!
kami ng mga taga balala ang dumadayo ngayon doon
wala na kasi sa panatalan...
now the quest is who's going to lead this projects
are the new leaders aware or concerned about it...?
or do we have the 'rights' to lead this objectives.?
but we already started imagine we have scholars now!
and the projects of rachelle and ate cynthia!
plus the balikatan culion. wow
we need more groups in culion
we have to stablish stable community there now
and start rebuilding culion sphere under the economy of
culion eco-tourism even just what had left for our children...
we still have mountains, sea, and landmarks...
we can still have the natural resources.. hopefully
let's plant trees now...
so the office near leonard wood park
will not be possible for us...
the park is really nice
i think that should be the main park now of culion...
a very historic place... where the oldest town of culion stand
town hall... :) plus the beautiful acasias...
let's generate incomes to culion
and one of them is eco-tourism
can anyone define
eco-tourism......?
thanks po kuya renato liwanag
mabuhay po kayo
nakakalungkot pong talaga
ang kalagayan natin doon
but we're survivors.....
hope to meet yo there...
we need to find ways in many ways
cheers
jong
q8
--- In Culion_Palawan_Online@yahoogroups.com, Renato Liwanag
>
> hello Karen, magandang idea yan potscards,you need capital o
funding dyan,ano ba purpose ng card.pag bibili o to promote lang ng
culion.if pag bibili yes babalik ang capital mo.tanong ko lang
karen,meron naba kau committee,strickly for fund raising??dapat mag
karoon kau,alam mo sa lahat ng liwanag,ako lang tagala lumaki sa
culion,,dyan ako nag aral ng elementary at high school,kaya i know
how culion use to be.
> i was there last may during the 100th.yr ng culion and i was
disappointed,ibang iba na,,parang ayaw ko na bumalik,but i still
love culion,,,so karen count mo na ako tulong sa inyo..any way i
can,,uwi ko next month uli.visit ko sa culion..madami ako suggest na
need na ngaun ng mga bata sa culion.kawawa mga bata don.walang mapag
laruan na lugar,,beautification ng culion wala.,kung meron lang mag
lead sana madali magawa yon.dapat ang baranggay at community kahit
sa landskaping ng area nila',gawin na..siguro ngaun na iba na mayor,
mag iiba na ang culion.
>
>
salamat,from toronto,canada
>
renato t. liwanag
> Karen Fami
>
> Hello folks!
>
> We just came up with an idea of making postcards out of Jong's
> collection of pictures then sell them to Culion tourists,to be
able to
> raise fund for our lined up Projects.
>
> What do you think? We want to hear your comments. We understand we
need
> a certain amount of money to print post cards, so we need your
> suggestions.
>
> Thanks
>
> Karen Fami
GREAT FUTURE indeed!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7582986795752940587&q=2057+world&total=26&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
GREAT FUTURE indeed!
but...
"for people of faith, and Christians in particular,
we know that technology is not to be our God,
and technology is most definitely not our Savior.
Each of us has to examine the role of technology in our own lives,
and how it squares with what we consider to be most important in life.
This does not mean that we become luddites,
rejecting new forms of technology.
What it means is that we carefully consider
how technology fits into our lives,
whether it helps or hinders the goals we've set for ourselves"
and what goals could that be...?!!
we need to involve taking a closer look at those very goals.
where do we draw the line...
and what should happen to those who cannot
afford or access this kind of tech. again a giant gap...
We can't afford to be unaware of the challenges facing us today.
The future is almost here.
(bioethics:)
the 11th hour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY
GREAT FUTURE indeed!
but...
"for people of faith, and Christians in particular,
we know that technology is not to be our God,
and technology is most definitely not our Savior.
Each of us has to examine the role of technology in our own lives,
and how it squares with what we consider to be most important in life.
This does not mean that we become luddites,
rejecting new forms of technology.
What it means is that we carefully consider
how technology fits into our lives,
whether it helps or hinders the goals we've set for ourselves"
and what goals could that be...?!!
we need to involve taking a closer look at those very goals.
where do we draw the line...
and what should happen to those who cannot
afford or access this kind of tech. again a giant gap...
We can't afford to be unaware of the challenges facing us today.
The future is almost here.
(bioethics:)
the 11th hour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY
Monday, July 16, 2007
'BALIKATAN'
yes
let's find first the alternative jobs
as solutions for our poor peoples
before we can solve our
eco-system problems and all.
we'll just like filling
a bucket full of holes...
and worst make their lives more misery.
the quest is source of economy
then everything follows...
first let's eradicate the kind of systems
like ppa, dpwh, dnr, customs, justice,
education, health, comelec etc etc etc...
look at our edu. system
the billions of pesos of books they
printed full of wrong informations
being given to our children!!!
where is justice?
dr. were there
in culion for a life time
but... look at culion!
the question is who gives permit
to the first talipapa?
and tapping of spring waters...
anyway we'll just blame poverty
that's all it is
but
it's not about the talipapa
it's not about the kamidling
it's not about the spring or anesvad
it's about the quest for love
beacause our God is not punitive God
It is love for other human beings
that permits us to go beyond or transcend death.
Greed, selfishness, poverty, exploitation --
these are all lingering manifestations
of a failure to love.
They show how far we are
from achieving full humanity.
i'm just being an advocate of it all
nothing personal...
cause we're already facing consequences.
for a long long long time
can we define quest?
simply perception
My advocacy or perspective
is more on evolutionary.
If we really have LOVE,
we need to develop our true institutions -- (mentioned above!)
institutions that enjoy independence, (no pressures from above)
institutions that operate
according to their own MORAL CodeS! (vitues + values = morality)
Whether this is to be done by (green)revolution, (or others)
or by (buying)election, or by (pork-barrel)charter change.
IT is not as important as knowing
what kind of society or
coron city we should put in place. (demo. or revo.)
There are no shortcuts to developments. (just what ppa did)
it will never be possible (even dev't)
for as long as there is mass POVERTY.
So, the first business of the day (now)
should be the elimination of mass poverty
and the large GAPs in wealth and power
that characterize present-day COMMUNITY.
not only culion but our country itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
jongnono
buscucolin city palawan
:)
just having fun...
sorry
but yo can make it personal if yo want
cause we're just doing it to gain ourselves
this is our
'balikatan'
minus
the foreign men
plus
'mga dayuhan sa sariling bayan...'
cheers
life is beautiful in the midst of them all
but the greatest of them all is always love
thanks po kuya alex
mabuhay kayo!!
let's find first the alternative jobs
as solutions for our poor peoples
before we can solve our
eco-system problems and all.
we'll just like filling
a bucket full of holes...
and worst make their lives more misery.
the quest is source of economy
then everything follows...
first let's eradicate the kind of systems
like ppa, dpwh, dnr, customs, justice,
education, health, comelec etc etc etc...
look at our edu. system
the billions of pesos of books they
printed full of wrong informations
being given to our children!!!
where is justice?
dr. were there
in culion for a life time
but... look at culion!
the question is who gives permit
to the first talipapa?
and tapping of spring waters...
anyway we'll just blame poverty
that's all it is
but
it's not about the talipapa
it's not about the kamidling
it's not about the spring or anesvad
it's about the quest for love
beacause our God is not punitive God
It is love for other human beings
that permits us to go beyond or transcend death.
Greed, selfishness, poverty, exploitation --
these are all lingering manifestations
of a failure to love.
They show how far we are
from achieving full humanity.
i'm just being an advocate of it all
nothing personal...
cause we're already facing consequences.
for a long long long time
can we define quest?
simply perception
My advocacy or perspective
is more on evolutionary.
If we really have LOVE,
we need to develop our true institutions -- (mentioned above!)
institutions that enjoy independence, (no pressures from above)
institutions that operate
according to their own MORAL CodeS! (vitues + values = morality)
Whether this is to be done by (green)revolution, (or others)
or by (buying)election, or by (pork-barrel)charter change.
IT is not as important as knowing
what kind of society or
coron city we should put in place. (demo. or revo.)
There are no shortcuts to developments. (just what ppa did)
it will never be possible (even dev't)
for as long as there is mass POVERTY.
So, the first business of the day (now)
should be the elimination of mass poverty
and the large GAPs in wealth and power
that characterize present-day COMMUNITY.
not only culion but our country itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
jongnono
buscucolin city palawan
:)
just having fun...
sorry
but yo can make it personal if yo want
cause we're just doing it to gain ourselves
this is our
'balikatan'
minus
the foreign men
plus
'mga dayuhan sa sariling bayan...'
cheers
life is beautiful in the midst of them all
but the greatest of them all is always love
thanks po kuya alex
mabuhay kayo!!
Saturday, July 14, 2007
coron city
yes indeed
reality in the making...
maybe the puerto just forgot
to mentioned city
cause of their hectic minds
and how to get their bonuses & rewards... :)
but there will always be the clashes
of dev't vs nature or environment
(again basin)
where are they going to put the
int'l airport
int'l port (ppa) waaaaaa! :((((
int'l hotels & malls
and
dams & powers???
a bridge too far
then culion will become coron 2!?
let's name it
buscoculin city
welcome
busuanga-coron-culion-linapakan city
panlaytan & maglalambay(ethans place now:) is busuanga??
so the whole calamianes
wow!
let's start it now
but first let's save earth
watch
inconvenient truth!!!
50 years from now earth will never be the same
hi rachelle
how can we be member of greenpeace
let's put it in culion 2
welcome po
cap. mercado
i'm sure he knows
the inconvenient truth about culion
we'll do documentary
as al gore... slides presentations
we're simply cog not sec. :) po
our specialties were distributed evenly
simply like a body of a human being
mind-body-soul
of course with the anatomy
& spirit
as a good samaritan
we will try to become
the good neighbor
fulfilling our duties & commandments
loving our neighbors as ourselves totally-
with all our heart-mind-soul-strength
that could be loving culion or maybe coron city
by this we'll show our love of God
with the option of justice!
cause we already have mercy
maybe coron city is a lie
that will enable us
to see the (inconvenient) truth....
better remove all the dogs :))
cheers again
reality in the making...
maybe the puerto just forgot
to mentioned city
cause of their hectic minds
and how to get their bonuses & rewards... :)
but there will always be the clashes
of dev't vs nature or environment
(again basin)
where are they going to put the
int'l airport
int'l port (ppa) waaaaaa! :((((
int'l hotels & malls
and
dams & powers???
a bridge too far
then culion will become coron 2!?
let's name it
buscoculin city
welcome
busuanga-coron-culion-linapakan city
panlaytan & maglalambay(ethans place now:) is busuanga??
so the whole calamianes
wow!
let's start it now
but first let's save earth
watch
inconvenient truth!!!
