Everyday

Bare Necessities

2011-07-01T22:02:00.001-07:00

"Hey, what room are you in?, I want to know if the AC is working"

"Well, err…third floor"

I have been caught off guard with little details. Not knowing what is your room number for instance. There is in us a inherent latency to live with a minimum of information in order to survive. We will know our pant size but not our collar or know our height but not our shoe size. Being perplexed while filling forms or someone asking your Constituency ward number are things of sun sets and sun rise:welcome to ordinary life

And isn't this a great trophy of human life, to survive with the least information? Why should I know my street name and full abbreviation of my college? Why should I know the name of that flower, I just want to buy it, not do a thesis! Queen comes to my mind, singing: Let me live!

Aye, but the necessities of life are not the measure of human perfection. It is not about a dog's life. Our ideal image of ourselves is always of greatness not of fighting fires and living camp-life until we are seventy. I suppose we have a tendency to live but for necessity.

A measure of a man is the measure of the finest details he ponders on. Why would Man care so much about blending colors of a table cloth, or the bucking pressure of Nadal, or the serenity of a Tenor, or the majestic beauty of a gothic cathedral? Why not just wallow around like a dog until food has been put on the plate? Because we have not been made for comfort, chico, but for greatness, bellows Benedict XI.

Then next time I get caught with an address but no envelope, a number without a code, or an important document but without a photocopy, I would like to remind myself that it is better to say mea culpa than to say "damn! There is so much negativity around"

Yes, and when are you planning to get that air freshener for it?

No one buys Peace

2011-03-14T03:18:00.001-07:00

Today, I left my mother to a place on my bike. It was a tense ride and slowest I've driven so far. Even my mom could only heave a sigh of relief only after the bike came to a halt with her still in one piece. I asked her, "Wouldn't it have made more sense to pay 10 rupees, hire a rickshaw and earn some peace?" She said she'd prefer carrying the heavy bag and break a sweat than take a rickshaw

I believe many people think peace is an absence of strife, having no problems, no catastrophes, no troubles or tribulations. Very few people believe peace is also attained as a sum of good decisions. Good decisions that don't create momentary tensions.

My mother preferred carrying that heavy bag in the scorching heat and deafening noise than pay 10 rupees and make a good decision. The consequence of choosing the former also would be to curse the purpose of doing the work, sympathize with oneself, "…what a difficult life I lead", and not being able to do anything cheerfully or with love.

Like everything else, peace comes at a price. I stand here outside a long queue with people complaining about slow service. Sir, please take a little pain to learn how to pay bills online. Wage a war on yourself and your less than average existence. Peace will follow this War

Resurrection gives a chance, gives Hope

2011-03-09T03:15:00.001-08:00

As Ash Wednesday has begun today, I was meditating on the homily of Pope Benedict XVI. He mentions and I quote,

"God created men and women for resurrection and life, and this truth gives an authentic and definitive meaning to human history, to the personal and social lives of men and women,

to culture, politics and the economy. Without the light of faith, the entire universe finishes shut within a tomb devoid of any future, any hope."

All of history has seen triumphant victories and big-hearted losers. What comes to my mind are those countries, or regimes or periods which saw victims, or generosities that had a price to pay. To take one example is the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were massacred. My point is that Human History cannot be a page without being a part of a book. A book points somewhere, it leads to a climax or an end where everything is understood in proper light. Detaching one particular murder on a page makes and reading it independently would make you wonder why such injustice. Our Human histories of War or Terrorism or misfortune, whether individual or historical, should also make us think? Does not it make us wonder that everything loses meaning and is pointless to fight for just a better world, or to have to pay a price, an individual, or for an entire community or people to pay a price for an ideal. Is it worth it just to make a day or two better? Will this human history of people who have died more valiant than others go up as smoke if we are to believe that life is here and now and while you and I are here, let's talk, give and take?

Resurrection changes it all. Human History of fortunes and misfortunes, stroke of luck and grave evil and injustice all can be seen in perspective. There is accountability, there is reward. There is a chance!

Surrogate Pregnancy: Buying and Selling Life

2011-03-07T04:57:00.001-08:00

An excellent article by Clare O Neil in the Sydney Morning Herald where she argues about the moral, commercial and societal difficulties that surrogacy poses. Here's a snippet

A second, more complex set of moral concerns is that commercial surrogacy could commodify pregnancy, babies and motherhood, leading to the breakdown of cultural beliefs we may not wish to change.

Babies and pregnancy are seen by society as sacrosanct. Through commercial surrogacy, they are given a price, and sold and exchanged much like other goods and services. If we allow babies to be bought, why not a two-year-old child? Should we allow babies to be sold at auction? For many, these (albeit extreme) hypotheticals feel intuitively wrong, contravening a basic belief that some things simply should not be bought and sold.

Moral Absolutes: Some acts are always wrong no matter what the circumstance or great good (purpose) acheived

2011-03-04T20:24:00.001-08:00

Here is a very good snippet from this column written by Christopher O. Tollefse called, Speaking Truth to Evil (in Public Discourse), on how certain acts not matter what the circumstance or the good one wishes to attain, is always wrong by the virtue of choosing that object, an evil object i.e (say) murder, Rape, Contraception ect.

Only "Unjustified" False Assertion?

The first challenge has to do with the nature of moral absolutes, such as the absolute norm against murder, or, as I believe, the absolute norm against lying. Hadley Arkes and Francis Beckwith, while seeming to agree that these are moral absolutes, have both argued that absolute norms such as these contain within them a moral qualifier. The prohibition on murder is a prohibition on unjustified killing. Likewise, the prohibition on lying is on unjustified false assertion.

Yet no critic, speaking from the Catholic intellectual or faith tradition, has drawn the obvious conclusion from this that therefore the (absolute) norm regarding adultery is a norm against unjustified extramarital congress; or that the (absolute) norm against contraception is a norm against unjustified prevention of conception. And this is hardly surprising, for it is widely recognized that this is not, in fact, the nature of these norms.

As John Paul II labored to explain, there are acts which, independently of their further ends, or of their circumstances, are wrong precisely in virtue of the object chosen. That object—the form of behavior settled upon by the agent—is incompatible with the human good, including the human being's ultimate orientation to God. Choices of these sorts are wrong everywhere and always. Their objects are designated "intrinsically evil" precisely to indicate that their moral character can be recognized by considering only the object of the act itself (other questions, concerning the gravity of any particular violation, for example, will require attention to ends and circumstances).

One does not, therefore, look to whether extramarital intercourse is being performed at the right time, with the right person, in the right way, or with a view to some good end (perhaps an abortionist will give up his trade if a married woman were willing to be his mistress, thus saving the lives of many unborn in the area). Rather, one recognizes that the choice of such intercourse is incompatible with the human good because of its violation of the good of marriage, full stop. In asserting that adultery is always and everywhere impermissible, then, the tradition does not hold that adultery is "unjustified extramarital intercourse," but that it is simply extramarital intercourse as such.

Education is a progression

2011-02-20T21:56:00.000-08:00

I have recently taken up teaching a few computer courses. When I plan them, I plan assuming that the student already has some prerequisite knowledge of element A (say) without which you cannot learn element B.

The problem begins when the person has enrolled to learn Course C without having any knowledge of Course A - B. You end up teaching him A - B - C or left gasping for air.

Education is a progression. You cannot jump to Dante or Shakspeare without an elementary appreciation of Poetry neither can you appreciate Plato or a novel if you have not already had patience with lesser books of humble length. The latter are a training for the former. They lead you to it. Without that training, you wither give up the truly noble because you haven't yet been training on those less noble stairways leading up to the great Hall.

Newman on Friendships

2010-08-14T02:45:00.000-07:00

An Article on Mercatornet that delves in deeper into Cardinal Newman's understanding of Freindships, something lost today

Being 15 years Newman's junior, when he died suddenly aged 60, Newman was devastated. "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or awife's," he wrote, "but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." Some 15 centuries earlier, St Augustine in his Confessions wrote in the same way about thedeath not of his mistress, but of his best friend. "My eyes sought him everywhere, but they did not see him; and I hated all places because he was not in them, because they could not say to me, 'Look, he is coming,'as they did when he was alive and absent."

Newman's desire to share a tomb with St John may seem unusual to the modern eye. Yet Alan Bray in his seminal work The Friend (2003) cites many such examples of friends sharing tombs in previous centuries. Such public commitments to "marriages of the soul" were common in pre-modern times. Bray's conclusion is striking: "Newman's burial with St John cannot be detached from Newman's understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its longhistory."

Reading the final page of Newman's Apologia – lyrically dedicated to all his Oratorian brothers and especially to "Ambrose St John, whom God gave me, when He took everyone else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for 21 years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender" – the writer George Eliot was impressed. "Pray mark that beautiful passage in which he thanks his friend Ambrose St John," she wrote to a friend. "I know hardly anything that delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a reality in the world."

Do we – can we – today applaud such friendship? Do we – can we – make room, now, for such"evidences of sweet brotherly love"? Men and women often have intense friendships with members of their own sex, friendships that have no sexual component; yet we are losing the vocabulary to speak about them, or we are embarrassed to do so. A "friend" is one you add to a social networking profile on the web; or it is a euphemism for a sexual partneroutside marriage. Can a man nowadays own up with pride to having a dearand close friend, another man to whom he is devoted? Can he, without itbeing suspected as repressed homosexuality? I fear the answer to both may be "no". And it is hard to know which is the sadder.

Not everything can be explained

2010-04-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were asked recently what possibly can be the benefit of learning a language. As my friend and I come from the same school of thought that learning is an asset that everything has to be looked at not as ‘benefit’ or otherwise but as ‘learning’ and knowledge, we began to elucidate.

Soon we ran out of arguments. While we knew taking up any art form, music, an instrument, language, delicacy or culture only enriches and ennobles life, we fell short of convincing people that evening. We begged them to consider that perhaps if they learned French, one day a client would hire them simply because doing business with them complements his growth as they have familiarity with French. We tried other natural arguments that ‘nothing ever is a waste’ or ‘you don’t know when it may help you’

We reached higher planes too and discussions turned more mystical with having us saying that when we aspire for certain nobilities, it imprints on our character and personality a hint and trace of the nobility. We have a part of nobility within us. Our personality is sealed with nobility and often becomes synonymous with it. Our identities find new expression and a breath of life. They manifest because we aspire to reach a higher goal (than usual sustenance) as to indulge in the enrichment of life by yielding to its calling.

Our friends weren’t convinced. I don’t blame them. My own friend in my team acknowledged that what has taken years to learn, with hard perseverance and effort, cannot possible be explained loosely and nonchalantly in an evening soiree and expect to be understood.

But another thing we learned is that often, when it comes to things we cannot touch or explain because they cannot be studied under a microscope but can only be conceived and experienced, it is often the testimony of God in our hearts. He explains to us the value of things because He is eventually the source of all goodness. If we have been attracted to Him, surely we will be attracted and find Him in all things that His beauty manifests in.

And surely, it wouldn’t be wrong to say His beauty has manifested in music, art, sculpture, architecture, nature, Poetry and literature, theatre to name a few. Thus appreciation of these nobilities often presupposes knowledge of God that God fills these things with meaning. These things then manifest in our personalities and give us Life. Surely, anyone who understands this simply understands this by the testimony God creates in his mind as a witness to all things good in the world. But that doesn’t guarantee that we would be able to explain the same to others. Another reason, we cannot fully understand neither God‘s reality nor explain it to others with clarity. Eventually, some things are left as a witness in the heart and don’t become advocates in expression.

Dr. Vost on Thomas Aquinas and Virtues

2010-04-16T11:25:00.001-07:00

You can find the complete interview here

Kapler: I know that Aquinas was very instrumental in bringing you back to Catholicism. How did that happen?

Vost: I was drawn into atheism by various philosophers: Ayn Rand, a philosopher associated with a philosophy called Objectivism was one. Albert Ellis was a psychologist. He had a system called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy; he also happened to be an atheist. These people, Ayn Rand in particular, said her system was based on the philosophy of Aristotle. Albert Ellis said his psychology was based on an ancient system of the Stoic philosophers. Now it just so happened that both those Stoic philosophers and Aristotle were not atheists; they were theists. These were also systematic thinkers that St. Thomas Aquinas knew very, very well.

Well, it wasn’t until my early forties that I first came across the writings of Thomas Aquinas himself. Here I saw an absolute, true master of the writings of Aristotle. There’s a saying I like to quote from Charles Darwin, “My modern peers of the day are like mere school boys compared to old Aristotle.” I had that kind of an ah-ha when I came across Aquinas!

Kapler: Aquinas – I’ve heard you describe him, most recently in your book Unearthing Your Ten Talents, as a master of psychology. What did you find in St. Thomas that you didn’t find in the other great psychologists you have studied, and even taught about as a college psychology professor?

Vost: Much of his work in psychology comes through in the Second Part of his Summa Theologica. Thomas examines in great detail what it means to be a human being. How is it that we think, and how is it that we feel? How does this reflect us being made in God’s image? Thomas looks at things like: Virtue, how do we make ourselves our best possible selves? Sin, how do we avoid those things that pull us away from God and make us less than what we are? There’s a true profundity of thought there.

Kapler: When you talk in Unearthing Your Ten Talents about “the virtues,” they aren’t something we hear a great deal about today – not in pop psychology, not even from the pulpit, at least not in my experience. Why does Aquinas put such emphasis on “the virtues,” this list of habitual qualities; and why do we need to pay attention to that today?

Vost: Thomas wrote in the thirteenth century, and much of theology focused on sins and our fallen human nature, things that are very important. Thomas also wrote a great deal about those, but he also had an emphasis on how we are good, very good – wondrously made in the image of God. So to understand ourselves, we have to understand the powers God gave us. And virtues are basically perfections of those various powers.

The Catholic Church and the upside down faith

2010-03-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

The Catholic Church teaches this upside down faith of Christianity. What the world calls popular, The Church shouts it down. When world makes everything a personal choice, The Church cries out for the lack of love. What the world cherishes, The Church reminds will pass away. What the world too easily embraces, The Church reminds to be slow to befriend. The Church fights a lone battle, preaches the love of a God made Man who died to exemplify it. It makes its way to every road and station of the world glorifying the love of God and whistling the praises of his mercy. It celebrates the dignity of life and the nobility of human action. It condemns commoditizing human dignity and rationalizations of the human mind. The Church dances its way to serve and willingly lays itself as a carpet for anyone who has found the love of Christ to enter into its triumphant mysteries. The Church has been doing all these down centuries defending its creeds and guarding the good of Mankind in a passing world which it pilgrims.

for His friends

2010-03-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

Giving up your life doesn’t seem so difficult when the question is of a friend that is going to gain. Jesus said no man has greater love than one who lays his life down for a friend. It seems Jesus knew that love moves us to lay our lives down for others without thinking of losing our money, our time, our desires, dreams and our very lives. A patriot dies for his country. He loves his country. And what is friendship but love. We offer a seat to a friend we see in the bus not because we are selfish and couldn’t see the plight of tens of others standing next to us but because giving your seat to a friend is a iota of giving your life in a little way. The train journey only demands your seat. But it is the model derived from Jesus’ example of no man having greater love than one who lays his life down for a friend. And Jesus did the same. He invited us to friendship when he laid his life down. We are his friends. We have no other way to love others than befriending them. Sure, we often are protagonists in a passing act of compassion or generosity. But that is what it is, a passing act, a burst of compassion or zeal of generosity. But the zeal of friendship flows constantly in the blood reminding us “Love…Love…give your life for your friend…lay it down” Friendship affirms a committed heroic love, unlike a passing heroic compassion or generosity, which is always ready when a friend requires to be loved. Friendship doesn’t leave you to the mercy of a heroic leap in virtue. Friendship silently mortifies oneself as a testimony of love. It readily crucifies one’s own passions and interests so that those of a friend can be redeemed.

We just stay where we are

2010-03-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

I can understand just staying where you are. It is difficult to take a dip and contemplate how it would be to learn swimming. It is easy to contemplate but difficult to take the leap in to the cold water. It is easy to just stay where you are: I don’t know to swim. But this list is endless. Who really doesn’t want to learn a musical instrument or read a profound and moving book or watch a musical performance that leaves you blushing and child-like, or trek the cold, moist and wet mountain or take children on a camp or listen to a wise person share his experience. We all can contemplate this, but difficult to actually give ourselves to our contemplation. We eventually stay where we are. It is easy to go with life not bothering, not trying harder, not going out of your way to make someone happy, not trying to intervene in another’s life as it is too much of a discomfort and we are afraid of what they will think. Life is good however it is, live and let live. We just stay where we are, believing what we want, doing what we feel, living each day unable to tell one day from another, unable to tell one hue from another on a canvas. It takes courage to feel accountable. It takes courage to grieve and to burst out in enthusiasm. It takes courage to be cheerful all day. It takes courage to believe that one is a child of God and so one has to seek Him in all things. It is easy to stay where you are, to preach a religion of love and brotherhood because everyone loves Love and agrees that we have a common brotherhood but difficult to imagine an undying faith, a sustaining relationship with God and a journey of transformation. This is difficult. Love and brotherhood is easy, they are lofty words, no one tries to delve deeper, what really that love means. So we can keep saying the same things on and on. We just stay where we are.

Faith in a post modern world

2010-03-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

Temptations come in strange often creative ways. One of the strongest temptations yet underrated and under talked about is the temptation to think nothing really counts or has meaning or is supernatural or my actions, my smile, my courage, my love was just a passing moment and does not possess eternal consequences and effects. These temptations subtly throw darts on one’s faith and deflate the enthusiasm on a dry afternoon or a sulking evening when everyone is busy doing what is done every day. Conversations aren’t exciting, people don’t have inspiring faces, everyone simply looks like they have come to fill their stomach gluttonously and get back to work in an equally reluctant fashion. Everything around seems lacking significance and just another purposeless moment. It is at these moments when you look around and you see hounds racing toward your heart, what now looks like juicy meat in order to dispel your sense of grandeur about faith, about a Lord who died for you and that it is not worth fighting for, it is not worth living, everything is but a evolutionary process and instinct. Just pass through it and have a good time. This, I believe is the intellectual decoy of The Enemy which he uses when your heart doesn’t seem to be fired up and you have not enthusiasm to go with. This is The Enemy’s world and you are playing an eternal game in his corrupting and perishing backyard. He is going to play hard, on your mind by crushing entirely or making us believe what we hold on to, Love in Creation, Justice in Condemnation and Mercy in Redemption is but a mere delusion and a romantic fairy tale. And he is going to attack your heart with all the shallowness and mediocrity around establishing that the heart cannot love for there is no such thing as love. Each one only looks after himself. There are prayers we say shut within our rooms. There are prayers we say like thoughts shooting out of our heart when we think of people, aspirations. There are prayers we say when we think deeply on a virtue or on an event. But to overcome this temptation of nothing really counts is a battle field prayer, a war cry, choosing ‘faith and meaning’ and standing your ground on enemy line. This is nothing short of an act of faith in a modern and post-modern world.

The man who loves

2010-02-28T01:26:00.000-08:00

Love makes us leave everything in order to serve the lover. No sooner has the phone rang, than he has left his books and his pen, he has stopped eating and forgotten himself. Some leave their bath when the phone beeps, for the call they are expecting. Some spend all day waiting for the letter or email. Love makes us cut off all the attachments. Everything else seems unimportant and unessential save the affection of the lover, to be at his or her feet and to serve him.

Prayer requires often at least an iota of such love. Where do I go, Lord, my hope is in you? A man who cuts off all the many little things vying for his heart, those men or women vying for a minute of his time, who switches off the TV or the iPOD, or minimizes the website, or gets off the phone call or stops talking or studying because it is time for Prayer. This man is in love. It takes love to pray, more than anything else. All of us can dance and watch a movie or cuddle a loved one. But many of us cannot always listen to another or talk to another. We are into everything but love. The man who leaves everything and sits down to pray listens and talks. He is in love.

Two contradictions: Sanctity and Comfort

2010-02-27T05:16:00.000-08:00

Comfort and sanctity can not go hand in hand. In this world, all pursue comfort whereas in reality, it is a garden to grow sanctity. It is the battle field where soldiers of sanctity are born but what is left of us, comfort-driven men, are merchants and traders of pleasures: one for another. Comfort sees the joy of rest and Sanctity sees the joy of watching the neighbor at rest. Sanctity is always trying to protect itself in a Man who wishes to be always at work. Through work, he guards his sanctity for work is harsh, work has thorns, work has sweat and work presupposes humility. Work and discipline embraces many little crosses which adds more coal to the fire of Sanctity. Comfort avoid all crosses, where there is no cross, there is no sanctity. Comfort seeks the conventions of the world, to live life as a king, sprawled on a couch hands outstretched, a visible glory. But sanctity seeks only greatness. It hides its glory portraying the ordinariness of the man without and greatness of the soul within.

Original Sin: The trophyism of human nature

2010-01-10T02:27:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who apologized to me a couple of days ago. A few days later he apologized that he apologized. While digging deeper into his struggles, he shared with me the following. He had neglected a particular favor I had asked of him. He was busy with many things and those things turned into obstacles for granting me my favor. As he realized it, he apologized.

But he said he felt a longing to apologize. Somewhere deep inside of him was an intention however little and dormant that ‘I am a good person as I am apologizing for my mistake. I have the magnanimity to accept it’ we all are no different from my friend

Man can never have a purified intention. This is the doctrine of Original Sin. It says that Man’s intentions and purpose for doing things got corrupted and he since then has to put much effort to have rectitude of intention. He can give but cautiously doubting the other rather than trusting. He can dispense knowledge but liberally wishing to present his eloquence than to edify the other. He can do a lot of selfless work and when it is time for glory, he may be unable to discern how much the work is selfish and selfless. He can help a friend and not know if he wills to do it because he desires the friend’s good, whether he would do it if his friend was his competitor, whether he is doing it because he has spare time and he has anyways nothing more useful to do. He can donate but wonders what point is donation if no one knows about it or if it is not appreciated.

Basically, with Original sin, Man desired self-glory and hence our intentions have been perverted. Whenever it comes to doing anything that does not involve ourselves, we somehow manage to include ourselves whether in trumpeting our contributions, desiring to be the funniest, or simply to be different and seek attention. The first Man desired to be like God, his first sin, known as Original Sin. Its effects today are seeking ourselves through everything.

And this has imprisoned us. Somehow every good thing you want to do will come with a tinge of self-interest which mostly roots in pride: seeking the glory of self. Humble people perhaps the saints may have had more rectitude of intention than most of us. My friend apologized found scores of people to apologize and thank. While it is really noble to apologize, how much of it is caused by a contrite heart that is really sorry for its sin is left to introspection.

We all have perceptions of ourselves. We are fooling ourselves if we think we are awful people. More or less every one of us has some vague perception that we are good people. We think-‘I am not like the bad world everyone is discussing over coffee’. So while we generally or vaguely accept that we are good people, we are concerned when not having said sorry or thanked the person enough, because we are scared people might not think we are good anymore. If we know we are good and others share the same opinion, it is our greatest treasure. “I have to do things faster as they all know me as very efficient and independent”. We don’t ask for help and often mess things up. “I have to study this well as I am known as a good student”. We try to go out of our way to prove people right. Our action or atonement is more caused by worry of our goodness being at stake than our contrition for being fallen creatures.

And hence we are imprisoned by our perception of self- ‘I am a good person’. Many times we are going to do things well or quickly or neatly because we want to showcase to others we are fine people. We want to be little gods everywhere seeking self-glory wherever we can. We are imprisoned by these perceptions and it is not going to go away anytime soon unless one has a humble and contrite heart. For a humble and contrite heart, God does not despise¹. I now understand in so many ways what Jesus means when he says, I am the truth. It means all goodness and grace comes from him.

We have muddled and confounded our intentions and perceptions of things. Often we can say we are good Christians and deep inside of us always aspiring to better our image. Many highly esteem us but we won’t stop until they keep little trophies in their drawing rooms. We really seem to believe that we are good people and it all seems to come from us because we choose it or cooperate with good things we do. Jesus says this truth shall set you free. The truth simply is that the angel said to Joseph: She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins²

We keep forgetting that if Jesus was sent to save the world, of course we are sinful people. If it wasn’t so, then why would a savior had to be sent to suffer and die for our sins? We are imprisoned in our perceptions until we accept mercy that no matter how much we try, how much we try to grow in love, virtue, and grace, we cannot completely get rid of pride.

All of the saints died still considering themselves sinners that God must have mercy upon. They were simply adhering to the truth that set them free. We are all sinners the sooner we know it, the sooner we stop this self-investment of creating trophies of ourselves in the other people’s houses. That is why humble people who don’t have pride allow God to do great things within them. For they go not where glory lies but renounce all those desires being ready to be broken, wasted, and trampled upon so that the path is straightened for God to do his work.

1 Psalms 51:17

2 Matthew 1:21

Selflessness and Purgatory

2009-12-27T01:07:00.000-08:00

And then came the time in late adolescence to watch all the TV series that cannot be missed before life comes to an end. Of course the list is subjective and mine goes like this: One Tree Hill, The Wonder Years and Lost. There are others too lest the one’s I mentioned lose their distinctness. These TV series consume a lot of time as they span for an hour or less. I joined the TV series bandwagon very late. For me, it meant finishing a whole season or two in a fortnight if I ever want to finish the six to eight seasons that have lapsed in the month. This meant watching episodes back to back on DVD or on the computer.

