Fr. Peter Rosenhart, MSC: 1928-2010

I received the text message past last midnight from a friend, informing me that Fr. Piet had crossed over from this life to the next last August 7, 2010 in The Netherlands. The following dawn, i sat for 2 hours in silence, feeling my loss and contemplating on the man who had sculpted a chunk of my religious sensibility as his sacristan and student. This is a sad day for me and for those who have known him and his missionary life.

For those of us who knew him during his missionary years in the Philippines, we knew him to be physically sturdy, his body strong as a rodeo bull. He did not have the bigness nor the regular Dutch height of the late Fr. Gerard Cruijssen. But his physical strength alone that flowed forth into his dictinct and stern speaking voice was commanding, if not intimidating. He seemed to have been gifted with long years of strong stamina to be able to almost singlehandedly minister to a 24-thousand populated parish for years.

Mainit was his last missionary station, outlasting almost all Dutch missionaries in the area. Mission for him was that northeastern part of Mindanao. I remember back in the mid-80s, how the hallways of the MSC District House in Surigao City teemed with frugal beings on conveniat Monday, simple food being served, a few bottles of beer dotting the dining tables, billiard balls clashing and rolling, the collection of exotic seashells with their scientific names of the late Dutch-speaking Filipino Fr. Portillo clasping our curious minds, while the late Bishop MC consistenly insisted for an 8-ounce Coke. Rooms were filled; hallways and the dining halls with boisterous laughter and stories shared. The Dutch had the penchant for mutual screaming even conversationally that is so alien if not freakish for Filipinos. Then the noise slowly faded, gone without coming back, and the rooms eventually constantly closed. The Dutch were leaving one by one. I’m not sure how much of those empty rooms exacerbated his need to belong, enough to decide to leave the mssionary area after less half-a-century of pastoral plowing. But Fr. Peter was also a man ahead of his time, acute in his vision that leaving was a way of saying – “let the Filipino clergies minister to their own people.”

In Mainit where he served for i guess 12 years, he was brimming with energy, financial resources, and vision. In his long years as our parish priest, 4 years of which i was a part of, he had trekked mountains, a hundred times crossed over our huge lake, had Willyz engine troubles while traversing rivers, built close to 30 chapels including the present main church, sustained the wobbly parochial school, paid hundreds of hospital bills of poor patients, dispersed hogs and carabaos to deserving raisers, did pranic healing to a host of patients and energized their drinking water, officiated countless sacramentals, and coached a good number of lay leaders. It is sort of messianic. Yet, he was fully aware and well-read that Vatican II ushered the shift from a highly doleout, priest-centered European-style of doing mission. He would not start a chapel project for example, without the commitment of the community, big or small depending on its capability. In my 4 years or more of knowing him, I had witnessed the consistency of his compassion for the poor and the sick as well as the implementation of his vision of empowering the lay. The truth I witnessed years ago is still the same truth I treasure up to these days. Early in life, I had known that God’s face is compassion and courage to share power.

He was a gifted man of God. But his gifts and work also got caught up within webs of institutional contradictions. Many times did he brush temper with the Diocese for what Fr. Piet had discerned as laxity in the area of social justice ministry, especially in its concern for the poor in remote barrios. He often castigated the Diocesan complacency in supporting small Catholic schools and their teachers who merely survived out of insufficient salaries. Fr. Peter could anytime speak his mind on cracks in social justice without fear, pushy at times but always seem right. Bishop MC, no doubt a gifted musician, in my adolescent impression was unlikely to share his 8-ounce soda with him during those shared mealtimes. Fr. Peter could be bullish with his physical and intellectual stamina.

In our parish, he terrified most of us by his candor and anger. He was loved by his tireless work of building the community, but often misunderstood for his irreverence of Filipino sentimentality and meekness in speech. It was the less inculturated side of him, the Dutch mark, that despite his extraordinary fluency in our local language, that brought him once to the edge of personal terror. Behind his back, a handful of educated, eloquent elite, who no longer could bear his honest scolding in public gatherings, launched a protest rally in front of the convent on All Souls’ Day. “Roll up your mat,” and “respect the solemnity of the mass” were their cry phrases. Enough with the high temper over a misphrasing of Paul’s letter to the Philippians! Had there been a psychiatrist’s clinic in our town, he would have been barraged with referrals for anger management. But he was sturdy enough to stay in his post but more mellow after in his manner.

