Picasso's kiss

Confused cubes
distort the imagination
neither yellow nor blue
always green


“to paint and nothing more”
Regardless of production
nothing existed before
“divested of useless realism”


the lines blur
the canvas tainted
the body frigid
the mouth opened


misplaced emotions
a wasteland
when a hunger for meaning
wraps its hands around my waist


"Neither the good nor the true"
colors that create nothing
my lips are void
“neither the useful nor the useless”

A Franciscan Benediction

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth bodly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

And the blessing of God the Supreme Majesty and out Creator, Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word who is our Brother and Savior, and the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide, be with you and remain with you, this day and forevermore. Amen

the reality of memories

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Sometimes I really miss being home. I miss the fields of bluebonnets outside of my house, I miss the coffee my parents brew every morning, I miss swinging on the back porch with my sisters.
I miss the smell off the heat dying off during a summer nights, I miss the sound of crickets in the countryside.
I am discovering more and more that this is not my home. But then the reality that when I go home it will not be the same is almost more frightening than living in a foreign country.
In Victor Frankl's “Search for Meaning,” he writes about the deep depression that many holocaust survivors faced after finding that the homes the returned to after years of suffering were not the same.
Frankl laments over this sense of idealism we build in our minds when we hold our memories to be a current reality. How could someone's memories be so strong that they sustain a person through such a hell? How could something hold someone together, give them strength to fight day to day, provide meaning through suffering, when that memory no longer exists?
And this is the struggle of living overseas. The people who are related to my memories our real; the love I feel towards them still “is”, but this ideal life I look back on, the accumulation of all the good moments, never was. And what is even more sobering is to realize that those moments have led me to where I am now.
I am at this point where I realize, in some ways, I am still that. But now, I am this also.
Its the analogy I have used before: my native country is yellow, this foreign country I live in is blue, and now I will just be green for the rest of my life. I can learn this country's history, I can learn the language, I can analyze and study the culture, but I will always be an outsider. Also, I can go home, but I will never be the girl I was before. I will compare and have part of an outside world always living with me. And most discussions will be tuned out in my mind by this repetitive saying when people begin discussions with me that, while this is the reality of their world, this is not the reality of the world.
Sometimes I wonder if this kind of introspection is harmful. I get so frustrated with people because they never want to have these kinds of conversations; but I question if in the end there is any kind of intrinsic value to these observations. Perhaps sometimes it is better just not to think about it. Besides, what kind of memories are made out of contemplating memories?

La soledad de America latina

Today I would like to honor Gabriel García Márquez.

Here is the speech he gave in 1982 after receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Solitude of Latin America
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

My Name Is Asher Lev-the struggle between who and what you are

A few months ago I read "My Name is Asher Lev" by Potok Chaim. Potok presents a young boy, Asher Lev, who is a kind of child prodigy artist. From a very young age, Asher Lev compulsively draws very profound pictures. His parents, who are Hasidic Jews, hope that their son will eventually give up his childish hobby and follow in the footsteps of his father.
As the story progresses, the son becomes more and more obssessed with art which fuels the tension between father and son. Asher, who loves his father, wants to please him, but also struggles with this gift that has taken him over.
Throughout the story, Potok sets up a dictomy between "who" and "what" Asher is.
As an Hasidic Jew, Asher is destined to carry out the traditions and bloodline of his family because this is WHO Asher is. But as an artist, Asher is obligated to paint the world as he sees it because this is WHAT Asher is.
Finally, one night Asher's father discovers drawings of Christ and naked women. Astonished, he questions his son about the blasphemous art. Asher responds,"Because I'm part of a tradition, Papa. Mastery of the art form of the nude is very important to that tradition. Every artist who ever lived drew or painted the nude. . . . "Idont want to sit in a room painting for myself. I want to communicate what I do. And I want critics to know I can do it." . . . "I respect you,Papa. But I cant respect your aesthetic blindness." Asher's father refutes his son by exclaiming that it is better to be aesthetically blind than morally.
For the last few months, I have been contemplating the complexity and application of this dictomy. It appears that many people develop this tension between who and what they are. But why is that some people are able to come to terms with it better than others? Perhaps because of the nature of extremes, some are able to blend who and what they are, while others have to chose.
An interesting point is that, while it is obvious that Asher's father is condemning his son's love for art from a moral framework, it seems that Asher also develops a kind of worldview from which he observes his surroundings.
Asher's teacher, a man who serves as a type of role model states, "I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I seem them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they are not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world."