50 years from now earth will never be the same
hi rachelle
how can we be member of greenpeace
let's put it in culion 2
welcome po
cap. mercado
i'm sure he knows
the inconvenient truth about culion
we'll do documentary
as al gore... slides presentations
we're simply cog not sec. :) po
our specialties were distributed evenly
simply like a body of a human being
mind-body-soul
of course with the anatomy
& spirit
as a good samaritan
we will try to become
the good neighbor
fulfilling our duties & commandments
loving our neighbors as ourselves totally-
with all our heart-mind-soul-strength
that could be loving culion or maybe coron city
by this we'll show our love of God
with the option of justice!
cause we already have mercy
maybe coron city is a lie
that will enable us
to see the (inconvenient) truth....
better remove all the dogs :))
cheers again
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
PAPAL POINT
PAPAL POINT
Inquirer
Last updated 05:55am (Mla time) 09/24/2006
Published on page A10 of the September 24, 2006 issue of the
Philippine Daily Inquirer
POPE BENEDICT XVI HAD INTENDED HIS SIX-DAY visit to his native Germany
to be a restful but meaningful homecoming. Like his great predecessor
who had been the first non-Italian in 400 years to become pope and who
had made a moving homecoming to his native Poland a year after his
election to the papacy in 1979, Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, had wanted to make his Bavarian visit a symbolic "return of
the native," a reaffirmation of the roots of his person and the roots
of the faith.
The visit turned out to be too meaningful for comfort; and it was
anything but restful. By quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on
Islam�"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread
by the sword the faith he preached"�during a university address,
Benedict has riled Muslims and even some Christians and sparked a
global conflagration. Catholic churches and Catholics in Islamic
countries have been attacked.
The Pope has said he is "deeply sorry" (some linguists say the English
translation should have been "deeply saddened") that Muslims have been
offended by the quotation. He clarified that in no way does the
quotation reflect his opinion. He has also explained that his
university address has been misinterpreted and that he has a "deep
respect" for Islam.
In hindsight, the "misinterpretation" seems a "miscontextualization."
The quote from the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Paleologus,
consists of 32 words out of a text of more than 3,000 words (at least
in the English translation of the German original)!
To be sure, the overall text must balance and complement those 32
words, which everyone must be reminded is a quotation that merely
served to illustrate a point. And what was the point of the address?
It was about the rationality of faith, about the Hellenic or rational
influence on Christianity that makes of the religion a marriage of
faith and reason. Definitely the hysterical reaction in the Muslim
world and some sectors of Christianity is an ironic counterpoint to
what the Pope was trying to say in an eminently academic,
level-headed, and, yes, rational way.
But was the Pope irresponsible in using the controversial quotation?
However incendiary the import of the quotation, the Pope indicated he
did not share the opinion of the emperor about the evil and inhumanity
of Islam. But he indicated that the quotation from the "erudite"
emperor should show that rationality plays an essential role in the
faith, and this rationality is translated into peaceful resolution of
differences; in short, in dialogue.
That rationality is eminently dialogical and peaceful was demonstrated
by the fact that the Pope was delivering an address to his old
university of Regensburg. In fact, he opened his address to the
students and faculty with a fond recollection of those days in the
academe when "despite our specializations which at times make it
difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working
in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various
aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason."
And the dialogical rationality of the faith was also embodied by the
Pope's quotation of the emperor that was uttered in the context of a
discussion with a Persian scholar�and a Muslim at that!
The Pope, in fact, said that the remark about Islam as "evil and
inhuman" was delivered with "startling brusqueness." The severity of
the remark then was merely a dramatic flourish to what the emperor was
trying to point out:
"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to
explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence
is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of
God and the nature of the soul. `God,' he says, `is not pleased by
blood�and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is
born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith
needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without
violence and threats.'"
The pre-eminent rationality of the faith, the Pope went on to expound,
must be maintained amid a Europe that has lost all sense of faith
because of extreme rationality and secularity. He said rational faith
is needed in the discussion with the great cultures and religions of
the world.
It is the tragedy of our time that a great address that exalts reason
and dialogue should be drowned in the din and blare of hatred and
irrationality.
Inquirer
Last updated 05:55am (Mla time) 09/24/2006
Published on page A10 of the September 24, 2006 issue of the
Philippine Daily Inquirer
POPE BENEDICT XVI HAD INTENDED HIS SIX-DAY visit to his native Germany
to be a restful but meaningful homecoming. Like his great predecessor
who had been the first non-Italian in 400 years to become pope and who
had made a moving homecoming to his native Poland a year after his
election to the papacy in 1979, Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, had wanted to make his Bavarian visit a symbolic "return of
the native," a reaffirmation of the roots of his person and the roots
of the faith.
The visit turned out to be too meaningful for comfort; and it was
anything but restful. By quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on
Islam�"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread
by the sword the faith he preached"�during a university address,
Benedict has riled Muslims and even some Christians and sparked a
global conflagration. Catholic churches and Catholics in Islamic
countries have been attacked.
The Pope has said he is "deeply sorry" (some linguists say the English
translation should have been "deeply saddened") that Muslims have been
offended by the quotation. He clarified that in no way does the
quotation reflect his opinion. He has also explained that his
university address has been misinterpreted and that he has a "deep
respect" for Islam.
In hindsight, the "misinterpretation" seems a "miscontextualization."
The quote from the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Paleologus,
consists of 32 words out of a text of more than 3,000 words (at least
in the English translation of the German original)!
To be sure, the overall text must balance and complement those 32
words, which everyone must be reminded is a quotation that merely
served to illustrate a point. And what was the point of the address?
It was about the rationality of faith, about the Hellenic or rational
influence on Christianity that makes of the religion a marriage of
faith and reason. Definitely the hysterical reaction in the Muslim
world and some sectors of Christianity is an ironic counterpoint to
what the Pope was trying to say in an eminently academic,
level-headed, and, yes, rational way.
But was the Pope irresponsible in using the controversial quotation?
However incendiary the import of the quotation, the Pope indicated he
did not share the opinion of the emperor about the evil and inhumanity
of Islam. But he indicated that the quotation from the "erudite"
emperor should show that rationality plays an essential role in the
faith, and this rationality is translated into peaceful resolution of
differences; in short, in dialogue.
That rationality is eminently dialogical and peaceful was demonstrated
by the fact that the Pope was delivering an address to his old
university of Regensburg. In fact, he opened his address to the
students and faculty with a fond recollection of those days in the
academe when "despite our specializations which at times make it
difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working
in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various
aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason."
And the dialogical rationality of the faith was also embodied by the
Pope's quotation of the emperor that was uttered in the context of a
discussion with a Persian scholar�and a Muslim at that!
The Pope, in fact, said that the remark about Islam as "evil and
inhuman" was delivered with "startling brusqueness." The severity of
the remark then was merely a dramatic flourish to what the emperor was
trying to point out:
"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to
explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence
is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of
God and the nature of the soul. `God,' he says, `is not pleased by
blood�and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is
born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith
needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without
violence and threats.'"
The pre-eminent rationality of the faith, the Pope went on to expound,
must be maintained amid a Europe that has lost all sense of faith
because of extreme rationality and secularity. He said rational faith
is needed in the discussion with the great cultures and religions of
the world.
It is the tragedy of our time that a great address that exalts reason
and dialogue should be drowned in the din and blare of hatred and
irrationality.
Psalm 23 Revisited
Psalm 23 Revisited
by Aneel Aranha (HSI)
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff�they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
One of the things I love about Scripture is the way it paints
pictures in bright, vibrant colors that are so vivid, I feel drawn
right into them. Psalm 23�which is nearly everybody's favorite
psalm�is an ideal example. The instant I start reading it, I find
myself transported into a meadow with lush green grass stretching out
as far as the eye can see. A clear blue lake shimmers on one side. On
the other side, a shepherd walks among his flock, staff in hand,
watching over them.
The sheep are safe, because they are under the care of a shepherd who
loves them enough to give his life for them. He won't run away when he
sees the wolf coming, like the hired hand would. The sheep need never
fear any danger�as long as they stay close to their master. But, as
wooly headed as they are wooly bodied, they keep straying close to the
gate, tempted by the lure of greener pastures on the other side of the
fence. It is only when they wander across and begin feeding do they
discover the grass is infested with snakes.
Sheep are, admittedly, foolish creatures and have no real concept of
the danger that awaits them. But we are surely wiser. Or are we? It
seems to me that we can be woollier headed than sheep. A lady once
came to me for advice. Married with two children, she found herself
attracted to another man. I spent the better part of a morning telling
her what she undoubtedly already knew she had to do, and how to do it.
She went away promising she would break off all contact with the man
and immerse herself in prayer. Two weeks later she called to say she
was deep into an affair and couldn't extricate herself from it. Or
wouldn't. "It is so beautiful," she simpered.
That's a good description of sin: beautiful. If it was ugly, we
wouldn't engage in it. But it's gorgeous to look at. It entices us,
like lush green grass entices the sheep to the other side of the
fence, and only once we embrace it do we see it's real face, with its
beady eyes protruding out of bloody sockets and its fetid breath. By
then it is too late; we are locked in its evil grip and it isn't long
before our lives begin resembling the aftermath of a bomb blast. The
woman's marriage is in shreds today�as is the man's�and strewn amidst
the wreckage are the lives of innocent children and countless other
casualties, all the result of two people who willfully chose the path
of destruction.
The same story, with minor variations in theme, is being repeated all
over the world. We're lured into hundreds of sins�all with the promise
that "it's so beautiful", and are then devastated by the pain and
anguish that sin always brings. What causes me the most sadness is
that it is so unnecessary. The pastures where the good shepherd�Jesus,
of course�has us lie down are far greener than anything that you will
find elsewhere. They are so satisfying and filling, it is positively
stupid to even look for, much less want to graze in, other pastures.
True, danger abounds here too, but nobody who stays close to the
shepherd has reason to be afraid. Though we "walk through the valley
of the shadow of death" we need fear no evil, because Jesus is with
us, protecting us. The level of protection is directly proportional to
the distance that we keep to him. The farther you move away from him,
the greater the risk you put yourself in. I have been hurt so badly as
a result of my recklessness in the past, I rarely move more than a
couple of feet away from him anymore. It puts me in a position of
immense strength and though the enemy does launch his assaults every
now and then, he ends up utterly humiliated. I have a few experiences
in this matter that you might take some encouragement from, so I
relate them here.
I formally launched Holy Spirit Interactive (HSI) on January 1, 2004.
A few months earlier, I invited a few friends to take a look at the
HSI web site, which was to be one of the pillars of the HSI ministry.
