Can I Have My Own Ten Commandments?

‘My Own Ten Commandments’ by Ticklebug

You Can But You May Not

17 March – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: On Calvary, Our Lord said to Dismas with all His heart: ‘This day thou shall be with me in paradise!’ He will say that to you.

Dismas is someone I hardly know. According to Terry Jones, whose website is Catholic Community Forum (catholic-forum.com/), Dismas is known as The Good Thief as well as The Penitent Thief. Dismas means dying. He became one of the Catholic saints, the patron of condemned prisoners, criminals, death-row prisoners, reformed thieves. Which tells me it’s never too late to be good, it’s never too late to be sorry.

Writes TJ:

An old legend from an Arabic infancy gospel says that when the Holy Family were running to Egypt, they were set upon by a band of thieves including Dismas and Gestas. One of the highwaymen realized there was something different, something special about them, and ordered his fellow bandits to leave them alone; this thief was Dismas.

Dismas had said to Jesus: ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your Kingdom.’ The reply was instantaneous: ‘Yes!’ Hannah Shively writes (illustratedword.gospelcom.net/): ‘All the world’s religions, with the exception of Christianity, have one thing in common: none of them guarantees salvation to their followers.’ Only Jesus guarantees salvation to the repentant sinner.

Now then, does that mean it’s okay to live a life of sin and then repent when you know that the end is near in order to be saved? No because in this life you may not know when the end is coming. No because in this life a life of sin is a life of sin, without the sanctifying grace. A sin against someone is a sin against God. No because life on earth was not meant to be a pleasure for you to the discomfort of others. No because you may not enjoy this life to the unease of your neighbor. No because in this life you may amass wealth but not at the expense of others. No because the Ten Commandments are for this life, not the next.

To live the life of Dismas would be to have your cake and eat it too, to have your own Ten Commandments and follow them as you wish, to be your own God. I love Ticklebug’s inspiring, instructive, original ‘My Own Ten Commandments’ because it reminds me that I cannot have my own ten commandments apart from God’s. You can’t follow all the ten commandments once and then leave them alone for the rest of your life.

Mother & Child

‘Mother & Child’ by bOr1s

Child On Mother

16 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: Dying on Calvary, Our Lord left you the most beautiful treasure that he had – his mother.

I never did appreciate the treasure of a mother. I was a Mama’s Boy if I may say so myself looking back all those 60 years up to the death of my mother, Baket Satur (Agapito), but I don’t remember ever feeling a Mother-Son special relationship. Or maybe I’m looking at it with idealistic eyes now.

I remember watching my mother sewing with her Singer Sewing Machine, pedal-pushing (it had a treadle). I didn’t notice it but I preferred to be with my mother rather than my father. She taught me how to oil the sewing machine with Singer Oil, of course, expensive oil, she would tell me, but she preferred it because it was good, better, best. She would ask me not only to thread the needle of that machine but also to spin into different bobbins different colors of threads. I enjoyed doing that one, watching the thread travel from one end of the bobbin to the other and back; I learned to do it fast. I would watch her sew a polo shirt, and it would be for me. I would watch her sew a short pant and of course it would be for me – that’s what I remember.

My mother must have had a complete set of attachments for her Singer. I used to fiddle with all of them, trying to create something with each attachment. I don’t remember ever having succeeded in producing something worthy of mention. But I would look at those attachments again and again and wonder what they were really good at doing. I never did find out. I might have broken one or two parts. My mother is gone now, to heaven I hope; today, I don’t know where that old Singer had gone.

I was with my mother often enough I must have unconsciously acquired some of her mannerisms people referred to me as binabai (Ilocano for effeminate) and I minded that very much, so all the more I kept to myself. In high school in the mid-50s, with a tip from the Reader’s Digest, I developed a big voice by learning to breathe from the stomach and not from the lungs. With that, slowly I forgot about having had a voice like that of a girl.