For Asher's teacher, art becomes the only objective reality from which he views everything else. And so also for Asher, art takes the place of religion to justify his existence. "Listento me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing,except to yourself and to the truth as you se it."
What does it come down to? What matters is which one the individual finds more meaning in: who or what they are. For Asher, art became his reality.

Interestingly, his father views his son choice as something that he should morally evolve beyond to chose against. Asher Lev's father states,"An animal can't help it, " my father said. "Do you understand me, Asher? The Ribbono Shel Olom gave every man a will. Every man is responsible for what he does, because he has a will and that will he directs his life. There is no such thing as a man who can't help it."

The "what" Asher is fighting against, in his father's opinion, gives the importance to "who" someone is. Part of the esoteric truth discovered in religion is the importance of sacrificing what you are individually for the collective "who".

His father's frustration is displayed when he states, "It's difficult for your father to hate something the world seems to value so much."
For the Lev family, who they are is everything the world isnt. But then it begs the question: is the moral claim Asher's father is making against the world valid? Is the "what" Asher's father is trying to save him from only destructive in the sense that it opposes his religion, or is it initally destructive in "itself?"

The reader is stuck with a dilemma: From the father's perspective, sacrificing "what" you are is the choice many people have to make in order to find the blessing in "who" they are. Unlike animals, people have free will to chose what is morally right against what is aesthically pleasing.
From Asher's perspective, he is chosing against his very existence if he stops drawing. Art is his fate leaving him with no choice. He concludes that he "would not be a whore to [his] own existence."

all shall be well

There is a place where the human fails, breaks down, turns to ashes. Hope has not a single foothold. In such an hour there is a perishing of everything unless the soul waits in silence for God only." - Amy Camichael
A few summers ago I read Amy Carmichael's biography by Elizabeth Elliot and retained this image in my mind of a strong Irish woman in the mist of Hindu temples saving children from prostitution (ie Devadasi). I remember reading this quote after so much had seem to go wrong and feeling overwhelmed with the ability to relate with those few times in my life where I have felt helpless and frozen in emotion.
Living overseas in a different culture has a way of stripping all securities away. When friends, families, and communities are thousands of miles from your new home, God has a way of making you come to terms with yourself in a very deep and profound way. Recently, I have realized that this intense vulnerability, which can be so painful, is one of God's mercies.
It is in trials of intense vulnerability that we must make a choice to indulge in our emotions, being overwhelmed by either anxiety or depressing, or harden ourselves to feeling at all. But if we have faith that God is working through these trials, that they are not just a series of misfortune events, but God's way of developing meaning and character in our lives.
Though the world is overwhelmed with despair, suffering, and darkness, our hope is in Christ and He is our victory. But we must always make the choice whether to give into our own self-pity, doubt, and pain, or have faith that, as Julian of Norwich famously wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Or, as Thomas Merton ends his autobiography:

It was true. I was hidden in the secrecy of His protection. He was surrounding me constantly with the work of His love, His wisdom, and His mercy. And so it would be, day after day, year after year. Sometimes I would be preoccupied with problems that seemed to be difficult and seemed to be great, and yet when it was all over the answers that I worked out did not seem to matter much anyway, because all the while, beyond my range of vision and comprehension, God had silently and imperceptibly worked the whole thing out for me, and had presented me with the solution. To say it better, He had worked the solution into the very tissue of my own life and substance and existence by the wise incomprehensible weaving of His Providence.

