A third one at http://marygrace.posterous.com/ is about my favorite stuff/obsessions.

Meaning + fun.

∞

Love is costly as much as it is freeing.

To be a peacemaker and a true lover, one must be a good fighter who will fight well and know which battles are worth fighting for when others have already given up and copped out.

Home is not a building or a zip code, it’s loving truly and being loved fully.

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” - Mother Teresa

“Love is loss: a deliberate, courageous form of giving yourself away.” – Jon Foreman

“If love were a choice who would choose such exquisite pain?” – from the movie ‘Anna & the King’

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”   – G.K. Chesterton

“If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” – Jon Foreman

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” – H. L. Mencken

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” – Murdoch

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continual debt to love one another.” – Saint Paul

∞

“Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to get leisure.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” – Socrates

“If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.” – W. H. Auden

“Time is real, we can’t rewind it / Out of everybody I met, who told the truth? Time did” – Common

∞

Mystery is not a problem requiring a solution but a truth awaiting revelation.

“The supernatural is the natural still not understood.”

“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” – Saint Augustine

“For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.” – Aristotle

∞

Real intercession is praying for what God wills for me and other people not what I want for myself or what others desire for themselves.

Prayer is trusting God to do the right thing—the best thing—despite our limited vision and choices.

∞

Without afflictions or antagonists, life wouldn’t be much of the adventure that it is.

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” – Mother Teresa

“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” – Aristotle

“Adversity has a way of revealing to us who are and how we see God.”

“Unless you embrace suffering you will never be free from it.”

∞

Don’t try to put humans inside stereotype boxes—they ain’t all cubes and squares.

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” – Saint Augustine

“It is our light—not our darkness—that most frightens us.” – Nelson Mandela

“Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?” - Pablo Casals

“All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.” – Plato

“Sin is too stupid to see beyond itself.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” – Jack Kerouac

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” -Mark Twain

“The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” -Thomas Sowell

“Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us…” – C.S. Lewis

“To be yourself in a world which is (trying) to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle.” – E.E. Cummings

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” -Mark Twain

“The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.” – Blaise Pascal

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.” -Bob Dylan

“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within” – George MacDonald

“To err is human- and to blame it on a computer even more so.” – Robert Orben

“We keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.” –Bukowski

∞

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” – Mother Teresa

“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” – Mother Teresa

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” — Desmond Tutu

“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” – Saint Augustine

“Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?” – Cornell West

∞

Sometime and somewhere in the history of the human sojourn, someone tampered with the map. But the prime destinations have always been holiness, not happiness; compassion, not accumulation; right relationships instead of rigorous religion, grace instead of greed.

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

”The question is not what you look at but what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” – Kierkegaard

“It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.” – Aristotle

“Speak only to improve the silence.” – (some ancient Chinese dude whose name I can’t read)

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” – Shakespeare

“Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?” –T.S. Eliot

“When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor Frankl

“Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.” – Blaise Pascal

“Happy is a yuppie word.” –Bob Dylan

“Confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder.” – Cornell West

“He not busy being born is busy dying.” – Bob Dylan “Show me a day when the world wasn’t new.” – Sister Barbara Hance

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” – Thoreau

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela

∞

Some people see the church as a building with walls made of uniform bricks and they think there should be a qualifier for the limited number of persons who can enter it. They don’t see it as a body made up of different parts—diverse people with diverse functions and capacities, pains and brokenness, yet alive and growing as it is nourished.

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” -Jonathan Swift

“At the beginning of all spiritual endeavor stands humility, and he who loses it can achieve no other heights than the heights of disillusionment.” – Friedrich Dessauer

“Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.” – Kierkegaard

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Bukowski

“Two basic loves: the love of god unto the forgetfulness of self or the love of self to the…denial of god.” – Augustine

“I pray that I may be quit of God to find God.” -Meister Eckhart

“Those who believe… without uncertainty, without doubt… believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.” – de Unamuno

“The number of people who have fled the church because it is too patient or compassionate is negligible.” -B. Manning

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott

“To follow Jesus is to love your way through the darkness of this world.” – Cornell West

“The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.” –Socrates

“You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.” – Kierkegaard

“True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul” –Einstein

∞

“One cannot hope to truly forgive unless that person knows about the rich incomprehensible joy of being forgiven.” – Dan Allender

“It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no one willed” – F. Engels

“We couldn’t live a day without depending on everybody.” – Will Rogers

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” – Mark Twain

“We are all trying to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts.” – Cornel West

“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards.” -Benjamin Franklin

“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” –Socrates

“As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.” – Socrates

∞

Originality is not so much as standing on your own as much as it is riding on the shoulders of giants to reach new creative heights.

“Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.” – Jonathan Swift

“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” – Mark Twain

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – L. Cohen

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious…the cradle of all true art and science.” -Einstein

“A song is anything that can walk by itself.” -Bob Dylan

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Picasso

“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes… so that something that is not in the poem can creep in…” – Dylan Thomas

About two years ago, I learned about the story of abducted child soldiers and slaves in a continent made nearer by the media and the internet, and dearer because of friends and music.

Before (0r after) you continue viewing the rest of my posts, please take a short while to click on the Social Vibe widget on the right side of this page. For every ad view, my chosen corporate sponsor will donate towards restoring hope to children and communities in a war-torn country in Africa through school buildings, holistic education and scholarships, and feasible employment.

With just about 90 seconds of your time, I encourage you to join me and those at Invisible Children in bringing the plight of our fellow humans in Northern Uganda from invisible to visible.

*Invisible Children is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 by three young independent filmmakers with the motivation to bring attention to the unseen war in northern Uganda and use the power of stories to change lives around the world for good.

It is harder to ignore a fact when it is hissing and growling inside my stomach. And the fact is that, right now, about 2.7 million people from Darfur are starving in displacement camps where they fled from violence and annihilation. And this already dire condition worsened beginning earlier this year, when the Sudanese government blocked the aid coming from international humanitarian groups, which the refugees have come to depend on for survival.

As I write this, deadlines are hounding me. But these are paperwork—concepts and abstractions in the air. The hard realities present a more impending deadline. Lives are actually at stake here. And my humanity is on the line.

In those moments when I’m not distracted, the heart recognizes that the stories of the displaced people in Darfur are closely intertwined with mine. But a full stomach can sometimes muddy this clarity in the busy streets of a harried mind. This is a timely reminder even for a grad student struggling to pay the rent and bills in a “3^rd world country” where inner and outward poverty is as close as glancing outside the window, stepping outside the door, and looking in my mirror.  Because whether a country is included in the G8 or the Bottom 8, each nation has something at stake here.

But this is more than just an issue of nutrition and physical survival. There is a different kind of hunger which affects more than the flesh and the bones. Sadly, this deeper sort of hunger not only gnaws at the soul and erodes dignity; it also emaciates the humaneness in humanity.

Once self-sustaining and thriving as a community, the refugees now have fewer to call their own and even much lesser to partake as daily sustenance. Yet they and I and everyone else will always be equal in dignity.  My hunger strike as a tiny gesture of oneness with every Darfuri may be a drop in the bucket.  Yet I’m hoping that that drop will help tip the scales to balance—a more accurate depiction of every person’s equality in worth.

The hunger pangs, trauma, and terror of the displaced Darfuris are mine too. Yet the more disturbing thing is that I don’t just identify with the “victims” in the refugee camps. The perpetrators who have vehemently denied the necessities and brutally forced them out of their lands and homes? Sometimes I am them too—when I know about these things and I don’t even try to do anything about it.

But what do I do about it? I have no clue.  All I know is that my voluntary hunger does not directly lead to having at least one famished Darfuri in the camps being fed by what I denied myself. It’s obviously not a simple equation as that. But the experience of fasting to enter the stories of those who are suffering did bring the refugees’ plight to the forefront of my consciousness and the core of my affect.  I have become more aware of my own greed, selfishness, and apathy. I had been accustomed to having food when I need or want it that I have to consciously resist it.  I am more needled by injustices—whether committed by my own hands or those in power halfway around the globe. More than ever, I am stirred beyond sentiments and lofty ideals.

In particular, I am moved to tell and retell these stories to others. As a section in the website Darfur Fast for Life poignantly attests, Adam, Oumat, Ateib, Dajhima, Nima, the rest of those who are fasting without choice, and everyone else in the planet—each has a story to tell and live for.  Since I joined the 3-day fast for Darfur, I have been telling stories of the Darfuris’ forced deprivation and my story of voluntary hunger to friends and family, colleagues and strangers, in planes, buses, gatherings—anyone who is willing to listen.

I want their stories not to end in this bleak plight; I want every heart out there in the displaced camps to be strengthened with stories of renewed hope and sense of dignity.  May others join in helping write a more hope-filled story of the Darfuris and then re-write a dark chapter in history into a brighter one.

Join the fast at: http://fastdarfur.org/

Distraction from Distractions

So this is what it’s like to be a grown up.  It seems that just as childhood is rife with dreams and  goals, adulthood can be replete with uncertainties and disappointments.   As people grow older, some try harder to make it; some just pretend to look put together.  I don’t have enough stamina to climb the steep ladder of worldly success; neither am I gifted with stellar acting skills to carry on the charades of success for the years ahead. The external picture speaks volumes: I’m falling apart and I’ll never make it. And there are certainly instances when it feels that this is all there is to it—that the noise is all the music that we will ever hear and the somber skies is all the light I will ever see. We eat to go hungry again. We fix things only for them to get broken once more. We begin endeavors with the best intentions and they end up hijacked in the middle of nowhere. We invent machines and methods to have better communication but individuals have become more isolated than ever.