Anger was his Achilles’ heel; it was his vulnerable side and it ground against Filipinos’ sense of meekness, privacy in criticism or correction, and rebellious spirit.

Fr. Piet, what you have done for the Reign of God in our midst is actually beyond our human measuring sticks. All I know is you have run your race and fought the good fight of your faith. By doing so, you have touched and shaped many lives and many faiths. You have touched and shaped mine in so many self-giving ways and I will remain grateful to you and to God for the transforming meeting of our lives. The last physical token of gratitude I dedicated to you was a manuscript of prayers and reflections born out of my encounter with cancer patients. In the unfolding of time, you became one of them. The healer’s body, seemingly enslaved by cancer cells, but in truth was “bursting out from bondage into boundlessness.” To me, you simply broke away from mortality into eternity.  Your passover was one loss of God’s servant in the world. But even then, as i keep running my race, I get the bonus confidence that one more intercessor in you has been in Heaven. I believe you have lived out the main question that your fellow Dutch Henri Nouwen used to ask:

“The main question is not, How much will we still be able to do during the few years we have left to live? But rather, How can we prepare ourselves for our death in such a way that our dying will be a new way for us to send our own and God’s spirit to those whom we loved and who have loved us.”

The meeting of our lives was a meeting of love, fierce love sometimes. It was meant to be. It will never be lost. It will remain to be so hopefully for the joy of anyone in the journey of faith, in our own movement from mortality to eternity. You will surely be missed around. We will miss the unique energy you bring into the world. But soon it will be a more divinely tamed one we will receive. Thank you for fighting a good fight with us. May eternal joy beyond what we can imagine be yours now. 

“

Uncle Jose: Thirsting a Man’s Presence

Grief is in the air. What with all the ghastly news of murders and massacres we intuitively associate with MEN. Let’s tweak the issue a little bit. Men-victims of domestic violence seem a silent statistic, isn’t it? My Uncle Jose’s death was a case in point. I was not in his funeral rite nor have visited his grave yet and so I have been wanting to honor him in a small way through this tribute, while keeping in mind also the silent men-victims of domestic violence. Do souls read blogs also?

You were a man of short stature, burly and big-hearted. You were a model of compassion but also a family icon of disciplined ambition. Your life’s vision was as sharp as the command of your eyes; the steps to your dream, as snappy as your gait.

How else will I remember you except with admiration. I admire you foremost for taking charge of your life, and for your heroic journey to break free from the bondage of inherited male complacency. Yes, at a young age, I noticed you joining those drinking spree but only to celebrate from your abundance over your favorite wild boar’s meat. You were the male disciplinarian, with my flighty father often at the hot seat of your brotherly rebuke. To anybody you can be as straightforward as a steady judge. But you can be concern as a loving confessor. You were quite an integrated man.

Why you married in your 40s was not within my childhood curiosity yet. Perhaps as a dreamer, you had more control of your sexual impulse than any of the men in the family. I suppose you had your mind set on the way out of the cycle of complacency, of the wayward trend of family resources wastage, of the alcoholic alter ego, of the demeaning pull of poverty, or of the mess of marriage. Your delayed marital decision did not speak it seems of a poor aesthetic judgment. Assuming it was your free choice, you settled with a bonny mestiza rural girl way younger than you. You must have been ingenious in so many ways in that remote hometown of your wife. Slowly, I witnessed your shift of status from a run-of-the-mill construction employee to a rattan-enriched busybody. You were coming home blithe and bestowed with extra esteem. As a teen, I had breathed in your aura of confidence. There could be no smarter and sleeker man in the family above you. There was jubilation every time you rejoined the family during Christmas or town fiesta. You were always generous of your blessings and this generosity alone commanded respect from among your family and friends. My most vivid of your generous and sensitive spirit was how you bought my class awards and test scores every yearend. I remember how I would doggedly keep those exams because they were potential financial incentive upon your visit.

