The Night Is Yours

‘Vancouver At Night’ by Sutanto

To Take Or Not To Take

13 February – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: Love is never rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not prone to anger. Neither does it brood over injuries. This is real love, ideal love. As human beings, can we have real love, can we achieve ideal love? I believe we could. Because it was to the Corinthians, human beings, whom St Paul was writing those words.

There are 4 sides of love there that St Paul enumerates. Love is never bad-mannered; it is always polite. Love is never selfish; it always thinks of the other. Love is never given to anger; it avoids getting mad at little things. Love never reminisces and remembers hurts; it forgives and forgets.

St Paul describes a love that is extremely difficult to have, to possess, to reach. Yet, we all need an ideal as a measure of what we have gone so far, or so near. Ideals are guiding stars that will not lead us astray even in dark and lonely nights. For we will surely have dark and lonely nights, even lonely days. If we have such love, it will sustain us.

I love this image by Sutanto because it is really a double image, with one image clear and the other image unclear. No matter that I am thousands of miles away from Vancouver. That is how life is, how love is. Is life clear? Is life unclear? It is both. You have to have faith. You take both sides. Take it, not leave it. Soak in the colors of life.

Anger Is Hydra

‘Anger Statue’ by Elmada

The Many-Head Monster

08 January – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: I grieve for the victims of armed conflicts, terrorism and violence, and for the silent deaths caused by hunger, abortion and euthanasia. – Benedict XVI. First of all, I take violence as the use of force and not persuasion or argument as an instrument of change. I’m interested in violence to rights, meaning social rights, not individual rights. Social rights are not a summation of individual rights; they are a systematization of these rights, so that these rights do not become mere multiples but one whole system. The rights of an individual give rise and, having done so, are limited, by the rights of society. Now then, Elmada has this note below the photograph: ‘I have no idea what it is supposed to be.’ I believe I have, and it is that anger is a many-headed monster, like Hydra, the monster slain by Hercules. Anger has many heads: discrimination, revenge, armed conflict, terrorism, violence. ‘Now then,’ if you are not aware of your own anger, then ‘you have no idea what it is supposed to be.’ In that sense, you are one of its victims, in fact, the very first.