Going beyond 'cash values'

Whenever it is half-way to my next payday, I keep on being reminded of money and the lack of thereof. It seems that the world today revolves around it and given its place in our modern life I believe that it deserves serious reflection that goes beyond the ‘biblical stewardship’ that is often peddled in contemporary churches.

Reflecting on the ethical implications of Matthew 6:19-34 Craig Gay, encourages his readers to transcend and rediscover meanings and values that go beyond the Christian response to the impasse that money poses to believers:

There are many things that we would need to say if we were to properly exegete this remarkable passage, but there are several points we can mention briefly in light of our discussion. The first is that Jesus describes ‘mammon’ not simply as a possible object of worship but also as a kind of ‘master’ to whom service must be rendered if it is to be worshipped. The second is that Jesus suggests that we are moved to worship mammon primarily out of anxiety and fear of not having our basic material needs met. And the third is that our anxiety and fear disclose a fundamental—and to—Jesus’ mind almost ridiculous –lack of trust in the goodness of God.

Christian TV: God help us all

Last night, Araneta Center, Cubao was teeming with Christian hipsters and their trendy youth pastors to watch the Christian-Rock worship group Passion, which as I was told by a friend will be a long-awaited worship experience, for 'born again' Christians. Anyways seeing the long lines, the merchandise, the CD's, the t-shirts worn I cannot help but feel, something like this video below: Watch. Be Horrified. Weep For Modern Christianity.

Here's a post that I wrote last year on the same phenomenon from a Filipino perspective. I guess not too many differences can be found here...

the space in between

Why the change of name?

For those who’ve been visiting this blog it used to be called: ad maiorem Dei gloriam which is Latin for the phrase: “For the greater glory of God,” which incidentally is also the motto of the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits.

Anyways I opt to change the blog name not because I no longer want to pursue a life that is lived ad maiorem Dei gloriam, I changed it because I firmly believe that if I were to pursue such a life I ought to be honest with where exactly I am in my walk of faith or whatever you would want to call it.

After days and nights of reflection on it I realize that with all honesty I haven’t reached that life yet. I am still this selfish, and self-consumed person who writes in condescending theological language online to speak out about the things that I have read, or are still struggling with.

In short, I am still a work in progress.

I am unfinished and I am in that vast space in between beginning and completion. I am in the tension between the now and not yet.

That is why I chose to rename it from a phrase that has commonly been attributed to Victor Turner’s concept of liminality which I got acquainted to via a lecture at the seminary on The Jewish Exodus from Egypt.

This is where I find myself in –in the space in between: the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.

Prayer

This is another one of those things that I’ve read a few months back that I’ve always meant to post, but haven’t really done so because there’s so much going on and there’s a lot of other things that were deemed important before. However, events in life would jolt us and we’d have to struggle with things like faith, hope, God’s Omnipotence and prayers, that are not answered according to our yearning, which Patrick Grant articulates so well in his book about the struggle towards a contemporary Christian spirituality:

“In the words of the old formula, prayer is an elevation of the heart and mind to God. It is the mind raising the heart’s chalice, the body’s offering.

The best-known prayer is petitionary, even though it does not make logical sense to ask Omnipotence for favours; we can only ask that God’s will be done, yet God’s will is done whether we like it or not. Still, logic does not account for the contradiction within which we find ourselves contending with Omnipotence.1”

1 Grant, Patrick. Out of Contradiction: Meditations towards a contemporary spirituality. (Edinburgh: The Pentland Press 1994) pp. 35-36

dia in su il fantasma

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
Ecclesiastes 1:2 (NIV)

I only knew her for a few minutes.

Yet her life speaks so much about how meaningless and unfair the world is...

I can still remember how I carried her beaten and bloodied body to the vet and buried the husk that once hosted her life in a shallow grave in our front yard.

I didn't even got the chance to know her name...

She was so young and yet so thin...so hungry...hungry enough to risk being mauled by our dog Hershey who thought her presence was an invasion of our house...

Our lunch cut short with the sound of agonized howling and the sight of her at the mercy of Hershey’s jaws. It took a splash of cold water for Hershey to release her from her death grip...

A punctured lung. A broken spleen. Ravaged intestines. The sight of her limping in a pool of blood.

Three bloody syringes to the heart ends her misery, her life and all its meaninglessness.

A glass eye. A still body. A contented frown.

What could be more tragic than dying young, hungry, painfully and unloved in the arms of strangers?

The mystery of life and death in barely sixty minutes of anguish and tears.

Frederick Buechner on love and gender orientation

I've been wanting to post this here for a while now, but it just seems that there are a lot of things to do, and better topics to blog about.

Nevertheless, I decided to re-post this piece from Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized, in his entry on the word --Homosexual he writes:

One of the many ways that we are attracted to each other is sexually. We want to touch and be touched. We want to give and receive pleasure with our bodies. We want to know each other in our full nakedness, which is to say in our full humanness, and in the moment of passion to become one with each other. Whether it is our own gender or the other that we are chiefly attracted to seems a secondary matter. There is a female element in every male just as there is a male element in every female, and most people if they're honest will acknowledge having been at one time or another attracted to both.

growing old | growing cold

After so many years I am scolded by my parents two times in the span of a week.

Funny thing about it is that its mostly about the most mundane things that I have done or have forgotten to do.

I am almost in my 30s, I am aging and have become even more aware of the immanence of my mortality.

I am aging but not growing.

I am suddenly realizing that the prospect of death isn’t so bad as opposed to the prospect of living dead in a life that’s filled with remorse and ‘what ifs.’

I cannot think straight anymore.

I am consumed with this unquenchable thirst for this one thing that’s so near and yet so far away –of this one person whom I must love from a distance, whose heart cannot be mine.

I hate myself and I want to die, because it is in dying that I hope to find solace that perhaps my passing would clear out the grime that I have tainted on the lives of the people whom I claimed to have cared for and loved.

Life as it seems now is somewhat pointless and that trying to make sense out of it inevitably leads to the collapse of my sanity.

So for now I wait and see and hopefully accept what life has in store...

bane

Love is this bane messed up sense of strong affection and attachment to the one that I cannot be with, for so many reasons that I cannot fathom.

I hate myself for being honest with what I feel.

I hate myself for clinging onto a ghost of a good thing.

As Sinatra once sang in his satirical take on the subject, we spoil good things by saying those three stupid words: “I love you.”

If only saying it is as simple as expressing gratitude to a wonderful meal, a lovely day or a favour rendered.

No reality is crueler than our imaginations because this entails an experience felt by a person for another person. Therefore it involves caring for or identifying with the object of your affection.

It is not convenient. It entails memories both good and bad. It takes us out of our comfort zones, it brings us fuller to our humanity than we can ever imagine. It incites desires. It fuels passion. It releases the devil in our emotions and the goodness in our beings. It stings as death. Its breath brings life. It confers choices. It bears consequences. It gives joy. It inflicts pain.

If only words are as simple as life…

easier said than done

Earlier today I was walking along the streets of Cubao when I passed along this, theater-turned-church-turned-miracle-center-of-sorts by a famous televangelist. As I passed I was met by a couple of teenagers who handed me a gospel track and promised me salvation. "Para sa kaligtasan sir!" (‘for your salvation sir’), and what followed was something shameful for my part I mumbled: "salvation, is easier said than done."

Now don’t get me wrong. I just reacted the way I have probably reacted for a couple of years now whenever I would be approached by people who wish to save me, which oftentimes mean: proselytize me. I’m still down with the whole idea that its something that is freely given by grace through faith –after all Scriptures testify that and I won’t contest that.