How you managed your wealth-generating rattan business in that remote place is beyond my retelling. There were only patches of stories about your praiseworthy demeanor in your business dealings, with your trademark soft-voiced diplomacy among the native rattan gatherers and your big-time buyers. I only heard the high level of your likeability among those you work with, evidenced by your being catapulted into a political office. Indeed, your success was as huge as those shiploads of rattan you supplied for your clients. I salute you for breaking frontiers!

Ah, but success, often, is escorted by the serpentine seduction of Satan. It is self-defeating for those ego easily swelled by its seeming eternal surfeit.The most evil of all happened to you, in the middle of your life of service and success: the total betrayal of your wife and your right hand guy who, in an adulterous connivance had murdered you. It was a couple of grotesque photos I received back in college – your body sprawled and bathed with your own blood in your own domicile. I couldn’t believe it – how the perpetrators could swelter with those relentless stabs of anger, horror, vile, ingratitude…of demonic force to the abysmal degree. God, forgive them. Your death simply silenced me in a painful way and for years.

“When we meet love, we kill love,” wagered theologian Brendan Lovett on the innocent death of Jesus. Perhaps, you loved enough to be hated; you loved enough at your life’s expense. I believe you did. You died as a good man, father, uncle and friend but not the kind of death you deserve. Do I have the calming answer to your fate? I can only hope you now are enlisted in the League of the Nailed Innocents.

I apologize for this long overdue tribute; grief at that time was a word foreign to me. Over the years, I am learning its art and necessity. Please know I miss your big man’s heart for the world. May your peaceful spirit joining Great Spirit intercede for us – men who are still trying to break from the small and big bondages of this world.

Against Abortion: A Way from a Mother’s Womb

For this 4th Sunday of Advent, i am sharing to you something very personal. This was originally shared to a clinical group 5 years ago and given the title Culture, Spirituality, and Transformation: A Way from a Mother’s Womb. With a little pruning, I am giving it a different title however for 2 reasons and in view of these 2 crucial events: one is Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth where the “infant leaped in her womb”; and the second, as my protest against the 15 US Catholic Senators who voted to finance abortion through public money.

Let me set the reflective mood first with this quote from Henri Nouwen:

“Where is this peace to be found? The answer is clear. In weakness. First of all, in our own weakness, in those places of our hearts where we feel most broken, most insecure, most in agony, most afraid. Why there? Because there our familiar ways of controlling our world are being stripped away; there we are called to let go from doing much, thinking much, and relying on our self-sufficiency. Right there where we are weakest the peace which is not of this world is hidden.”

Adam’s Story: The Peace That Is Not Of This World”

There is power in telling our stories, there is transformative power in sharing them. By sharing our stories, we learn to embrace our “angels” and name our “demons.” I have my story. You have your story. Let me begin mine from something so unique to me yet shared by human beings: what i learned, still learning, and need to unlearn from my mother’s womb.

Being in the womb was like being in the garden of relationality. It was total unity, like that of Adam and Eve before their expulsion from the Garden; a unity of my father’s sperm and my mother’s egg, of my mother and me. A unity so primordial and ancient, so universal. Never so close can one living being get to another living than being in one’s mother’s womb. What a profound and life-changing bond! Me, altering my mother’s body, my mother significantly shaping an emergent being in me. My mother standing with her own intra and extra personal resources: physical, psychological, and spiritual; Me, heavily dependent on those resources yet thriving independently on my own.

At the 16th week of my mother’s pregnancy, i could have been sensitive to light as my vision developed slowly in the dim, confined prenatal garden. Then by the 4th month, i may have developed basic reflexes and a host of facial expressions. At 5 or 6 months, i may have been sensitive to touch, then eventually to the noises in my mother’s body, and to voices , or music. Between 28 and 34 weeks, my brain’s neural circuits may be as advanced as a newborn’s and my cerebral cortex, mature enough to support consciousness. A few weeks later, my brain waves could have become distinct. Thus far in science, this is how a “normal” prenatal being develops.

