We have much to hope from.

When I had completed Simbang Gabi two years ago, during a time of emotional upheaval that almost threatened my sanity, I wrote down what the experience meant for me. In retrospect, my difficulty in talking about emotional matters exacerbated my tumultous state of mind then, but now I have hope that I would be able to open up about this someday.

The following excerpt is the end part of my Simbang Gabi reflection:

Mary and Joseph had experienced a great upset in their lives when they were told that they were going to be, under no uncertain terms, used by God to show His great glory and immeasurable love to mankind. They were told they were going to suffer a situation they didn’t expect, and didn’t want. They were going to be parents to a Being they weren’t even sure what kind of person would be, other than He was meant to be Emmanuel, a sign that God is with us. They weren’t even sure just how much He is their responsibility, because they were only His as much as He was theirs. And they didn’t know if they’re actually going to have Him, as birth was probably a process that was a lot less unsafe before like it is now. They actually did end up given only a little bit of time to know Him. They faced the consequences of their choices without knowing that it inevitably ended with death and loss.

Mary and Joseph weren’t to know what that meant to all of us. But it did happen, and they did go through with it, and now we know that God would offer His own Son to be with us and to die for us. He showed just how much we are worth, and it wasn’t because we deserved any of it. It is up to us to know what His gift of His coming means, what His gift of eternal life that He is offering to us means, and or live our lives trying to figure it out. We would never know what we truly deserve, because only God knows true Justice like He is the only one who knows how much (or rather, how little) time we have. We would never truly know His will, but we know enough that in believing and following the Father’s will, Jesus saved us from our sins. Even if Mary and Joseph weren’t to know what they would be, their faith was enough to see them through. Even if Mary and Joseph weren’t sure of what they would do, they allowed God to come into their lives, and it is in His presence in their lives that they found that they could do anything, that they could love God through all uncertainties and precariousness of living, and their effects of their actions would extend this far to us.

I know that, despite all else, all is full of love. That God does love each and every one of us, even those who choose to live in darkness and without His love. That by letting God be with us in all aspects of life, love can see us through anything. But what I didn’t know was whether I had enough love in me to forgive something I considered to be unforgiveable. I didn’t know that I could still love despite knowing the evil in the hearts of men. I didn’t know how much I needed to prove to myself that could actually give love as much as I have received, despite my fears of inadequacy and my sins.

This Christmas, God has given me the gift of this knowledge, that it is worth the pain of knowing life and love with what little time we are given, this belief that persons are gifts of God to me no matter who they are, and this faith that in choosing to love we become even more blessed with it, if not shown that loving is worth as an end to itself, and that should be enough even if we have no real way of knowing for sure. Even if I have to hold on to this knowledge, this belief, and this faith alone, I have to do my best to affirm and appreciate life, no matter how much it doesn’t make sense or how much it would cost me, given the great amount of death and darkness in it.

I couldn’t very well say to anyone who’s experienced enough bad things, or is experiencing agonizing suffering right now, simply that God is good, so everything’s going to be all right. But what I can say, what I can promise, is that we can do what has to be done, that we can do what we can in love, because God is with us. I am here because He is with me, and I am here because you, my friends, are with me, and so I know that everything’s going to be all right. So as much as I hate it, as much as I’m angry and scared, I can let go of my pain and offer it to God, because I know things will sort itself out in the end.

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

–Sherlock Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A bit awkward to write, but it’s all true.

I can’t write anything while my Dad’s in the next table with his friend, who is talking about religions and how Christian culture is against pleasure and sex.

I still remember back in Grade 6, when an art teacher, who hadn’t ever handled a class I’m in and whose name I forgot, suddenly came into class and proceeded to write on the blackboard:

“Sex is good.”
“Sex is beautiful.”
“Sex is a gift from God.”

After a moment of jaw-dropping surprise, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from giggling. (It took me until I was 15 til I stopped giggling whenever I hear the word “penis” after all.) I couldn’t remember what else that teacher had said, but I won’t forget those words.

For all my facetious attitude when the topic presents itself in small talk to the point of apparent prurience, I often forget my personal conviction about sex until I strongly react to ideas that are against it. I don’t believe God doesn’t want me to have sex, but I’m pretty sure I am not supposed to be governed by lust. I don’t believe in premarital sex, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t a mortal sin. I don’t believe God wants priests to suffer in their celibacy, but I’m pretty sure all of us and not just priests are supposed to obey God’s will. The demands of love may be confused with the demands of our own bodies and perceived social pressure, but I’m convinced that no one has the right to make the choice for me in what I want for a sex life.