the other

I just left a conversation over skype with a friend who just recently returned from living in Brazil's notorious favelas.
Leaving my computer, I was overwhelmed with anger.
I sat down. "Caroline, what am I so angry about."
And some how I already knew.
Im angry at the world. Im angry at people. And maybe Im just a little bit angry with myself.
Old emotions that I will never fully come to terms with.
After working with the same organization that focused on suffering and poverty, it seems that only the few people who have shared your experience are the only ones who really understand.
Others may politely listen and become bothered by your words; attempting empathy they may even cry. But you will you never look into their eyes and with an instance glance realize that they get it. No more words have to be said.
I should never pre judge people. I do not know what they have lived because I can only see the mask they wear.
But what made me so angry today?
When I first returned from Bangkok, I volunteered to teach a bible study at a youth camp. After one of the students pressed to know more about what I did overseas, I shared a few of my experiences. The youth were surprisingly receptive, but I had no idea how talking would effect me. As soon as the students left the room, I landed back into a small orange plastic chair and began to have flashbacks of a certain child I worked with. I started breathing heavily..I became a little dizzy..what was happening?
Upset after this experience, I talked to a man who had done loads of counseling. "What's going on with me? What was that? "oh," he gently replied, "your grieving."
what was I grieving? No one had died.
But in a way, maybe someone had died.
Fastforward to months later. I was watching a movie that showed, in just a flash, a cambodian woman standing on the street selling her body. And in an instant, I had a very similar experience: flashbacks, images, overwhelming sadness, tears boiling under the surface..
And its these kind of experiences that only a few people will understand. Only a few people will be able to provide some kind of solace. But in coping with these memories, I discovered, only today, something else evolve.
back to my conversation with my friend:
"caleb, what makes me so angry is that people will never understand what I experienced; they will never really see the world, and worst of all, they have their lives perfectly formulated in order to make sense of all this suffering. As they conjure up simplified answers to these colossal problems, they will be shielded from the reality of how life if. Yes, I accept a loving God who brings peace and brings healing..but I cant accept simple answers. You will never be able to emotionally and intellectually come to terms with that you have experienced. You have to accept that these issues are irreconcilable.
"Caroline, are you talking about yourself?"
And then something so profound and convicting hit me: I was not only angry at the world that creates this suffering, or the people who stand by idle and watch it happen; in the depths of my heart, I was angry at myself. You see, I realized that in not being able to cope with this hurt I've experience, I have hardened myself in some ways to not feel these pains anymore. I have become that person. Although vocally I still stand for the poor and the oppressed, my lifestyle screams apathy.
I guess this is what I really want to get down to and address: Why do we become "that something else we detest?" A few weeks ago, a seemingly homeless man started talking to me on the train. I had no idea where this vagabond had been or where exactly he was going; the only thing I really KNEW was that in that moment I saw something so profound concerning the human condition.
Our conversation started after he commented that I had "positive energy." "People's lives here are hard and superficial..that is why they dont smile. I like your energy though." Intrigued by this man's observations, I continued to listen to his stories. Trying to not stare at his snaggled teeth and tattered clothes, or turn my head at his breathe that REEKED of alcohol, I really tried to see his humanity and not objectify him because of his appearance.
The sojourner announced that he had become interested in martial arts from an early age to protect women. "You see," he explained, "my father abused me and my mother when I was a child. Now, I protect women," he added with a grin that reveal pockets in his gums where previous snaggled teeth existed.
I froze. I just couldnt come to terms with all of it. Here was a man who had a genuinely sweet and tender heart that desired to help others. In a sense, he had triumphed his father. He would give life in place of where his father had stolen it. But I couldnt ignore the overwhelming defeat I rationalized about the whole situation. He was homeless. He was a drunk. He scared children. So although in some ways he had the victory, I couldnt help but pity the loss. He couldnt deal with reality. His father took a part of him. So, he became that which is loathsome; he became the other.
Next example. A teenage boy who is raped, drugged, forced to dress as a woman, and prostituted. The boy cant deal with the reality or pain he has experienced. He is victorious because he chooses to love the innocent instead of rape them; he triumphs because the way he treats people makes the world a better place. But he is also defeated. As he looks in the mirror and runs his hands down his frail body, he continues in the identity he has been given because real life might literally kill him. So, the boy straps on his stilettos and continues down that street that has become all to familiar to him. He becomes that which he detests; he becomes the other.
But maybe most people's situations are not this extreme. Maybe most people dont experience the kind of traumatic experiences that provoke these reactions. But dont we all do it to an extent?
And so I return to that anger inside me, sitting patiently under the surface of my heart, waiting for some realization that would purge this *oh so unwanted* stream of emotions.
Why do we become that which we detest? Will I become that "other?"
And so I grieve the death of my innocence; I pray for my heart to be vulnerable, that I may feel the sorrows of the world and through the pain return the life that has been taken.