I hope yours was a normal one.

I probably struggled hard with mine. After all, my mother was born fatherless and denied of her natural need for a father. My grandmother was a victim of masculine violence. And so is my mother, a kind of masculine violence that perhaps will never be resolved in her lifetime.

How about you? What was your mother’s experience in her mother’s womb?

While in my mother’s womb, the cycle of masculine continued. My father left her with no intention of taking responsibility for his actions. Masculine violence being passed to me, and certainly, to a good number of innocent beings around me. No wonder – millions die from violence! My prenatal world knew only the hostility of wounded men. Certainly, i must have felt my mother’s anxiety and her endless, restless thought to protect me. Our bonding was deepened because i was her treasure in a fragile vessel. The more intense the anxiety, the more neurohormones released to combat stress. I wonder what measure of those anxieties i have absorbed. It was a stressful world for a fragile being like me. No doubt, it was my first experience of violence in that garden of unity.

How about you? Was yours a serene world or a world of protest?

I grew in complexity as the environment, both internal and external, continued to fashion me. My growth continued despite the injustice. Or more ambiguously, despite the dialectic of my father’s absence and my mother’s over-attachment to me. My growing complexity continued. The more complex i became, the more resistance i had against my upcoming detachment. The womb became my protection against a violent world. My mother never had an easy “death” for me (i have one scar on the skull from some forceps). Alienation from that comfort zone was too painful. Onward with the struggle against the seemingly punishing uterine contractions and constricting birth canal. I have to “die” from that archetypal union anyway, to discover more about that violent world that i sensed, my mother hoping to find friendship for me outside her life-nourishing womb. It was only through the struggle of contraction of the uterus and the birth canal, the struggle against alienation, and the “emptying of the womb” that i could be thrown back into the “womb of the universe” where a more developed consciousness thrives.

Since then, i learned that truth is not as clear as black or white. I learned about culturally induced and unnecessary anger and anxieties. And so about the dialectic of connectedness, alienation, and transformation. Now, i am back to that struggle to reclaim that lost primordial oneness with Mother Nature. This time, in the womb of Mother Earth with its connecting, alienating (like abortion), and transforming elements.

In the midst of anger and anxieties, uterine contraction and paternal absence, alienation and violence, LIFE PREVAILS! Because,

You formed my inmost being;You knit me in my mother’s womb.
I praise You, so wonderfully You made me;
Wonderful are Your works!
My very self You knew;
My bones were not hidden from You.
When i was being made in secret,
fashioned as in the depths of the earth.
Psalm 139:13-15

I am wonderfully made. I can forgive. I am forgiving.

I am evolving more beautifully from my past.

I hope you are…

————Photo credits: VickyvSwiredfool

My Silent Madness

With my bike, i was out alone last night in a churchyard that is becoming my mall of silence. You can make me sit and face an empty wall and give a reading on Gibran while everyone in the house snores audibly. Such a tryst is more than consuming a half-gallon of Selecta ube ice cream to me. (I often think of food indulgence these days as a rebellion against the human spirit’s craving to be simple and sacrificing in small, many ways.)

But nothing beats going out into the wild expanse of Nature, peering through my minute eyes into its uncontainable vastness, being awed endlessly by its seemingly eternal presence. The past 2 weeks had been alternate nights of clear, star-dotted and cloud-shrouded skies, as the moon gradually without maneuvering other physical beings around her, revealed its full grandeur. Last night, i was one witness, wondering over its seemingly late showdown from the horizon. The security guard likewise wondered when at 9PM, the moon emerged with its melon-hued fullness from the veil of clouds like a 6AM sunrise. We are in for longer nights and shorter days plus the cool breeze i can only savor in silence.

I walked to and fro on the concrete ground, craned my neck upward to wonder with the stars and the festival of celestial lights crowned by the lunar light. Priceless! Incomparable to any man-made entertainment!