Being celibate by choice is really freeing. I get to grin at people when they find out I’ve never had a boyfriend due to the lack of effort in finding one. My 11 years of being in a private Catholic school for girls in my formative years gave me a focus without distractions when regarding boys. I have enough practice in sorting out my feelings of attraction, and create a system to be able to differentiate if my desires are purely platonic or just impulse/hormone-driven. I happen to like being single, because it’s currently just too fun.

Of course, I have an odd set of standards for fun, and my family is vaguely nudging me to widen my circle of close relationships (but definitely stopping before concupiscence). But I like being my own woman at the moment. I sometimes wonder if I am being selfish, but it’s more likely because I haven’t been in active service for God and it reflects my laziness in my relationships. Loving God is something I should commit myself to devoting more time to, and then perhaps, romance will eventually come to be an idea that’s definitely worth my time.

We make the world what it is.

Having honed myself to the role of a very individualistic girl shut in the mental tower of her own making, I had the impression that taking leaps of faith is something akin to flinging myself from a high window. Little did I know that it would be like crawling out of the rabbit hole after living in my inner Wonderland for most of my life, instead.

I knew there was a reason I was far more fond of Dante than Shakespeare, that I take pleasure in the religious aspects of any story I read, and that philosophical texts only appeal to me when it agrees with my faith in humanity. It’s because I am a snob, contemptuously irreverent, and a skeptic who isn’t inclined to believe in other people. I think there’s joy to be found in being humbled every time I read something significant to my life. Even though I’ve always seen humility from the perspective of falling into the sin of pride, there’s so many more other ways to be humbled by one’s imagination that is free from human arrogance and ambition. The added benefit of laughing at something meaningful is that you get to learn to laugh at yourself as well.

Things that genuinely delight me are usually the things that don’t trigger my bad habit of being morbidly obsessive. I am too hard on my weaknesses and failures, but I treasure my uptake on wit and humor because it’s refreshingly freeing to indulge the aspect of myself that always knows the good reasons to anything. My appreciation of good humor is an ability that my self-critic can’t win against. If the joke was given enough care that it doesn’t hurt anyone, I only have to experience other people’s intelligence touching my funny bone. Being so serious and depressive that I am compulsively forced to search for meaningless things to amuse myself, it’s very humbling when I am to be won over by others’ preeminence in sharing their gift for humor, and I do so love being a gratefully happy audience.

Knowing that I can appreciate wit but cannot wield it, my humility is such that I don’t find it in myself to feel envy for other people’s gift for humor. Entertainment in itself is a concept that makes me think of the poem Laughter and Death, and Jars of Clay’s song Sad Clown. Yet I think the ability to appreciate humor comes from positive perception. Irony can only be satisfyingly relished if one believes in a world that’s entirely random and relative, and it’s stuff of good drama but not upliftingly affective. There’s only meaning in hope if it can’t be mocked.

We often don’t know it, but we often only look at things that makes us angry, despairing, fearful and shocked, because the media in the world usually holds such things to light for its entertainment value. These things end up alienating us from humanity, and from each other, like bad jokes often do. Humor should serve to help us see life’s colorful connections, and connect us to each other for the common desire for fun. For all our continuous search for happiness, we don’t remember to ask ourselves where happiness comes from in the first place. How would we know which direction to go if we can’t even see the Source of true delight?

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Having previously set Robert Frost’s Bond and Free as the poem for my life, I am struck by Khalil Gibran’s Your Thought and Mine, which I haven’t read before, as an answer to any personal philosophies I have. I think I need to see myself in a new light given the latter poem.

When one is rich in thought, it’s just as hard to let go of the thoughts you treasure. But the mind should grow as well, and not just in capacity of content. Too much freedom in thought has its own faults, which is a hard lesson learned, but I don’t regret coming from that wide open point of view, because they prompt me to think outside the box and end up seeing things in new ways. Where I used to see restriction, I now see certain graces that I could never attain for all my sense of self-determination through thought. Extreme individualism has its own dangers of mindlessness, like negativism, relativism, neo-paganism, aestheticism and puritanism (yes, that last is quite possible, and is a bad thing in the long run). 

It’s all right then to aim for the stars in our thoughts, but let love be the driving force of our actions, even if it has us putting on our own chains. Because I see now that being held down by the demands of love offers its own kind of freedom, and that is the freedom from regrets.

Learning to love for Love’s sake.

I had always thought that seeking to understand God to whatever extent we can is part of one’s Christian duty, as it would help us develop a better relationship with Him and thus be inspired towards lovingkindness. But the challenge in doing so is best illustrated in my difficulties in seeing God in every person. The usual conclusion I get from each exercise is I wasn’t given the grace, which at times seems like something beautiful seen in a display window of shop that one frequently passes by but never considers entering.

Grace is not something bought but is freely given, though, and it’s another thing I’ve realized about free will and love. If God is love, then He chose to love us to the extent of becoming one of us, even if He understood fully well who we are. He gave us free will, and all He wants us to do with it is to learn how to see what He saw, that in each and every one of us there lies the meaning of love.