My life was filled with The Simpsons or some movie or a TV series. When I observed many others who joined associations and did other work, I didn’t think that they were selfless but rather viewed them of not being passionate about what had got me heating my computer chair. Little did I think any TV series, movie or music of popular fame is enjoyable even to others and perhaps what they do (in their associations) is not their passion that they are gifted with but a much nobler thing like responsibility.

And then one day, I took up responsibilities for myself. Soon, I got so preoccupied with it that I hadn’t time for my TV Series. Formerly, I hadn’t time for anything to do with others but only to know what turn of events will transpire in the next episode? Later, these TV Series turned passé. I couldn’t afford an hour a day much less a week to watch them go on slowly, often dragging along. Sometimes a classic book could be more fun than watching people sleep with each other and break other people’s heart. I also began to detest the whole idea of watching run of the mill TV series. I began to have a sound judgment on things that formerly enslaved me. They got lesser and lesser priority in my life and soon left my life entirely as if an addict had been completely rehabilitated and got the toxics out of his system.

What really happened is the operation of Grace. The sooner I set my mind on things above, that is, eternal; I chose something that will be meritorious for my redemption. Of course, it is no surprise now as it was no surprise then, that my salvation won’t be from watching TV series and having a scholarly idea of who was adulterous in this episode and what was the most uncanny episode of the season.

Watching movies all day isn’t exactly heaven-deserving material to indulge with. But there wasn’t any inclination to understand that anything nobler or richer could be aspired for. I wonder if I could have pleaded ignorance or was it negligence. And of course, God helped me to make that choice. I wouldn’t know that shakily, with less courage and much persuasion to volunteer to teach a few kids, I was choosing redemption. God is slow, only Moses was unlucky. I didn’t even know I was choosing it while I made that choice. I can love God now as God loved me first when I didn’t understand what I was choosing and going to begin loving. How true is St. John indeed!

And that is the operation of Grace. The moment I chose something that is without me, these material indulgences no good to anyone but my lethargic body and shallow mind within me, began to snap one by one. I couldn’t snap them myself as I was too deep into them. It took many instruments of God to ask me to volunteer for a responsibility. It took my own pride to think I am doing something good and in that process, led me to mercy by repenting for that pride and then realize there are so many things worth our life than often our own passing fancies.

The point of this blog is not so much what selflessness can teach you as much as what happens in purgatory. That’s right; this article’s real motive is to explain Purgatory. Mark Shea, an eminent online Catholic Writer writes in Catholic Exchange that we will be cleansed of all those things that kept us from choosing the real Joy, Jesus Christ and the love of God.

Our understanding of Purgatory only pervades to the extent that Confession forgives our guilt and Purgatorial cleansing is a cleansing to purify the soul of all its injury through all the sins that have been committed and that it is only divine justice that we pay for them on our way to Heaven. Somehow, every sin, every act of greed, lust, sloth, envy departs from the true nature of the soul and hence injures the soul. This has to be undone so that we are able to recognize purely what love is.

And this is where the lesson I learned in Selflessness is at the heart of the understanding of Purgatory. Somehow, I can now understand how the testimony of holiness in the Church which the monasteries, convents bear witness to everyday will lead them to suffer less in purgatory. It is because they perhaps have to snap fewer chains tying them to this world. They are in the world and yet already out of it, preparing their journey to the real world. While we enjoy, things of this world, we create so many indulgences tying us down that often the paradox is that our preparation for the world to come is more in snapping those attachments that takes us away from the idea of the Kingdom of God.

It is a paradox because while the nuns and monks sow to reap their treasures in heaven, we first take out the weed that we have sown and the new seed of life gets a chance to grow. And just taking up one responsibility, doing something for the world outside of me taught me to snap a few chains tying me to the passing world of TV Series. At least one, from a host of things for which I may not have to be cleansed in Purgatory but we all have a whole list of items, Haven’t We?

I don’t mean the only way to enter our glory is to keep suffering in the world. I didn’t mention that I enjoyed my responsibility, did I? It made me the person I am today. The choices make us suffer, for our nature is inclined to choose pleasure and rebel against work. All things are created good. We have to sanctify them too and use it for the glory of God. Snapping ties doesn’t mean to have no ties at all but to have those that don’t hurt charity that is due to God and Man. Selflessness helps us untie those attachments that don’t help us transcend. We have to tie ourselves to those things that only help us give glory to God for all the things he has provided that can truly make us happy and truly acknowledge in gratitude, the love that God has showered on his Children.

We are all afraid

2009-12-27T00:40:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is struggling with joining the priesthood. He has had an encounter that makes him echo the same feelings I do often

Amazing Grace how sweet they sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but not am found, was blind now I see

The friend is great with girls. And he often wonders how he could picture himself as a priest without all the love he could have with a girlfriend or a wife. He hasn’t any ill-intentions with women only difficulty in discernment whether God requires him to live sanctity with a family and i.e with women and children or sanctity as a priest, with entire family of God.

What is my friend’s problem really? He is afraid. He is afraid whether he would be happy responding to the call of God, whether he can take a leap of faith, whether he can plunge into the water without knowing if it’s cold. When he pictures himself with a girlfriend, he pictures security and self-assuredness. He is assured of love.

But living in obedience to the will of God is much more than being assured let alone the danger of our own understanding and limitations of assuredness. It is about what is right. How can he ever know if he will be happy? All he can do it trust in God that He will take care of him. Somewhere deep inside he fails to trust God. There is a lacking of faith.

We are all afraid though. My friend shouldn’t be singled out though his problems are more tumultuous in proportions. We are all afraid of not being happy in life. Hence we choose things that fit our ‘idea’ of assuredness of happiness. In doing this, we take refuge in our own limited understanding of scheme of things.

Often we know some things are more right than others or nobler or more righteous. But this world has so skewed our standards of defining happiness that we are afraid of doing now what our hearts are inclined to. When we choose things that fit the ‘understanding of peace’ that this world has to offer, the assuredness, we often abandon the idea that God is really the source of all joy because we have gone with what we already have as opposed to choosing what are struggling with.

We are afraid we may not find joy by our choices and it presupposes a lack of faith in the belief of another world. We choose as if this world is all we got and our choices are not changing us according to our real purpose that finds its fulfillment in another world, the world to come. So we go with what is safe than what is courageous. We go with timidity rather than conviction. We go with natural rather than being supernatural.

The choices we make when we are afraid tell us so much of our real faith in God. It tells us where we stand in the scale of humility. As a child cries in the dark and runs towards his mother, our choices show what we think of ourselves, whether we truly believe we know very little, we are very little and completely depend on God and hence affirm our humility or whether when having to make these decision we run in apprehension to assuredness the world has to offer.

A mother loses her son and wonders if she can continue life without him. A man who is afraid of losing a job or quitting one as it is bereft of meaning. Parents have to live with dissenting children or betrayals. We all have something to be afraid of. We can have faith that this world is not where happiness lies so let us not pretend that we can find it if we try unless God wills to give.

We can go against the currents of this world filled with imperfections and an endless pursuit of self-assuredness. Or we can go with life as if we are sailors trying to rescue the sea of life. We may try to hold everything within our clasp but the nature of this world is such, it is going to perish, the sea will slip away from our fingers. Every choice made for worldly things or purposes will inevitably fade away along with its pleasures, comforts and fancies. But if one makes a choice contingent on faith, the hope that one day knowledge will replace this faith and with trust that is moved with love, these will remain¹

1 Corinthians 13

How God chose Bethlehem over every other civilization

2009-12-25T01:47:00.000-08:00

Of course, humility has been the hallmarks of the Gospel message. What with God taking on the form of man and living among them, being born in a manger, allowing his own creation to crucify him. God idea of humility is that he was ready to humiliate himself for the sake of love such. The other places he chooses humility was in choosing shepherds as the first to have a glimpse of Him. Choosing a woman as the first to see him after he resurrected.

We also forget that God chose from all the civilizations in the world, a lowly village of Bethlehem to break into history. This is what Mark Shea says in his article Promise Fulfilled

Consult any history book and the author will point you to the great centers of civilization in antiquity: Rome, Athens, Tenochtitlan, the Indus River Valley, China. Nowhere in any ancient estimation would it be said that the fulcrum of the world was to be found in a hardscrabble little village of washed-up dreams out on the eastern fringe of Augustus’ realm. Bethlehem had had its little moment in the sun, politically, a thousand years before, because it was the birthplace of David (an obscure Semitic monarch who meant a great deal to one of the insignificant little ethnic groups that buzzed like flies somewhere on the borders of Roman political consciousness). But let’s face it: Jewish nostalgia for David had about as much to do with hope as some tribe of Bantus dream of achieving world military domination. So why did the Jews hang on? Because God promised. And tonight, against all hope, the promise came true. The King was born.

Why the Church glorifies God through paintings and sculpture

2009-12-25T01:43:00.000-08:00

A snippet from the site, way of the (Church) Fathers

Some Church Fathers called Christmas the Feast of the Incarnation.

Incarnation comes from a Latin word that means “enfleshment.” What sounds to English-speakers like a rarefied theological term is really just a statement of fact: God took on flesh. When that happened, flesh itself became something holy, something to be celebrated with paintings and statues and Christmas cards.

Yet in the eighth century, a faction arose in the Church calling themselves “Iconoclasts,” Greek for “picture-smashers.” The iconoclasts tried to “purify” and “spiritualize” Christian life by obliterating all artistic representations of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. They seized and destroyed most of the religious images in the Eastern Roman Empire, and they cut off the hands of those Christians who would not part with their icons. God, they said, could not be represented in a picture; any attempt to do so was rank idolatry. But this is how St. John of Damascus answered them: “In former times, God, being without form or body, could in no way be represented. But today, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can represent what is visible in God. I do not worship matter, but worship the creator of matter Who became matter for my sake . . . and Who, through matter, accomplished my salvation.”

In other words, the Incarnation makes art, too, a holy thing, just as it made the body a holy thing. The artists who have painted the Nativity throughout the centuries were not creating idols. Their visible representations are hymns of praise to the invisible God made visible.

Look at any of the classic Nativity paintings and marvel at the care taken with the tiniest details. Every animal in the stable is an individual creature; every straw in the manger seems to be drawn with infinite care. Of all the biblical scenes artists have loved to paint for centuries, the Nativity is the one that seems to provoke the most thorough delight in the simple pleasure of drawing things. It seems as if God is in every detail.

How celebrating Christmas protected the doctring of the Church of God becoming Man -Incarnation

2009-12-25T01:35:00.000-08:00

This is a snippet from the site, way of the (Church) fathers

In the earliest days of the Church, Christmas was not one of the important feasts. Jesus’ life was still a living memory, and His extraordinary resurrection rightly occupied the central spot in the calendar. But as time went on, false teachers began to deny the fact of Jesus’ humanity. They claimed that Jesus’ body had been an elaborate disguise, that, in reality, God had never debased Himself by taking on human flesh. Later heretics denied also that Mary gave birth to the Word: instead, they said, she gave birth to a “vessel” into which the Word was later poured. Still other heretics believed that the Son was a subordinate being — divine, but not coeternal with God the Father.

All these heresies had one thing in common: an unwillingness to face the apparent foolishness of the Incarnation. Arius, the founder of the Arian heresy, was an eminently reasonable man. He denied the doctrine of the Trinity because, he said, three cannot be one; that’s elementary arithmetic. The infinite God cannot become finite man; that’s elementary philosophy. Therefore there could be no Incarnation.

Heretics like Arius wanted to spare God the unreasonable indignity of being corrupted by too close an association with humanity. It was the same problem the Pharisees could not get over: If this Jesus is so good, why does He associate with sinners and tax collectors? In fact, though the heretics would have insisted that they were defending the perfection of the Deity, they were actually denying the perfection of God’s love. Love, after all, can seem unreasonable. Anyone who values another as much as oneself seems entirely unreasonable.

It can hardly be coincidence that the celebration of the literal, historical birth of Jesus the carpenter’s son began to take on more importance just when the true faith was most dangerously beset by these flesh-denying errors. The scandalously human birth of the Son of God was the very thing that separated orthodoxy from heresy. Celebrating that Nativity committed the Church to a clear statement of principle.

Taking Christ out of Christmas

2009-12-24T23:29:00.000-08:00

My friend over at Random Thoughts seems weary of the materialism and stripping Christ out of Christmas. I share in her grief. we all have to rechristianize the present times. If we don't non-Christians who love santa claus will paganize it

We have to be leaven in the dough. We are the salt of the earth and if salt loses its taste, what use is it?
I think if each one of us tries, we can in our own way rechristianize the culture. Cakes, Trees, Creches are all important to make this culture christian. It is the popular culture of Santa Claus and red caps that we have to wary of.

This time, I put up a tree for the first time. I put two gifts under the tree for my family.

The whole point is the love that shows through your efforts. You clean your house, you put up a tree, you make a crib, all this because you care about Christmas and to invite Christ into your house. But this is secondary to the grace we ought to receive by preparing all Advent through reflection on scriptures, Regular confessions to make His paths straight as John the Baptist proclaimed.

I think Christmas becomes Xmas when people simply want to drink or party without thinking that Jesus is the reason of this season. When Jesus is the reason of this season, all things fall in place and get a perspective. The tree symbolizes love, goodwill togetherness, guiding star,ringing bells. The star symbolizes the star that guided the kings, the crib helps us contemplate on the nativity. A defenseless baby a sleep in a manager who controlled the stars in the universe. (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)

When Christ is kept in Christmas like you said, all other things are for glory of God. Perhaps the pagan culture we have to take caution of is people simply waiting for Christmas for just another party with Santa Claus, red costumes, snow, snowmen et cetera. But moved with the joy of Christ, Santa can be a great way to gift your family and enjoy a cake ;-)

December 24, 2009 11:27 PM

What makes us Human

2009-12-19T22:27:00.000-08:00

I was speaking to some good men on a train. They were speaking about how the terrorists who have killed innocents should be hanged. One of them argued, "Why the formality of having them undergo a trial procedure" We have all seen them shoot people ruthlessly without any sign of remorse or guilt. We can just execute them without the whole thing wasting time in court procedure"

I said to them that "each individual has a right to a fair trial". Some of them looked at me in disbelief. One of them said that they [terrorists] were not humans but animals if they could kill innocents. And animals didn't deserve a trial. These men in my company didn't perceive the terrorist as men like the rest of us. Somehow they are ignorant of the extent of evil. The extent of evil that man is capable of because of the reality of evil and not so much because of the reality of the nature of Man

While I could easily argue the popular defense that if we execute them without determining their motive for their crime and offering them a right to their defense, there is no difference between us and them. If they are animals for taking away something of us without rhyme or reason, we are no different from them who have snatched away their chance to defend themselves because we are angry they have taken away our life without asking us.

Life is very sacred but we are guilty of defiling its sanctity too when we have no value for their lives simply because they don't have any for ours. We can change the way they think but in case if we are unable to, do we believe any less in the value of human life to take their lives away because a few don't agree with us on the sanctity of life and have turned into terrorists claiming many more lives than we will ever be taking by a few executions that we will eventually deem as righteous actions?

And why do their lives still hold any value that we are to respect them and consider them our equals, those that kill without reason while even killing with a reason wasn't bad enough?

Somewhere deep inside this brings up the question: what makes us human? Is it to share? Why even animals in a community often do that? Is it to love? Why even animals love their offspring and caress them. Although animals have a share in this nature to love and share, there is something distinctly radical about what makes us human. And this is the ability to be compassionate, to feel guilty and to repent. It is our ability to ask for forgiveness, mourn for our wrongdoings and seek to make amendments where we depart from animals.

And therefore, a criminal no matter how ghastly his crime can be sentenced to life imprisonment or even capital punishment due to various reasons according to the degree of his crime or his presence as an endangerment to society. But he ought not to be executed on the grounds of ceasing to be a human. Who decides when a terrorist ceases to be human? What is the measure for inhumanity? A thousand lives? Ten Thousand lives? Is it a measure of numbers?

For until the last breadth of his life, there remains a chance for him to repent and to feel human again contrary to what his crime makes him believe. And human as we are too, we cannot extinguish the hope that he may, for all the crimes he has committed, for all the bloodshed, for the torment, for the cruelty, still seek his conscience and repent and establish what makes us human.

The annual visit to Confession

2009-12-19T22:09:00.000-08:00

It is time for Christmas. A week more and the waiting for the new born king will come to an end and the festivities of Christmas, starting with the Midnight Mass will take its culmination. It is also time for confession for many who have this idea of confessions ‘twice a year’. They blatantly say that they go for confession twice a year as if people in a club who share how often one frequents the parlor or a market in a far away town. It is their souls that are at stake.

I have always been amazed at what possible good can a ‘twice or once a year’ confession do to one’s soul? Sure, the absolution is granted because a person has decided to come for confession. The person has gained much in mercy but how much has the soul to gain in holiness to elevate the state of the soul. I look at it as a small worker who works carrying boxes in a company always reminding himself that one day he will command and direct others to carry the same boxes. He will be great. He will prepare plans and charts where the boxes will go. A soul that goes for confession sparingly much to the persusion of others is like that soul which never turns great, which neither becomes a saint and sapped of all its strength without grace, nor can it aspire for sainthood. It remains cut off from the grace that God can fill in order that it can be heroic.

And what does a Person remember in a 3 minute confession? There are men and women who visit the confessional once in a week or fortnight. I wonder if they are voracious sinners compared to the annual visitors. Quite to the contrary, These are men and women who are more sensitive to the understanding and reality of Sin. They realize that the devil is hidden not in fairy tale epics and fables but in the ordinary events of everyday life. He is hidden in the intemperance shown in food or the charity deprived to one’s neighbor or the sloth shown during work or at home.

I find it hard to recollect what has transpired in the month, in what I have done and what I have failed to do, that I have to now prepare a memo on things that I know I have done wrong in case I want to do a confession and don’t have the time to introspect. Who wants to leave the salvation of my soul to the mercy of a general introspection just before entering the confessional? Unless one does a minute of examination of conscience everyday

What guilt has the person taken to confession if he cannot remember sins? The annual visitor simply starts with ‘I lied I hurt I have been bad I this I that’. I wonder how much guilt remains of the sins to experience an honest act of contrition in order to reform. My point is not that sins are not absolved. I am not questioning the authenticity of the absolution. I am questioning the authenticity of the principle elements of Confession: contrition

If you may have observed how Man is oriented towards sinfulness and pride, you would also know that it so happens that after a year you either feel the one you wronged deserved it or that you didn’t do any wrong at all after what so many others around you are doing. So the objectivity of the sin is ripped apart and cases are built by the mind. What does an annual confession really involve? Sure, I will remember my mortal sins. Does the person deprive himself of communion every day until he does his annual confession and he is free from the guilt of mortal sin? A year comprises months and weeks and days which have a hundred little moments of spite, anger, deceit, selfishness, bitterness, accusations and excess? How do we feel alright about receiving communion everyday while we continue to plunder our soul of its sanctity and leave our hearts farther away from charity?

What about those who have not committed any explicitly mortal sin like Adultery or Murder or skipping Mass et cetera? What guilt are they taking to confession if their souls have become so insensitive to sin that they don’t realize what is a sin and otherwise. Pope John Paul II warned us of this saying the greatest sin of the 21^st century is the loss of sense of sin. A person who has lost the sensitivity to sins against the virtues of charity, faith, hope and justice among others, what guilt can he take to confession when he visits the confessional once a year, far removed from the little accounts of depravation and failings. Everything then becomes simply a recital of the catechism: I lied, I this, I that…

Lastly, Confession is the measure of many things. In today’s material world, where one doesn’t have time apart from Television, books, gadgets and other worldly commitments. A person who goes for a confession sparingly knows where he stands in the realm of things. He knows where he stands in the war between the material and spiritual between things of the world and things divine. When one sparingly visits confession, it indicates how much a soul seeks forgiveness of sins. Thus, it also shows how much the worries of the world consume his heart and hence does not give him an opportunity to seek to clear the clutter and dirt of attachments and excesses.

A person who receives the sacrament of confession regularly knows that he understands that all things will pass away for these things are temporal and come and go. But what will remain is the treasures that we store up in heaven. Perhaps we are busier, sadly, this Christmas, like every Christmas buying trees, Christmas sweets, Cribs, Decoration, Clothes and gifts. If Christmas is separated from the message of Christ-Repent for the Kingdom of God is near, then even a Christianizing culture of Trees and gifts can turn but a popular culture of opportunities to have fun. A world of people who simply wish to have fun and Christmas has slowly now become Xmas or Season’s Greetings: Their way to have it.

Smaller and Bigger Joys

2009-12-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

It is better to have little joys than to know how transient the passing, pleasures are. When we have huge expectations from bigger joys, they come,serve and go away leaving you desiring to be filled again. When I wished to buy a bike, everyday there was excitement. I reassured myself that when I get my bike, all of life's problems will be solved. Although it has done a great deal of good, It hasn't solved much. The bike has its place but the pleasure has passed like the wind.

They leave you more empty than what you were but smaller joys give you something to live for, to fight for. They continue the various touches and interruptions of God's timely graces when we least notice or expect. While the bigger joys often are so filled with our desires, indulgences and excesses and aspirations that we thrust too much on it, too much is at stake, too much of emotional baggage.

We shudder fearing what would happen if we lose it. We are afraid if anyone will come before us and take it away or having someone to compete with. We are afraid if the ambition of the bigger joy is quashed and our time is wasted or the deadline has collapsed and everything will have a domino effect. Life is turned into an investment plan.

The big expectations may be fulfilled but often at the expense of smaller one's. All the time we are overwhelmed with the anxiety of big aspirations that we forget to stop by and smell the roses. We then fail to appreciate a cup of tea, a kiss of the breeze, a window seat, a sweet melody and a bright morning.

Our eyes are fixed on bigger and more practical things. We smile and excuse ourselves always consoling ourselves that this sacrifice is worth the pain because the bigger joy will bear more fruits than the passing consolation of the smaller joy that was offered. The smaller joys of little daily reprieves like a bus that came on time or a mysterious stroke of luck- Such things have no place in our lives. But these smaller joys change who we are.

The bigger joys may give us a larger meal. The smaller joys infuses peace and the peace may help us make do with a smaller meal. The anxeity of a bigger joy may cost us our courtesy and to forget the journey and only be concerned about the end. Whether it is a small noble thing or a get-together, a friend, an article, a little time off, showing gratitude to others, or atoning for some setbacks- everything is sacrificed. We have no time for these courtesies of 'returning gratitudes' because bigger joys have oriented our thinking and give us a clear, horse straight vision.

We assure ourselves that all will be fine when we reach our end and all the atonement can be done after our ends have met. The smaller joys remember to thank the clerk's guidance or for the taxi driver's directions. The bigger joys drowns these all and only parties in the end hoping that all that he sacrificed will reach its fruition in his final revelry

To Love is to Forgive

2009-12-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

Lawyers love building a good case. That is essentially their job. While we build cases to defend ourselves and are thrilled when the case we build is iron-cast. No refutations can break it. But it only takes a clear conscience to build the noblest case, one also that no accusation can dampen.

We have a human tendency to defend ourselves and prove our innocence. Somewhere deep inside of us we wish to be called good and to be acknowledged that we fight the good fight, seek the truth and live in honesty. We may be very dishonest most of the time but the fact that we always have an excuse or a case to defend ourselves shows how much we believe in living by rules, fulfilling promises and being moral.

Often our last resort on being accused of immorality is not to repudiate any allegiance to morality but to claim that everyone around is living an equally depraved life. Observe that we do not say that "I don’t believe In morality at all so don’t bother me". Rather, deep inside, we still believe that morality is a good thing, untouched and unstained by the world’s cruelty and worth fighting for. Only that I don’t wish to fight now as no one around me is going fighting either.

Talking about building cases reminds me of forgiveness. Mother Teresa once said that we don’t have to go on proving to the world that we are upright or doing the right thing. Either they understand or they don’t. If they don’t, in heaven we will receive our vindication.

A few days ago, my I accused my friend of not devoting any time to me and being a big hypocrite talking about love and sincerity and yet not discerning his duties to friendship. Later, I learned that my friend was busy opening and closing his fathers bank account through a complex process, preparing some documents for his sister that was really urgent, helping out another guy with his and other little details.

I wished he could have told me all this notwithstanding that these reasons then would still sound like excuses to me. But the truth being I didn’t wish to listen or hear his story. All I wished to do was tell him how I wasn’t made happy, how he didn’t look out for me and what a hypocrite he was. It is one thing to demand from a friend and later realize that one was unworthy of demanding explanations. It is another to accuse a friend and later find out that he was innocent. The guilt just stifles and creates a tumult of anguish. You feel like you cannot be forgiven

He certainly must have felt like a lawyer wishing to build an unimpeachable case in his defense. But he knew that would leave me ashamed and guilty. I would feel embarrassed and think that I can never be forgiven. He did not wish that his friend go through this angst. He did not wish to make me feel so silly that I hang my head in shame. And so he never built any case and forgave me.