an existential experiment of displacement - prologue

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Albert Camus
It's 1:30 in the morning here in buenos aires and im in the mood to write something deeply philosophical. Well, maybe not deeply philosophical, but something well thought out and profoundly sincere.
I have had a few glasses of wine, and finely want to express myself in a more honest way than before.

Maybe this is overtly emotional, but due to lack to sleep, wine, culture shock, home sickness, and repression of serious though, I hope that my few readers forgive me.
I ask one thing before reading anything I write:
Please use my writings as a part of a thought experiment. Well, maybe not all of my writings, but make a special exception for tonight. Yes, tonight maybe I am not fully present, so please do not take anything I write too seriously.
There are a few issues I would like to discuss. In some ways I feel intellectually repressed, hence my conversational tone in my blog, but in other ways I feel freed. I hope you can follow along.
1) A notion of truth
I would like to navigate between absolutism and relativism. I reject both as certainty, and would like to propose a balanced solution. We must acknowledge a need for balance.
An absolutist view asserts total knowledge of all things- although we find security in absolutism, we all know, as the cliché has it “deep in our hearts”, that we will never know anything with certainty.
But also, no human navigates in absolute relativity, even the most developed existentialist is still directed by some meaning in his “assertion of non- navigation”. Although we feel truth in the realizaion of grays in life, it is death to the human soul to surrender to total gray. Ironically, the person who prides themselves in relatvitism is the very person who terms to declare the “social injustices” of their communities.
2) An establishment of truths
Lets break it down to real life. What is real life? Is the rush of the big city absord in the pluralistic conflicts of the world 'real life”, or is the small country community that focuses on the trivial aspects of everyday life 'real life?' Of course, in a way, both ways address different aspects of life. The big picture of the metropolitan city, and also the small town farmer who feeds the cycle of life with the crops he delivers with his hands. Both are truth. One should not be elevated above the either. Both are equally important. The value of both is that they each attribute to the human.
3) We need to re-establish humanistic truths
Now here is what I am going to say is going to become a little sticky and abstract.
I do not believe in an absolutist truth, but I do believe in a type of universal truth. Now, although this seems contradictory, please try to follow. Or just stop!
What I definite is being a universal truth is a truth that is pro- human. Because we are all of the same species, there are going to “rights” and “wrongs” that are going to be found in every society, although maybe interpreted in maybe different ways. For example, family structure is pro human. Of course, the family structure is not absolutist, and can function in different forms, but there seems to be a universal need for family bonds.
4) An existential experiment of displacement
Perhaps one of the best ways to discover universal truth is through an existential experiment of displacement. Much like John Rawls' veil of ignorance, we must establish humanistic truths based on what we, as an individual, would choose if completely detached from our current position in life.
5) The balance between angels and animals
I think one of the most profound definitions of humanism is that which is seeks the divine, while acknowledging the animal. We MUST seek the ideal, perfection, or so to say..the heavenly. It is this which gives us hope, and it is these things that spur us on to overcome the animal. But, it is also vital to recognize we are mammals; we are not angels. We must not paint life in overtly religious rhetoric, over spiritualizing that which is not spiritual. The most obvious example of this balance is in erotic love. Being love is in a sense a denial of reality; it is envisioning a person in a divine light, which is also crushed later by life, but exists for a time. The ecstasy of the lover causes one to sore through the heavens, which as L.S. Lewis notes, it is no wonder that God created the human with such an animalistic way of consumating its affection in order to bring the person back to earth. The human, who has momentarily tasted soma, has to engage in an act that puts him back in his earthly place.
ok, enough for right now.

