In a way, I am grateful for some of the esoteric and elegant math I’ve learned in physics. It gives me a nosebleed idea of the way God thinks. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.”
When I Say I Love You
What do I mean when I say “I love you?”
From the onset, what seemed to be an over-run expression especially during Valentine’s is actually problematic. There is the subject “I” and the object “You.” What is fundamentally revealed in the structure of the sentence with the addition of the verb “love” is a relation and if we wonder further, we can ask: What happens when a totally different I relate to a totally different You through love?
Goodbyes
I’ve never liked goodbyes. Or well, to be more accurate, I don’t like about 90% of the goodbyes I’ve said in my life. The 10% accounts for people I never got close to or I never got along with. But that 90%... that 90% was mighty painful. That 90% included family members, close friends and students that have gone in and out of my life. We live in a generation of mass migrations and impermanent situations. Some are destined to leave. And some are destined to be left behind. More often than not, I find myself in the latter group.
Love and Time
Thus, I rejoice with the first gift that is my beloved’s arrival—her existence and time. That she exists, and that she exists in this time, not the past nor the future, but is thrown together, simultaneous, co-incidental with me.
The second gift is her second arrival and that is our crossing of paths—that she not only existed and not only existed in this time, but that also she existed and she existed in the exact time and space as I was.
PM From Ignatius of Loyola to the New Generation
Fellow Pilgrims,
First of all, in the tradition of twitter, I would like to ask, “what are you doing?” I don't expect you to answer this in 140 characters or less, but that question can very well be the starting point of everything there is to know about life and your place in this universe.
A Friend
As a cradle Catholic, I grew up thinking that the saints were as real as my friends. Only, they had more power—although not quite dressed as fashionably as the Super Friends. Aside from my family, they were the constant in my life. And I don’t just mean in a spiritual abstract way. I mean, their photos and statues were in all the places I spent most of my time. They were there in our house. In my grandmother’s house. My aunt’s house, where I spent summer vacation. At church. In school. They’d even be at the department store—even if they were there for different reasons. They were always the same. Always in the same pose. Always dressed in the same way. Always with a halo.
Love and Suffering
It does not out work out the way romantic movies tell us. These movies conclude on an ecstatic but idealistic assumption that love ends happily ever after. Not all are lucky in love. Not all live happily ever after. Or those happily ever afters are not the ones we consistently dreamed of as happy. There are always struggles within. Relationships still break apart. Lovers reveal themselves as all too human, prone to error, temptation, and strife. Love manifests itself not as a matter of luck but a dreadful battlefield—an exhausting war of comings and goings, of sin and forgiveness, of toil and suffering. Stripped off of its eros, magic, and fantasies, what we are left with is a fragile and futile reality of love that hurts, decays, and is finite. Love, as we imagined and desired it to be, remains (reminiscent of Descartes) an elusive dream. It is an elusive dream that torments us.
The Game of Love
Housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome is the life-sized marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Prominent during his time, Bernini is known to have possessed the unique ability to capture in marble, the essence of a narrative moment with a shocking dramatic realism. A viewer can readily perceive this gifted ability by gazing at Apollo and Daphne, one of his famous works.
prayersofapilgrim.com 