Jesus didn’t stop loving Man while he was on the Cross. He prayed that His Father forgive those who did not know what they were doing. He could forgive because He could love. He realized, that having full knowledge that He was the Son of God, they would have been ashamed to death unto their acts. So He chose to forgive rather than build a case through scriptures on how they got it wrong and leave them shame-faced.

And so he let humiliation crash down upon him for a few moments. He forgave not because he is overtly inclined to forgiveness but because of applying the compassion that if I had full recourse to his plan of day, I would have never cast any judgments. It was not an act of mercy but more an act of love. My friend loves me and didn’t wish that I feel ashamed of myself. Mercy emanates out of love. We all think of ourselves as fine individuals, caring and kind and lovely. That all, perhaps we are. But If we cannot forgive, it is a measure of our love.

The Question of Authority

2009-12-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

As a kid, I had friends who always told me, "Good Friday to Easter Sunday does not add up to three days" or "the Gospel of St. Matthew says one thing and that of St. Mark say another and the book of Genesis contradicts how we understand the world”. I recall being disturbed about these judgments not to mention experiencing a waning of my faith like the Sower who sowed good seeds and the birds came and ate it away. The bird of ‘pride and reason’ wishing to topple the humility and serenity of faith and childlike reliance. I could never be a child. But I want to be now.

The more I understand the Bible, the more I come to understand why we require say the authority of a Church as one that can interpret that what is given qualifies as revelation such as the Bible which is the revealed wisdom of God. Just as a judge cannot dispense justice until it is firmly established what exactly is justice, or of the theologians, of hermeneutics, of the allegories, imageries and many things in the Old Testament finding its fulfillment in the New Testament. The more I am left like a child in wonder. How can a child not need a mother? How can I not require a friend? How can I not require an instructor or a lawmaker a hydraulic Engineer or an Architect? They all are authorities in their respective fields.

We put our faith everyday in ordinary matters on the mechanic who says the car part has gone bad and we will never know if he is lying and wants to make a buck or telling the truth. However, we can either spurn his counsel or run from pillar to post because we don’t trust him. The fact that I run from pillar to post presupposes that I have some knowledge that such a part cannot so easily go bad or that I have reasons to distrust him again presupposing that I know that his price quotation is disproportionate.

What do I do when I have no presuppositions? I have to take a leap of faith else my suspicion about the character of the mechanic can never teach me to trust people even if the suspicions are true and I stand to lose.

Today, we don’t know whom to put our faith in. Who has authority and where lies the truth? In such a crisis of trust which is really a crisis of belief is misconstrued as the crisis of truth. No truth remains but the individual’s own biased often uninformed or even whimsical search for truth and what he makes of things around him leading to some rejecting the very existence of Truth. What then remains of Truth is but what we make of it. Can there be a thousand truths?

Coming back to the Bible, time and again being heckled for antagonizing Science as if the Bible which is the wisdom and revelation of God tries to compete with Science which is the revelation of Man through reason. That science should be the revelation of Man through reason is something God wills and is the source of that reason and Man can access science simply because God has allowed him is something people don't comprehend. Pope Benedict XI has always maintained that Science is the discovery of God’s creation.

Science discovers nothing new from what God has readily made available. When Science finds out water on the moon, Science did not create the water or put it there. Either God has a plan for Man as we can see since the beginning of the Human race wherein Man has overcome certain disasters and periods of agony much because of the advancement of Science. Or God does not have a plan for Man and one virus or another will eventually overpower the greatest powers endowed to Science to serve Man and unveil slowly God’s creation, its complexity and intricacies. The point is, not whose wisdom is better or has more Authority, what the Bible says about Creation or what Science says?

The real question is whether we should look for scientific truths in the Bible. Is the Bible God’s Medical Journal? Applying the same standard, should we look for answers of greatest philosophical and theological questions from Scientists and Mathematicians? Shouldn’t the same apply to them? Their competence in one field does not entitle them to competence in another say, what Einstien has to say on God or what Hawkins has to say on the metaphysical question of the Universe cannot qualify as a philosophical or theological authority over what St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine have thought throughout the ages. By the same token, I don’t think many people would pay much heed if St. Thomas Aquinas would deem one painting better than the other simply by preferring one color over another or one style of painting over another. It remains simply his opinion even if he were to write or sing paeans of it. And yet we see this bias in the media which happily would try to dwell more on the insights of Einstein mulling on the existence of God or lack thereof than even inquire on St. Thomas’s five arguments for the existence of God that has made apologists and theologians expound and build their cases on it down the centuries.

And this is what Ronald Knox says on the Holy Spirit inspiring the writers of the Bible

"What do we mean when we say that any book of the Old Testament was inspired? That the Holy Spirit helped the writers, watched over the process and saw they did it right; That doesn’t necessarily mean that every word in the Old Testament, taken quite literally, is infallibly accurate. You find it stated in the Psalms, for instance, that God has made the round world. And when Galileo, or rather, first Copernicus and then Galileo, produced the idea which we all believe in nowadays, that the earth travels round and round on its own axis; that the sun doesn’t really "set ", when that idea was produced, a lot of people, chiefly Protestants, said, "That’s heresy! The Bible tells us that the earth can’t be moved, and here are these people wanting us to believe that it’s speeding round and round like mad!" But of course that was idiotic of them.

The Psalms weren’t written to teach us lessons in geography; they were poetry, and the person who wrote that verse was just talking in the ordinary language of his time. So you can’t be certain that every word of the Old Testament is literally true. But you can be certain that the theology of the Old Testament, once you have understood it properly and made allowances for the Hebrew way of saying things, must be true; because when it was written the Holy Spirit was at work to see that the thing got done right."

We require theologians to understand the truths communicated to us by God. If God is the source of all intellect, sure the Bible is not going to be a walk in the Park. If we require a journalist to place the facts and figures in an appealing way or a teacher to impart knowledge in an interesting way or a doctor to heal without skepticism, we ought to require theologians to understand the Bible. The question is of authority and obedience to people of authority whether it is of a local man giving you directions because you are foreign to a place or of a nutritionist advising you to stop eating burgers. Nothing becomes truth because it receives print space in the media. But truth ought to receive print in the media.

Often we question the bible not because it is not true but because we don’t wish to understand it. we are rather ok with what the local journalist has to say on the bible and his gibe makes more sense to us than what perhaps a priest has to say. We don’t wish to understand it because we don’t wish to recognize any other authority but ourselves. When an authoritarian wishes to dispense truth, we want to believe, “Now that is your version of truth. Who gave you the authority to claim it as truth”?

Well, if everyone’s opinion were equally good, it is goodbye to teacher’s doctors, scientists, mathematicians, politicians, lawmakers. But because we have all of these, we presuppose that some people have better opinion than others. Some people’s opinions are closer to truth than others and hence have more authority. And lastly, because not all the people in the world can invest all their time to determine whether Abortion is wrong or otherwise lest they all suspend their lives and professional work until they have come to the truth, a search that may never even end.

That is why we have ethicists, or perhaps to illustrate, the echoing and bellowing of one such authority as the Catholic Church that in recent time since the blatant pro-abortionist era, has vociferously opposed Abortion. No one asks or tries to inquire on how the Church has come to believe what she believes. In such matters, wherein lies the faith of over a billion Catholics lies the sound judgment of hundreds of moralists, theologians, bioethicists, and philosophers. A lawmaker can get it wrong if all that he has with him is his thumping fist or lobbying majority.

A weak or humbug authority only gives diktats and imposes itself on others by use of force. But a sound authority engages itself with the intellectuals and other authorities of the respective domains and lays its life down for its beliefs. They neither dilute them nor disown them. An authority is known by its conviction not by intimidation or power.

The forsaking of authority and to choose whom to give the same is really the problem of a breakdown of freedom. We are all confused to our limits to freedom and the purpose of individuality and liberty. I have liberty to live they way I want but not to change the truth of life itself. Such a liberty roots from pride of ‘my life my rules’ but if such an ideology is true, I wonder how a reader would determine which magazine is better than the other, which writer is better than the other. If there are no rules, there can be no game. Each can do as they think and there is no point of having a referee. For a referee establishes that a game can be enjoyed and played because each one has consented to accepting certain rules which are fair. So is life with its truths.

The nature of Asceticism

2009-12-11T06:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my friend wanted a tool to do some work. He could do work without the tool but with it, life would be really simplified. He was making a call to me and I was in the Gymnasium. Later on, when I reached home, I told him, “you knew where the tool was, you could have just picked it up. He only smiled and said, ‘It is alright. I did fine without it”

I realized later his real philosophy. Often we get all we want by a simple request or a difficult one. We are averse to bothering ourselves but will go out of our ways to make that last desperate phone call to get what we want. Why inconvenience ourselves, is our reasoning.

But somewhere deep inside just a plain ‘it will be more convenient with the shampoo, with the bike ride, with the pen, with the envelope, with a new phone” is another mindset, a fear active-how can I do without it?

Whether finding out there is little water left to take a bath or there is not much rice left for two to eat, there is always this gnawing fear ‘can I survive this bath without enough water? Can this rice be enough? Should we make some calls or set out to buy more rice? Deep inside the frantic calls or always getting what you want, is a view of being unable to trust God that we would be alright if we choose to do without them. Sure, we feel relieved when we make a call or ask a friend or roommate to go out of their way or use their service and consequently only thank God for working through them. But this is the paradox of asceticism.

The mortal searches the ends of the earth driven by fear and is filled with gratitude after his ends have been met. The ascetic is filled with peace first, for he believes God takes care of all and he needn’t tear himself if he has to do without enough bread or without the AC working and he will survive. He searches God because he is alright if he is deprived of many a things. if he can only receive peace from God instead. The mortal man searches all the ends to receive what he desired if only he can drive away his worry.

One seeks peace; the other seeks to banish worry. One wishes to know what it is to do without things and fulfilling all desires and to only cling to God. The other dreads a day that he would have to do without these things and his desires and clings to anyone or anything that could get him his heart’s desire. One realizes that things bring peace but things are of this world and the peace they bring is also of this world only to vanish away until another thing grips his heart. So he rather have the peace that has God as its source in practicing poverty in order that he can embrace whatever is the reality of his being. The other is harrowed by not having enough and it presupposes a difficulty in trusting God that all will be fine or that we can survive it without great tumult in our soul.

If only we first cling to God in the definitive moment of making a choice whether to do without it or get what we desire that now seems like a spiritual warfare of loyalty to things eternal or things worldly. Of course, our desire to always get what we want and its consequent fulfillment establishes that in this spiritual warfare of choice, choosing whether we can trust God and drive out the fear, mostly our loyalties go with the things of this world. That is why our peace is also momentary. It flees.

This is also the paradox of peace in everyday difficulties. When we drive out the fear because we trust God and take a leap of faith, we are at peace. The fear will be lesser every next time. But there will be a next time and a faith to show. it will keep coming. When we think that all our heart desires should be granted which presupposes a fear that ‘life cannot go on without it’. It is subject to the nature of solutions your friend or any other has to offer like a little water instead of a lot or cold instead of hot. When you still don’t get what you prefer(say in this case more water or hot water respectively), the worry is not perfectly quelled and the sadness remains. We are still vulnerable to sadness. The worry is banished but the worry increases every next time it comes. There will be a next time. Our faith will be measured. It will keep coming too.

The Everyday truth of Friendships

2009-12-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

There is a great joy in the little things of everyday friendship. My friend had to buy a camera yesterday and we went around from shop to shop trying to find him exactly what he wishes. Most of our friendship was lived on the way to these malls, on the sidewalk while starting the bike or while exiting a shop and infusing hope that the next shop would hand us what we desire.

After we bought the camera, we wanted to celebrate over dinner. I fancied this one hotel and two of my friends favored another. I tried my best using coy arguments to win them over. Eventually I chose friendship and their joy of desiring me to see what they see in the other hotel. I died unto my desire for my own joy over their hope of my joy after I come to believe what they believe

We lived so many little moments of friendship in numerous little things that it is hard to tell one from the other. If anyone were to ask me why I had a great time, it would be hard for me to explain how exactly that came about without a movie or sports or a party night.

I believe God often touches us in little things of love than show us friendships made of grandeur and show. If we are not able to encourage our friends in their little joys and be joyous ourselves, I see little possibility of we being able to grasp a nobler truth of a friendship with God.

For a friendship with God is discerning his hand and touch of love in the little things of everyday life. Without the grace to feel God's presence in our joys and pain, our life would remain but a random day of luck or error. We would neither be able to recognize the love of our really true Friend nor be able to live a friendship with Him who is the source of all our friendships, all our love. Life without finding love of God in little things would be merely an investment plan where one day we lose thousands and another day gain thousands.

But with God, the troubles of life are like walking over hilly areas in order to meet our friend who knows it is difficult to live friendship on His terms. And for all that, God rewards us with little joys of our life which are like resting on the greens of the valley. Without these bouts of love in little things, we lose the supernatural dimensions of our lives. Little things in friendship and the gratitude for love in them teaches us that peace in friendship is more wealthy than a life lived alone within our fantasies and dreams.

Seeking Perfection

2009-12-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

My friend recounts a story of a girl he met who was very pretty, very sweet and innocent. Often, these 3 traits suffice to melt any man’s heart. It is true. Although, we tried hard putting him on and harrowing him that she has been brought up in a different culture, that he is a devout Hindu and she, with western tendencies, Church going girl and it won’t work out, he couldn’t resist her idiosyncrasies.

Yet, he returned every evening often sharing many woes about how she is. Beyond the sweetness and beauty laid an imperfect girl. She had issues, many impulses, temperamental and quick to anger. People might say who is not haunted by these shortcomings? Another group might say love conquers all.

Well, love couldn’t conquer for my friend. Somehow he later began to find her resistible. He kept her at bay. He was making choices. He was listening to what his ideologies are, what is his mental dispositions and preferences in a partner or for that matter, a friend. Eventually, he suppressed his feelings because he couldn't be around her.

I wondered that here is a girl, imperfect like each of us. If she is easily annoyed and is temperamental, perhaps I take things very seriously and have other weaknesses. Was my friend selfish in making his choices? By being assertive that the girl is not for him? Let us keep the selfishness for another blog post. I would like to dwell on the imperfections.

Deep inside, all of us seek perfection. All of us wish to have an efficient motorbike or a good looking house or a well cooked dinner. Man seeks perfection and this is not something new. St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century had cited ‘perfection’ as one of the rational proofs for the existence of God. If some people are more perfect than others, if some cities or governments or processes are more perfect than others, then everyone are at varying degrees of perfection. If there is such a thing as degrees of perfection, then such a thing as perfection exists. St. Thomas Aquinas called this idea of Perfection, God. Whereas us men who are mortals in whom God has infused in us the longing for perfection. So that eventually, we may seek God, the infinitely perfect.

Often when people wish to correct us, change us and we snub them asserting our freedom to be how we are. We fool ourselves by spurning their offer to secure our pride. As we seek perfection, in us and around us, we cannot help but correct our friends because a more perfect object can be loved much more than an object that hasn’t reached the same perfection.

We cannot love stray dogs as much as trained Dogs¹. We love trained dogs because we have perfected them to an extent where they can sit, stand and roll according to our commands. Hence they are more adorable and we are more disposed to shower affection in a dog that can reciprocate a degree of perfection that we have infused in them. A literate wife can be appreciated more for being resourceful than an illiterate wife who may in many quarters, becomes a burden. There is not so much selfishness her but a longing for perfection.

1. Ideas from C.S Lewis, Problem of Pain

It matters what you do

2009-12-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

Whenever my friend Antonio asks others why they did what they did, the others will give their classic reply, “What about the whole world of people who are sinning? My action is not going to make any difference.”

Jesus said that when one person is lost He goes in search of the person and even if one person is found He celebrates. The whole world may be sinning but salvation is about you. They had their chance. Now it’s yours! The salvation of many men hangs on what you choose. They are going to choose their cards by something you are going to guide. It matters what you do

G. K Chesterton says, “We live at the wrong side of the tapestry” what we learn, what we encounter, we don’t comprehend that often it is only an experience for us but a lesson for someone else. It is not given to us the gift to look on the other side, to uncover the veil and know the secrets of every mysterious encounter with life. What we do now, we will never know whom it profits. If we are practicing honesty now, it is perhaps a preparation more for the person we will bump into ten years from now and who will be converted by our habits and conduct. But if we aren’t prepared, he is going to bump into us and life is going to be the same. We have lost his salvation for him.

We cannot delay our growth and our virtue for we delay that person our self can be due to which our friends are never the same again. They found the truth through us but if we don't grow the truth doesn't lie in us. If we are lazy in our growth, we are depriving all our friends of what they could meet know and their encounter with truth. It matters what you do!

St. Therese of Little Flower on Vanity

2009-11-08T00:29:00.000-08:00

Vanity
But to go back to my story.Three months after I was cured, Father took me away for a delightful holiday, and I began to see something of the world. All around me was joy and happiness. I was entertained, pampered and admired; in fact, for a whole fortnight my path was strewn with flowers. But those words of the Book of Wisdom are only too true: "The bewitching of vanity overturneth the innocent mind." (Cf. Wis. 4:12). When you are only ten, your heart is fascinated very easily, and I must admit that I found this kind of life charming. The world is able to combine so well the search for pleasure with the service of God, forgetting death, yet it has come to so many rich and happy young people I used to know. My mind goes back to their enchanting homes, and I can't help wondering what use to them now are those chateaux and estates where they enjoyed all the world could offer, and I realize that "all is vanity save loving God and serving Him alone." (Imit. I:1,3)

I could watch this a million times

2009-11-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

This is so sweet

Love: Virtue and Emotion

2009-10-30T04:42:00.000-07:00

Dave receives a call from Mikhail after a very long time. Mikhail apologizes for not having called. Dave writes to him later saying that he needn’t feel sorry and making ‘calling’ a chore. That way, says Dave, his relationship with Mikhail would become monotonous. He can call when he feels like.

Mikhail says nothing. After many days Dave receives a reply. Mikhail writes back.

Dave, I have been thinking of what you said about just calling when I feel like and not making my calls a chore lest our relationship turn monotonous. But Love is responsibility. When you leave a person to his ‘feeling’, he becomes no different from an animal. He Sleeps when he ‘feels’ like, reads when he ‘feels’ like, eat when he is ‘hungry’ as much as he ‘feels’ like. You get the point?

Feelings have their own place-to motivate what you strongly believe not to believe what you strongly feel. What you do is what you believe. I believe in love and hence I need feelings to motivate love. if I leave myself to feelings, I would love only when I feel conducive to the same. But feelings are like the wind, they come and go. They tear us apart often and often leave us enthusiastic. Our beliefs such as love cannot be contingent on something as momentary and unpredictable as feeling. Love is much more noble to fall prey to feelings.

It is good to love, such a maxim subsides in reason. Reason should incline our feelings to our beliefs so that we may act according to our beliefs. If reason fails to do that and our passions[bodily desires] incline our beliefs to our feelings, we would act one day, not act another, act less one day, become radical another. We would be a victim of our feelings acting a saint one day, a sinner another.

Love makes you feel accountable. Feelings make you rely on your moods and swings. Monotony is not in itself morbid. When monotonous activity is done with purpose, it is called consistency, a discipline, a relationship. It is monotonous in its nature, not in its purpose.

Too much Love will kill you?

2009-10-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

Mikhail and Dave are watching Romeo and Juliet. They exit the audio-visual room and say in union, “riveting! Simply brilliant” As they move past the cafeteria with their ice creams, Dave says, “You know Mikhail. Love is all good and nice and worth fighting for. But too much of anything is bad. So also, we shouldn’t love anything too much. Too much of love is also bad for any attachment to anything in excess is bad.

And Mikhail simply believes in enjoying his ice-cream, Dave wonders why Mikhail in his signature style is not pouncing on him with arguments and building a case. He throws the candy stick in the dustbin as if throwing a ball in the hoop and says,

“Love frees men. It does not enslave but liberate. When man is attached to something, he is not attached to it because he loves but because the object of his attachment, say football, Television, women, cars, money even books, enslaves him through his passions [emotions].

Joe watches a movie when he is supposed to do his homework and excuses himself saying the movie is a classic and that he only loves cinema and is homework is left undone. Anna is late for the Girls Scout meeting as she cannot make up her mind what dress to wear and says she was only trying to dress appropriately. All these remain our attachments and yet we confuse them with Love.

Love frees us from our attachments. It opens our eyes to the world outside of us and our attachments to the world inside of us are tempered. Love subsides in reason. But often we say we are only trying to love a game or food or driving and put off work that is not the fault of another who has suffered or our virtue that has been injured for reason has not prevailed. Love does not control. It does not fight for one’s own pleasure over another’s need.

Only if u have more love someone more than you have for yourself would you think: the movie is not so important or alright, so I will miss 30 minutes. It’s alright. The ground has not been pulled from below me.

Thus, love has drawn you away from the slavery of your passions. Thus, too much love frees us where as too much attachment to one thing clouds our reasoning and impedes the love we could otherwise show. Yes, too much attachment to anything is bad if not discerned with counsel. But too much love is required for the discernment and the liberation from the world within to the world without.

Irony of Christianity

2009-10-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Christianity is a strange thing, an encounter of life with life. An encounter of man with Man. An encounter of man with a man who is God. Christianity makes for a strange paradox. It makes me believe that I am a treasure for it calls me a son of God if I wish to be living in obedience and surrender to the Father's will. I have the privilege of sharing his son ship and I am a treasure. Christianity also makes me aware what a wreck and refuse I am. As I am nothing unto myself and all that I am, is through God and of God. I need God's mercy to touch my life that He chooses to share the divine magic of His life with the ordinary apathy of my human life. I am a wreck and yet a treasure. Nothing is mine and yet in humility, everything is.

No place for Love

2009-09-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

Dave and Mikhail are walking through the woods after the Debate finals in School. Dave failed to fill in for the debate as he couldn’t find a credit card and his last bet was Jim Scorsee. Mikhail tries his best to cheer him up. Mikhail plucks an apple from the Apple tree and flings it towards Dave.

“Here you are Dave, an Apple today will keep the blues away”

“it isn’t funny, Mikhail. I am sure Jim could have done the transfer of funds. But he doesn’t want to see me winning the debate, does he? He gives me tall tales of why he can’t do a silly transfer instead of just replying yes or no to my request. He is always acting so. He doesn’t like me. If he wished, I could have got the transfer done.”

Dave and Mikhail discuss Jim’s actions and other past incidences where Dave suspects apparently similar bad intentions of Jim and tries to put cards in places. After a while, Mikhail stops walking.

“Hey Mikhail, what happened? You can’t keep up to my pace. I will slow down if you wish”

“No, Dave it isn’t your pace. It is your mind. It is so extremely bent in proving Jim has malicious intent in everything to do with you that we have spent or wasted an hour discussing it. If we go on trying to find out who has malicious intent and who doesn’t and eventually have a malicious intent ourselves in judging others, we would never learn how to love.”

The offer of the Offertory

2009-09-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

Dave has just finished dinner at Mikhail’s house. When Dave brings his plate into the kitchen, he watches Mikhail calmly clearing all other plates. And Dave wonders why Mikhail would go to such an extent to wash the plates while he could always do them in the morning considering that it has been a tiring day

Dave asks, “Mikhail, the plates can always be done in the morning, can’t they?”

“Yes, they can. But I have to go for Mass in the morning”, says Mikhail.

“Well, it can be done after Mass, can’t it?”

And Mikhail says,

“Dave, at Mass, The infinite Sacrifice of Christ the Son in form of the life giving bread and saving cup are offered up to God, the Father for the expiation of our sins for he asked us to do the same in memory of Him during the Last Supper with the Apostles. In the offertory, the Priest prays asking that the gifts to be offered be made holy and acceptable in the eyes of the Lord. This is our chance to offer up our little of the day to the infinite gift of bread and wine that are going to become body and blood of Christ.

We can do some work and offer that good work into the offertory for the Mass like Abel did and Abraham was ready to give and many others. Our offertory like this cleaning of plates is incomparable to the infinite value of Christ’s sacrifice, yet our bit is like the two drops of water the Priests adds in the wine, that is mixed with it and dissolves into the wine.

So also my work is united to the work of Christ’s on the cross and has redemptive value if I am ready to sanctify it, offer it up and enter into my own glory like Jesus entered into his. But for that, I need to offer my bit of the day like Jesus offered all. I need to offer something with love like Jesus offered Love itself.”

Babette's Feast

2009-09-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I watched an Oscar Award winning French film, Babette’s Feast. There are many aspects I could elaborate about the movie. For a starter, this movie is about simplicity and choices people make in life. Two protestant daughters of a minister in an isolated and sleepy village on an island feed the old of the village. The young women who are obedient, humble and self-effacing are very beautiful and endowed with talents like singing among others.

Two men come into their lives but for a brief time. Though the women do not overly indulge due to the upbringing of their father who doesn’t think much of earthly love and marriage, they have an inkling it is not all wrong but eventually give up their little impulse that could have changed their lives. They make peace with it. It is this peace they make that is so ubiquitously subtle in the movie yet so noticeable.