So I cover my ears and close my eyes. And then I start to hear and see more clearly.  I shun food, and I feel more nourished.  We embrace other people and ourselves amidst the mess we made, and everything feels more in order. I walk or sit in lonely repose, and then I begin to feel closer to those whom I love and those who love me.

Letting God be God

Often, God is not the god we would have chosen.*  We want a God who is faithful to us in ways we can easily comprehend and anticipate, who expresses faithfulness in ways that we specified.^ I wonder if the disbelief or bigotry of many people is not due to God’s absence in their lives, but rather the disappointing and disdaining prospect that the true God might indeed be nothing like the god of their own definitions.

We grew up thinking that, with the proper education, we will have amassed theoretical knowledge in almost everything by the time we reach adulthood, and that we will know more in experience as we get older.  But the only thing I came to know after all these years is that I don’t know anything at all. Absolutely nothing.  With every candle added on top of that sugary icing or pastry, I just feel older, not much wiser.

Which is why I need Wisdom herself to be my teacher.  And one of the things I now recognize that no one in this world—not the “powerful,” “knowledgeable,” “wise,” “lucky,” “moral,” or “rich”—is in control. Certainly not me.

Oh yes, we do have choice, which is a form of control. But all choices boil down to just a couple of things: One, we take everything into our own hands, thinking that we know what we need and want and the best way to get it; we decide to play god in our personal universe where every effort is spent imagining and conniving to make things orbit around us. Two, we recognize that we are not the main author of this story; we are not the artist of this piece called history; that we are deficient and fallible stewards; thus, we loosen our grip in faith, give the reins in trust to the only one who can handle it with grace and redemption, and open our arms in loving embrace to everyone and all of life.

Choosing, once and daily, to be the solution instead of the problem, to let love be the anchor of justice, to wrap mercy with the shroud of grace—are among the scariest yet most liberating things I’ve ever attempted. I am responsible for my decisions, but not accountable for other people’s choices or the consequences.  I try not to play to anyone’s rules anymore. I discontinued making up my own rules to live by. Because there is only one able and rightful Ruler and I chose to let him be. He may be unpredictable, seemingly frustrating and elusive at times, but no one else is as good, as loving, or as promisingly satisfying as the one true God.

The Other Cheek

Not all are convinced that this is so and God is such a God.

For all we know, God is working on something else, something other than trying to become our pie-in-the-sky god.  Just maybe he is up to a more mind-boggling, logic-defying miracle than we ever could have asked for or imagined. The God of the universe has meant to do a work in and through (but not for) us.^

I don’t think of myself as burdened with the proof of the truth, although it may feel that way sometimes. God is God and he can handle everything. I think the only way I can be part of how God “proves himself” is by truly loving him back with all of me, with all of my life.

And loving God back, as far as I’m able to comprehend, is why I am, as much as the love of God is who I am. What I mean is that my identity is intrinsically linked to God’s name as Love, and my reason for existing is closely connected to the rationale behind the relationship of God with every human being. The purpose in relating to others is learning to love them the way God does and to receive God-empowered love from them.

Nonetheless, loving God back can sometimes feel like provoking death. This comes from the fact that, from the human perspective, God is usually a most unconventional lover. Or it may be because we are not as good and passionate lovers as he is. After all, it was he who defined love and is the very definition of love.  We, on the other hand, often can’t even begin to spell love, whether with our motives, deeds, or words.

This is mostly excruciating. Love is not a natural human reaction to someone who stands on our way, blocking our paths towards immediate gratification or earthly happiness.  Many don’t acknowledge their anger or hatred for God out of pandering piety or rigorous religiosity. But real love is unflinchingly honest as true love is free from fear.

It often feels that instead of benefits raining down, there’s a downpour of disappointments, which does not attest well to the kind of love God has for us.  Therefore, the calling to love God in all its nuances comes with the avocation for faithful obedience as we trust in his strong love and his perfect wisdom.  Loving God also means practicing obedient faith, which is necessary for a thriving inner life because we humans tend to be limited by the concreteness of evidences to back up our beliefs and perceptions. Sometimes loving God feels like it requires turning the other cheek to Him, which at first seems absurd or paradoxical. But when given further thought, the One who sculpted those cheeks into my face can do anything with it as He pleases.