But even the simple thought of joining their silent festivity could shock a consciousness hardened by noise. The human mind tends to think, imagine, plan, worry, or chatter endlessly so that submission to the silence of the moon and the stars is no eating of a Red Ribbon choco moca crunch. It takes some efforts and intention – from foregoing TV time to saying no to a child’s after dinner cajole to play. Just around 200 meters outside the churchyard is a bustling street. I have to be conscious of the difference between a city street and a silent churchyard because each demands two different kinds of consciousness: the city – at least an awakened sense of control and mindful activities (hindi pwedeng patanga-tanga sa kalsada); silent churchyards, or any ground of silence – of carefree, no wristwatch wondering.

In silence, time is less segmented into minutes, hours or days characteristic of city life because Silence is the Great Uniter of past, present, and future. It’s where i’m going in the ultimate sense of the word. And so you are. Never too bad to get to know it in the fullness of the moon and the glow of the stars. Tonight, i might go out again, moonless or otherwise, pedal from a city-consciousness to Nature-mindfulness, leaving behind a sleeping mother-and-child, believing that the silence that charges my being effuses and blesses everyone around me in return. Tonight, i will empty my mind again, leaving up to Silence to fill it. And i can tug some into the space because Nature is always community-minded.

The Pandesal Seller

I am inspired to write this musing after reading Brother Jun-G’s entry Negosyong Pandesal. To make sense of this post, I encourage you to read first Negosyong Pandesal:

i sense a simple man,
who got used since childhood
with his almost empty hands,
open those while the rest were asleep.
it was economic – the pandesal-selling,
but breaking the dawn with his voice
is analogous to the Psalmist’s desire “to awake the dawn,”
so that pandesal-selling became an opening up
of the spirit to the approaching light.

the discipline of waking up early,
the doggedness to sell,
in other words – the nascent, growing singlemindedness,
the focus on purpose with those globular pandesal,
i assume this is where being singlehearted begins,
and it is a long journey from the mind to the heart,
counting all the detours and the crossroads.

it really makes me wonder,
why the only thing he seems to need to do
is to come back into full circle with pandesal?
i suspect it is less the desire for profit
than the remembrance of those dawn moments,
hard-wired in his brain,
when his spirit braved the dark alleys,
while silently soaring against the darkness of poverty,
or apathy,
or a little more convenience from an extended sleep.

The pandesal, to me becomes sacramental,
nudging him mysteriously to open up
to his light within,
and the sun’s,
and God’s,
while filling up those empty spaces of one’s stomach.
Eucharistic, i assume, in his “pandesal way”.
no wonder the conversation ended,
only to begin,
in the more open,
more silent,
Greater Eucharist.

Passion and Fascination: Coolwaterworks Style

“Find your life’s true passion and follow it, follow the path that is no path. “Follow your bliss.” When you have the unmistakable experience of the Aha! then you’ll know you’re riding on the mystery.”

This is Joseph Campbell, one great American scholar on religions and mythology, in his teaching mode. The guy was unemployed for 5 years after college. Then got to take care of a dog for one year to support himself. From there, teaching and writing books became his bliss. He found his.

I’m into blogging for one year now and any blogger knows that posting regularly demands some time – from collecting and collating information to reader interaction. The question that often bugs me is: is it worth the time, even if given the nature of my job affording me to bask on some? My blog seems to ask me also in turn:

DF: Why build me in the first place?

dFish: Aha! This is getting philosophical. You need to know your genesis? Why don’t you scan your About DF page?

DF: It’s been getting steady there. It’s you who need that post-it note!

dFish: Okay fine. So what’s the point of reading it over and over besides your screaming?

DF: I like it – you’re thinking and acknowledging my emotion. Let me get back to the rhetoric of blog-building – don’t you think a lot of the highs and lows in hammering and nailing have to do with purpose, passion, and fascination plus time?

dFish: I like purpose; he’s not as morose as passion, although fascination is a lot more playful of the two.”

DF: Whatever!

Coolwaterworks and the WordPress Year That Was

Yes, that gravatar guy in a blue shirt with his backpack and baseball cap on – that’s Coolwaterworks, engineer and proprietor of the blog Nooks and Crannies. I have known N and C only for a number of months but the mind and passion behind it, as if I’ve known beyond those numbers. (Lotto bettors also know better how long is long.)