The protestant sisters are very pious and docile and always fostering the old community with hymns to God, to always sustain their gratitude that all bread and shelter comes from God who has mercy. In strike contrast are the two [possibly] catholic men who come into their lives. They are ambitious and believe in glorifying God in this life. Although this does not come out so clearly, it is very evident in their shock when the women aren’t willing to pursue their gifts or return their love.

And so enters Babette, another possibly catholic woman, who by turn of some events has lost her family in France and wishes to only work or serve the two old sisters. The protestant sisters are very humbled by the earnestness and labor of Babette. Babette takes care of all their needs and even more with a touch of love. So much so, the sisters realize that they have saved more money since Babette arrived.

And then one day Babette wins a lottery awarding her Ten thousand francs, enough to last her a lifetime and the sisters are sad that Babette will soon leave. Babette does make her intention clear but asks the sisters, a chance to prepare a French dinner in honor of the memory of their father whose 100th death anniversary is soon approaching. The sisters are initially reluctant but later agree.

And this is the place where the movie really reaches its fulfillment or should I say unleashes what the move is really about, Babette’s Feast. This is where Babette is really revealed to the world. The French dinner is something I haver never seen in my life but I am certain I would have wanted to be an ‘invite’ on that table. No wonder people say French cuisine is an art. Babette single handedly prepares a French dinner equivalent to trouncing an army alone. And she does it with a serene humility. The General, one of the dinners’ invite say it is a dinner that is capable of being turned into a love affair. The movie sees many of the old bickering men and women reconcile and love each other when they realize how they have been loved and touched by the beauty of God’s creation, food and human will to love. The songs continue, the dinner too and each one has a story to share.

This movie also explores or visits perhaps subtly the old misconception that Catholics do good works to earn their salvation. Papin writes to the protestant sisters how great they could have been but still will be when they enchant the angels in Heaven with their voice. The protestant sisters agree in the end, that many things in life cannot be pursued, many talents cannot be showcased or nurtured, often you have to leave it all to choose the better portion and it is then that God cares and always loves by his grace.

For the sisters, Babette was God’s grace and in the end, it reaffirms the saving power of Grace. Watch this movie simply to know how personal success hardly matters if one has not learned to love and our choices always bias us by worldly success but real success, the movie repeats again and again is when Truth and Mercy have merged. Some of the characters in the movie discover and preach it, others live it and a few others admit it in the end.

avoiding the Test

2009-09-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and do not put us to the test but deliver us from evil1

Often we run on the street when we see a small opening and the cars have to screech, abruptly halt and we smile saying, “Phew! Made it” We park our vehicles at a no-parking zone. We are always trying our best to rescue ourselves but don't really bother about putting others into trouble and often into sin.

We pray that God not put us to the test for we have an understanding of human nature. Human nature falls easily into temptation and consequently into sin. We don't need evidence of it. We know how easily watching TV has led us into not studying for an exam. Or how not letting go off the computer or snoozing the alarm has made us late. Of how driving outrageously fast to make it to an appointment instead of apologizing in foresight has made us a prey to accidents and an inconvenience to others by over speeding recklessly.

We think it’s all ok because we are getting late and we are hungry and we are sleepy. We are honest until there comes a time our honesty is put to test. Then, honesty was possible because honesty was convenient. Now it has come to choosing honesty and inconvenience, we know who we are.

The character of our honesty, bravery and fortitude is prune under fire when inconvenience is asking us to embrace it. And then love is wanting. We do something that is void of love i.e. evil. And hence the prayer goes, to not put us to the test but to deliver us from evil.

It is amusing how we don't think twice before putting others to the test. Now nobody is born with an inherent skill of driving and not all drive to the same degree of perfection. We easily forget that man is so anxious and always engulfed with thoughts, worries, preoccupations and fantasies that a slight 'test' can derail his concentration along with his car. A million things can go wrong between the clutch, brake, gear and the acceleration. To avoid having to put people to the test is to be compassionate, an everyday compassion

We don’t have to test his driving skills in order to know if he can brake on time if we run while there is not enough time to make it across. This is real life and real people and he shares the same human weakness that we do.

It takes some compassion and concern for others in the ordinary circumstances of life to think, “I will not put him to the test lest he fall” Often we don't want to be patient with work. May be we can. Our friend may have a lot of things to accomplish. It takes some compassion into thinking, “I will not put my friend to test who is already swamped with work lest he be delayed and do them all poorly or not at all. We ought to first know and ascertain the nature of his day. Perhaps we can give the work to someone else but we aren’t thinking hard. Perhaps we don’t wish to embrace inconvenience again of asking someone other than a friend. We find requests and an appeal to our helplessness embarrassing, uncomfortable and thus, inconvenient.

It is Human nature to err and fall and swamping one with work would make them vulnerable to mistakes or delay them and love is demanded of us to others just as we would like others to show the same generosity with us and not put us to the test. Deliver us from this 'absence of love' i.e. evil act of wanting to run before cars, of asking some official to go out of his way for us which might get him in trouble if he is caught. Only for we wish to get our work done. We prefer our selves and our selfishness over the well being of others when we put others to the test.

1 Matthew 6:13

The hypocrisy of patronizing anti-Christian entertainment

2009-09-21T00:41:00.000-07:00

One of my friends wrote to me on the Da Vinci Code saying,

“The book is just fiction. Just because it questions the authenticity of certain facts doesn’t falsify the facts. It is about our faith which should be strong enough to laugh it off rather than having to go to great lengths to justify ourselves.

Repeated attempts to do so would just make the general public wonder as to why is it that the Christian community is so worried about the book. Or is there something true in what brown's written.

I read the book 3 years ago. And that is all I did. I just read it. Once the book was done I put it down and went on with my life instead of questioning my faith and beliefs”

First, I have some questions that bother me. If you know it isn't true, why would one bother reading filth and dirt? Does one even get down reading some good books that fortifies one’s faith that one has time to dispense with falsity that endangers one’s faith?

What we don't realize is that punks like 'Dan Brown' make a buck because people like us read them and still stupidly claim that it is false and a lie. I know many people had to read it because they had to defend our faith. If you read it genuinely to take up such a task, well, I apologize. I get many questions on Da Vinci Code and although I haven't read it, I know what the book is about and can answer them to an extent.

The next question is that, I wonder if a film was screening on your father and mother scandalizing their marriage or a movie of say how your brother is a big gangster and a womanizer or runs a brothel. Imagine if the whole thing is false and your set of friends and cousins know it and are extremely enraged. Imagine if you see your cousin sister going for the movie. Wouldn't you wonder as to how she could go for the movie when she knows it is all false? Why did she not think of her cousin brother and how you would feel when you learn of it? Would you go for the movie to just 'laugh it off’? That is my problem with going for the movie.

If you wouldn’t do it when your family is slandered, I wonder why catholic’s do it when Jesus Christ is slandered. There is a disorder of the will. There is a lack of love. If I read the book or watch the movie, I am either ignorant or too blessed. I am ignorant because I haven’t met the thousands of people who gave up their faith after reading the book and blessed because I did not give up my own.

Dan Brown has struck at the heart of the Catholic Church. He has not written against, say, a doctrine such as The Communion of Saints. He has not maligned a priest, a pope, a saint, or a religious order. He has maligned Jesus Christ. For every person, who thinks less of Jesus Christ after DVC (Da Vinci Code), who thinks of Him as just a man, or a prophet, or a good moral teacher, Dan Brown will pay the price for it.

I am reminded of the parable of the Sower. The Sower sowed good seeds and the birds came and ate it away. Today, this bird is a millionaire because of people like us. I am amused anyone can call it a trivial thing. It is when we ‘protest’ do people think that we take our faith seriously. Do you know how the Muslims reacted when Mohammed was portrayed as a bomber? How the Hindus protest even when someone converts by their free will?

What about us? We are expected to sit back and say nothing because by saying something, we show others we are scared? Where did we get that idea? When we are silent about something, it implies ‘giving consent’ and that anyone can say anything about our religion because our religion is a matter of opinion. There is no ‘the faith once given’ being handed down from centuries from the Apostles right down to the Church as she is today.

When we are silent, we may give people the impression that some can believe Jesus Christ can be married and could be a moral teacher and could be God and could be prophet or could be political leader. We don’t exactly seem to others as men and women testifying to ‘truth’ that is handed down from centuries as the doctrines of the Church, unchanged and undiluted. By our silence, People of the world see us practicing a speculation not Truth.

The devil is called the father of lies. He tricks people into believing anything because he despises our loyalty the Church as the only divine thing in the world. He will be ready to spread any misgiving about her. We assist the devil when we don’t talk about it in our capacity. But then again, how much strongly we feel about the DVC also reflect on our faith in Jesus. If we wouldn’t accept any slander about our sisters and brothers, why would a good catholic accept it of Jesus who is Lord?

I think the problem with Catholics today is not that they can bear humiliation by carrying the cross of DVC but they are not bothered to take a stand when questioned or cornered on their patronage of the book or movie. They say, 'my faith is very strong, it is not going to affect me'. Do you and I ever think if we skipped the movie and the book, other Catholics or non Christians would feel guilty that they indulged in watching it? They would get the hint that 'well, I guess Dan Brown has written something really vile and preposterous for Marie and Jenny to skip the movie'.

By patronizing the movie, they get the hint 'well, Marie and Jenny went for the movie too, so I guess the whole book is arguable and worth a discussion' People like us who go 'I am very strong in my faith and beliefs and a book will not have me strayed' actually commit the sin of foolhardiness and pride. We give ourselves too much importance thinking we are too strong and need not worry about a fall. I have learned of catholic philosophers who have lost their faith reading the philosophies of Nietzche and Jean Paul Sartre.

I know men who have told a priest, “Father, nothing is going to happen when I read God Delusion’ and have consequently questioned their faith immensely and thought of it as folklore. It shows great prudence and great humility for a person to skip the movie or the book. The former (prudence) is a cardinal virtue and the latter a virtue Jesus himself said is required for Salvation (Until you learn to be like little children, you cannot enter my kingdom).

I say it is best to show prudence in these matters than indulge even when we know it is rubbish because this is how the devil acts. He is an angel after all, an intelligent spiritual being endowed with the gifts of wisdom. He lies to you, ‘this is nonsense, your faith is stronger than this’. And when you watch it, a doubt has been sowed into your mind however little, however trivial. All he has to do is stand back and relax while he sees you tormenting yourself gradually.

But Jesus said, “If your hand makes you stumble, it is better to cut it off and enter the kingdom than to go to hell with it. If your eye makes you stumble, it is better to pluck it out and enter the kingdom with one eye than to not enter at all” Even if you believe the faith as I do, don’t think it is you who do. If God were to withdraw His grace, you and I would be nowhere. To call DVC, a fallacy is a ‘grace’ in itself.

Coming back to ‘I have lot of faith and this movie cannot alter my beliefs’ this is such hypocrisy. When I have complete faith in my wife and someone wishes to meet me about my wife’s apparently illicit liaison, I would tell the man, “I don’t wish to hear anything. I have complete faith in my wife and even if my wife were to fall, I trust her to tell me than to know it from a third party” This is called a strong faith. Setting an appointment with the man to know what he has to say doesn’t inspire much ‘faith’ in the goodness of your wife.

I am still trying to figure out how some of us who say ‘I have complete faith and a movie is not going to affect me’ still read the book or watch the movie. I told you, it is a different case when a priest reads it because a lot of people are going to ask him about the book and it would be quite foolish if he says, “I have not read the book” But we are all bound by our conscience. If we don’t study by the virtue of its nobility but because exams are nearing, I wonder how many of us took up the book and the movie because we only wished the good of other souls in peril.

The truth is, we have a weak faith or simply lack of love which allows us to run our curiosity wild. A strong faith would make us skip the movie as we believe we cannot make a single buck for a novelist (Dan Brown is a novelist. It is an insult to Historians to call him one) who shows the Catholic Church in bad light.

If we patronize the movie, we support their cause. Our loyalty to the bride of Christ, the Church shows when we make a sacrifice if the movie is supposed to be enjoyable and laughable as you say. For many of my friends, they pray for Dan Brown’s soul, so skipping the movie is not a sacrifice for them but an act of ‘reason’ just like not smoking a cigarette is not a sacrifice but an act of ‘reason’.

If we go to watch the movie, there is nothing catholic about us. You are just a viewer like any other who has come to watch a movie. But if you avoid the movie people sense it is not because the movie timings are inconvenient or the movie genre is not preferable but because you are a Catholic. A chance for you to show the people in your circle that you believe it is fiction and you have no time for people who sell nonsense at our expense. A chance for us to bear witness to the faith, to stand by Jesus and His Church unlike the apostles who fell many times but always had a ‘strong faith’ and no love lacking.

On a lighter note, I understand you were gave your opinion about how sometimes protests can lead to overkill. That is why you didn't see The Church protesting about the screening of Angels and Demons, did you? Do you know why? Because Dan Brown himself accepts it is fiction. But it is not enough calling it fiction. It is how he plays his grand plan. He shows the priests, the bishops and the pope as some clandestine, power hungry and an immoral organization shielding the Truth. Again, it shows the Church in bad light. Now you may not believe the bishops are evil and secretive because they aren't. But let us not be naive about its impacts.

Tomorrow when you try to correct your non Christian friend on some Church Teaching and you say the bishop or Church says this, he would quickly remember what the bishop and Pope did to shield the truth in Angels and Demons and would find it difficult to yield to your counsel. The point is he doesn't think The Church has authority so much to be believed because of movies like Angels and Demons.

So the article was not asking us to protest but simply warning people that Dan Brown does it again. He comes out with another book (the lost symbol) like his previous nonsense. It is to belittle him so that people are dissuaded from buying his new book not to create publicity for it. The article was appealing for people to be prudent with their money and time

Why we pray

2009-09-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

Unless you make prayer a must-have it will never come to be. You will never pray. I must have food. I must drink. I must rest. While we never skip these requirements, prayer can be conveniently skipped. Until we don't add prayer from the 'can do' to the 'must do', you will never really sit down to pray. Unless you withdraw from the television, from your ‘resting’ and ‘eating’ and ‘talking’ and ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘cleaning’, ‘cooking’, ‘studying’, ‘thinking’, ‘eating’ and ‘playing’, prayer will never find a reality.

Why should you pray today?

1. I have talked to many friends but I haven't talked to Jesus

2. How can I go about the day without strength that comes from Prayer?

3. What do I have to tell Jesus about my day today?

4. If I don't speak to God in prayer, all else has been but a natural day. But my end is supernatural and out of this world. If I don't pray today I have been an element merely of this world. But by speaking to God about entering into my life and its daily activities, I am a son of God.

5. How do I know what the Holy Spirit requires of me today, if I don't pray?

6. I pray so that Jesus doesn't have to say sadly, "I don't know you" or so I wouldn’t have to confess even more sadly and shamefacedly "I don't know Him or His power and love in my life"

7. Sometimes, he is the best friend I have got, the best counselor, the best guide and the best comforter. What I don't realize is he can be this all the time if I pray everyday

8. How do I take a decision without talking to Our Lord in prayer? I have only used my own limited mind not the power of the saints and angels in heaven who intercede if I am ready to pray and surrender my problem at the table of God

9. If I don't pray, how can I ever be certain if what I am doing is God's will or my own? If it happens to be God's will, very well but can I be certain until I pray and the Holy Spirit testifies in my heart? But if it is my own [will] by the folly of not praying to receive inspirations, then I am in big trouble.

10. If I don't pray, God can become a cosmic force, the cool breeze, the ‘lucky charm’, a headmaster, a judge, a feeling, an author, a leader, everything but a friend. Without prayer, God cannot be a shepherd for a sheep, my friend and my brother.

Overlooking little details

2009-09-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us¹

Mikhail just got off the computer as the recess bell rang. Dave met him outside and asked, “who have you been emailing?"

“I have actually received one", said Mikhail.

"My friend has just moved to a new city for his architectural training and while I reminded him that he hasn't kept in touch, he apologized at the breakneck speed of the construction contract and never having found minutes to call or write with overbearing work. Dave smiled at this and said, "Hey Mikhail may be you can get back at him as he never found 3 minutes until you took him to task. He shot back a reply quickly unlike all the excuses for the failures of the days before.”

And Mikhail said,

"Dave, I can embarrass him alright. But I choose to overlook it and have mercy than to humiliate him. I can and I am capable of holding people in contempt and waiting for a chance to lay my bait and trap people for such little details of their excuses.

I wonder what would happen if God instead of being merciful, waited for endless opportunities in little details of our life to see us trip and fall into deceit and error and leave us embarrassed. I would lose my salvation at the drop of a hat. But God overlooks our weaknesses and watches keenly at our intentions in things. His mercy is for giving us another chance, to magnify the greatness of our soul when he finds us guilty not to humiliate us when He sees us covering up.

The character of Thomas More

2009-09-16T06:23:00.001-07:00

The Grand Duke, Henri of Luxembourg cannot not decline personal responsibility for allowing fellow citizens to be killed by doctors, no matter how much political pressure is applied. A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More, illustrates this point. One of his old friends asks More why he would not sign the Oath of Supremacy: "Why can't you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!" And More replies, "And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?"

Source: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_price_for_opposing_euthanasia/

The Pursuit of Knowledge

2009-09-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

Have you observed something? The more Man pursues knowledge, the more closer he comes to understanding himself. The more he comes to understand himself, the more he understands his actions and choices. The more knowledge he searches the more meaning he finds in everything that he does. His life actually becomes all about ideas because it is these ideas that Plato talks about that fires up Man and which Man should rightly live for

And the more idealized he becomes trying to romance these ideas with his own limitations the more he realizes how sorry his state his that life is actually real and an idea cannot fit into reality the way an idea is. But his only satisfaction is to appreciate the purity of the idea and his humble opportunity to implement it imperfectly. He finds meaning in the imperfection created by a real world. Thus Realism has really given impetus and recognition to Idealism. Plato and Aristotle have reconciled in my little musings.

There is a greater demand of living life well if one has greater understanding how life should be lived well. If knowledge eradicates ignorance, then the suffering that was obscure and an ‘obstacle’ becomes known, challenging, charming and enigmatic. Suffering finds meaning in knowledge and knowledge finds pursuit in Man. Man finds purpose in Action.

The death of an expression?

2009-09-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

Someone wrote in a comment on a blog that sorry’s and thankyou’s are not necessary. They either show a ‘vacuum’ in a relationship else people partaking in the relationship would not apologize or thank one another. Or they don’t have to do it because two friends understand each other if they are good friends and sorry and thank you become dispensable or a formality.

The point of sorry and thank you is an expression of a feeling. We do it with strangers because we think they are not obliged to help us, they can easily ignore. And yet, when they do, we are overwhelmed by their kindness and thank them incessantly.

With friends, I am afraid, that we 'presume' they are going to help and the closeness is something contrary to the strengthening of your friendship than what it seems.

One fellow says we don’t need to apologize as we can be easily forgiven if we are dealing with a ‘good’ friend. What he means to say is that, introspection, conversion of heart, guilt of hurting another person can all go for a toss. I don't do it, I really don't need it. I don't know or wonder that doing these things (introspection, expression of gratitude) can better the person I am and thus be appreciated better, loved better and hence enrich my friendship.

Perhaps people have too much pride or to less a humility to think something can be wrong with them. They don't see their conversion or 'turning a new leaf' as an answer to the problems with relationships and Mankind. Their notion of a better relationship or a better society is: Look, let me be, let me live, I am what I am, I live life on my own terms, please live your own. I try not to harm anyone and what else could anyone expect of me?. Such a ideology would patently find no reason to acknowledge a 'thank you' for someone touching one's life and a 'sorry' for disturbing another because of one's weaknesses, shortcomings and imperfections.

If only one had the humility to accept what one is with all his imperfections and faults could one be able to fathom how much one falls short of loving or accomplishing something. I say 'sorry' to acknowledge my mistake first, not only to be forgiven. So If I have wronged my friend, I say sorry in order that he/she knows I deeply regret it not because I know I will be forgiven and hence don't go to the sorry place at all. he/she needs to know that I am ashamed of the word or deed and that a heart is meant to love and my word or deed has worked contrary to it.

My friend requires knowing that I disapprove of my own conduct that has hurt him/her. This can only strengthen friendship. A ‘sorry’ conveys that I care enough to reprimand and reproach myself. That I care to keep my life in check and that I am accountable to someone and that I should treat a friend differently, more tenderly, more gently than a stranger.

The same applies to a 'Thank You' so I needn't go in detail. I am shocked that there are those that cannot see the essence of a thank you and a sorry. They are deep expressions of a human being that make us different from Animals. I can feel grateful at someone's act and I can feel sorry of letting another down.

This is an act of humbling oneself. To not experience this act of being 'humbled' and gratuitous, to expect someone's pardon because you have hurt another. To be immensely penitent because that hurt is towards a friend, not just a stranger. I am sad that many would think a Thank You and a Sorry are dispensable

Friendship with the Holy Spirit

2009-09-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

what is friendship with the Holy Spirit but our sensitivity to His promptings, to put into effect His will, our obedience to His command, that is a whisper, like the sound of a bedbug or a gnat, so little but yet profound and clear.

Our surrender to His power and our body to be his instrument so that we can always do the Will of God and be preserved in the richness of our personality is essentially nurturing friendship with the Holy Spirit

Choosing Heaven

2009-09-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him¹

A few years ago, I asked one of my friends about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. I was very anxious to avoid it. I was aware that some kind of recompense has to be paid in purgatory for the sins committed on earth for the purification of souls. I feared it. I inquired about the means to avoid purgatory which were ranging from prayers to good works which all came down to love. I also learned why the purification is necessary and whether I can be assured that purgatory is a transition to heaven and not hell. I realized years later, much with sadness, what C.S Lewis writes about too, in the Problem of Pain.

A good fellow starts a club for people he loves who also love him. This club has members who love the founder of the club and indeed their very membership is hinged on their amount of love. Their membership is revoked if their love for the founder is any less than what love is demanded. The peculiar thing about this club is that the founder is unheard of and just an ordinary man in the world.

No one would happen to know the founder until one seeks him. In direct contrast, everybody, including children, know all about the club. It is as old as Santa Claus or perhaps predates it too. The club they say, 'is the place to be in' in equal queerness. Surprisingly, they neither know a person in the club nor what it involves. All they know is that people in the club are happy and if they can't be in the club, they rather not be anywhere else.

People leave no stone unturned to enter the club but keep deceiving themselves. For, true membership is for those who try to love its founder. They can only begin to love the founder if they have any knowledge of the founder. People are neither interested in the founder nor the criteria he has charted. Everybody, everywhere and everyday claims to have seen the founder and reveal to others, the revelations the founder has made.

But it is plain from the founder’s charter that he expects lots of changes from potential members to be worthy of the soil of his club. But potential members are not looking or willing to change themselves but rather only wish to avail the benefits of the club. Those, that people have since time immemorial attributed to the club as eternal happiness, peace and life among others.

Man often treats God just like this founder. He chooses God not out of pure intention but because he fears hell. He wishes to be in heaven, the 'club to be in' because it is popularly considered to be a happy place. What exactly he expects to find in heaven as his happiness, he does not know. All he knows is a parallel, an analogy here and there or a notion suited to his way of life. Man enjoys women and wine and dine and fast cars and bull fights and excursions and poker and glory. Perhaps he thinks heaven is the continuation of this.

May be he did not have any woman and was advised by the doctor to not have wine. May be he was poor and couldn't afford the luxury of a car. So he thinks he's suffered enough in the world and when he finds out that hell is a place of eternal suffering too, he tries all his might to avoid it or thinks that because he suffered here, in heaven, he would have all that he was deprived.

From all of these perceptions of Heaven, of receiving what one was deprived, continuation of the worldly pleasures, there is a crucial thing missing: Love of God. Love of God and realizing that man’s truest happiness is to be found only in God and he may run behind women, fame, money, materials and other pursuits that are momentary and pass away like the wind but his heart will never be at rest until it finds its rest in God².

The day when man’s heart has taken its refuge in God, every other material thing he possesses will not suddenly be renounced or destroyed for making way for God. These possessions will neither become less sinful nor more virtuous but find its proper order and place in creation and in the mind of a human soul, the highest of Creation, who finds himself in love with God.

While for the man who chooses heaven in essentially choosing God on earth, God chooses heaven for him as a continuation of man's choice so he may rest in Him and His vision. You don't have to love any president, King or founder in order to enter the country, Kingdom or club respectively. This applies to any Kingdom but Heaven. Heaven is the only place where you have to love the master for entering it. And below is perhaps, one of the best arguments I can place for those who claim to be good, nice, kind, loving, living without harming others, minding their business, never interfering with others, peaceful and never really thinking of Heaven or Salvation or God while doing all these and yet think they are entitled to Heaven too.

Nobody chooses heaven and really gains it. It is the same as I can’t enter a house if I don’t know the owner. I can’t appreciate poetry if I don’t know what the Poet is trying to say. I can make of poetry what I wish but that still won’t be an objective truth. It will only stand as my perception. Nobody chooses heaven and really gains it. Unless God wished me to be in heaven against my will which is against God nature to destroy man’s freedom for that God is not a God of mercy and love but a tyrannical God.