I have set out in this search to truly know about the one true God whom I chose to worship and serve.  It may seem irreverent and cavalier, but beyond becoming a God-worshiper and God-server, I have turned into a God-wrestler. I flood him with tears. He showers me with grace. I shirk in fear because of my limited vision. He stretches my viewpoint’s horizons. I twist his arm for a name. He embraces me with arms of assurance. I shoot questions in doubt of his love. He unfailingly gives me endless second chances to accept his love as the best answer. On and on goes the long list of his gracious responses to my belligerent temerity and rebelliousness.

The Cost of Being Free

God’s love is strong. It transcends failures, mistakes, and flaws.  I am deeply loved with this strong love. I knew it and therefore I know freedom. I am free.

On the other hand, any kind of knowing enslaves. Because you can no longer think, act, and feel in opposition to what you already know without some considerable nagging from the head or a tug from the heart.  A respected author rightly declared that we are all slaves—slaves to instincts, desires, ideals, delusions, other people…It seems that we have limitless choices of gods and altars on which to offer our time, energy, money, attention…

But if love were among these choices, who would choose such exquisite pain? It appears that love is both an involuntary compulsion and a conscious decision. When I tried not to care, it doesn’t work any whit, like me trying to stop the sun from rising and setting. There are times when I feel free from the addictive grip of devotion and passion. But even just by doing the most mundane things—like watching little children play in a park, listening to a song, or riding a bus—can draw me back to the arms of love. And before I knew it, I’m back at it again. Because I’m too much of a fool not to. Some friends made the observation that I am capable of great courage. But really, I’m only one part brave and then three parts fool.

Pissing Off the Enemy

I always wanted to be a hero. From my early years, heroic tales and individuals—real or imagined—never failed to enthrall me. I relish the feeling and the thought of me playing a part every time good conquers evil.  I crave real adventures.  I want to give God the delight of pointing me out to His foe as someone who is always on the side of goodness and love, charity and justice, truth and peace; who is a true lover, friend and daughter.

I still want to be a hero. But what are the chances of being a David Livingstone, etc?. I’m painfully average and my life is almost ordinary. And in the ordinariness of many of my days, living can sometimes feel like I’m just cleaning up the mess I made, that I’m just trying to undo my past mistakes, wishing for a do-over to whitewash my regrets. Then at the end of the day, when it’s time to rest in the bed I made, I can’t sleep in it. With all my flaws and errors, I don’t see myself as deserving of a break to savor the fruits of my hardships.

I’m definitely one who is not content with just passing through. I’m more comfortable cutting others considerable slack while being hard on myself to toe the line and be on fire all the time.  Yet with all these efforts, I still end up in dead-end roads and at the bottom of the morass.  Many sincerely good people never reach their rainbow’s end; many deceitful and apathetic people continue to thrive well in their sprawling concrete cribs and Ducati wheels. I’m supposed to be in the middle of these two categories but it appears that what the “good” do not deserve and what the “bad” should get  tend to befall me on a regular basis.

With all the glitches in my soul, there’s nil chance that I would rise to the rank of general in the war against evil abroad and within. It appears that the only way for a mere foot soldier like me to be a hero for love and goodness is to not let the tormenting, ironic adversities get to me. I saw how hopeful resilience (as opposed to apathetic jadedness) can be such a potent weapon in the invisible battlefields of the heart and the cosmos. So I will continue to suck it in, “raw deals” and all, and even relish the fact that, with the right kind of hope and long-suffering, I could be pissing off the enemy and gaining heart and soul ground for the coming kingdom.

The Only Fuel

I am typing these words and they are pointing at me with a hypocritical finger.

Now and then, on those frustrating days, it crosses my mind to “teach” others a lesson, get even, or drag them with me on my way down to the gory mire of revenge and hatred.  I pretend that the justice I mete out will be more fulfilling because it is more tangible and swifter than the excruciating process that ensues out of the decision to turn the other cheek out of “bold love”. We think we will like things better in our own terms.

In time and by degrees, I came to own the fact that I am not here or out there to prove myself right or to prove others wrong. My existence ceased to be about me as I see it.  I try to be energized by no other fuel apart from love; I join no other movement besides charity. Because ultimately, there is nothing to prove. There’s only the truth of lasting love to rest on.

My eyes may now be a tiny bit jaded, my pace slightly dragging, my soul scarred. But more than ever, my heart is dared to move by love and in love.  I have become more willing to live even after what seems like a thousand deaths; I have become more welcoming of death that I may live tomorrow and see the day that will wipe out the remembrance of every sorrowful tear and lament.

I wait.

“I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot,” declares the LORD. Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.”  – Hosea 2:14-15

∞ 15 March 2009

* Walter Brueggemann (2003) in his book of prayers, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth.

^adapted from author, Bible teacher and musician Michael Card’s article, God’s Disturbing Faithfulness (2005)