Coolwaterworks is a careful, refreshing writer to read, seems always mindful of the difference in usage between a colon and a semicolon, between a chicken baticolon and Calle Colon. Dive through to his every entry and you sense a man who knows well, or perhaps a signatory, to the subject-verb agreement of 1898. If there are grammatical slips, I like to harbor those against some hurried time, like toothbrush left behind from the packed items out of haste to catch the last submarine to Spratlys. Coolwaterworks simply has the habit packing for excellence, for a total package, for perfection without being rigid and imposing, in contrast to being settled with a half-cooked crab, the mediocre, the semi-broken backpack or a pants’ zipper.

Perfection is the field of science and no doubt being an engineer himself, is shaped by this field. If those high-selling fishball vendors are also learning the science of concocting sauces of different flavors, likewise with Coolwaterworks. He blogs. He works. He travels. He makes shots. He writes. He prays. With the consciousness of a man of science, most likely mindful that one neutron in aberration could lead to a different material configuration. Engineers and physicists take no visible matter for granted the way Mother Ricky Reyes pays attention to every hair contour of her customer.

From science, let’s move to art because our guy is really that ambidextrous in my strong opinion (I am sometimes as opinionated as Secretary Raul Gonzales may reklamo?) Art is a different field the ground is not precision but playfulness; the fertilizer is less our capacity for logical thinking and more, by our capacity to play with the colours and textures, the heights and depths, the lights and shadows around us. Children know this capacity better with their coloring book or excursions to the Lower House Zoo.

Feast on Coolwaterworks’ photos, his picturesque travelogues and his countryside ecstasy and you see less an adult man of science at aim for Strunkian precision and more a child living and playing with his sense of wonder within. That’s Coolwaterworks. Parang si Mommy Dionisia lang minsan – dancing, going to the parlor, happy with her Louis Vuitton bag. From N and C, you can sense how he frolics with time and with those that fascinate him and he is passionate about. He may not own a Louis Vuitton bag for grannies but at least, he has WordPress. This is his virtual bliss. Happy Anniversary Mark!

—————–

Photo Credit: Nooks and Crannies

Spelling God, spelling what i believe…

Let me play in one mental game. Think or recall one person you believe is a  non-believer. Think. Recall. Need more time? If you recall one atheist you came across with and cannonball him to fill in the blank simply because he is on the other side of the border of faith, then let me punch in this wager: your backup reasoning is essentially wobbly. Why? Your atheist acquaintance may not necessarily believe in a being with a capital letter, you know, like Superman or Dragon Warrior. But ask him again, probe his public thoughts and it doesn’t take a Hubble space telescope to detect his magnified, enthroned, centralized being – Reason, No-God, Humanism, Facts, or Evolution.

“But wait,” you may tack on, “why capitalize those when even the God of believers only has a small “g” in the atheism circle, and still comes out seemingly persuasive to enjoin others to another believing bandwagon?” Find out from here.

Trivial as this may sound, I sometimes think it’s one of those legacies often unquestioned because it’s as commonplace as our house doorknob: spelling God.

Capitalizing God, capitalizing other gods

Capitalization implies importance, emphasis, centrality, primacy, identity, or even hierarchy of values. We capitalize our names to emphasize our existence, to highlight our identity. Those who do so otherwise like the poet e.e.cummings get the same existential attention I assume.

Let’s humanize our habit of capitalizing G. There is at least a universal habit of capitalizing our real names. What’s the impulse behind? Naming and capitalizing the names carry an existential function – that of singling out a living or non-living being’s uniqueness. Names are important, their capitalized letters only to highlight how important those names are. No doubt, I can write my full name in small letters, a bit deviant an act against social standard. But if I can give a “capitalized treatment” to an ordinary cheap pen in a prose because I want my readers to have a unique mental image of such a writing instrument, then why give an “under-treatment” to the ideas arranger?