That was no thanks to my mother. And no thanks to my mother was my growing love of reading. She never even reached Grade I, only the Spanish Cartilla. She thought it was a waste of money for me to buy extra-curricular reading materials such as the magazines Liwayway (Tagalog), Bannawag (Ilocano), Bulaklak (Tagalog), Kislap Graphic (English-Tagalog), and the 4 komiks magazines (Pilipino Komiks, Tagalog Klasiks, Hiwaga, Espesyal, all Tagalog) with illustrated stories, not necessarily funny). But I would buy them all out of my fare and food money – almost everyday I would walk the 2 km from our village in Sanchez to and from school (Rizal Junior College in the town proper of Asingan, Pangasinan), and save the money (10 centavos for a ride). I would come home with the magazine or komiks tucked inside my pants at the back, hidden by my shirt; reaching home, I would first visit the haystack at the back of our garong (granary) and hide the reading material there and visit it later. I just loved reading even more than my mother hated it, and it was also fun fooling my mother like that.

No reading lessons from her. The lessons I remember learning from my mother are all on sewing, you better believe it. I learned to sew on a patch of cloth so carefully you wouldn’t notice the patch at all – the first part of the trick is to match the material exactly; the next is to sew in a matching thread by hand in tiny ins and outs. It takes practice and some patience. I have patience with such details. I must have gotten it from my mother.

I was so engrossed when my mother was sewing I would watch her cut cloth and sew a whole dress, a polo shirt, pants. I didn’t learn to cut cloth, but I learned to love sewing and sewed my own back pocket at the back of my cotton short pants whose cloth string I learned to sew with my mother’s Singer.

There are quite a few Mother & Child photographs I saw on Flickr, but when I saw this one by bOr1s, I knew at once it was perfect for this. He used a filter unlike the ones artists used to use in commercial printing houses, and that tells me that this mother and her child are alive only in my memory. bOr1s, thanks for the memory!

Did it look like I was following the footsteps of my mother? I don’t know. I know the back pocket of my shorts was for marbles and my slingshot, all three ubiquitous. I also know I look like my mother. I didn’t like the idea at first admitting I had the face of my mother, not my father; over the years, I learned to live with it. My mother wasn’t bad-looking, no, but I wanted a face of my own, or why not my father’s? He was my kind of good-looking.

I was sorry I was stuck with the face I had. But now I have to remember that I owe my mother my face. In fact, I owe my mother all of me. What could be a more beautiful treasure than that?

The Light, The Dark, The Life

‘Hurt’ by DarkBeauty

All The World’s A Stage

15 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: When the Roman soldiers were nailing Our Lord to the cross, he said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ When someone hurts you … forgive!

Forgive? Easier said than done. We cannot forgive. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That is also for us who do not know how to forgive. To forgive but not to forget is not to forgive. We know not what we do!

When hurt by someone, we rankle inside, we linger on the pain, we inscribe the ache in our head, we describe it with unsaid words that weigh heavily on us. And yet we do not notice that we do any or all of that. When we are hurt, we suffer the ill-feeling and do not think for a minute that we can get rid of the agony if we but learn to forgive.

For us, it’s stupidity to forgive. We want justice! That is the only thing reasonable that must be done. We will settle for nothing less.

Of course. If not the law, common sense tells us that for any wrongdoing, there must be an undoing, or at least a retribution. A wrong act must not go unpunished, a damage done must not go unrepaired.

We are reasonable men, are we not? Reason must prevail!

That exactly is the problem. Reason. We use reason in dealing with our loved ones and our unloved ones. Faith. We ignore faith in dealing with people everyday. Faith belongs only in church, in prayer meetings, in times of Bible sharing. To love your enemy is blasphemy.

If we could apply much more faith and much less reason in our lives, we would be able to forgive even when not asked to forgive, and we would be more blessed. We know in our hearts that it is more blessed to forgive than to give, and yet we do not follow the dictates of our hearts. Instead, we allow the head to lead us not into the temptation of forgiving. The way we deal with people is that forgiving is not a grace but a sin, not goodwill but a wrongdoing, not a sacrament but a sacrilege.