The invitation was a private one, mainly intended to get some feedback
on the site. One of the invitees picked up on what he believed to be
an anti-Mary slant in two of the pages on the site, although all those
pages contained were verses from Scripture, with both Catholic and
Protestant interpretations presented. He promptly spread the word that
the site wasn't kosher. I will never forget what followed.
Self-appointed guardians of the church�all lay people posturing as
leaders of the Catholic community�took it upon themselves to defend
what they thought was an onslaught against the Church, and came down
heavily on me.
Given the obsessive�often irrational�hatred many Catholics seem to
have for their Protestant brothers, the easiest way to destroy a
Catholic ministry is to call its founder Protestant and rumors to the
effect started flying. Never mind that I had acknowledged the vital
role that Mary had played in bringing me back to God, never mind that
I went for mass every morning, never mind that I was under spiritual
direction from a Catholic priest, never mind that I was out there
engaged in promoting, teaching and defending Catholicism: a few people
seemed determined to prove that I was Protestant in my beliefs and
went about doing so with a vehemence that was frightening to see.
Soon, thereafter, scurrilous rumors about my character began floating
about, along with questions about my motives in being a Christian.
There were some people who actually went about saying that I was
working under instructions from the evil one! This would have been
laughable had it not been for the fact that the people making these
claims were allegedly "anointed" people whom quite a few took seriously!
Gandhi once said that he loved Christianity but loathed Christians
because he found so little of Christ in them. I couldn't help finding
myself in agreement, and for the second time in my life, I didn't want
to have anything to do with Christians or Christianity anymore! I
wanted to return to my old life and the people I knew. They were an
unholy lot, for sure, but at least they didn't pretend to be anything
else. It was then that Jesus spoke to me through Psalm 23. "Don't
quit," he said. "Stick with me and I promise you that I will set a
banquet before you in the presence of your enemies."
I nearly quit anyway, but in the end sheer bullheadedness made me hang
on. I am so glad that I did. HSI took off like a space shuttle leaving
the ground at Cape Canaveral. It gained almost immediate acceptance in
Catholic circles, with priests advising parishioners from pulpits
across the world to visit the site. Praise poured in from the clergy,
including Bishops and even the occasional Cardinal. Some very anointed
Catholic writers, most associated with powerful ministries, began
contributing material. And to cap it all, the Vicariate adopted it as
its own. The "enemies" could only watch in stunned silence as Jesus
kept his promise, serving up meal after meal after meal right before
their very eyes!
HSI completed a year on December 2005, and as I thanked God for making
it far more successful than even I had ever dreamed in just twelve
months, he made another promise. "That was only for starters," he
said. "The main course is yet to come!" It is being served even as I
write this. HSI now has an Outreach Program, which uses music, drama
and dance to reach out to people. An ongoing Discipleship Program is
bringing countless Christians closer to God and one another. A Global
Intercessory Prayer Circle has hundreds of people from all over the
world putting differences aside and uniting in prayer. And much else
is happening that is truly wonderful.
I tell this story for a reason, and it has nothing to do with blowing
any trumpets. I tell this story to encourage all those out there who
want to spread the word of God not to quit when they find themselves
persecuted. Being a Christian is not easy; it is one of the hardest
things you could think of doing in this world. Bringing other people
to Christ is harder still, and often made practically impossible by an
abundance of "enemies". These are, of course, the evil one and his
lackeys, but they have to use people to perpetrate their schemes.
You might think the people being used would come from outside the
Church, but most of them lie right within: small minded,
self-righteous and sanctimonious people who are more concerned with
guarding their turfs, or ensuring that "rules" are followed, rather
than being the people whom Christ asks them to be. Most people who
want to take Jesus to others give up in frustration or, more often,
leave the Church to start up splinter units, doing no real good other
than dividing the body of Christ further.
I tell them what Jesus told me: Don't give up! Don't give up what you
feel called to do, or the Church, because giving up plays right into
the hands of the enemy. Find yourself a good spiritual
advisor�preferably a priest�who can help you in discerning what is
right and what isn't, and steer you in the correct direction. Then put
your trust in the Good Shepherd who will lead you in paths of
righteousness. He will protect you as you travel through the valley of
death. And when the enemy launches his assaults on you�and he most
certainly will�Jesus will invite you to a banquet and prepare the
table just for you! And as your enemies watch in shock, unable to
understand why their schemes to take you down didn't work, he will
anoint your head with oil and bless you so abundantly, your cup will
overflow.
Surely, only goodness and mercy can then follow you for the rest of
your life.
May the Spirit be with you.
by Aneel Aranha (HSI)
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff�they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
One of the things I love about Scripture is the way it paints
pictures in bright, vibrant colors that are so vivid, I feel drawn
right into them. Psalm 23�which is nearly everybody's favorite
psalm�is an ideal example. The instant I start reading it, I find
myself transported into a meadow with lush green grass stretching out
as far as the eye can see. A clear blue lake shimmers on one side. On
the other side, a shepherd walks among his flock, staff in hand,
watching over them.
The sheep are safe, because they are under the care of a shepherd who
loves them enough to give his life for them. He won't run away when he
sees the wolf coming, like the hired hand would. The sheep need never
fear any danger�as long as they stay close to their master. But, as
wooly headed as they are wooly bodied, they keep straying close to the
gate, tempted by the lure of greener pastures on the other side of the
fence. It is only when they wander across and begin feeding do they
discover the grass is infested with snakes.
Sheep are, admittedly, foolish creatures and have no real concept of
the danger that awaits them. But we are surely wiser. Or are we? It
seems to me that we can be woollier headed than sheep. A lady once
came to me for advice. Married with two children, she found herself
attracted to another man. I spent the better part of a morning telling
her what she undoubtedly already knew she had to do, and how to do it.
She went away promising she would break off all contact with the man
and immerse herself in prayer. Two weeks later she called to say she
was deep into an affair and couldn't extricate herself from it. Or
wouldn't. "It is so beautiful," she simpered.
That's a good description of sin: beautiful. If it was ugly, we
wouldn't engage in it. But it's gorgeous to look at. It entices us,
like lush green grass entices the sheep to the other side of the
fence, and only once we embrace it do we see it's real face, with its
beady eyes protruding out of bloody sockets and its fetid breath. By
then it is too late; we are locked in its evil grip and it isn't long
before our lives begin resembling the aftermath of a bomb blast. The
woman's marriage is in shreds today�as is the man's�and strewn amidst
the wreckage are the lives of innocent children and countless other
casualties, all the result of two people who willfully chose the path
of destruction.
The same story, with minor variations in theme, is being repeated all
over the world. We're lured into hundreds of sins�all with the promise
that "it's so beautiful", and are then devastated by the pain and
anguish that sin always brings. What causes me the most sadness is
that it is so unnecessary. The pastures where the good shepherd�Jesus,
of course�has us lie down are far greener than anything that you will
find elsewhere. They are so satisfying and filling, it is positively
stupid to even look for, much less want to graze in, other pastures.
True, danger abounds here too, but nobody who stays close to the
shepherd has reason to be afraid. Though we "walk through the valley
of the shadow of death" we need fear no evil, because Jesus is with
us, protecting us. The level of protection is directly proportional to
the distance that we keep to him. The farther you move away from him,
the greater the risk you put yourself in. I have been hurt so badly as
a result of my recklessness in the past, I rarely move more than a
couple of feet away from him anymore. It puts me in a position of
immense strength and though the enemy does launch his assaults every
now and then, he ends up utterly humiliated. I have a few experiences
in this matter that you might take some encouragement from, so I
relate them here.
I formally launched Holy Spirit Interactive (HSI) on January 1, 2004.
A few months earlier, I invited a few friends to take a look at the
HSI web site, which was to be one of the pillars of the HSI ministry.
The invitation was a private one, mainly intended to get some feedback
on the site. One of the invitees picked up on what he believed to be
an anti-Mary slant in two of the pages on the site, although all those
pages contained were verses from Scripture, with both Catholic and
Protestant interpretations presented. He promptly spread the word that
the site wasn't kosher. I will never forget what followed.
Self-appointed guardians of the church�all lay people posturing as
leaders of the Catholic community�took it upon themselves to defend
what they thought was an onslaught against the Church, and came down
heavily on me.
Given the obsessive�often irrational�hatred many Catholics seem to
have for their Protestant brothers, the easiest way to destroy a
Catholic ministry is to call its founder Protestant and rumors to the
effect started flying. Never mind that I had acknowledged the vital
role that Mary had played in bringing me back to God, never mind that
I went for mass every morning, never mind that I was under spiritual
direction from a Catholic priest, never mind that I was out there
engaged in promoting, teaching and defending Catholicism: a few people
seemed determined to prove that I was Protestant in my beliefs and
went about doing so with a vehemence that was frightening to see.
Soon, thereafter, scurrilous rumors about my character began floating
about, along with questions about my motives in being a Christian.
There were some people who actually went about saying that I was
working under instructions from the evil one! This would have been
laughable had it not been for the fact that the people making these
claims were allegedly "anointed" people whom quite a few took seriously!
Gandhi once said that he loved Christianity but loathed Christians
because he found so little of Christ in them. I couldn't help finding
myself in agreement, and for the second time in my life, I didn't want
to have anything to do with Christians or Christianity anymore! I
wanted to return to my old life and the people I knew. They were an
unholy lot, for sure, but at least they didn't pretend to be anything
else. It was then that Jesus spoke to me through Psalm 23. "Don't
quit," he said. "Stick with me and I promise you that I will set a
banquet before you in the presence of your enemies."
I nearly quit anyway, but in the end sheer bullheadedness made me hang
on. I am so glad that I did. HSI took off like a space shuttle leaving
the ground at Cape Canaveral. It gained almost immediate acceptance in
Catholic circles, with priests advising parishioners from pulpits
across the world to visit the site. Praise poured in from the clergy,
including Bishops and even the occasional Cardinal. Some very anointed
Catholic writers, most associated with powerful ministries, began
contributing material. And to cap it all, the Vicariate adopted it as
its own. The "enemies" could only watch in stunned silence as Jesus
kept his promise, serving up meal after meal after meal right before
their very eyes!
HSI completed a year on December 2005, and as I thanked God for making
it far more successful than even I had ever dreamed in just twelve
months, he made another promise. "That was only for starters," he
said. "The main course is yet to come!" It is being served even as I
write this. HSI now has an Outreach Program, which uses music, drama
and dance to reach out to people. An ongoing Discipleship Program is
bringing countless Christians closer to God and one another. A Global
Intercessory Prayer Circle has hundreds of people from all over the
world putting differences aside and uniting in prayer. And much else
is happening that is truly wonderful.