It could be equally argued that under-capitalizing names is no big deal, less torrential to alter a person’s inner or outer landscape. There were primitive practices or existing cultures less attentive to capital letters. But just as every stroke in a letter in all alphabets count within its cultural classroom, the universal practice of capitalizing names at least must be charged with meanings practical for humanity – uniqueness, centrality, primacy, identity, significance.

Such centrality, however, could only be stretched up to a certain limit like a rubber band. I may be unique. You may be unique. But both of us know we cannot be the center of all meanings of the universe no matter how ambitious our ego would sometimes dictate us. So what does humanity do? Where do I dig to find that Center? Like a hungry miner, I dig within and out and glance now and then at the shining gold of meaning I name God. The beautiful thing is I am not alone in digging, having glances, and naming God. I don’t think God really bothers to be given a name with a capital letter, and much more, alter with this name the very personality of God as the center of all meanings. We seem to agree as “fellow miners” naming is for the sake of human convenience, self-respect included. If I can write my father’s or mother’s name in capital letters in an angry missive not out of mindless habit but of self-respect as a son, perhaps, the human spirit has a weightier reason for doing so before its Source.

I don’t think God really bothers to be talked about all the time like sex scandals in barber shops or moral canteens. Again, it’s human convenience, respect for the human longing to behold God’s face included. I think what God wants is for me to see more of this luminosity that is ever transforming of the way I make myself and my self-centered desires to become the center of all meanings. Under what environment does the gold of God shine forth? I guess pretty much under those circumstances when I question the names I assign capital letters with – Pleasure, Power, Reason, Success, Prestige, Humanism (you can add more if you want). And here’s one more: Religious Security, which is inclusive not of VAT, but of all creatures who go to church to hide from God, yahooooo!

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Photo credit: ahisgett

DesertFishing’s 30 Most Read Posts

It has been a year-round journey of silence, emptiness, boredom, inner world exploration, negotiation with cultures, and time of typing, at times with others, but mostly with myself and the Sacred that I have no idea how big is. Blogging is only a medium for exploring the bigness of God within and in the culture/s that is more or less familiar to me. The blogosphere is becoming a boundary-less arena of information and interaction. But at the end of the day, silence beckons me to go back to the fundamental question: how did this or that piece of information affect me, form me into a better person, hook me to my deepest desire to let the seed of the Sacred within grow and bear fruit? After one year of blogging, there are actually less tangible statistics to measure the growth especially in an area called spirituality because growth happens in silence, in our sleeping hours, much like the wordless rising of the sun on the east. Those growth are more inward – the joy of sharing, the boldness to get wrong, the weakness of being challenged or ignored, the consolation of being heard, the trembling before evil or fear, the lightness of living, the ecstasy of illumination, the desire to keep growing as a child heading Home. To realize that I am not alone in my desire and that there are the same desires out there curious of their names, this I suspect is why these posts are the most read.

A Grain of Desert Sand
Sunset and Diarrhea
KC Concepcion, Annabelle Rama and Simon’
About DF
Susan Boyle: Some Spiritual Morsels
Fr. Thomas H. Green, SJ: 1932-2009
Tough 10 New Blogs of 2009: Thanks to Re
President Ramon Magsaysay: Isang Pag-aal
CFC-Gawad Kalinga Split: Good News or Ba
Heavy Metal Monk
Marian Shrine Taller than the Statue of
“When I Met You” – Mother Teresa as an A
“Belo Touches My Skin. Who Touches Yours
My Christmas Wish for Tracy Isabel Borre
Among Ed Panlilio and my Hunger for a Po
Susan Boyle: A Counterculture Spirituali
Lenten Series Tips: Power of the Holy Ro
Manny Pacquiao: A Mario Lopez Interview
Want Some Breathless Moments? Pray with
Welcome/Dadjon/Tuloy Po
Bishop Ite Jimenez of Butuan Retires
Lenten Series Tips: Free Cebu Pacific Fl
Class Bibo
Owling on Novels
“Let us go over to the other side of the
Benedictine Bishop Admits He’s Gay
Arnold Clavio Unang Hirit News Blooper
D’ Fisher
How Much Did Manny Pacqiuao Earn from Hi
Pinoy Priest Cooking Show