In fact we count the number of hurts we get. And because we add each to the other, they increase in their intensity just as if we multiplied them. Each time we make a count, in fact the bruise becomes a self-inflicted wound. It hurts every time it’s touched. And so it never heals. We never ever want it to heal.

DarkBeauty’s shot I find perfect for illustration: Hurt is a stage of life, your life. I love it for being the perfect B&W photograph: Light defined by darkness, black defined by white, life defined by both.

Whether you see white or black or life depends on you, not on the other players. Whether you see yourself as focus or you see yourself as periphery depends on no one else but you. Whether you are frightened or you are encouraged depends on you alone.

But you see only the depth of pain. Ah, what you see is what you get!

A Cross To Carry?

‘Hilario Girls’

A Cross To Understand

14 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: They placed the heavy cross on the shoulders of Our Lord … When you take up your cross, each day, you are Simon of Cyrene, helping Our Lord to carry his cross to Calvary.

People have or, rather, we have in fact several crosses to carry, not that I’m counting.

One: My daughter Cynthia is 31 years old (born 08 April 1976) and an authentic autistic – she can take care of her daily routines and is literate (and in English, to boot), but her conversations are mostly in her own private world. She is what may be called a high-performing A child. She can memorize names and dates and such. As I write this 16 March, she is surfing the Internet (I peep and I see mostly celebrities) in the other PC, and only heaven knows where all that visual knowledge goes. She is very quiet about it.

Isn’t that a surprise! Now let me continue counting the crosses.

Two: What Cynthia is using is the PC I have been telling you about (blog for 13 March, uploaded 15 March), the one that had refused to connect to the Internet for the last 3 days in my expert hands. I must have been doing something wrong and she must have been doing something right! In fact, that PC has quit like that and Cynthia has made it work like that several times for the last few months, and I’m beginning to appreciate the fact that crosses aren’t necessarily what we think they are. They are blessings in disguise.

Today I stop at two. When you understand what crosses are for, there may be so many you may not be able to count them – but you will have known how to look at each one of them: Undiscovered treasures.

Now, where is she?

 

My Windows Pain Continues

Desktop background photo titled ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ by Frank A Hilario. Image includes error message on a failure to connect to the Internet

I Let It Worry Itself To Death

13 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: Our Lord was crowned with thorns. When you talk to him in prayer, you remove one thorn from his tortured brow.

The story of Christ on the road to Calvary continues. The story of my Windows pain continues from 12 March as I write this 15 March.

The Hilarios’ PC

12 March. It’s seven in the morning; our Epson Stylus CX3700 will not print, and Graciela, 4^th Year High, needs to print for her homework. (She prints in the other PC, with the HP, but laser, not color, and is unhappy.) I do not suspect a virus, Trojan or spy software. First, I suspect a USB malfunction – we have two USB hubs on the H (Hilarios’) PC, and the CX is connected via USB, and this PC is about 6 years old – it survives with lots of new components, like a new monitor (MAG Innovision Flat and new hard disk – so I insert / reinsert the USB printer cord into the new USB card at the back of the CPU (central processing unit) tower assembly – and try all the old and new USB ports, all 8 of them, plus all 8 slots of the 2 USB hubs I bought. Still will not print. Windows Help and Support is no help at all. The setup software for the CX too is unable to recognize the printer – it doesn’t continue to the happy ending that I know is a message that ends thus: ‘Successfully installed.’ For more than a dozen tries, there is no ending, only another beginning.