I tell this story for a reason, and it has nothing to do with blowing
any trumpets. I tell this story to encourage all those out there who
want to spread the word of God not to quit when they find themselves
persecuted. Being a Christian is not easy; it is one of the hardest
things you could think of doing in this world. Bringing other people
to Christ is harder still, and often made practically impossible by an
abundance of "enemies". These are, of course, the evil one and his
lackeys, but they have to use people to perpetrate their schemes.
You might think the people being used would come from outside the
Church, but most of them lie right within: small minded,
self-righteous and sanctimonious people who are more concerned with
guarding their turfs, or ensuring that "rules" are followed, rather
than being the people whom Christ asks them to be. Most people who
want to take Jesus to others give up in frustration or, more often,
leave the Church to start up splinter units, doing no real good other
than dividing the body of Christ further.
I tell them what Jesus told me: Don't give up! Don't give up what you
feel called to do, or the Church, because giving up plays right into
the hands of the enemy. Find yourself a good spiritual
advisor�preferably a priest�who can help you in discerning what is
right and what isn't, and steer you in the correct direction. Then put
your trust in the Good Shepherd who will lead you in paths of
righteousness. He will protect you as you travel through the valley of
death. And when the enemy launches his assaults on you�and he most
certainly will�Jesus will invite you to a banquet and prepare the
table just for you! And as your enemies watch in shock, unable to
understand why their schemes to take you down didn't work, he will
anoint your head with oil and bless you so abundantly, your cup will
overflow.
Surely, only goodness and mercy can then follow you for the rest of
your life.
May the Spirit be with you.
Self-mastery
Self-mastery
By Fr. Roy Cimagala
Inquirer
Last updated 10:54pm (Mla time) 09/22/2006
WE have to be more aware of this need of ours. While we normally like
to be spontaneous in our behavior, we sooner or later realize that
spontaneity alone, without self-mastery, can be dangerous. That would
be like energy without direction.
You see, we are a very complex creature, with many layers of awareness
and tendencies, with conflicting forces and competing impulses, due to
the many different parts, aspects and stages of our life.
We are at once body and soul, material and spiritual, individual and
social, private and public, local and global, in time and outside of
it, etc. Each aspect has its peculiar properties that need to be
integrated with those of the other aspects.
We are subject to different times and places, historical and cultural
conditionings that certainly exert some influences on us, often in
very subtle but effective ways.
Besides, our Christian faith teaches us about our sinful origin and
wounded nature that would make our life more complicated and exciting,
and our need to integrate things properly more challenging.
"Breaking the relation of communion with God causes a rupture in the
internal unity of the human person, in the relations of communion
between man and woman and of the harmonious relations between mankind
and other creatures," (29) the Compendium of the Church's Social
Doctrine explains.
If there's no conscious and well-thought-out effort at self-mastery,
we'll soon find out we are terribly lost, we can unwittingly harm
ourselves and others. We'll be adrift in some ocean not knowing where
we would be heading. We'd be ill-prepared to face our increasingly
complex world.
There are different forces, both inside and outside us, that tend to
dominate us in their own selfish terms without due regard to what is
truly good to us, according to an objective truth about man or to any
reference to the common good.
What worsens this is the modern attitude that denies there's such
thing as an objective truth about man. The truth about man, they say,
will always be changing and shifting. Nothing can be held absolute and
permanent. And so what our Christian faith tells us about ourselves is
thrown out of the window.
Thus, our mind can go one way, while the heart can go the other. Our
speech can just be some mindless chatter, rid of balance and
direction. Bad manners, instead of refinement and delicacy, prevail.
There is chaos instead of peace and order.
Sometimes, our appearance has nothing to do with what is inside us.
Hypocrisy and deception get systematically cultivated, undermining our
integrity. And these discrepancies and anomalies can go on endlessly.
Then you have the hormones and the urges that can just pop up anytime,
urgently needing discipline. The young ones are most vulnerable to
these, often leading them to obsessions and addictions, to harmful
practices and vices.
If we consider our environment just a little, we'll realize we are
constantly teased and titillated, often arousing the body while
killing the spirit. We easily become victims of the so-called freedom
of expression or artistic rights that often go their own selfish and
shallow ways.
This explains why we have to struggle against laziness, complacency,
disorder, proneness to discouragement, imprudence. There's also the
propensity to lack focus and determination in our activities, to be
dominated by changing moods.
We should not be surprised therefore that given this state of affairs,
we often find ourselves in some quarrels, both small and big, from
petty feuds with neighbors to devastating wars between countries.
We have to understand that underlying the big conflicts we have, for
example, in politics is this often ignored problem in the personal
level where self-mastery is missing.
There has to be a continuing awareness of this need, starting in the
personal level and always reinforced by the family, community, the
Church, schools, etc. Plans and strategies to attain or improve in it
should be initiated and pursued.
We need to foster greater self-knowledge among ourselves. Networks of
helping others cope with their personal difficulties should be put in
place. If we put our mind and heart into this, we will realize this
ideal is quite feasible. It's not quixotic.
Together with the appropriate human means, the spiritual and
supernatural means should never be neglected. These are prayer,
sacrifices, sacraments, ascetical struggle, doctrinal formation,
spiritual direction, etc. These are indispensable.
ciao
By Fr. Roy Cimagala
Inquirer
Last updated 10:54pm (Mla time) 09/22/2006
WE have to be more aware of this need of ours. While we normally like
to be spontaneous in our behavior, we sooner or later realize that
spontaneity alone, without self-mastery, can be dangerous. That would
be like energy without direction.
You see, we are a very complex creature, with many layers of awareness
and tendencies, with conflicting forces and competing impulses, due to
the many different parts, aspects and stages of our life.
We are at once body and soul, material and spiritual, individual and
social, private and public, local and global, in time and outside of
it, etc. Each aspect has its peculiar properties that need to be
integrated with those of the other aspects.
We are subject to different times and places, historical and cultural
conditionings that certainly exert some influences on us, often in
very subtle but effective ways.
Besides, our Christian faith teaches us about our sinful origin and
wounded nature that would make our life more complicated and exciting,
and our need to integrate things properly more challenging.
"Breaking the relation of communion with God causes a rupture in the
internal unity of the human person, in the relations of communion
between man and woman and of the harmonious relations between mankind
and other creatures," (29) the Compendium of the Church's Social
Doctrine explains.
If there's no conscious and well-thought-out effort at self-mastery,
we'll soon find out we are terribly lost, we can unwittingly harm
ourselves and others. We'll be adrift in some ocean not knowing where
we would be heading. We'd be ill-prepared to face our increasingly
complex world.
There are different forces, both inside and outside us, that tend to
dominate us in their own selfish terms without due regard to what is
truly good to us, according to an objective truth about man or to any
reference to the common good.
What worsens this is the modern attitude that denies there's such
thing as an objective truth about man. The truth about man, they say,
will always be changing and shifting. Nothing can be held absolute and
permanent. And so what our Christian faith tells us about ourselves is
thrown out of the window.
Thus, our mind can go one way, while the heart can go the other. Our
speech can just be some mindless chatter, rid of balance and
direction. Bad manners, instead of refinement and delicacy, prevail.
There is chaos instead of peace and order.
Sometimes, our appearance has nothing to do with what is inside us.
Hypocrisy and deception get systematically cultivated, undermining our
integrity. And these discrepancies and anomalies can go on endlessly.
Then you have the hormones and the urges that can just pop up anytime,
urgently needing discipline. The young ones are most vulnerable to
these, often leading them to obsessions and addictions, to harmful
practices and vices.
If we consider our environment just a little, we'll realize we are
constantly teased and titillated, often arousing the body while
killing the spirit. We easily become victims of the so-called freedom
of expression or artistic rights that often go their own selfish and
shallow ways.
This explains why we have to struggle against laziness, complacency,
disorder, proneness to discouragement, imprudence. There's also the
propensity to lack focus and determination in our activities, to be
dominated by changing moods.
We should not be surprised therefore that given this state of affairs,
we often find ourselves in some quarrels, both small and big, from
petty feuds with neighbors to devastating wars between countries.
We have to understand that underlying the big conflicts we have, for
example, in politics is this often ignored problem in the personal
level where self-mastery is missing.
There has to be a continuing awareness of this need, starting in the
personal level and always reinforced by the family, community, the
Church, schools, etc. Plans and strategies to attain or improve in it
should be initiated and pursued.
We need to foster greater self-knowledge among ourselves. Networks of
helping others cope with their personal difficulties should be put in
place. If we put our mind and heart into this, we will realize this
ideal is quite feasible. It's not quixotic.
Together with the appropriate human means, the spiritual and
supernatural means should never be neglected. These are prayer,
sacrifices, sacraments, ascetical struggle, doctrinal formation,
spiritual direction, etc. These are indispensable.
ciao
the Word becomes crying.
the Word becomes crying.
We have to look at the point to which it is leading us:
to a naked infant in a crib.
a being who is helpless,
"flesh" we are to understand weakness,
finiteness, mortal createdness.
Here is the scandal of the Christian faith.
A scandal that is not restricted to Christ's birth,
nor even to his earthly existence,
but continues in his way of being present today.
And so God is linked to a process of becoming.
Who is this God who get involved in the history of human beings,
with its density and even its darkness?
"What child is this?"
a virgin birth?
if Mary goes home to Mom and Dad and says, `Well, I've got good news
and bad news. Here's the good news. The good news I'm going to be the
mother of the Messiah. The bad news is, I'm already pregnant. But, not
to worry. I'm pregnant by means of the Holy Spirit.' And, you know, if
I'm a normal parent I'm going, `Uh-huh'. And where was Joseph when all
this was happening?' ...there's a scandalous element to the story?
ok ...let's find the mystery.
do i look athiest?
:)
We have to look at the point to which it is leading us:
to a naked infant in a crib.
a being who is helpless,
"flesh" we are to understand weakness,
finiteness, mortal createdness.
Here is the scandal of the Christian faith.
A scandal that is not restricted to Christ's birth,
nor even to his earthly existence,
but continues in his way of being present today.
And so God is linked to a process of becoming.
Who is this God who get involved in the history of human beings,
with its density and even its darkness?
"What child is this?"
a virgin birth?
if Mary goes home to Mom and Dad and says, `Well, I've got good news
and bad news. Here's the good news. The good news I'm going to be the
mother of the Messiah. The bad news is, I'm already pregnant. But, not
to worry. I'm pregnant by means of the Holy Spirit.' And, you know, if
I'm a normal parent I'm going, `Uh-huh'. And where was Joseph when all
this was happening?' ...there's a scandalous element to the story?
ok ...let's find the mystery.
do i look athiest?