We can’t really choose Heaven until we don’t choose what Heaven is all about and choose the source of its entire splendor. When a movie is a roaring success, the directors and actors are probed on how they shot one scene or the other. We all wish to understand how the graceful scenes actually got their nature of grace. How the actors converted their mere skill into a graceful scene . Understanding their reasons helps us better appreciate the movie.

Or think of the Band like The Beatles. There would not be many who devour their music without knowing who the band members are, how they came together, what difficulties they faced, what the songs mean, who their inspirations were and how their music evolved.

Love follows knowledge and knowledge is fostered by love³. When you enjoy the Band, you wish to ‘know’ more about the creators. And this makes you cultivate more knowledge in order that you can love it more perfectly. Knowledge leads Love and Love drives Knowledge. You can’t really choose Heaven until you choose the splendor of Truth of its own creator through Whom Heaven receives its splendor

A man who has never been in love chooses marriage as he has some idea it is a good thing. Two people in love don't choose marriage. Marriage chooses them for marriage is the continuation of their love. Another way it could be understood that a home owner hangs a painting according to how well it lights up the room. A painter chooses a room according to how well it lights up the painting. The home owner chooses the painting for he has some idea it is good but not like the painter choosing the painting because it is the continuation of his love for the paintings whether in the exhibition hall or at home. We should believe in love and in marriage and not only ‘take’ it up because it is believed to be good things.

There are consequences then of destroying the dignity of good things. Heaven too, should be chosen not simply because it is a good place or a good dream of fantasy to entertain. It should be chosen primarily because in Heaven lies the real purpose of life, the consummation and fulfillment of all the answers and the triumphant entry into the final purpose and vision of facing up to the Creator for the eternal life.

These same good things in Heaven can be lost if we destroy the dignity of good things here on earth in all that God allows us to choose in choosing Heaven. That is why for a lot of bitter things we undergo; we can await our answers in Heaven. For a lot of talent but not success, for a lot of success but not talent, for a life which had its own story and melodrama, the real purpose of how God uses us in accordance with our will, awaits its consummation in Heaven.

Heaven after all is the continuation of love you have for the love you show here on earth. God will make for you a house in Heaven if you make a little house in your heart for him on Earth. This is the promise of Jesus Christ when he taught the Jews. The Jews are the center of the act of Salvation and Jesus came to save ‘His’ People but yet implied to them that to every man who loves him and keeps his word, the Father and He will come and make a house in the man and dwell in him. Heaven then becomes the continuation of love we have for God here in our dwelling but achieves its fuller expression in the house that God builds for us in His dwelling, Heaven.

1. John 14:23

2. Writings of St. Augustine

3. Writings of St. Augustine

The Purpose of Man and the Nature of God

2009-09-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

I have been learning to ride a bike of late. It has been quite a learning experience. I have often have had these airs about me: Rickson reads good books; Rickson watches critically acclaimed classic movies. Such little notions of self-pride are daily little struggles. In lieu of bike-riding, this is especially essential since it humbles me that I am no good. I look with envy at others who have mastered driving.

Finally, there is something, among other things, that I can struggle, not in the sense how we struggle with daily battles of nobility, purity or conscience but struggle in the sense, how a pupil struggles with his violin in his second class. I can struggle and pray that God helps me to be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect. For we try to learn one thing well or another, cook well or design well or paint well for there lies in us, a little glimpse of our Creator.

Somewhere deep inside us, we desire perfection. We desire not leaving a statue carved shoddily but to achieve beauty. Deep inside us, we desire beauty and desire perfection and God is beauty, God is Goodness and God alone is Perfection. We all have in us thus, an implicit, inherent desire for God for we desire goodness, we desire beauty and we desire perfection. And God is all this.

I don't want to thank God for giving me the opportunity to ride a bike as much as I want to thank him for nourishing my friendship through it. My friend has shared with me the woes of losing opportunities to get good deals, the excitement of checking a new bike, the anxiety of doing the payment, the keenness in fixing faults. At times, I have confessed, in my weakness and despair, to never be able to put the bike on its stand. He has shared my agony of being unable to do it. He has shared my helplessness of not knowing exactly what to do in order to learn it. I have asked God in prayer to learn it and today, when I could, he has shared with me the joy of achievement.

Today, I went ahead and thanked him for having taught me three things that he observed were wanting in my skill. It is then I realized what a fool I am. I believed I was being grateful and expressing gratitude for those three things. Can I really fully show gratitude for the innumerable minutes he has patiently waited so that I can put the bike on stand? Can I really thank him for sitting pillion and perhaps risking his life if he has an inkling of a judgment that I am not ready? Can I thank him for accompanying me for buying, bargaining, negotiating, testing, suggestions, tricks, ready reckoners and those innumerable little details that is a part of everyday friendship?

I could die out of exhaustion if I began to thank him. I rather come down on my knees saying, “Thank you, friend. My life is yours. May the best of my life be given to you for you have loved”

But I know now, how God works. He could have made a million little puzzles, amusements, thrills and machines and He has as he has made a bike. But He has made all these only so that through these we may learn to love each other. Through a house, we may learn to shelter, through hands, we may learn to hold and help and hug. Through money, we may learn to aid. Through words, we may learn to counsel and comfort.

God, the Good God is all this as the Bible expresses in various themes and events such as when Jesus is exhausted, God the comforter. When Moses does not know what to do, He is God the counselor. When Israelites are afraid of defeat, He is God the helper. When Israelites don’t know where to go, He is God the shelter. He uses these visible everyday miracles to bring forth his invisible love, grace and beauty of life. Some of his nature, the nature of his Goodness is reflected back in our everyday experiences.

And we desire more of these experiences, more of these friendships, this love and this bond. We don't realize that what our real desire, in desiring these ‘preview’ of the film is, God himself. God is the film. In desiring happiness and little comforts through relationships and things, we look for a satisfaction of a desire not realizing that all these should lead to the one desire as a river flows eventually into the sea. The desire of God is the stage of having no real desire for satisfaction of the desire but joy for having the desire itself. God creates the desire and we fail to desire the One that would lead to an end of trying to satisfy desires for to desire God would be to desire, desire.

We have all felt this when we love our mothers or love our children. We love them and it would be still OK if our child never gave us a little kiss. We love simply due to the desire to love unlike our professions and businesses. We desire God and us yet not know it. When we desire Him, we wish to glorify him in all things that happen for good to those who love God. Our relationships, choices, experiences take on a whole different meaning. We start looking at rain, shelter, food, money, teachers and friends, all as providence. We look at them, especially foreordained in our lives for God did not wish we suffer alone in the pursuit of happiness.

A mechanic who fixes your car doesn't simply remain an economic entity of the business chain of automobile industry. He essentially is an opportunity to glorify God that 'my car can be fixed simply because You have allowed the concept of a mechanic', 'there is a doctor because you want me to be healed so that through the doctor and his very existence and healing, I can glorify your providence, sovereign design and plan for Man and his salvation’

And this is where I begin to understand what the Church always has taught. Ask the church the purpose of Man and the Church says Glorify God. But a man works and a man loves and a man sings and a man writes. Where does glorifying God come into all this?

All things are made for the glory of God. I can never pay my friend fully for his love. This is essentially because it is not mine to give him and not entirely his to take. If a bike has helped me not so much to burn the road but to love my friend, the bike remains nevertheless a utility for all practical purpose but first to glorify God.

For God, through an act of desiring to buy a bike, allows me to experience what friendship can be. He teaches me how a friend can desire to will the good of the other through this friendship, which again is nobility. A nobility, which acquires its beauty by sharing in God's beauty, that he may be glorified through it.

And God is all this: his magnificence and love over pours onto earth and we get a iota of a notion of his love when we love in friendships, parenthood or brotherhood. God is all this, friendship, Master, lord and teacher. Anything can be enjoyed simply because God allows it by placing traces of Him into all things that we seek in purity and truth. Those that haven't understood this and still deem God as a judge, punisher of transgressions, and a cosmic force not only miss the point but miss life entirely.

This is at the Heart of Christian Hope and Christian eschatology. Today, as we enjoy the comfort of a house and can glorify God. We enjoy eating a nice meal outside and can glorify God for a hotel or for food as a delicacy and hospitality, an art. In reading a good book, that God puts great tales and fantasies into the minds of authors and allows them to recite it as a masterpiece.

The promise and Hope that all our little joys, if we glorify God through them for it pours out from His being as God is Love. All these joys will culminate and find its fullest expression when it ends in its source, God. That just as we can now enjoy hints of joy according to our senses, so also, these joys will find its climax in contemplating the face of God proper to our vision in Heaven.

The role of Conscience

2009-08-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

We have to always lean on our conscience else we risk condemning ourselves. Even a person who is wrong but honestly believes he is right is bound to listen to his conscience no matter how erroneous he is in reality. He commits a wrong act by doing what his conscience tells him (because he has an erroneous conscience) but suppose he does not listen to his conscience, he becomes a transgressor.

For God judges us according to how much we seek truth. While each one of us is judged according to our understanding of things, one who does not seek what his conscience tries to tell him has already condemned himself, what judgment can he expect from God if he has already damned himself. So while an erroneous conscience makes you sin, we are still bound by the erroneous conscience abandoning which, will make us transgressors.

That was just a small gist on the conscience. The other day my friend made an interesting point. she said, my conscience should have not allowed me to enter the class as I know I am late. I do not believe there exists such a puritan sense of conscience of self-condemnation. If there is, there is an order to it. I can skip an accessory that is freely available to pick, given at an event because I did not attend that event. Here, it would be right to condemn yourself for I do not merit the accessory.

My conscience is operating towards justice. But this can still be mitigated. I could ask to have it even without deserving it and leave it to the event manager to decide. Enjoying the fruit of the award has not against my conscientious judgment of justice. I have asked the event manager to offer me not by the virtue of justice but by the virtue of compassion: as a gift.

In fact there are scenarios on which your conscience should desist you from eligibility to any fruit of life. If you are applying for a teacher’s job but you aren’t a certified teacher (you don’t have to means or knowledge to teach), your conscience is going to voice: why are you applying for the job? (Unless one’s heart is so hardened that one cannot see beyond the personal desire for money)

In such a case, you should refrain from going for the interview rather than leaving it for the interviewer to discern whether to grant you the job. The reason being, one, you are doing injustice to the students who expect a teacher who will teach them. The interviewer’s compassion towards me would be shocking as he is not applying any reason: he is violating the interests of his students by offering a job to someone who does not merit the job.

The role of the conscience is to administer the truth of the matter and urge us to seek it and follow it. For deep down in our beings, we are capable of hearing the voice of the eternal and discerning the law that the eternal has inscribed in our hearts, the moral law. The conscience identifies when I depart from truth and also identifies goodness in things. But the courage to uphold good and condemn evil comes from Human Will. After the fall of Man, Original sin has scarred the human will to choose good over evil. While Man was always made for Good and Man was and is made to love, he inclined to sin due to his tainted nature.

Thus grace that comes from God aids our will tremendously to choose goodness. This does not mean we are led by God’s grace but only encouraged by it. Eventually, it is we who choose the good. But God allows his grace to shine like light over an object that was veiled in darkness (of our ignorance and weakness) and this light paves the way for the dramatic entry of our choice. If I do not choose it, I reject the grace by God. If I know it is of good and yet do not choose it, I reject the grace along with transgressing my conscience.

Another poor example is when only 20 years and above are allowed to play TT. You may skip the tournament instead of asking yourself to be excepted because you are 20 years and a month. Appearing as a candidature may compound the problems of the authorities who may now have to allow everyone because of you. Either they allow everyone over 20 years and whatsoever months, to serve justice or serve only you and become a stumbling block to their principles and force them to ask you to be quiet about it thereby amounting to dishonesty.

In the case arriving late for class, the role of conscience is already done, I have acknowledged I am late; I leave it to the teacher to decide without being hard on myself. I know I do not merit to be allowed but I plead to her mercy, not justice. If I am on time, I would be pleading to justice. None of us condemns ourselves to hell because of guilt, do we? We confess our sins.

Seeking out our own wretchedness

2009-08-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

The prostitute lay there on the ground and the Jews picked up stones to stone her to death. And Jesus said, “Anyone who has never sinned may throw the first stone” Each one started receding beginning with the Elders

I was helping a boy through the frenzy he found himself amidst. He was running amok from table to chair making calls, threatening people. He was expecting a parcel. I had inquired on the urgency of the parcel and was told that it is required at the earliest. Another friend contradicted the explanation saying,

"The parcel isn't necessary. The parcel contains a wire. He could use the wire from anyone else to do his work. He is just trying to get attention by bringing down the house. He wants others to see how miffed he can be. He wishes that others may see how big a muddle he finds himself into and his, is not an ordinary life but one he fights for. Through all this, he wishes to show that he is a no-nonsense guy who can yell at irresponsible and errant workers and fight like a man to get his work done”

As my friend shared this, I realized that I should not have comforted the person as the person only desired attention and I was assisting and thus being an accomplice in the self-indulgence. A similar situation engulfed me before. No sooner had I comforted my little nephew than I was reproached by my aunt for patronizing and encouraging the toddler’s unacceptable behavior. There ought to be compassion but compassion too has a time and a season

The following day, I resolved to confront and corner the person. My speech was ready: You are running after a wire that you can borrow from another instead of wasting your precious time, patience, tolerance and peace that has patently left you quite disoriented and ill-disposed to speak to anyone as you continue to fix a grim and gloomy countenance. It’s not worth losing your peace, joy and cheer. You are just trying to make yourself feel better by trying to get attention and yell at others to get your work done as if to show you don't take nonsense. Deep inside you crave attention

After a few moments of peace, I realized something. I desired to spew venom on him. The reasons can all be good. I wished to cut him to size. My intolerance that such a behavior should be patronized, acceptable and witnessed was more than his desire now to procure his wire. No, I wanted to set it right that I see through his game and he can just relax.

Learn to forgive was the inspiration I received. Forgive him; it is perhaps very easy to prove them wrong. It is an adventure for him to boost his ego of getting his wire, making scores of calls and reproaching people for their lapses. It has perhaps now become an adventure for me to unveil his silliness and ‘attention-desiring’ shallow ideals. I want to tear him apart so that he knows how wretched he is and consequently, I am only going to show my own wretchedness that I judged his wretchedness. I showed no mercy but wished to make him pay for his own wretchedness.

Forgive him, it will do my soul and interior life a lot more good than his own. He may be steeped in the vice of ‘seeking attention’ that it may be difficult to break out. But if I make a sacrifice and forego the taunt, or snide remark or some badmouthing, that he wasted his two hours; my soul only is more purified. I will forgive ten others after meriting an increase of grace for accepting grace for this act.

I am not saying there should be no correction. When the urge to correct, itself is a self-indulgence; When correction is no more gentle and charitable but turned into an evil, it takes the form of hatred, spewing labels, insults, hurling taunts. Consequently, something as noble as correction becomes hatred for another’s despicable actions. Such a correction, if it may be called so, ill-disposes a soul to peace and serenity but leaves the soul in a tumult of seeking correction as if ‘if I don’t correct, the person is damned’ such an outlook often brings out our own wretchedness.

Is Passion the enemy of Reason

2009-08-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

It is not a well kept secret that man is enslaved by his passions. We see it every day. Whether it is a man who ogles at his secretary and does not reason: but I am married or a boy, who loves his girlfriend and spends his entire father’s entrusted money on trips. Reason, again, does not prevail but passions rebel against it and the boy is unable to defend ‘My father would consider this treachery’

It seems I have given the impression that Passions are the worst enemy of Reason. Passions are movements of our sensibility. And in themselves they are neither good nor bad. They would be bad if they lead us to act against our reason, against our nature. But, on the contrary, they would be good if they lead us to act correctly.

But I would like to correct or refine myself in my portrayal or representation of Passions and Reason. You will observe a child brings down the house when he wishes for something. A child’s mind is sedated with passion. He is unable to reason his way out of a situation as we do when we deprive ourselves certain pleasures due to the loans we have to pay, due to the debts we have incurred, due to the desires we curb for our children. This is reason, this is prudence, or this is temperance, whatever you call it.

An animal will never find any reason to curb his hunger or his sleep. In our passions, Man shares this Animal nature. This animal nature we possess that departs from the essence of human life, Love, when Man is ready to destroy man for the pursuit of lust, land or wealth. These again are unbridled passion that rebel reason: I ought not harm anyone else for my own good

It is in the context above, I called Passion the enemy of Reason. Passions only rebel, they are bodily desires. They are a disorder of will due to our tainted nature that inclines us to sin. But there are often circumstances where a student is late for the lecture and reason dictates he ought not to be allowed. But any reason that is not eventually pointing to good is only going to end up autocratic. The purpose of reason is to achieve good not so that reason serves itself. Reason that serves itself will eventually serve tyranny. If more good can be done by having compassion on the student, then reason should always serve good: I ought to forgive

There are cases where the teacher may be ingratiated by a particular student who consequently takes liberties of coming late. The teacher may make exceptions but now, it is not so much the virtue of compassion being practiced but emotions that cloud her reason. She cannot look to truth, as her own love for the student has clouded her understanding of discipline, impartiality and justice. It is wrong not only to the student but a wrong against other students and certainly against herself. The teacher’s fondness for the student is not serving the student’s good but only her own ego. He makes her feel important and she reciprocates by making allowances.

We observe this phenomenon everyday and it should not be a surprise to anyone that The Greeks got it right all along.

Some objections to the understanding of Emotion

2009-08-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

I my earlier post on Emotions, A commenter wrote in the combox that Emotion could creep in and cause immense frustration and often, depression. I have often myself undergone distress at certain scathing remarks made by people. The same remarks have driven me to offer a repartee but I have stopped short of it and held my cool. This is because, while we feel jealousy or hatred or anger, there are different degrees of it. A little bit of anger is called irritation. A little more is called rage or wrath.

The point is, the disposition of our soul, the values and the level of our virtue allows us either to choose forgiveness or let us go with emotion just as the horse riders allows himself to be guided by the horse rather than guiding it. If I allow reason to prevail (I ought to love or I ought to forgive), my emotion can be subjected to reason. This is not easy stuff. No amount of explanation of suffering or love can actually give someone the courage to act it. This is after all, grace.

But the combox made an interesting comment. I am afraid there is a misunderstanding of the role of reason. Reason is objective. As I mentioned in my earlier Post, the man at the drowning episode would fear for his own life while seeing someone drown but reason would say: Jump, he will lose his life.

Now one commenter mentioned what if like an emotion, even reason goes the other way saying, “The man dying is not your kin” This is a disorder of the will. Each person has equal dignity in the eyes of God. While I am more inclined to give a chocolate to a friend and more inclined to offer help to a friend. In the case of life and death, my inclinations and preferences have no say. Reason has to prevail.

Inclinations and passions again are what we love more than others. Again it is an emotion and the man’s will is pointing to emotion than Reason. What the commenter is trying to say is in the case of a kin, the man would have jumped much more easily than in the case of a stranger. This means that his will would point to emotion and because he loves his kin, he would jump. This is the same as a mother running into a burning house for her kid. We usually don’t see others doing it and when we do see them, we say, "you are a hero". It is simply because he has shown heroic virtue. “Don’t jump, he is not your kin” is emotion biasing reason. Life has the highest dignity and it has to be protected.

The second case the commenter mentions is, ‘this is a dangerous situation’ Now, fear is different from Prudence. Fear is an emotion, Prudence is a virtue. If someone is manhandling a lady and I have a general fear of intervening, this is could deter me from helping the lady. This is fear and reason says, “Help her” and emotion says. “Don’t get yourself involved”. Again we let emotion bias our reason[ing].

The third case the commenter mentions is, ‘Don’t try to do a superhero act’ Prudence is a virtue. If a switch is faulty, there is a fear of being electrocuted. Prudence is right reason in action. You are not going to tinker with the switch not because you lack the right implements for implement can be bought. It is not that you lack time for time can be created but that you lack knowledge and skill.

Prudence would demand that you call an electrician instead of going ahead and endangering your life. The same is the case when you know for certain that you do not know to swim and jumping in would be losing two lives. Here it is not fear (or subsequently cowardice) that stops you but Prudence, right reason in action. Prudence is the golden mean between cowardice and heroism. No prudence could make you late for a meeting when you stop on the road to watch a fight and extreme cautiousness could often make you a coward for not willing to even voice your opinion or support a group fearing Punishment

“This is not my kin” is a form of selfishness and lacks the full appreciation of Human Life. Emotion has not actually gotten better of emotion as much as a lack of knowledge of value of Human Life.

“It is a dangerous Situation” is fear that clouds a man’s reasoning. The will requires to be disposed to courage but is inclined to fear and hence disposed to cowardice. Again, it clouds reason and makes us reason erroneously justifying, that the situation is dangerous.

‘Don’t try a superhero act’ this is Prudence, different from the emotion of fear if he has judged that he is incapable of doing something by himself. But you will observe the will is still disposed to reason and not fear. It is disposed to the right reason in action. Prudence allows one to avoid being foolhardy in the case of jumping in the water without the knowledge of swimming and avoids cowardice by not fleeing the scene due to the knowledge of the value of Human Life. Reason still prevails when Prudence is applied

The classic understanding of Emotion

2009-08-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Often many pop spirituality authors have this tendency of ranking emotions from a higher rating (such as Love) to a lower rating (such as jealousy). There are objective goods and truths in the world but an emotion per se is not objectively good or bad. Perhaps they are objectively good or bad but not to the extent that they can be good or bad in all cases. It is not in the nature of an emotion to be good or bad

Love is good but if reason does not prevail, a fine thing as love can be corrupted by wishing to possess and impose on others, requirements, we would never wish on our selves. Our own insecurities make us pervert Love and consequently, motivate us to harrow and impose ourselves on them. What motivates our action is not Love that has ceased to exist but to be free of our insecurities and be free from our doubts and trust issues.

No one thing is good in the world, say love or patriotism. To cite another example, there are instances when a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country (say Mamta Banerjee’s love for West Bengal which people alleged is clear in the rail budget) have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries says C.S Lewis [brackets added without italics]

The problem with this over-emphasis on emotions and making a psychology out of it is that it gives emotion too much power and gives ‘will’ and reason a lower rank. It is all about what one is feeling, what one should feel, what thoughts is being transmitted from the universe. No questions are asked such as, where are these emotions coming from? Why am I feeling jealous? Jealousy can also be good.

I see two guys being very good friends and I long to have a relationship as they do. I am jealous. Until now, the full force of jealousy has not manifested. Until now, my will is controlling my emotion, the jealousy is not overbearing for the will tends to reason and good. Because the will tends to reason, it does not allow emotion to run like a horse away from reality. Reason says (to jealousy), “Stop here, beyond this you cannot manifest because it may undermine yourself and others”. Reason prevails. Reason prevails also because the will tends towards good: I cannot be jealous for something so noble. I am jealous for I myself long for a relationship like theirs.

Plato and Classic Philosophy say that the soul is made of intellect and will. Emotions are of the body, the passions. Usually, passions take a man away from reason. It is not wrong to feel these passions but these passions are usually overbearing if reason does not keep its check and subject the passion to dominion of reason just.

If you feel hungry and wish to leave for lunch but have a project and project team stopping you, your emotions or passions can persuade you to leave. Reason has to prevail, saying,” look I cannot leave as no one else is leaving at this critical juncture” But passions may be too strong and one may cook up things like: why can’t I leave, I have finished my work? Often many people would call this lack of charity or individualism which is fine at a certain level but definitely does not help in projects.

Eventually you are going to do (action depends on will) where your will is pointing. If your will is pointing to reason (I ought to stay back), you will not go but simply control your hunger for a little while. if your will is pointing to emotions (Just leave and grab a bite, quick), the battle has already been won and you will begin to make some excuse like a phone call or that you have to visit the toilet in the pretext to leave for lunch. Deep inside, you know you ought to have waited back with your team. Nobody makes excuses for the right things but only for the wrong things.

Another thing about emotion is that people often say that we should ‘go with what your heart says (emotion) or ‘trust your feelings’ or ‘higher instinct’. They really don’t understand how emotions work. When a man is drowning, there is perhaps a will to help as everyone believes in helping but only fear, insecurity and weakness of losing one’s own life in the process, sets in as the primary emotions. In spite of this, reason demands: jump, he will lose his life. If I had to go with my emotions or with my ‘higher’ instinct, that was to flee, I would be choosing self-preservation over the highest nobility: life. Yes, prudence can be shown and self-preservation is also choosing life but it is choosing one’s own.

Man often feels emotions due to his own imperfections and often due to what society perceives is ‘sissy’, ‘pansy’, ‘girlee’, ‘dufas’ and all those stereotypes. At such times, either given in to what I ‘feel’ or command myself to adhere to reason and not emotion for emotions will always rebel against reason.

There are certain imperfections in Man. If Ben was brought up in a community where things work, an eye for an eye, there are chances, an act of virtue, of bearing up excess work in silence would be deemed by Ben as cowardice. An obedient person could be perceived by Ben as a weak person and the emotions running through Ben’s mind would be to avoid being associated with such people.

An Emotion is a horse galloping fast and Reason, the horse rider. The horse rider has to control the horse by reining it left or right and subjecting the horse to the right direction. Else we risk breaking the foundations of right and wrong by patronizing emotions and doing as we desire rather than doing what ought to be done.