I can get tired and cranky, but I don’t. It’s a choice, a decision I made about 10 years ago but one that took years to come to fruition. You don’t change overnight just because you want to, you decide to. You have excess baggage on your trip to heaven on earth and you may not realize that. Excess baggage can be like this: I forgive you, but I can’t forget the hurt you gave me. Or, I deserve better than this. Or, I’m so smart, why ain’t I so rich? When comes the time you blame no one but yourself and then you do forgive yourself, then you begin your own journey just like Dorothy’s in the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz. You are on the way to some enlightenment.

I’m a freelance writer, editor, publisher, and I spend 97% of my time on the PC. So now you know that years before, if faced with a situation like a malfunctioning PC, I would have badmouthed Microsoft, Surecom, the USB maker, the supplier of the generic (IBM-compatible) CPU tower, Edimax (maker of the Ethernet PCI adapter card), and most everybody else. They don’t make things like they used to! Ah, but not anymore. I can tell myself: Get used to it. Remember Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. So, it would be wrong to go wrong yourself!

It’s complicated, so I will simplify it and say that after analyzing / reanalyzing things, I decide to format the master hard disk and leave the master slave hard disk intact (that’s where all our files are, including installers). That calls for another half day of installing routines, countless of them, including typing serial numbers and my name and company all over again. But like I said before, it’s not a pain – it’s a pleasure. The pain’s gone if you don’t look at what you’re doing and instead focus on what for you’re doing it.

15 March: I can now report a happy ending of the story of the H PC. The printer is working fine, thank you: printing, scanning, copying, reducing, enlarging. What more can I ask for?

The Office’s PC

13 March. The other, the O (office’s) PC suddenly will not connect to the Internet via the Hilarios’ Smart WiFi / Smart BRO connection – and I don’t know why. This PC has been connecting before this, in fact for the last 2 years. The image you see, is a screen capture of my desktop on this PC, with the Windows part saying ‘This page cannot be displayed’ and my photograph from Los Baños as desktop background saying essentially the same thing. Two can tell a common story.

In fact, as I write this, 15 March, 1100hr, the O PC still can’t get an Internet connection while the H PC continues to enjoy one – and their CPU towers are only a foot apart (they share a Surecom router). I have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled Windows and all those software I listed on my blog for 12 March (uploaded 14 March), and still no Internet. Windows Help and Support offers nothing better than clicks that lead to nowhere. I am ready to give up for now and bring the CPU tower to the technician, which means Prologue Computers some 3 km away. The last thing I have just tried is to use the router-to-CPU cord/link that’s working with the H PC to the O PC – still, no Internet. I guess it’s the hardware, not Windows; we’ll see when I bring that thing to the technician. The O PC is a little older than the H PC, so age matters, I suppose.

But the pain of continual PC troubles? I haven’t noticed any. Have you?

To Pain In Vain

‘Cartography Of Pain’ by Tou Les …

To Gain In Pain

12 March – This is the pastoral text of Fr Reuter: Whenever you are in pain, and you pray … you are standing beside Our Lord at the pillar, sharing the pain of the lash.

Pain is something you notice when you pay attention to it – and it becomes more painful the more attention you pay to it; it eventually becomes self-pity, which is never a good thing.

Not then, but now I like to think that pain is a lesson in love. Pain is part of life. To avoid pain in pain, you must learn to love, to live in pain. To pray … not for the pain to go away but for the pain to be a source of comfort, even a source of joy. What? That’s crazy! No, that’s a paradox. I know – a paradox is meant to be searched for the truth. You know, a paradox, like ‘If a man strikes you on the left cheek, turn to him the left also.’ And ‘The first shall be last, the last first.’ How do you learn that? You begin to learn when you give up what you already know. You learn when you don’t have any idea that you’re learning.