:)
faith & reason
Muslim leaders accept Pope's invitation to dialogue
(by CWNews)
Oct. 16 (CWNews.com) - In an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI (bio -
news), a group of 38 Muslim religious leaders have taken up the
Pontiff's invitation to a serious dialogue between Christianity and
Islam.
In their 4-page message, the Islamic scholars offer a detailed
response to the Pope's lecture at the University of Regensburg. They
write:
While we applaud your efforts to oppose the dominance of positivism
and materialism in human life, we must point out some errors in the
way you mentioned Islam as a counterpoint to the proper use of
reason, as well as some mistakes in the assertions you put forward
in support of your argument.
The open letter is signed by representatives of every major branch
of Islam, including the grand muftis of Egypt, Russia. Bosnia,
Croatia, Kosovo, Oman, and Uzbekistan; the Iraqi Ayatollah Mohammed
al Tashiri; Prince Ghzi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan; and
authorities from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia,
Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Morocco. Their message was decribed by
FAther Justo Lacunza, the former rector of the Vatican's Islamic
institute, as a gesture "of great importance" to inter-faith
dialogue.
The full text of the Islamic leaders' letter has been reproduced on
the American Islamica web site, through which the message first
appeared.
The letter respectfully cites what the authors see as errors or
oversimplications in the Pope's treatment of Islam during the
Regensburg speech. The authors argue, for example, that the teaching
in the Qu'ran that "there is no compulsion in religion" is intended
to restrain Muslim leaders from any attempt to force conversion.
They say that the term "holy war" is foreign to traditional Islamic
languages, and the term jihad is properly used only to refer to the
believer's struggle to be faithful. Rejecting any use of violence in
the name of religion, the Islamic scholars cite their belief that
Allah is all-merciful and all-compassionate; they ask
rhetorically: "Is it not self-evident that spilling innocent blood
goes against mercy and compassion?"
The open letter assures Pope Benedict that Islamic thought does not
see a conflict between faith and reason. The text says:
There are two extremes which the Islamic intellectual tradition has
generally managed to avoid: one is to make the analytical mind the
ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of
human understanding to address ultimate questions.
Welcoming the Pope's clarifications of his Regensburg speech, the 38
Islamic leaders express their own desire for a "frank and sincere
dialogue." They say: "We hope that we will all avoid the mistakes of
the past and live together in the future in peace, mutual acceptance
and respect."
"Christianity and Islam are the largest and second largest religions
in the world and in history," the letter notes. "Together they make
up more than ??% of the world's population, making the relationship
between these two religious communities the most important factor in
contributing to meaningful peace around the world."
COMMENTS:
Posted by: Tominellay - Oct. 19, 2006 4:18 PM ET USA
The comments of saufun are exactly correct. I see the decline of
Islam from this watershed moment.
Posted by: saufun - Oct. 19, 2006 12:09 PM ET USA
Pope Benedict, like all great teachers, has succeeded (at great
personal sacrifice, probably) in stimulating his listeners (in this
case, the world) to reason and reflect. This response by the Moslem
moderates is among the first fruits. Post-Regensburg I have been
astounded by all manners of journalists, politicians and bishops
(yes, bishops too) using the words "faith and reason".
Posted by: normnuke - Oct. 18, 2006 9:04 PM ET USA
Once again we CWNers have news that the MSM folks look the other way
over. In today's newspaper I saw yet another story about how Muslims
worldwide are still furious over the Regensburg address.
BTW, will this one day be as famous as the Gettysburg address?
Posted by: saufun - Oct. 18, 2006 10:54 AM ET USA
I think this was a hard won opening. Even my very secular friends
acknowledge that since the Regensberg speech, public discussion of
Islam is freer and more courageous, and moderate Moslems are daring
to speak openly (having criticized the Pope first, of course- and
that is probably understandable from a pragmatic point of view). Way
to go, Pope.
Posted by: surewish - Oct. 17, 2006 7:10 PM ET USA
Before waxing too optimistic, consider the situation of Christians,
and the Orthodox Patriarch, in Turkey. It is a nightmare. And this
is a "tolerant" Islamic society. The military is the only bar to
Sharia justice and 85% of the people want an Islamic rpuublic. Seems
to me, the Pope is trying to begin by establishing a common lexicon.
Posted by: Cupertino - Oct. 17, 2006 11:20 AM ET USA
This is a grace filled moment. Certainly there are two views in
Islam and one of them proclaims that violence and conversion by the
sword are called for. But these men who want to dialogue with our
gentle Pope think otherwise and may very well speak for the vast
majority in Islam. We should pray that talks begin soon and are
continuous. It is the only hope, really, now that extreme Islamists
will soon have nuclear weapons.
Posted by: CJ - Oct. 17, 2006 11:07 AM ET USA
I agree with Truth over Sentiment - Good news indeed! The response
from the Grand Muftis is encouraging. I have always found it
possible to acknowledge and share the commonalities of belief and
reverence that Catholics and Muslims share, (love of the same God,
for one thing) whilst in no way feeling the need to hide or minimise
anything of our own faith. I am sure my Muslim friends feel the
same. God is with all those who seek Him sincerely.
Posted by: TRUTH over SENTIMENT - Oct. 16, 2006 7:49 PM ET USA
This is very good news. It is clear now why the Holy Father said
what he did and how he said it. Makes one wonder if these Imans knew
what he was to say.
These 38 Imams obviously teach Islam in a different tone than do the
radicals that get all the press. If this dialog does go on, it could
put a wedge between moderate and radical Islam at a time when the
world needs it most. Look for the Ayatollahs in Iraq to disown these
38 men.
Posted by: trinnie - Oct. 16, 2006 6:36 PM ET USA
The full text of the Muslim leaders puts the best interpretation on
texts in the Koran dealing with violence against non-Muslims and on
conversion, but there are many other Koranic texts that do not
favour this 'peaceful' view. Still, this document is of sensational
importance, in the way it condemns violence now (although Islam did
spread across the Middle East and North Africa by sheer aggression,
not in self-defence). Muslim suicide bombers can never claim that
their acts are justified.
(by CWNews)
Oct. 16 (CWNews.com) - In an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI (bio -
news), a group of 38 Muslim religious leaders have taken up the
Pontiff's invitation to a serious dialogue between Christianity and
Islam.
In their 4-page message, the Islamic scholars offer a detailed
response to the Pope's lecture at the University of Regensburg. They
write:
While we applaud your efforts to oppose the dominance of positivism
and materialism in human life, we must point out some errors in the
way you mentioned Islam as a counterpoint to the proper use of
reason, as well as some mistakes in the assertions you put forward
in support of your argument.
The open letter is signed by representatives of every major branch
of Islam, including the grand muftis of Egypt, Russia. Bosnia,
Croatia, Kosovo, Oman, and Uzbekistan; the Iraqi Ayatollah Mohammed
al Tashiri; Prince Ghzi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan; and
authorities from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia,
Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Morocco. Their message was decribed by
FAther Justo Lacunza, the former rector of the Vatican's Islamic
institute, as a gesture "of great importance" to inter-faith
dialogue.
The full text of the Islamic leaders' letter has been reproduced on
the American Islamica web site, through which the message first
appeared.
The letter respectfully cites what the authors see as errors or
oversimplications in the Pope's treatment of Islam during the
Regensburg speech. The authors argue, for example, that the teaching
in the Qu'ran that "there is no compulsion in religion" is intended
to restrain Muslim leaders from any attempt to force conversion.
They say that the term "holy war" is foreign to traditional Islamic
languages, and the term jihad is properly used only to refer to the
believer's struggle to be faithful. Rejecting any use of violence in
the name of religion, the Islamic scholars cite their belief that
Allah is all-merciful and all-compassionate; they ask
rhetorically: "Is it not self-evident that spilling innocent blood
goes against mercy and compassion?"
The open letter assures Pope Benedict that Islamic thought does not
see a conflict between faith and reason. The text says:
There are two extremes which the Islamic intellectual tradition has
generally managed to avoid: one is to make the analytical mind the
ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of
human understanding to address ultimate questions.
Welcoming the Pope's clarifications of his Regensburg speech, the 38
Islamic leaders express their own desire for a "frank and sincere
dialogue." They say: "We hope that we will all avoid the mistakes of
the past and live together in the future in peace, mutual acceptance
and respect."
"Christianity and Islam are the largest and second largest religions
in the world and in history," the letter notes. "Together they make
up more than ??% of the world's population, making the relationship
between these two religious communities the most important factor in
contributing to meaningful peace around the world."
COMMENTS:
Posted by: Tominellay - Oct. 19, 2006 4:18 PM ET USA
The comments of saufun are exactly correct. I see the decline of
Islam from this watershed moment.
Posted by: saufun - Oct. 19, 2006 12:09 PM ET USA
Pope Benedict, like all great teachers, has succeeded (at great
personal sacrifice, probably) in stimulating his listeners (in this
case, the world) to reason and reflect. This response by the Moslem
moderates is among the first fruits. Post-Regensburg I have been
astounded by all manners of journalists, politicians and bishops
(yes, bishops too) using the words "faith and reason".
Posted by: normnuke - Oct. 18, 2006 9:04 PM ET USA
Once again we CWNers have news that the MSM folks look the other way
over. In today's newspaper I saw yet another story about how Muslims
worldwide are still furious over the Regensburg address.
BTW, will this one day be as famous as the Gettysburg address?
Posted by: saufun - Oct. 18, 2006 10:54 AM ET USA
I think this was a hard won opening. Even my very secular friends
acknowledge that since the Regensberg speech, public discussion of
Islam is freer and more courageous, and moderate Moslems are daring
to speak openly (having criticized the Pope first, of course- and
that is probably understandable from a pragmatic point of view). Way
to go, Pope.
Posted by: surewish - Oct. 17, 2006 7:10 PM ET USA
Before waxing too optimistic, consider the situation of Christians,
and the Orthodox Patriarch, in Turkey. It is a nightmare. And this
is a "tolerant" Islamic society. The military is the only bar to
Sharia justice and 85% of the people want an Islamic rpuublic. Seems
to me, the Pope is trying to begin by establishing a common lexicon.
Posted by: Cupertino - Oct. 17, 2006 11:20 AM ET USA
This is a grace filled moment. Certainly there are two views in
Islam and one of them proclaims that violence and conversion by the
sword are called for. But these men who want to dialogue with our
gentle Pope think otherwise and may very well speak for the vast
majority in Islam. We should pray that talks begin soon and are
continuous. It is the only hope, really, now that extreme Islamists
will soon have nuclear weapons.