Faking Love

2009-08-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were at a gathering and my friend was busy asking some questions to another guy he had just met. I thought later that my friend wasn’t really interested but only faked it. I reserved my thought process for later. I do not believe now, that he faked it. He didn’t fake it but showed what perfected will, wills for. Pure Intentions perfect the will without relying on biases.

The biases and stereotypes that ‘we have to have something in common to enjoy our conversation and be friends’ are dispelled. A perfected will eventually manifests into perfected love. Fancy love is filled with fancy things: colors, cakes, juices, gifts, kisses and smiles. Not that we don’t need fancy love, it is often and in the beginning, an expression of loving someone in the first place .But true love endures. It endures lack of motivation to love.

Mrs. Dolores, whose son is the scout captain in college shows off her son as her trophy. Everywhere she goes people talk about her son. She loves her son and because of this new found pride, she is motivated to love him more.

Passions(sensibilities or senses that arise out of our sensitive appetite of our Soul) play a prominent role in our love. Everyone enjoys a funny movie but not so much a history movie. Love has to be cultivated for a history movie. It has to be appreciated that history aids our understanding of the perspective of the times and the very journey of the lives of men. History records the journey of the ordinary days, audacities and atrocities in time. This phenomenon is not an emotion per se such as fear, thrill or anxiety that we can relate to as in any other horror movie.

The appreciation of why history is essential can make history fascinating and studying the complex lives of men, a form of love. But it’s not all jokes and pranks. Our will has to point to appreciation than to enjoyment. It is very easy to see why you are not enjoying a history movie and call it boring (if the movie is genuinely not boring). Perhaps your will points to your senses and your senses expect a tickle, a prank, a fight, an adrenaline rush, a surprise or a sexual overture. The same reason we don’t enjoy academic books on philosophy as opposed to bestsellers and cheap watered down cosmetic imitations of the same. (Read: All of the self-helps books today are cheap imitations of the teachings of Classic Philosophy and Christian Philosophy and Stoicism)

This is the same reason we don't visit the sick. We visit Disney land, for why should we be alone at home when it’s so much fun on the rides? Nobody desires living alone or loneliness. We don't visit the sick, for how can we enjoy visiting old, clumsy, uncouth dregs? But they are essentially alone and lonely. All they want often is just someone's company. Nobody visits them in years. Imagine if you sat next to one and the thought running through her minds is: someone has come leaving Disney lands, clubs, pubs, and come here to visit me. Someone cares. I do exist for him. I am a person. I am wanted.

Now to actually swim the tide and really make it to the old age home, your will has to point not to your emotions but point to a part of you that identifies with loneliness and being alone. This is part in you called reason. It does not ask what one feels but what one ought to do or what is right. This identification may be personal(first type) of having known what loneliness feels like and never willing that anyone else undergo the same(compassion) or the identification(second type which is knowledge: empirical or rational) that certain things are good like sharing and caring and certain things, the absence of good(bad) like conceit and deceit regardless of having undergone it .

If you think of an old woman and your will points to emotions, perhaps usually, only ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’, ‘old’, ‘ragged’ and ‘morbid’ will come to your mind. These are the same as a ‘rancid food’, ‘animal waste’, ‘crow shit’, ‘feces’ and ‘stench of sewage’ that makes us run away from it just as strawberry, vanilla and chocolate lure us towards itself.

There is an objective resistance to suffering, to what our passions dislike. Anything that involves sweat, tears, pain and hardship is rebelled by the passions in spite of their ends being good. Anything that involves ease, comfort, gratification convenience is invited by our passions even if the ends are bad. This is due to the fall of Man. We are but fallen creatures.

Man is reason and passions. Passions are overbearing. They often take man away from reason. This is at the center of the doctrine of selfishness. What do I choose? What does my heart will? does my heart will that I visit a sick lady? Deep inside all of us will to bear good fruit. But again we wish to do enjoyable good, something our passions invite and not rebel. Again, passions get the better of us. We talk ourselves into thinking, "hey I am a nice guy. I like to befriend people" and then we befriend a guy who either roots for the same football club as we do or who loves mark twain as we do, who plays tennis as we do or who listens to Metallica and has a stash of new age rock. Again our passions play a dominant role. We go with what we enjoy. We call it love.

Now when you really begin to make an effort to actually walk across the classroom and say hello to a puny little guy wearing spectacles scribbling algebraic expression and say: what are you doing? He answers, I am doing the homework. You are aware that no one is going to do it for another week. You ask him what he likes and he says mathematics and Electronics. You were expecting he would say formula one and Liverpool.

I begin to wonder now what would make me interested in walking across to a person and introduce myself to another reluctant and a less interesting prospect as this nerd. The object behind this action is either some deep seated interest or extra ordinary love. There is no other. The visit to an old lady, to make another person feel the same dignity that has been bestowed equally by God on each of us, is either driven by extra ordinary love or a certificate of having accomplished social work.

Watching a history movie can either be grooming a special love for appreciating history or stalking an astonishingly pretty girl who watches such movies and wishing to cross her ways in the pretext of love for history. The action of going against your passions, of what you don't enjoy has only two motives: conceit or caritas i.e. love. There is no other.

If I was talking to the guy, I was either feeling he doesn’t share our academic field, does not share passion for books, for discussing a city, and perhaps feels left out and unwanted. At this moment he is not very different from the old lady who is left unwanted. The only difference being he can close himself in his own world of materials believing that he doesn't need friends. He feels perhaps he has his bike, his oil rig job or his cigarette. Materialism will soon wipe out any traces of ‘unwantedness’. He will have a world within himself. Soon, feeling unwanted which materialism allowed him to obliterate will slowly turn into feeling of hatred: who needs these bookish people who only talk about books

He is not different from the old lady except that the old lady has nothing to call her own. She cannot hide behind materials. When the person is very introvert and doesn’t feel the desire to talk or be candid and yet you take an interest in knowing his job, his company, the clientele, it is either because you wish to have a referral in the Oil Rig or you want him to feel wanted, to feel that people do want him to talk about his job, to talk about his love for his bike. It is not ‘faking’ but pointing your will from emotions (what makes me happy) to reason (I ought to make another happy)

I call this selfless becomes one has no vested interests in it. Your objective is to make another happy. You do it for love. You may not like to know about Oil Rigs but learn to love it. Love teaches, if your will can be commanded to point to good and not to emotion. A mother does not like to stay awake all night to care for her sick child. It’s not her hobby. She doesn't wait for the child to fall sick in order that she can stay up all night. She learns to stay awake and sacrifice for the good of her child. She longs to sleep too.

But she points her will to goodness rather than emotions. Her emotions of deprived sleep and her longing for a comfortable bed is not very different from what we feel when we have to befriend someone less enjoyable, eat something that is not cooked well, visit the sick, watch good cinema as opposed to popular cinema that may be boring initially because of our overbearing reliance on sensation (comedy,horror ect).

But a mother’s love is pure and hence her will is perfected in order to choose good over what her passions desire. It would be very rare to hear of a mother with an impure intention of suffering for a child because someday her child will be rich and take care of her. At that moment, she only wishes her child to be well and be freed from the sickness. It would be rare to hear of a wife who wishes her husband wake up from a coma so that he would have just enough strength to sign all of his wealth in her name. At that time, she only wishes her husband to come alive for her need to be loved.

Impure intentions destroy the dignity of the person. If the mother does suffer for her child in order that one day she will have her rewards, her child ceases to be a person and becomes an investment just as Mrs. Dolores, perhaps overjoyed in her self-indulgence, began to perceive her scout son as a trophy. The comatose husband is the wife’s insurance package in an event if her intentions are impure. To love is to will good, to have pure intentions.

Love is the toughest teacher. It makes us a man from an animal. It purifies. Love commands the will to seek not enjoyment but what is good. To will, that another not be left out of a game is choosing a good. Often that would mean playing with a novice and turning a novice yourself, which may not be challenging or enjoyable, just so that he could enjoy the game than shudder away at your mastery and attribute it to the difficulty of the game. Love seeks that he be able to appreciate the game as much as you. A father plays like a child and suppresses his own pursuit of challenges and thrills in order that, one day the child will play like the father. Omnia Vincit Amor

Goodness is contagious

2009-08-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

My friend presented a strategy and I adopted it. The strategy was appealing because it was good. I had been influenced by it. Goodness is contagious. How it is then that, evil is more influential? Because Goodness is noble and worthy of all praise, it is hard and hence the absence of good, that is evil, flourishes much easily than good.

We learn about machine and inventions that were made for good but are much easier to be used for something else. In life too, our weakness makes us do something else. Our weakness often even does not allow us to recognize goodness. How Goodness is then is contagious?

Because the greatest power of love can break barriers of the strongest forms of evil. Jesus taught the same. He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. In that sense, the best way to humiliate your enemies is to love them.

Evil cannot be overcome by a greater evil as in a war which is a game of one-upmanship. But the clutches of evil is broken free by the overbearing of love. That is why in life, you do not have to try hard to change someone’s will. Try loving them for a change and they will humbly submit.

What will make them submit is their own goodness. But I wished to change them because they were evil in the first place? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? But they recognize your goodness when you love. No one can recognize goodness without himself being good. My goodness has established goodness in others. Goodness is contagious.

The best movie of all times

2009-08-10T05:57:00.000-07:00

You were not made for comforts. You were made for greatness

-Pope Benedict XI

We all know how winning a football world cup feels like. We don’t have to be the players on the field. The team is received with roaring adulation and jubilation. In another scene, Imagine yourself walking out of an airport in a foreign country and scores of unfamiliar people take hold of you, greet you, cover you with the choicest bouquets exalting your books

Now imagine a bee line of a thousand people thronging for a movie ticket. You already have a pass by the virtue of sharing the same name as the title of the movie. You find that strange and yet oblige to watch it after their persuasion. When you enter, they are watching a show you are quite familiar with; the scenes feel as if they have been experienced. The melodies are also your favorite songs. The dialogues are what once you have expressed, delivered and dispensed. It all seems like you have met the characters and perhaps been the very protagonist of this movie. And then it dawns on you: they are screening the movie of your life. Today they are showing your life as a movie. And theatre is packed till the last seat.

Angels are trying to force themselves in from the windows. St. Peter and St. Paul are buying pop corn and finding their seats quickly much to the discomfort of those who are being hindered by the constant noise. St. Thomas Aquinas has bought along another secretary with a quill in case he finds some inspiration to pen down a psalm. St. Monica has come along with her son. Some of them are sitting on the floor lucky just to get in to see your life? What is so enigmatic in the movie?

They say this man lived a life of honor. He loved the church. He let his faith radiate into his life. He was a man who modeled his love for God on King David, of whom God said, “is a man after my own heart”. A man who found in others something to love and like Christ tried to wash each other's feet and bore his cross to enter his own Glory. A man who tried to share the good news with others.

They have all come from far away to see the flame he held within, a flame never to be extinguished until his last breath. They have come to watch that flame, incandescent, burn into a thousand different experiences on the screen today. Do our lives burn with such vigor that someday the same saints we pray to, would be making a beeline for the tickets to watch a movie, a movie of how you go about life with cheerfulness and a touch of grace?

The Classic Understanding of Emotion

2009-08-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Often many pop spirituality authors have this tendency of ranking emotions from a higher rating (such as Love) to a lower rating (such as jealousy). There are objective goods and truths in the world but an emotion per se is not objectively good or bad. Perhaps they are objectively good or bad but not to the extent that they can be good or bad in all cases. It is not in the nature of an emotion to be good or bad.

Love is good but if reason does not prevail, a fine thing as love can be corrupted by wishing to possess and impose on others, requirements, we would never wish on our selves. Our own insecurities make us pervert Love and consequently, motivate us to harrow and impose ourselves on them. What motivates our action is not Love that has ceased to exist but to be free of our insecurities and be free from our doubts and trust issues.

No one thing is good in the world, say love or patriotism. To cite another example, there are instances when a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country (say Mamta Banerjee’s love for West Bengal which people alleged is clear in the rail budget) have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries says C.S Lewis [brackets added without italics]

The problem with this over-emphasis on emotions and making a psychology out of it is that it gives emotion too much power and gives ‘will’ and reason a lower rank. It is all about what one is feeling, what one should feel, what thoughts is being transmitted from the universe. No questions are asked such as, where are these emotions coming from? Why am I feeling jealous? Jealousy can also be good.

I see two guys being very good friends and I long to have a relationship as they do. I am jealous. Until now, the full force of jealousy has not manifested. Until now, my will is controlling my emotion, the jealousy is not overbearing for the will tends to reason and good. Because the will tends to reason, it does not allow emotion to run like a horse away from reality. Reason says (to jealousy), “Stop here, beyond this you cannot manifest because it may undermine yourself and others”. Reason prevails. Reason prevails also because the will tends towards good: I cannot be jealous for something so noble. I am jealous for I myself long for a relationship like theirs.

Plato and Classic Philosophy say that the soul is made of intellect and will. Emotions are of the body, the passions. Usually, passions take a man away from reason. It is not wrong to feel these passions but these passions are usually overbearing if reason does not keep its check and subject the passion to dominion of reason just.

If you feel hungry and wish to leave for lunch but have a project and project team stopping you, your emotions or passions can persuade you to leave. Reason has to prevail, saying,” look I cannot leave as no one else is leaving at this critical juncture” But passions may be too strong and one may cook up things like: why can’t I leave, I have finished my work? Often many people would call this lack of charity or individualism which is fine at a certain level but definitely does not help in projects.

Eventually you are going to do (action depends on will) where your will is pointing. If your will is pointing to reason (I ought to stay back), you will not go but simply control your hunger for a little while. if your will is pointing to emotions (Just leave and grab a bite, quick), the battle has already been won and you will begin to make some excuse like a phone call or that you have to visit the toilet in the pretext to leave for lunch. Deep inside, you know you ought to have waited back with your team. Nobody makes excuses for the right things but only for the wrong things.

Another thing about emotion is that people often say that we should ‘go with what your heart says (emotion) or ‘trust your feelings’ or ‘higher instinct’. They really don’t understand how emotions work. When a man is drowning, there is perhaps a will to help as everyone believes in helping but only fear, insecurity and weakness of losing one’s own life in the process, sets in as the primary emotions. In spite of this, reason demands: jump, he will lose his life. If I had to go with my emotions or with my ‘higher’ instinct, that was to flee, I would be choosing self-preservation over the highest nobility: life. Yes, prudence can be shown and self-preservation is also choosing life but it is choosing one’s own.

Man often feels emotions due to his own imperfections and often due to what society perceives is ‘sissy’, ‘pansy’, ‘girlee’, ‘dufas’ and all those stereotypes. At such times, either given in to what I ‘feel’ or command myself to adhere to reason and not emotion for emotions will always rebel against reason.

There are certain imperfections in Man. If Ben was brought up in a community where things work, an eye for an eye, there are chances, an act of virtue, of bearing up excess work in silence would be deemed by Ben as cowardice. An obedient person could be perceived by Ben as a weak person and the emotions running through Ben’s mind would be to avoid being associated with such people.

An Emotion is a horse galloping fast and Reason, the horse rider. The horse rider has to control the horse by reining it left or right and subjecting the horse to the right direction. Else we risk breaking the foundations of right and wrong by patronizing emotions and doing as we desire rather than doing what ought to be done.

The bare minimum

2009-08-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

Today we talk about not an uncommon nature of man. In my school days, we had an organization that visited our school to garner funds for their NGO. They gave out forms for all students and we had to go, usually, door-to-door to collect money. This was a huge hit in the Nineties. Seventy-Five rupees was the minimum to earn a certificate and there were other rewards for those who surpassed 1000 and above. I never knew what those rewards were simply because I never ever reached there. I do not know who reached there as I was surrounded by hundred others who were content with the certificate.

There is a danger to interpret the notion I am slowly trying to form as a ‘lack of pursuit of excellence’. I am trying to elucidate a behaviour not a lack thereof. If I was trying to talk about a pursuit that man has none of, I am trying to talk about something wanting. No, I will stick to what man does not what he does not or cannot.

The behaviour of Man (that you may observe in yourself as I observe in myself) is that of the ‘bare minimum’. His will is not inclined to goodness but rather to ‘not being called an evil person’ To explain, it is like a banker whose only objective ought to be to maximize his money but according to bare minimum, the banker would only strive to avoid going bankrupt. His motto isn’t ‘how can I maximize profits’ rather it is ‘how can I surely not become bankrupt’

You will observe this ubiquituous phenomenon whenever there are choices to be made between good and evil. Man, in such a case doesn’t really will to do good but he is conscious that he ought to choose good for he tries never to be deemed ‘evil’. He continues his life satifsying the bare minimum. He doesn’t wish to dress with modesty or chastity. No, he doesn’t choose that but he asks questions such as: what bare minimum requires to be fulfilled in order that these clothes are not called obscene?. What minimum can I contribute in a fundraiser or to a beggar or in Church inorder that I am not called a miser?

Our hearts don’t will for virtue but only to satisfy the bare minimum in order to not be called sinners or defilers. A woman may hope that her outfit is not obscene. Deep inside, she has an inkling she may have crossed the line which means she will feel immensely peaceful if she has just made it within the line. She will not choose chastity through her outfit rather stay within ‘limits’ to not qualify as ‘obscenity’.

We don’t choose to vie for goodness.we are happy doing just enough to not be called a sinner. Such a ‘pursuit’ (I switch now from behaviour to the why the behaviour is allowed) is the virtueless waste. For it chooses to value the fear of turning into a sinner than choosing the joy and prudence of being a saint. An excellent student who returns home from school everyday oblivious to the distress of his fellow students at their inability could guiltlessly say, “Well, I have not disturbed, distracted, hidden or misled them in any way in order to be evil” Yes, but they need help and you haven’t done anything noble either.

It reminds me of this Catholic Prayer:

I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned through my own faults, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do…

So perhaps you, a product of the ‘bare minimum’, of the virtueless waste think, what I have done? Nothing at all, I stayed within limits, what do I have to confess? And then meditate on what you have failed to do...Often, that is all the difference between a sinner and a saint.

Children and Pain

2009-07-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, some fellows had a moral dilemma. They were talking about shouting at wives and I interrupted: why would you shout at your wife? Just be nice to her. They said you can’t be nice to your wife when she has patently annoyed you. I asked them to show more charity but they wondered where I was coming from. They asked me, “What’s wrong in shouting at wives, Don’t people beat children? Is it right or wrong?”

I now answer that it is wrong first to compare shouting at a wife that one does from their weakness and is not a tool like beating a child. To compare them both is to not understand the two different cases at all. I have other means with my child but I use beating (pain) as it is most effective (why such effectiveness is justified only in the case of children will be dealt with later). In the case of my wife I can’t use pain is because I am suppose to show love.

To shout is the absence of good. A patient person would show tolerance before breaking. To not possess the virtue of patience is not an excuse to yell or beat someone. A much more patient person would show a lot more patience before breaking. My point is, a person who makes a scathing remark instantly on his wife or yells at her at the drop of a hat, it shows, how much love has subjected him to obedience and virtue. Love makes us love our mothers. Love should make us love our wives and be understanding, respect their free will what they choose for themselves (until unless it undermines your marriage as a whole) Love makes a person increase in holiness (being patient, pure, generous, understanding).

And here is where I said that if a husband yells at a wife where he ought to show love, he is weak. This is fine, everyone is weak in different degrees. There is none who has escaped the fallen nature of Man. But some are weaker than others. Some try not to be weak and in that they show a lot of virtue because love disposes them to virtue. Some of them have by habit, created a vice. They are those of whom their wives say, “My husband, if my house is not in order, he gets wild” or “My husband, the minute he steps into the door, poor man, bad day at work, starts screaming at everyone” These men are more weak than others. They ought to try harder as the good men who love their wives and will never raise their voices much less fingers even under fire. Testimony to this fact is my father (so that no one says such men don’t exist. And Yes, I believe it is holiness that has made my father like this. Without holiness, he would be just like other men. )

Now I come to the crux of the topic of why such love may not be used with children.

You don't beat a woman because she is not a child. Somehow this line may seem to give the license to beat children. What is it about children that they can be beaten and what is it really about adults that they can't. There is something in adults (woman, adults, parents et all) that is missing in children due to which what is torture to woman is not so to children. What is ‘manhandle’ to woman is not so to children. What is ‘force’ to woman is not so to children. And that's why beating children, shouting at them is not the same and cannot be compared to beating and shouting at wives and women in general.

I am not trying to justify violence against children. Violence is to harm a person as its end. Beating children is violence when you beat children as an end. When you beat children because you are a father and you want to show them who is boss amounts to violence. I am not speaking of this form of beating. This form of beating uses 'they are my children I can do what I want' as a pretext to manhandle other beings. It makes objects of children such as tables and chairs we can fling in any corner of the house. This is downright wrong and is condemned by me too. But I am talking of beating in a much more philosophical sense

Beating causes pain. A child at his/her age cannot understand why a particular thing is good or bad. If he wants it, he wants it. It is not given to a child to reason or understand: may be my parents are not that wealthy. I think I am wrong in my demands. May be I will be a good boy and they, in their joy, give it to me

A child cannot reason like this. His will though, when he comes of age and that is why an adult (teen) is taken to psychologist to mend his ways and not to a policeman, to be threatened to mend them anyways. A psychologist will 'reason' with the teenager which if the teenager finds reasonable will amend his ways. Whereas a child will be threatened of being sent to military school or of the bogie man or of the devil snatching him away if he makes mischief. Fear of pain and pain itself plays a prominent role in a child's life because at such an age a child is more animal in his mind.

A child is full of passions (emotions). That is why when an adult who does not understand a mother's plight and demands for a bike is said to be acting childish. It is because such a behavior is uncalled for from him. He is supposed to allow reason to prevail. He is supposed to think: my mother is poor, how can I demand a bike from her, what if to make me happy she indulges in committing wrongs like shoplifting or sexual favors just to get me a bike?

A child will not 'reason' but only think through emotions. Emotions engulf a child. It is for the very same reason a child has to be bribed and deals have to be struck to aid him to excel. "Learn mathematics and mama will get you a chocolate" the child does not understand that mathematics is essential to his development to further advance into algebra or calculus like a teenager would. A child does not understand that mathematics is noble and much like an art that can be indulged in as a mathematician or a scientist understands it. Thus a mother uses bribe or fear (pain) to encourage him to believe in something he doesn't understand (why) only for the day that will come when he will understand goodness of mathematics in order to believe.

This is why mothers beat children. There are much tastier delicacies than ‘farex’ and baby food but a child can only understand baby food and liquids. There is still time for chicken, samosas, pulav and biryani. The child's age finally gives in to the 'real' delicacies when he is an adult. In the same way, a child cannot understand 'reason', he wouldn't understand if you speak to him on the nobility of science or the usefulness of geography to encourage him to study.

The child's turns into an adult gives in to reason not into pain and no more can this child-who-is-an-adult-now be beaten but has to be persuaded. Mothers usually complain to their friends, other agony aunts, "my son doesn't listen to me" this means she does not beat him but tries to reason and the ‘agony aunt friends’ don't say, "Why don't you cage him or beat him" they usually say, "Don’t worry, my son will speak to your son"

When a child is an adult and of 'reason' no more can you think of his good so much so to impose it on him of what he can't think for himself. You cannot force ‘good’ on him if he himself doesn't agree it is 'good'. This will be imposing your good on him. No one tells a mother who has a child of 6 years that she is imposing her idea of good on the kid for a child doesn't know what is good. Left to himself, he would think spending all year in Disney land and having all the toys in the world qualifies as ‘good’.

Now I will admit not all kids need to be beaten and rightly aren’t. Some are really disposed to obey. They have been brought up into thinking that only in obedience is their good. This is because they have faith in their parents. This is not a bad thing as people make of ‘faith’ today saying it is blinding and foolish and better not to trust anyone. No parents usually deceive their children. The trouble begins when the parents, in charge of guiding their children look to directing them towards their gain than that of the one's they are supposed to serve (children). We have faith in the law and hence we approach them. The trouble begins when the officers in charge of dispensing law look to their own gain than that of the one's they are supposed to serve (citizens)

Hence you can't beat a woman for your own requirement if she doesn't do or think as you say. She has been endowed with 'reason' as you are, to think for herself, as you think for yourself. Our love is first in respecting this freedom of will they have. We do not respect the freedom of will of a child not because he hasn't any but because his will is distorted and he doesn't know what is good. How do you respect a child's will who is ready to cry and break everything in the shop until the batman figure is his to take home? The same action if committed by a man we would say he is mentally ill. It is simply because the man has not let 'reason' prevail. We talk to the child in the language he understands-pain. Only till pain gives in to reason and no more does pain need to be used. For if it is used on a man who can reason, it is torture.

N.B: I am only writing on why people beat children and not why children ought to be beaten.

The Final analysis of Our Hope

2009-07-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

I recall once asking my friend as we were on a boat ride towards Elephenta Caves. I looked at him in the face and told him: what If Moses or just one of the prophets, like Elijah is not true. The whole of the Bible will fall like a pack of Cards. For Jesus meets Moses on the mount during the Transfiguration. If Moses is not true, Jesus could not meet it and yet the Apostles record he did. So the Apostles lie. If the Apostles lie, the Bible loses its credibility as divinely inspired. Every other thing falls apart. 2000 years of Christendom starts crumbling down.