Computers are a pain in the neck, in the ass, in the pocket. I love them. Today, 12 March, I am right now again reformatting the master hard disk of the office PC, 40 GB, partitioned into 3 (drive C, drive D, drive E – the E for all installer software except for booting), FAT32, not NTFS, and re-installing all these (pay attention, please):

1. Windows XP – 10 desktops & passwords (Frank, Antonia, BabyChaf, Bonafe, Dingot, Edwin, Jinny, Jomar, MCynthia, Paul) main-board, monitor, fonts, mouse settings, folder options, display choices, change drive letters – the Hilarios have 2 hard disks and 5 flash drives, set up Network Places – we are logged on to the Internet 24 hours a day with the Smart WiFi/Smart BRO)

2. ZoneAlarm – Internet firewall; it’s good

3. eTrust anti-virus – I trust it.

4. Ad-Aware – to watch for unwanted ads

5. Spybot – to watch for hidden software monitors

6. Norton Systemworks – Fast & Safe Cleanup, WinDoctor, SystemDoctor, OneButton Checkup & repair

7. Epson Stylus CX3700 – individual tanks, color; 5-in-1 (printer, scanner, copier, enlarger, reducer)

8. Xerox Phaser 3116 – laser printer, maximum 600 dpi, print all text black, economode

9. Microsoft Office – I set the other programs like Access, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher to install at first use; Word template, file location, all kinds of settings, Frank’s Menu (for instance, I add XFactor in the menu, for reprogramming Word to my liking, with Alt-X as the key shortcut)

10. OpenOffice – because it’s good and it’s free! I can save to pdf.

11. Google Desktop – It’s great for locating files you can’t find in a million years but you know it must be there somewhere in that hard disk. Thank you, Google!

12. Adobe Reader 8 – It’s great and good-looking.

13. Mozilla Firefox – It’s the best.

14. Netscape – I like the copy-paste shortcut while researching.

15. Opera – yes, I use all 4 browsers – Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer), any number of them simultaneously, as I find moving from one site/browser to another site/another browser heaven on earth.

16. Microsoft Encarta 2005 – Children’s Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus and Translations

17. Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 – because you have to have at least two sources of information

18. Microsoft Bookshelf 2000 – inside, it’s my favorite American Heritage Dictionary which is great for definitions, usage & style notes. It also has great synonyms, and valuable quotations.

19. Windows Media Player 10

20. Windows Live Messenger – for variety

21. Yahoo Messenger – for instant messages, an indispensable one for me.

22. A4Tech – webcam, for my daughter and her family in New York, so far.

23. Shortcuts & briefcases – all kinds, as well as a folder for such on Frank’s desktop (my children do their own thing in their own desktops, which is the point of the desktop exercise).

Surely, I must have gone through a lot of pain to learn all that? Indeed. You don’t learn without pain.

This story continues what I have already told in an earlier blog here (‘Do Love’), about early this month when the two PCs at home crashed one after the other. If you count a conservative 4 hours just to set up all those software every time a PC gives you trouble (it slows down visibly and gives you all kinds of sick signs), and I have since early this month completely re-installed all those software 5 times for each PC, that means 4 hours times 10 complete sets equals 40 man-hours spent. Assuming 8 hours of work every day, that’s a total of 5 working days for each PC just for installing / reinstalling all those software.

Just to resuscitate those 2 PCs, I have so far spent 80 man-hours within 14 days. If that’s not pain, I don’t know what pain is. In fact, I don’t keep regular hours, so can you imagine the pain of all that work? It’s not hard labor (no sweat), but you can imagine the stress waiting for every single software to install

1. function by function

2. reboot after reboot

3. CD after CD (20 in all)

4. folder after folder of installers

5. insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, click, wait, eject CD / insert CD, wait, click!

6. And when drive C Windows is done, set up drive D Windows. (We have two Windows setup in each desktop PC. Why? File management.)

7. And do all that all over again completely 5 times in 14 days.

Who would be crazy to do all that? I would be.
Been there, done that!
It’s not work to me – it’s play.
There’s pain all the time – there’s pleasure most of the time.

It’s more than just ‘No pain, no gain.’ An easy way out is: ‘No gain, no pain.’ I submit that the way to handle pain is this: Find the pleasure out of the pain. Among the pleasures I find here is that I do have 3 books to edit at this time; while the monetary rewards make me rich only for a day or two, it’s something I love to do, and I know that I’m doing it very well, thank you.