Posted by: CJ - Oct. 17, 2006 11:07 AM ET USA
I agree with Truth over Sentiment - Good news indeed! The response
from the Grand Muftis is encouraging. I have always found it
possible to acknowledge and share the commonalities of belief and
reverence that Catholics and Muslims share, (love of the same God,
for one thing) whilst in no way feeling the need to hide or minimise
anything of our own faith. I am sure my Muslim friends feel the
same. God is with all those who seek Him sincerely.
Posted by: TRUTH over SENTIMENT - Oct. 16, 2006 7:49 PM ET USA
This is very good news. It is clear now why the Holy Father said
what he did and how he said it. Makes one wonder if these Imans knew
what he was to say.
These 38 Imams obviously teach Islam in a different tone than do the
radicals that get all the press. If this dialog does go on, it could
put a wedge between moderate and radical Islam at a time when the
world needs it most. Look for the Ayatollahs in Iraq to disown these
38 men.
Posted by: trinnie - Oct. 16, 2006 6:36 PM ET USA
The full text of the Muslim leaders puts the best interpretation on
texts in the Koran dealing with violence against non-Muslims and on
conversion, but there are many other Koranic texts that do not
favour this 'peaceful' view. Still, this document is of sensational
importance, in the way it condemns violence now (although Islam did
spread across the Middle East and North Africa by sheer aggression,
not in self-defence). Muslim suicide bombers can never claim that
their acts are justified.
The Martyr's Cup... Eucharist.
The Martyr's Cup... Eucharist.
by Mike Aquilina
In July of A.D. 64, during the tenth year of Nero's reign, a great
fire consumed much of the city of Rome. The fire raged out of control
for seven days�and then it started again, mysteriously, a day later.
Many in Rome knew that Nero had been eager to do some urban
redevelopment. He had a plan that included an opulent golden palace
for himself. The problem was that so many buildings were standing in
his way�many of them teeming wooden tenements housing Rome's poor and
working class.
Convenient Fire
The fire seemed too convenient for Nero's purposes�and his delight in
watching the blaze didn't relieve anybody's suspicions. If he didn't
exactly fiddle while Rome burned, he at least recited his poems. Nero
needed a scapegoat, and an upstart religious cult, Jewish in origin
and with foreign associations, served his purposes well. Nero, who was
a perverse expert at human torment, had some of its members tortured
till they were so mad they would confess to any crime. Once they had
confessed, he had others arrested.
He must have known, however, that the charges would not hold up. So he
condemned them not for arson, or treason, or conspiracy, but for
"hatred of humanity."
To amuse the people, he arranged for their execution to be a
spectacle, entertainment on a grand scale. The Roman historian Tacitus
(who had contempt for the religion, but greater contempt for Nero)
describes in gruesome detail the tortures that took place amid a party
in Nero's gardens.
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the
skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed
to crosses, or were doomed to the flames. These served to illuminate
the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open the gardens for
the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he
mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in
a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and
exemplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was
not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty,
that they were being punished.
That is all we know about the first Roman martyrs. We know none of
their names. Tacitus doesn't tell us why they were willing to die this
way rather than renounce their faith. Yet this should be an important
question for us to consider. Why did the martyrs do this? What
prepared them to face death so bravely? To what exactly did they bear
witness with their death?
Let us begin with the witness we know best and ask ourselves: How can
we spot a Christian today? What are the unmistakable signs that tell
us we're with a fellow believer?
Christian Signs
In the first generation of the Church, there were several unmistakable
signs. St. Luke tells us that the first Christians, one and all,
"devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the
communion (koinonia), to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers"
(Acts 2:42). The teaching of the apostles, the communion, the breaking
of the bread, and the prayers.
This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about
those first Christians as we would like to know. They were a small
group, not especially wealthy, without social or political status, and
often operating underground. What's more, over the next 275 years,
imperial and local governments tried fairly regularly to wipe out all
traces of Christianity�destroying not only the Christians' bodies, but
their books and their possessions as well. So what we have left are
the handful of documents that survived�mostly sermons, letters, and
liturgies�as well as a few other scraps of parchment or painted wood,
and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved for us.
Yet what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the
archeological digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the
Apostles, especially in one small detail: The first Christians
"devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching, to the communion, and
to the breaking of the bread and the prayers." One phrase
especially�the breaking of the bread�recurs in many of the scraps we
have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the
Eucharistic Liturgy, the Lord's Supper.
Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and
that is perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be
Christians. No Christian practice is so well attested from those early
years. No doctrine is so systematically worked out as the doctrine of
the Eucharist.
It was when they gathered for the Eucharist that all this�their common
life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the
apostles�happened most clearly, directly, intensely. They experienced
fellowship with each other and together heard the apostles' teaching,
and they broke the bread in the accustomed way, as they said the
customary prayers.
So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its
unity in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.
A Eucharist Everywhere
Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman Empire. One modern
sociologist estimates that, in the centuries that concern us here, the
Church grew at a rate of forty percent per decade. By the middle of
the fourth century, there were 33 million Christians in an empire of
60 million people.
That meant that the Eucharist was celebrated everywhere. And the fact
that it was celebrated everywhere was itself a favorite theme of the
earliest church fathers. Justin the Martyr commented in the Dialogue
with Trypho that, by the year 150, "There is not one single race of
men . . . among whom prayers and Eucharist are not offered through the
name of the crucified Jesus."
The ancient Fathers commonly applied the Old Testament prophecy of
Malachi to the liturgy: "from the rising of the sun to its setting my
name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered
to my name, and a pure offering." Those lines found their way into
many Eucharistic prayers, where they remain even to this day. (They
appear, for example, in the third Eucharistic prayer in the Roman
Missal: "so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to
the glory of your name.")
As the Church moved outward from Jerusalem, this is what believers
did. They offered the Eucharist. The early histories tell us that the
first thing the Apostle Jude did when he established the Church in the
city of Edessa was to ordain priests and to teach them to celebrate
the Eucharist.
This is what the early Church was about. Everything that was good in
Christian life flowed naturally and supernaturally from that one great
Eucharistic reality: from the Christians' sacramental experience of
fellowship and communion, of the teaching of the apostles, of the
breaking of the bread, and of the prayers.
Real Martyrdom
But there was another dominant reality in the ancient Church. It is
something that appears just as often in the archeological record and
in the paper trail of the early Christians. That something is
martyrdom. Persecution.
Martyrdom occupied the attention of the first Christians because it
was always a real possibility. Shortly after Christianity arrived in
the city of Rome, the emperor Nero discovered that Christians could
provide an almost unlimited supply of victims for his circus
spectacles. The emperors needed to keep the people amused, and one way
to do so was by giving them spectacularly violent and bloody
entertainments.
The Christians' morality made them none too popular with their
neighbors anyway, so the citizens were more than willing to cheer as
the Christians were doused with pitch and set on fire, or sent into
the ring to battle hungry wild animals or armed gladiators. It was all
in a day's fun in ancient Rome. Over time, Nero's perverted whims
settled into laws and legal precedents, as later emperors issued
further rulings on the Christian problem. Outside the law, mob
violence against Christians was fairly common and rarely punished.
The Christians applied a certain term to their co-religionists who
were made victims of persecution. They called them "martyrs"�which
means, literally, witnesses in a court of law. And to the martyrs they
accorded a reverence matched only by their reverence for the Eucharist.
In fact, the early Christians used the same language to describe
martyrdom as they used to describe the Eucharist. We see this in the
New Testament Book of Revelation, when John describes his vision of
heaven. There, he saw "under the altar the souls of those who had been
slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne." There,
under the altar of sacrifice, were the martyrs, the witnesses.
That image brings it all together. For, in those first generations of
the Church, the most common phrase used to describe the Eucharist was
"the sacrifice." Both the Didache and St. Ignatius refer to it as "the
sacrifice." And yet martyrdom, too, was the sacrifice.
God's Wheat Ground
And so, in A.D. 107, when Ignatius described his own impending
execution, he imagined it in Eucharistic terms. He said he was like
the wine at the offertory. He wrote to the Romans: "Grant me nothing
more than that I be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready."
Later in the same letter he wrote: "Let me be food for the wild
beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God's wheat, ground fine by
the lion's teeth to be made purest bread for Christ." Ignatius is
bread, and he is wine; his martyrdom is a sacrifice. It is, in a
sense, a eucharist.
Ignatius's good friend Polycarp also died a martyr's death. Polycarp
was bishop of Smyrna, and had been converted by the Apostle John
himself. His secretary described the bishop's martyrdom, once again,
as a kind of eucharist. Polycarp's final words are a long prayer of
thanksgiving that echoes the great eucharistic prayers of the ancient
world and today. It includes an invocation of the Holy Spirit, a
doxology of the Trinity, and a great Amen at the end.
When the flames reached the body of the old bishop, his secretary
tells us that the pyre gave off not the odor of burning flesh but the
aroma of baking bread. In yet another martyrdom, then, we find a pure
offering of bread�a eucharist.
The Eucharistic images in Ignatius and Polycarp echo again in the
future writings and histories of the martyrs. Even in the court
transcripts, presumably taken down by pagan Romans, the Christians
reply to the charges against them with lines from the liturgy. They
lift up their hearts. And when they are sentenced, they say Deo
gratias�thanks be to God.
The story of the martyr Pionius proceeds in the words, verbatim, of
the eucharistic prayer: "and looking up to heaven he gave thanks to
God." The Greek word for "thanks" there is eucharistesas. So we might
read it as, "Looking up to heaven, he offered the Eucharist to God,"
even as the flames consumed him. In a similar way, the priest Irenaeus
cried out, in the midst of torture, "With my endurance I am even now
offering sacrifice to my God to whom I have always offered sacrifice."
So pervasive is this eucharistic language in the early Church's
account of martyrdom that one of the great scholars of Christian
antiquity, Robin Darling Young of Notre Dame, has spoken of the
ancient Church having two liturgies: the private liturgy of the
Eucharist and the public liturgy of martyrdom.
Loving Eucharist
But what is it about martyrdom that makes it like the Eucharist? Well,
what has Jesus done in the Eucharist? He has given himself to us, and
he has held nothing back. He gives us his body, blood, soul, and
divinity. He gives himself to us as food. And that is love: the total
gift of self. That is the very love the martyrs wanted to emulate.
Jesus had given himself entirely for them. They wanted to give
themselves entirely for him�everything they had, holding nothing back.
If Jesus would become bread for them, they would allow the lions to
make them finest wheat for Jesus.
So: Martyrdom was a total gift of self. The Eucharist was a total gift
of self. In the Eucharist, Jesus gave himself to us. In martyrdom, we
give ourselves back to him.