maybe its the small things

"Beloved young people, about to choose your life's vocation,
ponder how we are all called to goodness and how the older generation- my own, I regret-
is leaving you a heritage of so much selfishness, of so much evil.
Renew, new wheat, newly sown crops, fields still fresh from God's hand,
children, youths: be a better world." Oscar Romero / martyred March 24, 1980

Last spring, I moved to Bangkok, Thailand, in order to work with the ministry Word Made Flesh. Because one of the main goals of the organization is serving the poor, all of the teams live in simplicity.
For each field, simplicity has a different face.
When I arrived in Bangkok, I found a house full of people and empty of furniture. Day by day, I discovered my lifestyle of simplicity growing more difficult as the luxuries my American life had provided me previously disappear. My breaking point came in April after I had caught lice during a short term trip to Cambodia. I discovered not only my hair infested with little bugs that caused my head to painfully itch without relief, but also that I had caught a flu. Because I had no air conditioning and it was during the Thai summer season, I could not tell whether I was sweating profusely from the heat or my fever. Deprived of a wash machine, I had to boil water several times a day in order to clean my sheets and wash my hair. I remember laying in my bed overcome with self pity. I had never been so uncomfortable in my life and wanted nothing more than to return home. It was then that I thought of the children I worked with every week in the notorious Klong Toey slum. For many of these children, lice, heat rashes, and stomach pains, were a daily part of life. I will never pretend to understand the children of the slums, I will never guess at what they think, I will never comprehend how they feel. But after experiencing a glimpse of their everyday lives, I felt a a barrier that separated us fall. For fourth months, I was not only coming closer to the lives of the children I worked with, but closer to how most children in the world live. Also, I surprisingly found that simplicity was a tool that brought me close to both the children I worked with, along with my team members.
Months later, after returning to the States, my vivid memories of Bangkok mainly consist of sitting on an old tattered mat offering refuge from the cold concrete floor eating bowl after bowl of rice with my friends. Without television or computers in our house, we past time sharing not only stories of laughters, but tragedies in our lives that provoked tears, along with the dreams we hoped our futures held. Many nights we sat outside with out Buddhist neighbors as they shared they candies with us. I remember sometimes feeling the world stop; trapped in a realization that my life in the States was not blessed with this level of daily intimacy with others. In this community, I could not control when things happened or which people I would spend my days with; I had to accept everyone at all times.
I think the greatest challenge of my generation is learning that the Gospel is meant for community, and that community is a place of selflessness. Many Christians wonder if they would ever be able to pay the ultimate price of their lives for the Gospel. But sometimes I wonder whether the daily sacrifices we are called to make are just as valuable.
In Thailand and Cambodia, I had the priviledge of meeting missionaries who had dedicated their lives to serving the poor. For many of them, the cost they paid for their faith was not so drastic that they were running for their lives; instead, for them the challenge was dying to the small luxuries they had previous enjoyed. Saying they would give their life for the gospel was not always the biggest challenge. Sometimes the greatest cost for a missionary is eating another bowl of rice, week after week, when they crave a steak. Or perhaps wanting to sit on the back porch swing with their sister who they have not seen in two years. Because the reality is that giving our lives to the Gospel does not always include a moment of intense decision, but an accumulation of small pains that daily remind us of what we are giving up. It is this type of sacrifice I fear I, along with this generation of Christians, will struggle with. How many of us declare that we would give everything for Christ, as we sit excluded from the pains of the world in our secluded houses? Do we really think we will automatically become selfless human beings if we were forced out of our luxurious environments? The reality is that selflessness is the ultimate assertion of independence; paradoxically, we discover that the more we sacrifice, the more freedom we will find. It is in this liberation that we find it bearable, and even enjoyable, to daily struggle with others.
“What is the 'impossible'? It is liberation. To liberate people from the demons of fear, or loneliness, of hatred and of egoism that shackle them. To liberate people so that they also can love, heal, and liberate others. But in order to do that, you must go in poverty and experience the life of God flowing within your own flesh. You will give life but a life that flows from the heart of God. You will bring people to new life, a new hope. The mystery of community lies between the call of Jesus to communion with him, 'Come and be with me,' and the sending off to announce the good news of love, to give life to other people. - Jean Vanier