The image titled ‘Cartography Of Pain’ by Frenchman portrait photographer Rudolphe Simeon (his website here) who signs with the longest / longish Flickr name ‘Tou Les Noms Sont Deja Pris … Pfff …’ (translation: ‘All the names have been taken’) – when I saw it a few minutes ago, at once I identified with it. The pain lingers, already etched on the body (the face), the past reaching out to the present. The pain is not yet gain. The gain in pain is not automatic – you have to work for it. You have to map yourself out of its terrible territory. In this man, who looks to me a little like Jesus, the pain is in transition (‘frozen in time’), and it will remain in that state until the man finds his gain from pain, as nobody can find it for him. He must turn that pain into gain, as nobody can do it for him. That to me is the cartography of pain. All the pains have been taken in – now they must be taken out, or transformed into gain. We must all learn the cartography of pain – to discover the locus of gain.

Bad Mood Rising?

‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Padrone

Good Man Rising

11 March – Today, this is the pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter: Pilate said: ‘I find no cause in this just man. Therefore I will scourge him.’ … Why did he scourge the just man? … For our sins.

Isn’t it always that they scourge the more-just man? They persecute those who are better situated than them; they vilify those who are better known than them; they harass those who are better positioned than them. They throw stones at the mango tree with the ripe fruits, they always do, men and children. In fact, the unjust man, the sinful man is never punished; instead, he is given his due reward – he is given backward what he has been giving forward.

In contrast, you who are trying to be good, or trying to make peace with God and men and nature wherever you are whatever you are, you are the one being persecuted until you give up your innocence.

You lose your innocence with a subtle maneuver, which is like this: Someone convinces you: You’re not happy. You should aim for the better things in life. Let me help you get there. I am good at helping people get there where they should be! So you aim for what man calls the better things in life. You listen to those who tell you they know the truth, and that the truth will set you free! The scourging will come later when you have lost your naivety, your blamelessness – and you will deserve that scourging.

There is no delight scourging an unjust man, for his counter-delight would be to scourge you back. If you scourge a just man, he is not going to scourge you in return. You have picked no better target.

That’s probably the reason people don’t want to be more just – they just receive more trouble than the unjust who couldn’t care less anyway. That’s exactly the point – you should care more – which means you have to accept the scourging. And that’s not easy.

‘Scourging at the pillar’ is one of the mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Our scourging of others doesn’t have to be with a visible pillar, and they don’t have to be standing and with hands bound like Jesus – and the guilty scourger could be anyone we think supports us or protects us: family, friends, neighbors, officemates whoever. What is scourging? Scourging can be denying, persecuting, abandoning, vilifying, undermining, backstabbing, betraying and anything not for the better but for worse.

At 67 years of age, I have come to realize that life is not what you make it but what you take it. I am the liver – life depends on the liver. I have decided to be happy no matter the scourging at the pillar of life. Jesus taking the scourging is the best example for me. My own scourging is for my own sins. I am not innocent. I have to accept the scourging. I might as well learn from it – and smile that it’s no more than a scourging.

I like ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Padrone because it looks to me what the skies were when Jesus was being scourged at the pillar. That scourging was meant to give Jesus what a dark night of the soul looked like, felt like. ‘I see the bad moon arising / I see trouble on the way’ are the first two lines Padrone quotes from the song ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The photograph is exactly that.

The image tells me yet another story from what Padrone’s notes say – or, which amounts to the same thing, I look at it with a different perspective: If you look at the moon as bad, to you it is; if you look at the scourging as useless, to you it is. The view depends on the viewer. What you see is what you get.

What Is Truth?

‘Truth Is Ugly’ by Idle A While

What You Can’t Accept

10 March – This is the pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter: Pilate asked Our Lord: ‘What is truth?’ But he did not wait for the answer … When you are troubled, wait for the answer. It will come.