My friend replied that if the Bible was not true, he does not know what to believe in. His life might as well be summarized as a chain of endless days with no meaning at all. He wouldn’t have any hope of any good he did. A similar experience engulfed me recently when I was at Mass in Church

Whenever I come forward for communion in Holy Mass, I contemplate on the Cross or face of Jesus. The other day it dawned on me: what if Jesus’ death on the cross failed to dispose me towards love? What if it failed to bring out pain and sadness of his death and the glory of his victory? What if one day it all stops happening and I become indifferent to the whole event of the Passion and Death that divided time and changed the course of History?
I will have no hope left then.

On Fasting

2009-07-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we were speaking on fasts. Fast is to abstain from all or some kind of foods or go hungry to deny oneself. The rationale behind a fast is as important as the fast itself. If the fasting, from denying oneself turns into say, gaining oneself such as gaining for oneself a toned body or losing weight before the wedding or a ramp walk, then the same fast becomes a diet.

We have talked about the ontology of a fast. Now let us get on to rationale of a fast. I am a catholic and suffering is a fundamental element of Christianity. Jesus suffered for each one of us in the world and his suffering, redeemed. Anytime there is redemption, there is an element of suffering involved. Whether you redeem your brother who is unable to pay off his dues or you apologize on behalf of your mischievous son. There is always ‘denying’ in redemption. But look what Christ’s redemption did? It brought salvation to mankind. So we are asked to be like Christ and participate in this redemption by ourselves redeeming others and being the instrument of God in the lives of others. This will entail lot of suffering, don’t you think?

Fasting is based on the same lines of denying. While suffering in general, is hidden in the role a Mother plays for his son late into midnight checking on his temperature, fasting is a direct love. In the mother’s case, love is explicit and suffering is implicit. In fasting, the choice of suffering is may be explicit but is motivated by love. Christians fast to share the pain of the cross as Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus to carry the cross. Christians fast to tell Jesus, “Lord, you died for my sin, surely lord, I can give up my desire for coffee today for you”

Every form of Love requires an expression. The Romeo does it by climbing a perilous hilltop or idly waiting at the bus stop for an hour. There is suffering involved here too. But he is not concentrating on suffering but on love. Love motivates him to do it. What he is trying to say by buying an expensive diamond that cost him two months’ salary and his own bike is: I love you. The faithful do it by a fast. What they are trying to tell God is that, “Look, I love you, I am denying my desire for you. I have to die to my desire and I want to show you, I can go this far for you simply because love motivates me to do that,”

Love of Learning

2009-07-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

I have learned the secrets from the philosophers. I have understood the actions of God and his design from the theologians. I have learned the mysteries of the world from the contemplatives. I have transcended to learn what is noble from the mystics. I have learned to appreciate simple truths with the pleasure of reasoning and logic.

Yet all this is not enough for me to love my neighbor. All the reasons my neighbor does what he does is not enough for me to show compassion for I am busy scheming my next rebuttal. Knowledge does not give you grace but opens one out to the reality of it: that one needs it and it cannot be culled out of books

How much more proof does one need that mere learning cannot help me love a neighbor while a poor peasant who knows nothing about the awesomeness of the ways of the world and of noble conversations may love a neighbor more than I. What more proof that grace comes from God only if I in humility ask it and no amount of knowledge of the world can teach me any bit of love.

I read about God design of free will and how he can achieve his will without destroying my freedom and will. I may have understood such lofty proofs but if I may not able to love my neighbor sitting next to me, how much does the knowledge account to? It is better that I learn to love than to be puffed up with pride of learning that does not dispose me to love.

Work

2009-07-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

My friend spoke to me about a boy who was always enthusiastic about doing work. Whenever the teacher put up some work and asked for volunteers, one hand was raised in the room. It looked as if rest of the hands were tied to the ground. This boy loved doing work. My friend even went on to share that he did not always do the work proficiently lest someone complain that he did the work as he had competence. It was his enthusiasm to accept work. Competence comes much later.

I try often to mull on why does Man deny work? All of us run away from work. Work has become now an evil. Man tries as much as he can to run away from it. If yesterday, we were asked what we would like to be given by a genie, most of us would say, give us our dream. Today, people would say, give me a million dollars so that they can just buy their dreams or can do without them. They can just sit in the house and do nothing? Is doing nothing the new profession?

At a certain level I can comprehend the apparent ‘evil’ of work. In my own experiences of being asked to volunteer for helping a kids club and teaching another set of kids, I refused. Deep inside, I knew it was not lack of time. It was the fear of the infringement of my freedom. It was the fear that doing this work would not leave any time for myself. It was an inherent selfishness that ran through my decisions.

There are people who on being asked if they would like to do a certain thing will respond: let me see, what I am doing today…I seem to be free, alright send me the details about the location and venue. There are another set of people who have nothing to do on the particular day but would dread vouching their time for an activity, course, seminar, work et cetera. They would think, “oh dear, work, I won’t be able to live my ‘own’ life”. My first objection is, if you really had something to do, then it is in direct conflict with your ‘own’ life. But if you have nothing on your agenda for the particular slot and yet refuse, it is a lack of will. Why is there a lack of will? Surely the will would be present if one would be invited to a party. The will is pointing to emotion and emotions don’t wish to work. It wishes only that, that could please it.

On a deeper level, people fail to dissolve themselves into the work they have been asked to do. They fail to identify themselves with work. They think work is one thing and my life is another. Thus work is a direct opposition to their comfort, joy and pleasures. But work should be my pleasure. That I work and so I eat. Often I have felt very guilty eating because I haven’t worked to merit food to give me sustenance. Work should be what defines me, fulfills me, gives me joy that I am useful, productive and worthy of love and recognition.

Have you ever seen the grin on a person’s face when he says: today, I went to market bought vegetables. I continued to the post office to post my mother’s letter. I took a number to the doctor, my brother is sick. I came home to send the files you needed over the internet. I finished my homework by afternoon and went to church in the evening”. In all this, you don’t see whining but a sense of a fruitful day. You do not see the person so much complaining as much as the person wishes to sing praises to a dossier of work he has committed, completed and feels good about. He has the will in doing this work, he dissolves himself, his preferences and desires and commands himself: my freedom is not taken away but is expressed as I believe in spending my time by going to the market and by waiting at the dispensary. It does not make me late for my ‘own’ work but gives me time to finish that what has been given to me, what I have accepted as my own, my responsibility.

Only until you can call work your ‘own’, can work be done and man be productive. Until then, selfishness persuades you to protect yourself from anything that can help you find yourself. Selfishness wants you solely for itself and makes you into a slothful bag of nothingness. It wants you to listen to your music, your movies, and your breakfast at home at your convenience, your Saturday evenings, your sleep, your life. Every time we find it difficult to commit or do work, it is a testimony to how selfish we are and speaks of our state of holiness. It is different if one does not commit for the fear of laying our feet in to too many things. That is prudence not selfishness

Don’t foolishly believe you are protecting your self-interests when you don’t even know what you wish to do in the day. Through work, we know ourselves but through our selfishness we know nothing but passing pleasures. Watching television, movies and playing games are temporary pleasures. Even a bored lad reads something as noble as a newspaper. But he may not be reading it for he wishes to be a well-informed person but because he does not know what else to do with his time and life.

Friendships: What’s the deal?

2009-06-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, two of my friends and I joined together in a contract for a school project. Days after giving our word to each other, one of my friends, Coleridge (name changed) backed off and joined another group. It seems he buckled under the pressure thrust on him by his own friend. A year later, Coleridge confessed that he didn’t mean to desert the group but was under heavy compulsion.

In the confession Coleridge mentioned that his friend, Dawson wondered why he had joined us, hardly knowing us and reminded Coleridge that he shares better camaraderie with himself. As a final argument to convince Coleridge to leave our group, Dawson told Coleridge: it’s not like a legal agreement where you have signed on the dotted line. You can do what you want.

Dawson forgot a few basics about agreements. Let’s remind him about it. When I give my word to a friend, that fact that I don’t sign on a piece of paper only shows that I trust my friend. This ‘understanding’ of friendship reposes trust in one’s word and faith in each other which doesn’t allow anyone to drag the friendship to legal paper.

Hundreds of thousands of people everyday give their word, money and lives to their friends. The guarantee they give is their friendship. In stark opposition, when I take a loan from the bank, you put your house as guarantee for the bank cannot trust if you will run away with their money. The problem is of trust and it is fair. They cannot trust me and I stand to lose my house if I betray them. The same applies in friendship. We trust our friends and it would be silly and shocking for a friend to ask for a guarantee.

When you turn against your word because you think: I am not legally bound means you think you can break anything until you are not legally bound. What about being bound by friendship? Is that not reason enough to keep the oath? Breaking a legal agreement entails punishment which people dread. Turning against one’s word in friendship severs friendship which is a harsher punishment. For in the former case, it is easy to concede punishment on the body while in prison or a punishment in school. But is it easy for one whose sense of friendship has been scourged to love again?

My friend asked for forgiveness and after a year I had forgotten about the incident. But it’s one thing to ask forgiveness, it’s another thing to believe you have been forgiven. Often the shame of what one has done eternally plagues one’s mind. The courts dispense punishment which is atonement. After that it reconciles the criminal back into society as a citizen. But in friendship, is it easy to forgive or believe you have been forgiven?

If everything in the world was only bound by legality, nobody would be able to trust each other. The world would be a difficult and morose place to live in. No friends would keep secrets. If someone took counsel in another and reminded that he said the words in confidence, the other could betray saying: but I wasn’t legally bound, was I? It seems in such a damned world, there is greater regards for bonds of legality than of friendship.

Sharing something in confidence is an act of surrender. It is an expression of free will. My friend is bound by friendship but not enslaved by it for he believes in friendship and in keeping secrets. If my friend keeps secrets as he is bound legally but doesn’t believe in keeping secrets, he is a slave to the law. Friendship frees while the law oppresses.

Dawson suggested to Coleridge that he may break the word given to us as he is not legally bound. Paradoxically, it tells more about the understanding of friendship of Dawson’s of the world and what their own friends can expect from them.

Diamonds to desire

2009-05-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

We had to share an assignment with some friends during school. The leader of our group, Jack, was a taskmaster. While he was neither reticent nor curt, people had a penchant to ridicule him. They were of the opinion that he loves to study. Today, we live in a culture that does not appreciate anyone who desires perfection. They ridicule them saying often, ‘You don’t have a life’ or ‘so and so’ is boring. It is a strange and dangerous downwards descent. For only if one is aggressive, one is fun. Only if one is outspoken, shows bravado or can mock others, one has a personality. People usually are more inclined to hold such things in high esteem than to hold in esteem, others who are quiet. Perhaps they are quiet not because they are reserved but because they show restraint.

There was a time when a kid could say his multiplication tables at the snap of fingers and he would be called ‘smart kid’. Nowadays we forget the child put in effort to know his tables. For today, a child who is repulsive to the notion of ‘effort’ and virtue and who can still table the homework albeit unscrupulously is deemed smart. The usage of words has evolved much at the expense of virtue. Is it the death of right usage? Much like the Anti-Christ, we have come to an age of anti-usage. Virtue’s labor lost?

And so Jack, though extraordinarily competent and holding a high order of graces, was still lampooned. I was not party to it. Most of the times, I pitied him for being derided for I saw what others couldn’t: he was very diligent and brilliantly bright. I saw what others saw and yet overlooked. But what pained me is: why did I appreciate this person so much? Why was I in awe of him when he was only an object of humor for the rest?

I had recognized the good where others were clouded. I appreciated Jack because of a diamond. Diamonds are rare and beautiful too. I appreciated Jack, for, like everything rare that is glorified, virtue is rare too. Virtue is noble and all good and hence worth fighting for. As virtue has to be fought for, it isn’t easy. That is why sincerity and perseverance is rare in an individual. Most of the times, they require a fight, a pursuit. Virtue is not by its nature a trait in an individual but a pursuit. We are what we do. We don’t just do virtue, we choose it. A lot of things in the world are done without virtue and the world still functions.

And so I wondered what drove Jack so much that I was bereft of? What did he see in the problem so much that I didn’t? What did he understand that I didn’t? What did he appreciate that I couldn’t? I was in appreciation for these about him. I couldn’t observe the same drive in others about his struggle. I had a diamond of my own.

Explaining away Explanations

2009-05-26T22:56:00.000-07:00

A year ago, my sister received a call. She spoke at length. After the call she raced into my room and screamed: It was Peter (name changed). Peter was her estranged friend. They had fallen out on some issue and after a year, all of a sudden, he called and my sister was more than joyful to reconcile. History goes that one fine day he just refused to speak to my sister. My sister tried with no avail to reach to him but he cut off all lines of access. She was unforgivable.

I asked my sister in passing: did you ask him for an explanation? She was perhaps just too happy to win her friend back and didn’t bother. I was assertive: you mean he did not apologize or explain his behavior? Does that mean you’ll don’t start from clear consciences but just take off where you’ll left it? Unexplained and open chapters that you’ll are just bypassing? Wouldn’t it bother you? How could he act so? Just put the plug on communication one day and on another, resume it. Doesn’t it matter to him what you think of it? He starts it, he stops it, never mind what you feel? He is treating you like an object.

She understood but did not comply. Why? Why didn’t she yield to my reasoning and be urged to action? I am glad she didn’t toe the line to my reason for what I am about to tell you. A month ago I had a mild tiff with my friend. I fantasized receiving a call from my own version of an ‘estranged friend’ (I actually waited two days for that call). I wondered how it would it be; what I would tell her. I promised myself I won’t rake the past and embarrass her.

Oops! I have just hit a ‘contradicting your own principle speed breaker’. Was I turning back on my principle? I recalled the incident with my sister and what I thought then was weak and submissive(of her) suddenly dawned on me to what it really is: Compassion. I will give you another one: Forgiveness. I learned something by just fantasizing that call.

I didn’t require an explanation because I had forgiven the person. There is no need for explanation to comfort me anymore. People desire explanations when they are unwilling to forgive others easily (unless it’s a job and responsibility has to be pinned for atonement, c’mon we know the difference between two friends and a professional arena).

People want explanations on why they were treated like objects (remember my sister?) but isn’t that what Christianity teaches us? That people are going to persecute you, anyone can love a friend, great is the one who can love his enemies, pray for those who persecute you, this is my command, that you love one another as I have loved you(the ‘my’ & ‘I’ is Jesus)
In a nutshell, Christianity says forgive others when they don’t give you what is due to you: respect, dignity. Isn’t forgiveness all about being alright about being treated like objects not because you are a pushover but precisely because you have managed to kill your pride and drown your ego?

That you think you are not beyond humiliation if Jesus Himself was humiliated, spat on, slapped, scourged? If God could empty out himself and take the form of Man for love, surely we could also lower our guard and confess: alright, so my friend tripped. Do I have to embarrass him by asking uncomfortable questions? This for me is at the heart of forgiveness.

A lot of people might seem to tell us that “Oh Forgiveness needs lot of love and generosity” True. I don’t disagree one bit. But another interesting point I have to add is that: Knowing our own limitations that we aren’t infallible and are just as inclined to fall as anyone else: Humility. Humility also helps to forgive. Humility is the Arch of Forgiveness.

The Saints did it all

2009-05-25T20:21:00.000-07:00

The list of 'been-there-done-that' will always include: Smoking,drinking and other 'ings' that I better not plunge into. Most of them will see its place in our college years. Two years ago my friend quit smoking. A year ago he, he always mentioned how he valiantly steered the ship of fortitude and trounced the habit and expunge his system of the toxicant. He always sensed a pride of quitting the cesspool of lighting up and one could always feel the emancipation in his words.

Two weeks ago, my friend smoked again. That is why I started with saying my friend quit two years ago. He did not resume the habit but rather caved in after two years. We cannot call him completely clean as he relapsed though we don't have to 'brand' the poor bloke. Two years, without the stick, he was unblemished, two weeks ago, he was lonely, passions created a revulsion, nostalgia kicked in, one thing led to another and he activated the dormant account.

My point is not to belittle my friend's achievement or hail his effort. My point is this: We can never claim we have trounced our weaknesses or that we are larger than our temptations. We can never arrogantly affirm that we are stronger than our weakest temptation. St. Theresa of Avila said, "Our temptations are the measure of our weakness"

We are enslaved as long as we think we are liberated. But as long as we think we need God's grace to 'Lead Us Not into Temptation’, may be the grace will keep coming. The moment we allow some pride to creep into our system over our achievement and trivialize an ‘erstwhile conquered vice’ (like saying smugly, ‘Smoking was so difficult but I nailed the thing and broke off, I was better than it), we ascribe to the struggle our own strength and consequently, grace may in turn, be stifled. We may be on our own from then on: with all passions and no grace.

Not that God abandons us for our wee bit of human pride. For spiritually, we yet love God and recognize his working. But humanly, we are left to ourselves. We are allowed to fall and to realize how much more we need God. St. Thomas Aquinas calls this the fear of God1 : Fear of separating oneself from God. He describes the gift as a "filial fear," like a child's fear of offending his father, rather than a "servile fear," that is, a fear of punishment
We are left to ourselves to realize how much we need God and how foolish it is to think we have conquered over selfishness, over alcohol, smoking, lust, greed, gluttony, sloth or anything that defiles us in excess.

That is why also, I believe the Saints are the real heroes of the world for they showed true heroism in the taming of their passions . They did this not to self-indulgently reach perfection but for the love of God, dedicating themselves to things larger than themselves. A fool abstains (in line with taming of the appetite) just to see how far he can go with it. If he does it just to know ‘his’ capacity, it’s still about himself: how far ‘he’ can go, what ‘he’ can do, how strong ‘he’ is, how much adulation ‘he’ can receive from it, how much ‘his’ ego can get boosted. The struggle only fills himself more with himself. It is all about his pride and his achievement and his glory.

But the saints did not know what they can do or what can be done through them. They conquered not by strength but by abandonment to God. Not by holding within but by letting go. That is why we may be glorious in many a things in life either at work which is a necessity or at a hobby by skill. But try doing what your mind doesn’t aid. (Skill comprises what your mind is disposed towards. Try playing a game you are a novice at just to accompany your friends even though you could have played another game you are skilled at). Try involving in something your passions rebel against (try standing through your journey rather than taking a seat. The passions within will commence screaming: No No! It’s a long journey, you can read the paper, you will get tired, you paid for the seat etc). Try choosing something your will does not incline towards (try choosing a meal you least prefer. The will does not comply to do it for there is no purpose driving the will, I can understand).

They will all cry for a purpose. Why should I play a game I am not good at? Why should I stand when I have paid for the seat? Why should I eat something I prefer less over something I prefer more? Even a sportsman will subdue his passion: give up that what brings him down (smoking, junk food) but he too has a purpose: The purpose to win the trophy aids him. I have a friend who once told me: I don’t eat meat on Tuesdays. On asking him why such a noble pursuit, he replied: Just that, I don’t eat. I didn’t know how much nobility prevailed if he didn’t know himself why he was doing it.

Training of your passions is as good as the purpose or motive to pursue it. Even self-development is a noble ideal. A man who increases his hours of reading because he believes reading is a good thing is motivated by his conviction of goodness of reading and the good reading will achieve in his life: self-development.

The saints had ‘all for you my Lord!’ as their motive and their lives are an extra-ordinary testimony of grace. They died eventually doing the will of God throughout the ages 2. Their lives stand as a salute to what the desire to love God can do and their death sees the rejoicing of angels in awaiting the banquet in Heaven. But before the climax came the everyday heroism which Mother Teresa of Calcutta talks about as ‘Little acts done with great love’. In St. Paul’s words, the saints died daily3. While Christ’s ‘once and-for-all’ death on the cross received for them their redemption. For the saints, the memory of Christ’s choice of death motivated them out of love to die daily in little things in the hope that like the grain of wheat they may too rise again4

It all started with one action at a time and from there it reached Hospitals, schools, Colleges, Homes for the Poor, aged or those rejected by Society. While we can have any and all the purpose we want: self-development, trophies and the likes, their testimony of faith through their testimony of grace is there to see everywhere in the world and goes to exemplify how much their purpose eclipsed sublimity and continues to be today for every potential saint in every corner of the world. The saints, always fired up by their zeal burning like a beacon set ablaze the paths everywhere they tread.

Each of us who studies the lives of the saints is passed on this fire whether we encounter them in our schools as St. Francis of Assisi or in colleges as St. Thomas or Books of Prayers. First, we have to start with our own passions. What do we have to die towards, today?

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_gifts_of_the_Holy_Spirit
2 The Liturgy of Mass: Liturgy of the Eucharist, Eucharistic Prayer II
3 1 Corinthians 15:31
4 John 12:24

Prayer: The Conversation filled with Grace

2009-04-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

We keep cribbing that we don’t receive what we ask in our prayers. We have to be patient. If the fruits of answered prayers don’t show up the fruits of praying and being patient surely do. Often the act of praying gives us things what the content of prayer does not. If a prayer is not answered, the very act of praying can strengthen us to endure what is lacking. Only if we continue to pray. After all, do we pray because we are needy. Or do we need to pray? We have to choose between the two dichotomous ideas and when we choose the latter, in ways only God knows, we begin to understand how the need to find prayer in our lives gives us what we pray to find in our lives.

I Can Be Proud

2009-03-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

Mikhail and Dave were entering the parking lot. Mikhail’s parents had come to pick them up from school. Just then, a student whizzed passed in his new sedan. This was Roger who brought a new car. His father was known to be a wealthy businessman, something Roger was very proud of. If anything, Roger could live only for the pride that came with the dealings and interactions of Roger and his father with the who’s who of the rich and famous.

Dave said, “Mikhail, Look at Roger, so happy with his new sedan. It seems like he needs nothing more. Yesterday he was giving us a session on what all the sedan can do and what speed it clocked. Roger’s a real lucky guy. He has taken his friends for a ride today and Sasha has been speaking to him now. Everyone’s all over him.”

And Mikhail says, “Little things always make us feel good. It is in our nature and of this world to feel proud when I have something you don’t or to possess something rare and valuable. It gains us attention. We are in the spotlight and feel like a one minute celebrity. We have achieved something others can’t. People will look up to us with awe and often, only God is given that honor. We are treated as if we created a miracle, we are treated like demigods. Pride is wishing to be like God in our own way without explicitly desiring to compete with God.

I think the only time we can feel proud is when we are righteous in the eyes of God and have done his will. For everything else, we have to bow before God and Man, like Jesus did to the extent of washing people’s feet. Washing people’s feet in our world can mean doing thins we think is below our dignity whatever our sense of dignity is, whether we are bureaucrats, nurses, parents etc.

But there is only one dignity in God’s eyes: Children of God. We all can pick up a peel lying on the floor. If we can feel like and be the maid for a moment, perhaps we can stand before God, humble and contrite and God may not turn away his face. But who can claim righteousness before God when everything is his grace and we merely participate and attune our will to his good? I can be proud that every time I try, I make a choice. I merit that grace. I choose what I will be: In the spotlight before men or spotless before God. My pride lies in my choice

Heaven: It's all worth it

2009-03-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

Dave and Mikhail are walking out of their classrooms. They have just finished their Calculus exam. Dave looks at Mikhail with a grin. Mikhail asks: What’s the matter? I didn’t know calculus was so easy? Dave responds: I did write my paper well. It doesn’t reflect my grasp over calculus. It’s just that I watched a good movie yesterday while I should have been studying. All morning I was wondering if I would regret watching that movie. But my paper went really well. I could savor stealing an hour or two to watch the movie. I feel its all worth it.

And Mikhail says:

When you indulge in something and are afraid wondering if the indulgence will be too high a price to pay. Tomorrow when things go your way, you realize that it’s all worth it. Heaven will be something like that. You don’t understand the pain. You don’t understand how your suffering has value. You don’t understand why you fall face first in spite of trying so hard. Why do you feel dry instead of praying so hard? Why does the world seem not to transform in spite of pouring all the optimism. Why does the world still feel material and shallow even when you try to feel supernatural as if everything counts: all your effort. But one truth will come, heaven will not pass but will prevail and it will all be accomplished. Everything you did- the leaf you picked up, the people you succored, the neighbor you lent a hand to. The kid you helped with mathematics. The lunch you skipped. The expensive racket you let go to buy your brother a shirt. It will all have accomplished their ends. Heaven will make every sacrifice, a jewel in the crown. Heaven will make every moment of trial, a triumph. Heaven will make every moment of effort, an eulogy.

The War Of The worlds: Justice and Charity

2008-08-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

My friend urged me often to not abdicate your rights and be indifferent. He was talking about rickshaw drivers taking us for a ride. I always observed my friend fighting for this cause and it never caught on. Until one day, I myself realized that I may not be able to reform all drivers across the city. I thought he was right. We can do it one fellow at a time.