But there's a problem here. Very few of the ancient Christians died
for the faith. What about the rest? What was their gift? How did they
live the Eucharist?
Not long after Christianity was legalized by Constantine, St. Jerome
noted that some believers were already growing nostalgic for the good
old days of the martyrs. But Jerome stopped such fantasies in their
tracks. He told his congregation, "Let's not think that there is
martyrdom only in the shedding of blood. There is always martyrdom."
There is always martyrdom. For most of the early Christians, the
martyrdom came not with lions or fire or the rack or the sword. It
came not at the hands of a mob or a gladiator. For most of the early
Christians, "martyrdom" consisted in a daily dying to self in
imitation of Jesus Christ.
Jesus told them: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself
. . . daily." So the Christians denied themselves, in imitation of
Jesus. What did this mean, in practical terms? It meant that they
would never eat lavishly as long as others were going hungry. They
would never keep an opulent wardrobe while others dressed in rags.
They would never hold back their testimony to the faith as long as any
of their neighbors were living in sin or in ignorance of the love of
Jesus Christ.
Whatever they had, these Christians gave. They gave of themselves�just
as the martyrs gave themselves in the arena�just as Jesus Christ gave
himself on the Cross�and just as Jesus Christ gave himself in the
Eucharist.
In Christ, these Christians had come into a Holy Communion. In
baptism, they were baptized into his death, into Christ's own
martyrdom. In the Eucharist, they became one with him, in the deepest,
and closest, and most intimate bond possible. They were closer to
Jesus than they were to their best friends, closer to him than they
were to their spouses. They were closer to Jesus than they were to
their own parents or their own children. He himself had promised them
that they would live in him, and he would live in them.
This was, and is, the deepest truth of the faith. In Jesus Christ, we
live as sons and daughters of the eternal Father�we share his own
divine life. In Jesus Christ, we can call God our Father because God
is eternally his Father. In the New Testament, St. Peter puts our Holy
Communion in the most powerful terms: We have become partakers of the
divine nature.
The Life the Martyrs Knew
And what is that nature? How does God live in eternity? What is the
Trinity for us, besides a theological abstraction and a mathematical
enigma?
John said it all: God is Love. God is self-giving, life-giving love.
From all eternity, God the Father pours himself out in love for the
Son. He holds nothing back. The Son returns that love to the Father
with everything he has. He holds nothing back. And (as the Western
tradition has understood it) the love that they share is the Holy Spirit.
This is the life the martyrs knew even at the moment of their death�
especially at the moment of their death. But they themselves had been
caught up into that life so long before and so many times. They
themselves had been caught up into the life-giving love of Jesus
Christ�the life-giving love of the Blessed Trinity�whenever they had
gone to the Eucharist. Whenever they had received Holy Communion.
Whenever they had joined with their brothers and sisters for the
teaching of the apostles and the communion, the breaking of the bread
and the prayers.
Jesus gave himself entirely to them, and they gave themselves in
return. At every Eucharist, he gives himself entirely to us, and we
give ourselves entirely in return. We say Amen�So be it!�I accept. And
when we do that, we consent to the communion.
We need to know what we're doing when we say "Amen." The life of
Christ is more than a warm, fuzzy feeling that everything (including
me) is okay and everything (no matter what I do) will work out fine.
It's accepting his cross. It's accepting our martyrdom. And in the
words of Garrison Keillor: If you don't want to go to Minneapolis,
what are you doing on the train?
There is always martyrdom. St. Paul had signaled this in his Letter to
the Romans, where he wrote: "I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by
the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy
and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." Surely Paul's
words reached many future martyrs in Rome, where he himself would one
day die by beheading.
But his words reached many others as well, men and women whose
sacrifice would be something quiet and hidden and noticed only by God.
It is the same St. Paul who referred to our bodies as "temples of the
Holy Spirit." Let's not ever forget that, in the ancient world,
temples were not mere shrines; they were places of sacrifice.
And so are we. Our bodies are places of sacrifice, and our lives are
the offering on the altar. We ourselves are the Eucharist in motion.
The Look of Love
Our everyday life should be a voluntary sacrifice, voluntary
self-giving, voluntary martyrdom. Listen to the traditional language
about penance and reparation, mortification, fasting, pilgrimage, and
almsgiving. It's all about self-possession, self-denial, self-mastery.
And all that is great. It is good to be disciplined, and self-denial
is a means to achieving discipline. But discipline, too, is a means
and not an end in itself. Why do we want to possess ourselves?
Jesus shows us why. We possess ourselves in order to give ourselves
away�just like Jesus, just like the martyrs. Only then can we become
truly ourselves. For we are made in God's image, and God is
life-giving love, whose human life was a self-giving sacrifice. The
Eucharist is that sacrifice, and all our lives must be placed upon the
altar, all our lives must be taken up into the Eucharist.
Remember the question I asked earlier: How can we spot a Christian
today? The same way we could have spotted them on the streets of
first-century Rome: by their Eucharistic lives. When we give ourselves
without holding back, we are living like the early Christians. We are
living like the martyrs. We are living like the Most Blessed Trinity
in heaven.
St. Irenaeus put it well, around the year A.D. 190: "Our way of
thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn
confirms our way of thinking."
What does it look like in the day-to-day? It looks like a mother
staying up all night with a sick child�or a grandmother up late with
the child so that her daughter can get some sleep. It looks like a
husband working overtime at a job he doesn't particularly enjoy, so
that his family can know a better life. It looks like a family keeping
vigil by a deathbed. It looks like the dying man who musters a smile
for his loved ones.
It looks like the young couple who give up life in suburbia to head
off to the mission field. It looks like the religious sister who has
renounced family and liberty in order to give herself entirely to
Jesus Christ and his Church. It looks like a pastor, who must serve as
father and teacher and psychologist and sage and business manager�and
can't find enough hours in the day.
That's the total gift of self. It's what the early Christians knew.
And it's what we must come to know for ourselves, if we want to become
ourselves�if we want to become what God made us to be. There's no
other way to be happy. It's all there in the Mass of the early
Christians, and in the Eucharist we attend on Sunday, the Eucharist we
live every day of our lives.
hsi
by Mike Aquilina
In July of A.D. 64, during the tenth year of Nero's reign, a great
fire consumed much of the city of Rome. The fire raged out of control
for seven days�and then it started again, mysteriously, a day later.
Many in Rome knew that Nero had been eager to do some urban
redevelopment. He had a plan that included an opulent golden palace
for himself. The problem was that so many buildings were standing in
his way�many of them teeming wooden tenements housing Rome's poor and
working class.
Convenient Fire
The fire seemed too convenient for Nero's purposes�and his delight in
watching the blaze didn't relieve anybody's suspicions. If he didn't
exactly fiddle while Rome burned, he at least recited his poems. Nero
needed a scapegoat, and an upstart religious cult, Jewish in origin
and with foreign associations, served his purposes well. Nero, who was
a perverse expert at human torment, had some of its members tortured
till they were so mad they would confess to any crime. Once they had
confessed, he had others arrested.
He must have known, however, that the charges would not hold up. So he
condemned them not for arson, or treason, or conspiracy, but for
"hatred of humanity."
To amuse the people, he arranged for their execution to be a
spectacle, entertainment on a grand scale. The Roman historian Tacitus
(who had contempt for the religion, but greater contempt for Nero)
describes in gruesome detail the tortures that took place amid a party
in Nero's gardens.
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the
skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed
to crosses, or were doomed to the flames. These served to illuminate
the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open the gardens for
the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he
mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in
a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and
exemplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was
not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty,
that they were being punished.
That is all we know about the first Roman martyrs. We know none of
their names. Tacitus doesn't tell us why they were willing to die this
way rather than renounce their faith. Yet this should be an important
question for us to consider. Why did the martyrs do this? What
prepared them to face death so bravely? To what exactly did they bear
witness with their death?
Let us begin with the witness we know best and ask ourselves: How can
we spot a Christian today? What are the unmistakable signs that tell
us we're with a fellow believer?
Christian Signs
In the first generation of the Church, there were several unmistakable
signs. St. Luke tells us that the first Christians, one and all,
"devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the
communion (koinonia), to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers"
(Acts 2:42). The teaching of the apostles, the communion, the breaking
of the bread, and the prayers.
This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about
those first Christians as we would like to know. They were a small
group, not especially wealthy, without social or political status, and
often operating underground. What's more, over the next 275 years,
imperial and local governments tried fairly regularly to wipe out all
traces of Christianity�destroying not only the Christians' bodies, but
their books and their possessions as well. So what we have left are
the handful of documents that survived�mostly sermons, letters, and
liturgies�as well as a few other scraps of parchment or painted wood,
and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved for us.
Yet what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the
archeological digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the
Apostles, especially in one small detail: The first Christians
"devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching, to the communion, and
to the breaking of the bread and the prayers." One phrase
especially�the breaking of the bread�recurs in many of the scraps we
have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the
Eucharistic Liturgy, the Lord's Supper.
Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and
that is perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be
Christians. No Christian practice is so well attested from those early
years. No doctrine is so systematically worked out as the doctrine of
the Eucharist.
It was when they gathered for the Eucharist that all this�their common
life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the
apostles�happened most clearly, directly, intensely. They experienced
fellowship with each other and together heard the apostles' teaching,
and they broke the bread in the accustomed way, as they said the
customary prayers.
So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its
unity in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.
A Eucharist Everywhere
Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman Empire. One modern
sociologist estimates that, in the centuries that concern us here, the
Church grew at a rate of forty percent per decade. By the middle of
the fourth century, there were 33 million Christians in an empire of
60 million people.
That meant that the Eucharist was celebrated everywhere. And the fact
that it was celebrated everywhere was itself a favorite theme of the
earliest church fathers. Justin the Martyr commented in the Dialogue
with Trypho that, by the year 150, "There is not one single race of
men . . . among whom prayers and Eucharist are not offered through the
name of the crucified Jesus."
The ancient Fathers commonly applied the Old Testament prophecy of
Malachi to the liturgy: "from the rising of the sun to its setting my
name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered
to my name, and a pure offering." Those lines found their way into
many Eucharistic prayers, where they remain even to this day. (They
appear, for example, in the third Eucharistic prayer in the Roman
Missal: "so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to
the glory of your name.")
As the Church moved outward from Jerusalem, this is what believers
did. They offered the Eucharist. The early histories tell us that the
first thing the Apostle Jude did when he established the Church in the
city of Edessa was to ordain priests and to teach them to celebrate
the Eucharist.
This is what the early Church was about. Everything that was good in
Christian life flowed naturally and supernaturally from that one great
Eucharistic reality: from the Christians' sacramental experience of
fellowship and communion, of the teaching of the apostles, of the
breaking of the bread, and of the prayers.