‘What is truth’ is a profound question to ask, and I don’t blame Pilate for not waiting for the answer that he probably felt he wouldn’t understand anyway. He must have heard of Jesus and his parables – like the parable of the talents: the woman gave what she had, two coins all in all, everything. And his paradoxes –‘Love your enemy!’

The truth is if you want to truly give, you give of yourself, you give part of what you need, even everything that you yourself need – if you give what you have in excess, that is not truly giving. And that of course is not your idea of giving. You give what you want to give, not what you are told or expected to give, not what the other fellow needs (you don’t know what he needs), but what you say he needs. To you, that is giving.

The truth is if you want to defeat your enemy, the only way to do that is to love him. And that of course is crazy! So you go on loving your family, which is not so bad; you go on loving your friends, which is not so bad either; you go on loving mankind, which is not so bad after all – but you go on hating people who don’t measure to your standards. How can you waste your love on people you hate? Those politicians and leaders/dealers – they are an abomination! You can’t see the wisdom in their continued position of power – even in their continued existence. Of course not. It is seldom that we can see the truth.

I’m imagining myself seeing an angel crying. I didn’t think angels ever cry, can ever have any reason to cry. Now, I’d like to imagine her crying because she can’t see why we can’t see the truth. Who was it who said, ‘And the truth will set you free!’ That is not correct, not literally. It is only we who can set ourselves free – once we see the truth. How can the truth ever set us free when we can’t see it? The truth will not go out looking for us – we have to go out looking for it. And God bless us if we find it and know it to be so.

When I saw the image, I immediately fell in love with it. It is ugly, it is beautiful! ‘Truth is ugly’ says Idle A While (Vanessa Paxton), who owns the image. It is too. You have to see beyond the ugliness to see the beauty. Ugliness is skin-deep, beauty is bone-deep. Beauty is in the eye of beholder, and so is truth, I do realize now, inspired by the photo: Truth is in the eye of the beholder. Thank you, Vanessa.

You Can’t Win War

‘Lost In [Color/] Space’ by sMacshot

You Can Only Win Peace

09 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: The soldier slapped Our Lord in the face, hard … for all our sins.

I don’t think I have ever been slapped by someone; I don’t remember slapping someone either. But I imagine that a slap in the face is extremely hurtful – from the pain of it coupled with the shame of it. From the example of Jesus, if we learn the lesson, we will see it as extremely helpful: If someone slaps you on the left cheek, turn to him the right also. A slap is stressful, on the part of the slapped as well as on the part of the slapper. How can you ever like it?

The image by sMacshot is the result of a slap on the face, not by a hand but by technology, not the least of it being software. While the photographer had lost face, she was not about to be defeated. She might as well have told herself: The fault, dear girl, lies not in our software but in ourselves. If photography slaps you, you might as well turn a negative into a positive! She did learn to like it. I love it.

Learning from that, there are only two ways you can ever like a slap on the face. One is to like the result – it stops you from your foolishness. The other is to learn to take it; for your sake, you have to learn to take it. Let it be a reminder that you are not perfect and never have been, that you didn’t have to hurt someone but you did, that you were selfish with someone, that you denied someone, that you made someone mad – in some direct way, you failed to love someone and that caused a deep pain that was excruciating and needed release.

A hard slap on the face doesn’t have to be a smack on your cheek by someone angry; it can be a whack by life on you such as an injury, an illness, an accident, a failure, a going away. You have to learn to deal with it as Jesus handled that slap on his face: Take it and leave it at that. Let it remind you of the mortality of the slapper and of your own, of your vulnerability to revenge: Slap the slapper. What is clearly wrong with that is that the problem doesn’t end there; in fact, it continues, since you have just given it a new lease on life. To be slapped by someone is someone setting a bad example; to slap back that someone is setting another bad example. You can’t win if you do battle. You can’t win the peace by winning the war.