What we do when we finally realize it, the truth that God died for us and what it means, is entirely up to us. It’s a terrifying fact, and one most human minds shy away from contemplating. To those who will choose to set forth in answering the call of love, it is the beginning of the most dangerous adventure of their lives.

There are many instructions, but there is only one rule: We have to believe that the reward of love is worth seeing it through the end.

I have decided to take my Lent reflections one thought at a time. (And yes, this is my closest approximation to one linear thought at a time.)

Venting a little on poetry.

Before Mom's birthday dinner earlier, I was panicking over the fact that I confused the poems of Khalil Gibran with Rabindranath Tagore, couldn't tell who Mary Oliver was from Edna St. Vincent Millay, and mistook Dorothy Parker for Dorothy Sayers. It happened while I was looking for poems as accompaniment of our presents (Gibran's "On Children" from "The Prophecy", "If I Could Tell You" by W. H. Auden, and an untitled poem by Kabir translated by Robert Bly). This recent freak out is due to three factors:

- My poems files are just as disorganized as my photo/image files, which reflects how my thoughts on poetry and visual art get muddled despite my brain's preference for linear thinking.

- Nothing pisses me off than forgetting a poem, because poetry memorization is a long and hard process for me. I hated my unhelpful brain cells so much that I couldn't think straight. (Damn hormones.) Give me pages of Shakespeare to memorize for a play, and I'll remember it more than I could recall something as short as Invictus and who wrote it (William Ernest Henley, because I Googled).

- My school books on English literature, Filipino books in English, and lit compilations have long been given away. (I told my Mom I'd rather give away my manga collection than part with my favorite books, books that were given to me, and books I personally bought. She couldn't give away my manga because they weren't useful anyway, so she relented.) Hence, I had to rely on the internet and my memory to retrieve bits of poetry I have cluttered in my head. Digital references aren't the same as physical copies (I still rely on my high school notes, for example), so I easily get frustrated when being made to look these up in the internet, mostly because of the possibility that I wouldn't find it there. I don't know if I'm just being some kind of an old-fashioned romantic, or simply dependent upon sensory memory.

I cling to my non-neurotic auditory memory.

A-delta sensory nerve fibers.

referred pain

1. Pain felt in an undamaged part of the body away from the actual point of injury or disease.

2. Inability to remember what your voice sounds like, or the last time I met your eyes.

3. Fear of someone else's loneliness.

4. Old pillows, worn towels, and the commutability of comfort.

5. Discordance in the soul.

"Where’s your head?" and other non-stupid questions.

When you are a Christian, Kantian, Jungian, and "UPian" (not the official term, of course), and you remiss in the important parts of your life (read: academics), you're going to be in serious trouble.

In other news, the Earth is starting its new revolution around the sun, my superpower of self-involved avoidance is reaching its limit, the internets continue to be interesting, and there's two months to go before my choices are made for me. *frowns* I should invest in Post-It notes.

Memetic.

I don't answer much, apart from interesting online quizzes (ticking choice-boxes is so much easier), because I tend to take these more seriously than I should. I suppose they resemble my usual blogging, only more structured without the digressions and weird metaphors that happen in stream-of-conscious rambling.

Personal and fandom memes:
Name
Art
STC
The "Perfect Lover"
Fandom related lists - 1 - 2

BS 175.

My birth order, if strictly chronologically, is 4th. I've spent about 8 years as the youngest child and a couple more as the middle child until I found out my 'cousins' are actually my siblings. (We don't do upfront in the family. *shrugs*)

My primary family (as of 2006) consists of
my father (49),
my mother (47),
my maternal half-sister (26),
my paternal half-brother (26, 2 months younger) who has his own family now,
my older brother (23),
myself (21), and
my younger sister (13).

As part of this expanding post on Marriage, Kinship and Family:
Attention
Avoidance
Socialization
Angst-o-rama non-contemplation

MyDocs inventory.

Deep Thought, my laptop, had her hard drive replaced (37Gb) in the Great Warranty Abuse of August 2006. Since then, my academics file folder's size was considerably lowered as I neglected to include my documentary-related files in my backups (having no DVD burner and only dialup discouraged it until it was too late). Next to that is my fandom folder at a surprisingly measly 537Mb, followed by my videos folder at 1.98Gb, the latter's exponential growth induced by my newest fandom (Smallville) and spurred by the recent installment of wireless broadband in our household. Reigning champion would remain to be my music folder (3.98Gb), even if I have transferred most of my other mp3s to my sister's Creative Zen Vision (the family's mp3/vid player) already.

I think if I didn't have the habit of storing my photos online, my pictures folder would have the biggest file size.