Real Martyrdom
But there was another dominant reality in the ancient Church. It is
something that appears just as often in the archeological record and
in the paper trail of the early Christians. That something is
martyrdom. Persecution.
Martyrdom occupied the attention of the first Christians because it
was always a real possibility. Shortly after Christianity arrived in
the city of Rome, the emperor Nero discovered that Christians could
provide an almost unlimited supply of victims for his circus
spectacles. The emperors needed to keep the people amused, and one way
to do so was by giving them spectacularly violent and bloody
entertainments.
The Christians' morality made them none too popular with their
neighbors anyway, so the citizens were more than willing to cheer as
the Christians were doused with pitch and set on fire, or sent into
the ring to battle hungry wild animals or armed gladiators. It was all
in a day's fun in ancient Rome. Over time, Nero's perverted whims
settled into laws and legal precedents, as later emperors issued
further rulings on the Christian problem. Outside the law, mob
violence against Christians was fairly common and rarely punished.
The Christians applied a certain term to their co-religionists who
were made victims of persecution. They called them "martyrs"�which
means, literally, witnesses in a court of law. And to the martyrs they
accorded a reverence matched only by their reverence for the Eucharist.
In fact, the early Christians used the same language to describe
martyrdom as they used to describe the Eucharist. We see this in the
New Testament Book of Revelation, when John describes his vision of
heaven. There, he saw "under the altar the souls of those who had been
slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne." There,
under the altar of sacrifice, were the martyrs, the witnesses.
That image brings it all together. For, in those first generations of
the Church, the most common phrase used to describe the Eucharist was
"the sacrifice." Both the Didache and St. Ignatius refer to it as "the
sacrifice." And yet martyrdom, too, was the sacrifice.
God's Wheat Ground
And so, in A.D. 107, when Ignatius described his own impending
execution, he imagined it in Eucharistic terms. He said he was like
the wine at the offertory. He wrote to the Romans: "Grant me nothing
more than that I be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready."
Later in the same letter he wrote: "Let me be food for the wild
beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God's wheat, ground fine by
the lion's teeth to be made purest bread for Christ." Ignatius is
bread, and he is wine; his martyrdom is a sacrifice. It is, in a
sense, a eucharist.
Ignatius's good friend Polycarp also died a martyr's death. Polycarp
was bishop of Smyrna, and had been converted by the Apostle John
himself. His secretary described the bishop's martyrdom, once again,
as a kind of eucharist. Polycarp's final words are a long prayer of
thanksgiving that echoes the great eucharistic prayers of the ancient
world and today. It includes an invocation of the Holy Spirit, a
doxology of the Trinity, and a great Amen at the end.
When the flames reached the body of the old bishop, his secretary
tells us that the pyre gave off not the odor of burning flesh but the
aroma of baking bread. In yet another martyrdom, then, we find a pure
offering of bread�a eucharist.
The Eucharistic images in Ignatius and Polycarp echo again in the
future writings and histories of the martyrs. Even in the court
transcripts, presumably taken down by pagan Romans, the Christians
reply to the charges against them with lines from the liturgy. They
lift up their hearts. And when they are sentenced, they say Deo
gratias�thanks be to God.
The story of the martyr Pionius proceeds in the words, verbatim, of
the eucharistic prayer: "and looking up to heaven he gave thanks to
God." The Greek word for "thanks" there is eucharistesas. So we might
read it as, "Looking up to heaven, he offered the Eucharist to God,"
even as the flames consumed him. In a similar way, the priest Irenaeus
cried out, in the midst of torture, "With my endurance I am even now
offering sacrifice to my God to whom I have always offered sacrifice."
So pervasive is this eucharistic language in the early Church's
account of martyrdom that one of the great scholars of Christian
antiquity, Robin Darling Young of Notre Dame, has spoken of the
ancient Church having two liturgies: the private liturgy of the
Eucharist and the public liturgy of martyrdom.
Loving Eucharist
But what is it about martyrdom that makes it like the Eucharist? Well,
what has Jesus done in the Eucharist? He has given himself to us, and
he has held nothing back. He gives us his body, blood, soul, and
divinity. He gives himself to us as food. And that is love: the total
gift of self. That is the very love the martyrs wanted to emulate.
Jesus had given himself entirely for them. They wanted to give
themselves entirely for him�everything they had, holding nothing back.
If Jesus would become bread for them, they would allow the lions to
make them finest wheat for Jesus.
So: Martyrdom was a total gift of self. The Eucharist was a total gift
of self. In the Eucharist, Jesus gave himself to us. In martyrdom, we
give ourselves back to him.
But there's a problem here. Very few of the ancient Christians died
for the faith. What about the rest? What was their gift? How did they
live the Eucharist?
Not long after Christianity was legalized by Constantine, St. Jerome
noted that some believers were already growing nostalgic for the good
old days of the martyrs. But Jerome stopped such fantasies in their
tracks. He told his congregation, "Let's not think that there is
martyrdom only in the shedding of blood. There is always martyrdom."
There is always martyrdom. For most of the early Christians, the
martyrdom came not with lions or fire or the rack or the sword. It
came not at the hands of a mob or a gladiator. For most of the early
Christians, "martyrdom" consisted in a daily dying to self in
imitation of Jesus Christ.
Jesus told them: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself
. . . daily." So the Christians denied themselves, in imitation of
Jesus. What did this mean, in practical terms? It meant that they
would never eat lavishly as long as others were going hungry. They
would never keep an opulent wardrobe while others dressed in rags.
They would never hold back their testimony to the faith as long as any
of their neighbors were living in sin or in ignorance of the love of
Jesus Christ.
Whatever they had, these Christians gave. They gave of themselves�just
as the martyrs gave themselves in the arena�just as Jesus Christ gave
himself on the Cross�and just as Jesus Christ gave himself in the
Eucharist.
In Christ, these Christians had come into a Holy Communion. In
baptism, they were baptized into his death, into Christ's own
martyrdom. In the Eucharist, they became one with him, in the deepest,
and closest, and most intimate bond possible. They were closer to
Jesus than they were to their best friends, closer to him than they
were to their spouses. They were closer to Jesus than they were to
their own parents or their own children. He himself had promised them
that they would live in him, and he would live in them.
This was, and is, the deepest truth of the faith. In Jesus Christ, we
live as sons and daughters of the eternal Father�we share his own
divine life. In Jesus Christ, we can call God our Father because God
is eternally his Father. In the New Testament, St. Peter puts our Holy
Communion in the most powerful terms: We have become partakers of the
divine nature.
The Life the Martyrs Knew
And what is that nature? How does God live in eternity? What is the
Trinity for us, besides a theological abstraction and a mathematical
enigma?
John said it all: God is Love. God is self-giving, life-giving love.
From all eternity, God the Father pours himself out in love for the
Son. He holds nothing back. The Son returns that love to the Father
with everything he has. He holds nothing back. And (as the Western
tradition has understood it) the love that they share is the Holy Spirit.
This is the life the martyrs knew even at the moment of their death�
especially at the moment of their death. But they themselves had been
caught up into that life so long before and so many times. They
themselves had been caught up into the life-giving love of Jesus
Christ�the life-giving love of the Blessed Trinity�whenever they had
gone to the Eucharist. Whenever they had received Holy Communion.
Whenever they had joined with their brothers and sisters for the
teaching of the apostles and the communion, the breaking of the bread
and the prayers.
Jesus gave himself entirely to them, and they gave themselves in
return. At every Eucharist, he gives himself entirely to us, and we
give ourselves entirely in return. We say Amen�So be it!�I accept. And
when we do that, we consent to the communion.
We need to know what we're doing when we say "Amen." The life of
Christ is more than a warm, fuzzy feeling that everything (including
me) is okay and everything (no matter what I do) will work out fine.
It's accepting his cross. It's accepting our martyrdom. And in the
words of Garrison Keillor: If you don't want to go to Minneapolis,
what are you doing on the train?
There is always martyrdom. St. Paul had signaled this in his Letter to
the Romans, where he wrote: "I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by
the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy
and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." Surely Paul's
words reached many future martyrs in Rome, where he himself would one
day die by beheading.
But his words reached many others as well, men and women whose
sacrifice would be something quiet and hidden and noticed only by God.
It is the same St. Paul who referred to our bodies as "temples of the
Holy Spirit." Let's not ever forget that, in the ancient world,
temples were not mere shrines; they were places of sacrifice.
And so are we. Our bodies are places of sacrifice, and our lives are
the offering on the altar. We ourselves are the Eucharist in motion.
The Look of Love
Our everyday life should be a voluntary sacrifice, voluntary
self-giving, voluntary martyrdom. Listen to the traditional language
about penance and reparation, mortification, fasting, pilgrimage, and
almsgiving. It's all about self-possession, self-denial, self-mastery.
And all that is great. It is good to be disciplined, and self-denial
is a means to achieving discipline. But discipline, too, is a means
and not an end in itself. Why do we want to possess ourselves?
Jesus shows us why. We possess ourselves in order to give ourselves
away�just like Jesus, just like the martyrs. Only then can we become
truly ourselves. For we are made in God's image, and God is
life-giving love, whose human life was a self-giving sacrifice. The
Eucharist is that sacrifice, and all our lives must be placed upon the
altar, all our lives must be taken up into the Eucharist.
Remember the question I asked earlier: How can we spot a Christian
today? The same way we could have spotted them on the streets of
first-century Rome: by their Eucharistic lives. When we give ourselves
without holding back, we are living like the early Christians. We are
living like the martyrs. We are living like the Most Blessed Trinity
in heaven.
St. Irenaeus put it well, around the year A.D. 190: "Our way of
thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn
confirms our way of thinking."
What does it look like in the day-to-day? It looks like a mother
staying up all night with a sick child�or a grandmother up late with
the child so that her daughter can get some sleep. It looks like a
husband working overtime at a job he doesn't particularly enjoy, so
that his family can know a better life. It looks like a family keeping
vigil by a deathbed. It looks like the dying man who musters a smile
for his loved ones.
It looks like the young couple who give up life in suburbia to head
off to the mission field. It looks like the religious sister who has
renounced family and liberty in order to give herself entirely to
Jesus Christ and his Church. It looks like a pastor, who must serve as
father and teacher and psychologist and sage and business manager�and
can't find enough hours in the day.
That's the total gift of self. It's what the early Christians knew.
And it's what we must come to know for ourselves, if we want to become
ourselves�if we want to become what God made us to be. There's no
other way to be happy. It's all there in the Mass of the early
Christians, and in the Eucharist we attend on Sunday, the Eucharist we
live every day of our lives.
hsi
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