Do Love

‘Half Face’ by Finnegar

Don’t Do Hate
08 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: Caiaphas, the high priest, said: ‘It is necessary that one man should die to save all the people. …True! It was. He died to save us all.

Reading that today, 09 March 2007, it suddenly occurs to me that there is another interpretation of the death of Jesus the Christ in order to save us all, and it is this:

Christ showed us the way to eternal salvation by dying for love.

That’s my theory, very personal. That just occurred to me this afternoon, visiting at my daughter Teresa’s place at Baesa, Quezon City. Incidentally, I’m typing this at their desktop computer, the one I gave them a year or so ago complete with a printer and, a few weeks ago, resuscitated for them. It had died, literally; their Windows XP had crashed. It didn’t die for love – it died because of its own internal weakness. That inherent weakness of Windows is the reason NASA would have none of Windows in its software for any of the flights it fancies – Windows would be the first to crash.

Microsoft Windows is known to crash every now and then and the Baesa crash was not a surprise. I consider myself an expert when it comes to setting up Windows XP, but nobody’s perfect. At home, we have been using two desktop PCs (1 for the Hilarios and 1 for the office) side by side for over a year now, and I have been installing and reinstalling software in those two PCs since then countless times. Just the other day, I reinstalled Windows XP in the two PCs about 6 times – virus + Trojans + spyware, probably and errors on my part, certainly.

Why the talk about Windows in an item about love – has Windows any lesson to us about love? Yes, I do believe it has, and it is this:

Love what you have. Hate is such a waste of creative energy.

‘Kill Bill’ is such a waste of energy. A few days ago, I emailed someone who was ranting against Philippine politicians and leaders and blaming them for the ills of the country, and told him it was a pity to spend energy on anger when it can be channeled to something more productive, more creative. And he responded: ‘TAMA KA DYAN. (You’re correct there.) USELESS GETTING ANGRY.’

That’s why Jesus did love, and did not hate. He was instructing us how to live everyday: Do love, don’t do hate.

Ultimately, he was instructing us to live forever this way, let me say it again:

Christ showed us the way to eternal salvation by dying for love.

Now, in my view, there are 4 important things to consider in that formulation:

Showing the way. Jesus didn’t live for himself. He didn’t try to attain perfection for himself. He was unselfish. When he knew he was ready for his ministry, young as he was, he embarked on it boldly, not even informing his parents, Mary and Joseph, who were concerned. When you love, you love everyone equally and have no special attachment even to your parents. He was willing to die for his conviction; he was willing to sacrifice everything for his attachment, and he had only one – it was called Love. And it was enough: Love covers all, more than a multitude of sins.

Eternal salvation. Our ultimate goal is to possess eternal redemption, or eternal life, whichever comes first. There is no greater goal than this – there is no other goal in life than this.

Dying. To be saved, to be redeemed as sinners, we have to die. Ah, death, where is thy sting; grave, where is thy victory? In dying, we don’t have to breathe our last; we only have to die to self. That is to say, to renounce the self as private, complete, independent, free. The self is not whole; the self is only one member of mankind, which is The Whole. When you realize that, when you are able to accept that, you have died to self.

Loving. Love is physical, psychical, personal, emotional, chemical etc, but is not shared with only 1 or 20 or 300 or 4,000,000; it is shared with all – or it is not love. The way I see it, that is the true meaning of 1 Corinthians 13. Whom do we love? We are selective and should not be. Love is all-inclusive. Love is not between people who select each other – love is among all the people. Love selects all.

Now, the concept of ‘dying for love’ need not be physical – it is first of all psychical, involving the self: Love is a sacrifice of one’s self-interest in the interest of one’s love. That is why love is the most difficult thing we have to do.

The image by Finnegar illustrates what I mean: If you can die to self, if you can accept that you are not whole until you accept that you are part of the world, or that the world is part of you, then you can indeed die for love.