Initially, it began with enlightening drivers about our rights and how they cannot do what they want. Often this didn’t work as they didn’t give two hoots to be awakened about our rights. Next began coercion, using law to intimidate him: if you do not wish to go then take me to the nearby police station. This gives them few indications that we are not going to take it lying down. But two can play that game. Often drivers prefer playing ‘who will blink first’ and say: fine! let us go to the station :)

True, he doesn’t really wish to face the cop but even we don’t really wish to take them there. Often my friend never got out of the rickshaw until he took him where he wishes. I too resorted to such means, lost my temper, threatened them with the consequences of being penalized, concocted a story of how my father is a cop and he will beat him up. I wondered often, where is the line between persuasion and coercion?

I love Jesus Christ not only as a Catholic but as boy who adores his teachings. Mahatma Gandhi too adored Christ’s teachings. Gandhi was so exemplary that many often were so aghast at his means to righteousness and justice that they considered him a threat to their comfort and way of life. Indeed, many were and are used to arm twisting, resorting to violence and manhandling to get their work done. Gandhi changed it all. Gandhi, in a conversation with a doctor in Africa remarked: I now understand what Christ meant by saying ‘if they strike you on one cheek, offer the other’. He meant, that if they oppose you and attack you, do not give up. Offer another resistance. Offer resistance until they realize you are convinced for your cause and are ready to suffer for it

We all have ideologies in life. If your ideology is success, then you wish to reach success perhaps, in the shortest, fastest, and easiest way. If your ideology is happiness, then you may wish to reach it in a way that gives you utmost joy. Now this means you are ready to undergo endless strife. But that’s not a problem as your ideology is utmost happiness without constraints. Inspired by Christ, and wishing to be an exemplary Christian, my ideal in life is to be charitable: charitable in action, words, conduct, character and spirit.

And in comes the obstacle. What about justice? What about fighting for causes? If you are in tune with my ideology then you will realize our first problem is what do we do when it comes to seeking justice? Take the rickshaw drivers incident for one. I tried being expressive and assertive. But some of them displayed hooligan behavior to have any hope of budging. The predicament is that if you leave him (and his rickshaw and take another), you conclude that, he got his way and he will keep getting his way if he wishes and there is nothing we can do about it. Or I arm-twist, threaten, intimidate and take him to task, everything that admittedly opposes charity. No one can lie that after taking someone to task, they have been calm enough to engage back in charitable atmosphere. There is resentment in the air that you got your way by force and ill-will.

There are chances that you may leave the rickshaw and forget your cell phone in it. Now the driver has a reason to keep your phone. This is not the same as stealing as much as it is ‘vengeance’. Clearly, you have been uncharitable and he seeks revenge. I understand keeping the phone is not justified as it is not related to hiring a vehicle by your right but you understand where I am getting. Not showing charity does not inspire people. Even in a brawl, it is the one who keeps patience, calm and composure that is admired. Many may come to the rescue of one who does not raise his hand but only his opinion.

Also, let us for one moment forget virtue of charity and stick to reason. If one is forced to obey the law, it means that he has no freedom to break it. If there is no freedom to break the law, it is not a law but tyrannical force. If there is a penalty to break the law, there is implementation of it. Because the means to appeal to this implementation is poor, one cannot take law in one’s own hands and force someone to accede to the law. If the driver has no freedom to break the law, he has no free will. The irony is that the customer trying to fight for his right is now the hooligan.

This brings me back to ideologies. Pursuit of transcendental virtues is not the same as pursuit of higher education. You cannot always expect a positive outcome in the latter given the right inputs. This does not apply to virtues, especially transcendental ones. One has to remember that it is ‘I’ who choose to practice virtue and it should be at the expense of my own life not another. If I wish the other to act in a just way with me and I resort to means that oppose charity, what have I achieved? The one thing I wished to show him, Charity, I have not, only because I wished to extort justice from him.

Justice by definition means fair play. What is owed to you is due unto you. But charity is not the same. You may be at the losing end all the time and still be a winner as you have shown charity. At the same time, no one tells you not to punish people for not playing fair. Gandhi understood what charity is and he tried to teach the country overnight. What he forgot was that developing virtue is a deep conviction and often the trade-off is, time. Indians, during the freedom struggle looked at charity as a “strategy”. We won freedom and soon lost charity. The strategy was only to serve a purpose, it seems. Gandhi lost in turn as cared more about building a humane independent nation as opposed to an independent nation. He did not connive a plan to be charitable as if it was a tried-and-tested way to win independence. It is quite patent, it is the worst. He did not stumble on to the Bible which gave him a master plan for independence. He realized that it is more worthy to be right in the eyes of God and get your way than to use wrong means to get your way and lead others astray.

Charity and justice will often collide. Charity seeks to move the person by touching his heart and making him seek his conscience. Justice makes a person bypass his conscience and compels him to toe the line by showing him the baton. While justice seeks one’s own good, Charity seeks not its own. Charity is the highest ideal. The bible says: And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love¹. It is our scarred human nature that does not wish to lose or be wronged or suffer that seeks justice and forsakes charity. Justice serves well-being of this world. Charity seeks God. Each of us decides where our loyalties lie. Whom do I wish to serve?

1. 1 Corinthians 13

NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING

2008-08-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

As a child I used to adore my cousin. She was very kind and loving. A few years later when I met her, I did not see in her those things that I so easily appreciated. Did she lose those things? Had she got corrupted by the trials of life? My conclusion simply was: I do not find in you those things that made me love you so much. If this is my conclusion then the next logical conclusion is: and so I cannot love you now.

This is the predicament many of us put ourselves in. we do not understand how love works. We enjoy how love feels. We don’t really enjoy love. Most of our lives we are motivated by how we feel and because love gushes in feelings we say “love binds us together”. Once the feeling is gone we shallowly say, “I don’t think I love you anymore” whereas what is really wrong is you never really loved the person [perfectly] but only loved what you felt while you thought (or really did, I don’t discredit) you were loving the person.

Name. A simple analogy is of a friend. It is the bond of friendship that keeps two people together. We confuse many things when we decide what really got us into befriending a person let alone what will encourage us to continue endearing the person. For example, if I you are asked what do you like in ‘X’ and you make the mistake of saying because X is honest and kind. If tomorrow X ceases to be honest and kind, do you then cease to be a friend of X? Your friendship is not a bond rather it is a pursuit.

You pursue honesty and kindness in X and because you feel strongly about them it attracts you towards X. what if after many years X evolves and the fuel that his honesty and kindness powered your relationship with is falling short? It is better if we define friendship by love and not “names”. So that when someone tells you ‘rickson’, you do not remember a manifesto or a common minimum program which you signed with him to be friends until upheld. What if you cling too hard on the manifesto and your friend has changed for the better and you are still reluctant to grow.

I have often heard so many of my friends say: you have changed so much. Perhaps what they are saying subtly is, “I don’t think I can relate to you the way I used to and because you have so abruptly and drastically changed, you are not the same person to me and I may feel it rather uncomfortable to share the same things I used to. So our friendship will never be the same again”

Place. Instead of finding a place in my friends heart, may be my friend only fell in love with certain traits I had years back. He may have found those traits very convenient or beneficial to his well-being. Now if I have adopted different ideologies and world-views, and when he remembers the “name”-Rickson, he just does not find it in him to love me because he cannot find it in me the traits that he did before. Friendship then really is making a place for a person in your life.

I have a friend I often meet and enjoy spending time with. But I do not find myself as concerned about him as I do with other friends. I realized this is because I like this friend because he is very intellectual and a thinker. Again, I am making a mistake of only pursuing in him traits that I appreciate. He is truly my friend when I make a place for him in my heart. This has nothing to do with traits. This has everything to do with love. If he gets twice as smart in a year, it may motivate me to spend more time with him.

Is that friendship or just I pursuing things according to my preferences and tastes? Will his doubly smartness develop a concern in my life if I get to know he has experienced a crisis or setback in his life? Where will my concern arise from? Where will I find suffering in me to be in communion with his suffering so that his cross can feel lighter? Can my appreciation of traits find me suffering for him? I doubt. Appreciation of each others traits is just the beginning of beginnings. If you do not take it farther than that, you may be just pursuing your own self through others.

Animal. What separates man and Animal is rationale. Man is a rational Animal. Giraffes often have sex if they are tensed or intimidated. They are not rational creatures and they cannot think or introspect or deal with situations. They do as they feel; they push if they are pulled. They run if they are chased. They attack if they are invaded. We humans think a lot. Often we think so much, it crosses the line into scheming. We scheme and conspire, plan and judge. Something we hear quite typically about marriage is: Before marriage he was so adorable and impressive. After 20 years he is a different person. Most of the people end up saying: I don’t know what went wrong. We both changed so much.

Change is here to stay. Change is the most unchangeable thing. It is the only constant and permanent thing in life. Thus we should have more respect for an individual who we enter into a relationship with than change demands. We should have respect solely for the sake of love and not change. Change is reality, love is a choice. All of us are influenced by different things. If you have stayed with your wife for 30 years, how come both of you’ll haven’t got adjusted and exposed to the same things to such an extent that both of you’ll find yourselves successfully compatible? What is the cause of fights then, as friends have things in common are very compatible. This is the basis of fraternities in colleges.

We have to remember -I love the person now. His traits, that I fell in love with, were a lure towards the river. Now the river itself has to lure me. I do not need to look at the shimmering light on the river water or the comforting greens beside it. The river itself has to quench me. We cannot scheme or reason now. We have to lose rationale¹ like animals and love the person as someone whose traits give him an identity. It would be amusing to think we love traits which are housed by a body of a person.

Things. I am not so idealistic to think that we should be incapable of loving things in people and only love the person. Countrymen make the country. Students make the school. A man is what his ideologies are. But this is the difference pursuits and love. Our pursuits are according to our ideologies. But love surpasses pursuits.

It is a choice to love someone unconditionally or at least that loving this person has no agenda others than what loving will achieve: the hope of making a world for another person through you. You do not get to choose what your brother or sister will be like, do you? What happens to ideologies then? We are lost for choices to bond. Only love remains…

1. By saying, one has to lose rationale; I did not mean you should not bother to question why you love the person until you continue doing. St. Thomas Aquinas says the origin of love is our affections and emotions and our reason. Love is emotional when the person concerned is unable to live without the object of his love and it is governed by the dictate of reason when the person lives what he grasps with is mind. We should love in both these ways, with our will and with a heart. From the emotional and sentimental points of view we realize how much we ourselves need help, protection, affection and happiness. At times these very deep feeling can and should be a channeled for seeking the people we love: friends, lovers, mothers, brothers and sisters for telling them we truly love them. If our actions were the result only of cold and rational choices, or if we tried to ignore the affective side of our being, we wouldn’t be living our human life to the full. At times, we may perhaps feel cold and listless with our heart unresponsive, our feelings fluctuating unpredictably. We shouldn’t then make do with the feeling of following love unwillingly like swallowing an unpalatable medicine. (IN CONVERSATION WITH GOD 4, ORDINARY TIME, WITH ALL OUR HEART)

NATURE: CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD?

2008-08-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

“And in the beginning there was Man.” We have heard this in the Bible and many narrative movies. But what eludes us is if God made them or Science. I do not wish to discuss the pros and cons of Evolution or ponder on Man’s origin. All I want to throw light on is God and Nature. If I have to believe the likes of Richard Dawkins, contemporary Darwinist, even for a second, I will then be forced to state that we all are children of Nature. We have no God, Nature is our God. Otherwise we can go with the teaching of the Church which says whether evolution or not, Man was created in God’s love and not as some random fusing or mutating or chemical or metaphysical reaction. Now whether God chose it through evolution or any other way is for Science to unfold. Gravity already existed even before Newton threw light upon it. Newton’s discovery of what is gravity doesn’t force God to repudiate His claim to designing it.

I wish to speak about love. When I move out of my home and board a train swarming with people who are peeved at each other. When I walk the street and observe that not many find it worthy to fight for another’s cause. They either play the spectator or walk briskly ahead as if nothing happened. When someone is in need of a favor from me and the ball is in my court or when I need a favor and wonder what can convince him to oblige? Should I smile or rather make him smile by bribing him?

What can motivate us to love others? Where do we find love in a world that our elders define in the following ways: ‘wait to help someone and you will get duped’…’think about others and others will not bother to think about you’…’as long as he is of help to you, be on good terms with them’…’you try to be a nice guy and the world will make you pay’…’everyone lives for themselves in the world and no one is different’

Such ideas perpetrate a gross pessimism in which Love cannot thrive. If I have to calculate my loss of time or money or comfort before helping someone, surely nothing much is motivating me to love. Why isn’t a man’s suffering out of an accident not motivating me to pick him up and take him to the hospital? Why don’t I look at a man trying to con me or not being proper to me as I am to him, with sympathy and compassion on the man’s weakness?

I believe it roots in our worldview of existence and origin. Love starts from our choice of our deepest belief. Love goes back to God. Pachomius was a secular young man, he volunteered as a soldier in Constantine’s army. Some soldiers were camped outside a little village near Thebes and could not be supplied with food. The citizens of that community were friendly Christians. They took care of the soldiers with kindness and courtesy. Pachomius was impressed. He asked for an explanation of this kindness and was told about Jesus Christ. He was stirred awake. His life was utterly changed¹.

This is the principal difference between a child of Nature (CON) and a Child of God (COG). A CON has no reason to feel motivated to love. He can live just like Evolution tells him: be fit enough to survive. Why should he bother about ethics or any other aspect of life that impacts another? Even so a CON may and often does live ethically as a responsible citizen or an honorable person but this too is a means to live in harmony with society or to abide and maintain the highest standards in society. In other words, love of self or betterment of Society motivates it.

If ten people on the boat have reached their maximum capacity and one is left on a burning ship, a CON would not know how to weigh the life of a man hanging on the choice people in the boat make. He may be ethical but because its nature we are talking about and not God, he probably is clueless to the respect for each man’s life. He would mathematically decide to weigh the life of ten people, more important than the life of one left there in the ship to die.

Even if I have to concede that a CON does show sympathy. It is my sympathy in fact with all those people who show sympathy without ever questioning: where does this sympathy come from? Why do I feel this sympathy to another helpless person? Is it because he needs love? And why should I give him that? As no one else would? A CON will stumble upon truth but never reach the complete truth. His kindness to the helpless fellow helps him (the fellow) to better society but there is no contribution from Nature as a parent to motivate him to love. It is just his gratitude for his own life and reflection on the way the helpless fellow is suffering compared to him.

A COG is also motivated by love if not general sympathy. Seeing the helpless person as God sees him and remembering that Christ said: Love one another as I have loved you so that the child can show his love for God and love his neighbor as he would love himself. Loving God motivates us to love others. I do not know one person who has felt motivated to love others because an inanimate vague nature has said so or the radiant beauty of nature motivated him to be kind to his neighbor.

A COG may err and fall into wrong doing. But because the child has his reference as God, and God knows all and in principle can never be confused. The child is aware that either he is right or wrong. There is no middle ground or anything subjective in the sense that is alright for him to do but not others and others to do but not him. For God can neither be deceived nor be in a dilemma. Thus the COG, though commits a wrong, acknowledges it as his weakness that he did something wrong and hopes God would have mercy and help him ahead to be more courageous.

A CON doesn’t see wrong doing as an act whose consequences is perpetual or something he will have offer an explanation to. A CON is not obliged to think that his action is transcendental. So in an event that he commits an immoral act or perpetrates wrongdoing, he may just approach it as…”well, everyone does it, I had to survive…had to stay afloat…no point telling the truth if it doesn’t serve my purpose.” Values and ethics just serve as a means to an end for a child of nature. A child of nature expects others to be ethical when it serves him like paying ticket to board a train and may not be ethical himself while overcharging a product because he is just doing it to protect himself and his business. There is no reference. A CON is lost in the confusion and relativism of the world

The final point is that a CON can only do so much. He can love all he wants but what he achieves is just…”every one of us will live in harmony and brotherhood.” Such pursuits are only to the betterment of society and so that we all can co-exist peacefully. This is a very subtle and subconscious selfishness, actually. A COG just loves because God is love. He loves as Love is an end in itself. Thus our love for god reflects in our lives as we try to bring God to others. If God truly enters our lives, it bends us and breaks us and makes us new moulds into clays the Potter decides. All virtues that are instilled in me, all gifts, and all graces are God’s will and generosity. A child of God has nothing to claim as his own. There is much to hope to be a COG. Alas, the child of nature leaves the show at the time of death. For the Child of God, the show has just begun, banquet that awaits him for running God’s show.

1. Living Love, a Treatise by Francis de Sales on the love of God

THE HONEST SOUL

2008-08-05T23:31:00.000-07:00

A smile has fragrance

That the other can smell.

A smile costs a little more dearly

Not so much as to sign with a president’s pen.

Little bit of honesty, a little bit of truth

Little bit of humanity every day in this world uncouth.

A little bit of love and service to bear.

You will find the world changing

The chance is everywhere.

Sing a song, tell it all

Make your intentions clear.

To get your all, you spoil their hope.

Hiding one self and living in fear.

Let people know you by your tongue.

They take a chance and are left in despair.

Because we only care about ourselves

I make humanity but no humanity I share.

Nowhere to run, nothing to hide

I am clear in my soul.

If this be my test, will I stand about You?

I have loved You with my whole

Para 1:

It is easy to smile. So much so, that we fool people in our smiles. Our dishonesty is veiled in our smile. A real smile is one that says you love that person in all honesty. This ‘real’ smile, no one desires to offer. This smile takes more effort than for a president to sign a bill that makes a nation’s law.

Para 2:

The author says that every day we talk very vaguely about humanity and goodness. Real humanity is something as ordinary as loving a person next to you and being honest with him. We get these opportunities everyday and in every walk of life be it in the bus with disgruntled passengers or in a queue.

Para 3:

We often use so many euphemisms, subtle ways, stories and alibis to suit our purposes. We keep hiding and finding cover under lies and deceit.

Para 4:

Let your words be a precursor and the sign of your identity. Let others believe you by your word. To trust another, is a noble way to measure humanity. In order to serve our purposes, we give others hope that their purposes are being served too. Once our purpose is fulfilled we leave them in despair. We all are a part of humanity but there is nothing so ‘humane’ we share with others. Instead we justify our actions everyday by saying-everyone does it (dishonesty) or this is the way the world works.

Para 5:

Misery and worry makes us lose our health. A man who has no debts, a clear conscience and good health is then the happiest. This man even goes on to believe that his soul is not in sin and awaits the judgment of God in hope. He knows he must have paid a price to choose to be so. He only hopes that if having a clear conscience is the test God asks us to take every day, then he has loved humanity with all his efforts. God made all of humanity and the world and this man has loved God by all his strength.

INTROSPECTION

2008-08-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of gifts in me

If only I discover

But all I do is look at the world outside of me

Overlooking the joy that is near

Between me and my peace

Lies a certain kind of fear

That tells me not to carry

What means to me so dear

I seek a joy that is fleeting

Running away from the knowledge of myself

This world has joys my heart is after

And my soul cries out instead.

It is difficult to let go

Once what has done my senses in

Does my life have any purpose then?

If senses all but end in sin

Am I really free to be?

They say you can do what you please

If my conscience cannot prick me

I am enslaved by the darkness, no light to see the breeze

I seek what is easy

But gain is only for the brave

I can try many things lest I be a fool

Sickness leaves my soul deprave.

So put my heart at peace

If pursuit of pleasure is so vain

What for is pleasure if so deceiving?

Why don’t You fill me with your grace instead?

WILL AND CONVICTION

2008-07-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

WILL AND CONVICTION

Dave and Mikhail were walking in the park after studying Geometry together. Dave seemed disturbed and wasn’t walking at the same pace as Mikhail was. Dave was left way behind and Mikhail stopped. Dave realized how far he was left behind and leaped ahead.

Mikhail: What is it, Dave?

Dave: Mikhail, I try to avoid indecent pictures and movies and all the media attention to sexuality and suggestive videos.

Mikhail: I understand and the problem is?

Dave: The problem is that I try to have strong will power to avoid all the trash but eventually end up right back where I started. I devour the pictures and enjoy them because they are enjoyable. I try to be strong and strengthen my will power, keep myself busy but I fall.

Mikhail:

Dave, Will is the courage Machine. They say, where there is a will there is a way. The way can be walked precisely because there is a will. Do not confuse it that because you are building your will, a way too will build on its own. Even if the way had to build itself, at every halt, it will ask your will, how much do you believe that the way is right? There will be no answer from the will. The will cannot think. The will can only be strong. Someone else is trying to make it strong. That ‘someone’ will have to answer the way. As the way does not find an answer, it halts and consequently the will does not know why it is being strengthened and stops persevering and you go back to old ways. The will here, is like a human bull dozer that can try to demolish a wall but takes a beating on the impact with the wall but does not know why it needs to demolish and it buckles under the pain of the impact.

There is no conviction. Only if you are convinced it is wrong will the willpower know to what end to strive towards and what is the price to pay if there is lack of will. The human bull dozer does not know why it has to pulverize and doesn’t think the pain of hitting the body on the wall is worth the pain. With every hit the pain is acute and it(will) weakens.

You have to be convinced that what is wrong should be refrained from. Although instincts and impulses that incline us to them (the wrong), they incline us to them because our nature is designed so. Similarly our intellect, our capacity to reason and knowledge is what is telling us that although we feel inclinations towards them, the inclinations should be kept in check. It is a different thing if even after being convinced you find it difficult. This is weakness and you have to try harder. You may still base your joy on those things (wrong) and hence it is difficult. It is like a dog that has become loyal to his master but the master may think it right for the dog to leave. But the Dog keeps returning. Loyalty to the master is what it (the dog) places its joy in and weakens the dog.

If you are convinced what is wrong should be avoided is the beginning of will power. Will power is not a huge drum to be filled by water. It rather is a huge drum with a hole underneath. The water keeps seeping but your conviction keeps willing towards filling more water. If human weakness makes you fail, it is precisely because all good things in life are worthy to be fought for and no good character comes easy. Falling is easier than picking oneself again.

PEACE

2008-07-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

Mikhail and Dave are returning from the Annual Strawberry Carnival.

Dave says: Mikhail, look at all these people trying to enjoy themselves.

Mikhail: Trying?

Dave: Well, Yes, Mikhail. Do you really think they are happy?

Mikhail: I wouldn’t know. In the deepest place of their mind they know if they are. God too can look through their deepest desires.

Dave: I wonder whether we are and we can ever be. What are we doing actually in this world?

Mikhail: What do you mean?

Dave:

We keep struggling. We keep trying for this. Then try for that. The pursuit continues like as if to win trophies. Then we find out we are good at this or that. We get success at it, make money. Then we realize what money can do, what it can get us and how others too play along when you show them the money.

And life continues, problems come, some you solve, some are not solved but covered up but they haunt you. Then you run away from people and places, time and truth. This keeps going until you meet new people and lament not having the old. The new people become old and you long for novel things.

And you feel life is just one year repeating itself countless times, birthdays come and go, anniversaries, fortnights, leap years, kid’s sports day and then you forget some. You mourn and regret them. You love people and hurt them. You sing in joy and when lonely, sleep with them. You struggle everyday and you long for night’s sleep. Tomorrow morning you run out of bed thinking all those people who are expecting things from you and you wonder when you will ever get your life all by yourself.

And when you do get it for a moment, you cannot stand the silence and loneliness and quickly want people to surround you. When people are not doing that, you try to get into their lives and later want to escape out. These things continue for some time and in all this you try to find and still keep the pursuit on for the primary: Happiness. So tell me Mikhail then, what is Happiness?

Mikhail:

This is what I prayed to God today, “Thank you for your peace today. What is happiness but your peace today? For the want of peace makes me believe I am not happy and I am not happy because I think buying things and taking refuge in novelties and activities will bring me joy instead it is peace that I lack and I seek. Whereas if I have peace I would believe I am happy

STICKING TO DEFINITIONS

2008-07-08T04:48:00.000-07:00

Mikhail visits the library to observe a new phenomenon. A book is reserved by a student if he doesn’t find it. This book cannot be then further renewed/re-issued (by another student who possesses the book) beyond the specified duration as it is reserved and will be pre-empted. One other student brings a book to the librarian who knows there is a huge fine on this student for defaulting the renewal/return of the book. Now, the Librarian is in a predicament. The student has come to the librarian to find the status of the fine (not necessarily to return/re-issue it). Every day that passes without renewing it multiplies the fine exponentially which only bolsters the library funds.

Now this student is present before the librarian with the book. Before her, stands another student who has reserved the book and needs it. On the other hand, if she allows the student to go without forcibly taking away the book, the library receives a huge amount of money.

The librarian wonders: It is only a matter of days, the fine will keep multiplying until it’s time to take the book from him for it is reserved.

Mikhail wonders after this incident. He thinks:

Shouldn’t we be sticking to definitions? What is a library? Isn’t it a place where a student can view, read, list, search and borrow books? How did it suddenly develop a commercial hue? Why wasn’t the student who had reserved the book get preference or rather be justly treated where in priority was given to receiving overwhelming amount of fine money (even if it is for a day) over his need for the book?
This makes me question certain things? Do we stick to definitions? Whom and what do definitions serve? Who should a library serve? Does it serve a student if a student is the subject of its definition or can the subject of the definition be compromised when wads of money come into the picture?