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November 1st, 2005
04:39 pm - Creed from a Latin American Mass
CREED FROM A LATIN AMERICAN MASS:
I believe in God, Creator of an unfinished world Who does not decree an eternal plan of development in which we cannot participate.
I believe in God, Who has not divided people into the poor and rich, specialists and ignorant, owners and slaves.
I believe in Jesus Christ, Who saw the world situation and Who took a stand in it.
Taking Him as my example, I see the precaution with which we must organize, the extent to which our intelligence is atrophied, our imagination impoverished, and our efforts neutralized.
Each day I fear that He may have died in vain because we do not live as He lived, because we betray His message.
I believe in Jesus Christ, Who rises for our life so that we may be liberated from the prejudices and presumptions of fear and hate, so that we may transform the world into the Kingdom of God.
I believe in the Spirit Who came with Jesus into the world.
I believe in the community of all peoples. And in our responsibility for making of our world a place of misery, hunger and violence or the City of God.
I believe that it is possible to build a just peace.
I believe that a life full of meaning is possible for all and in the future if this world of God. AMEN.
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September 27th, 2005
August 13th, 2005
12:49 am - "I believe it is life, not death, that has no limits"
It was a quiet day when I left Omega House.
Typical to Houston weather, there was the late afternoon down pour that lasted a few minutes and chased everyone off the patio. Norma made Spanish Rice to go with the left overs from my going away luncheon. Dee and Anthony got into it over who had more street cred - Jay Z or Nelly and Dan got a visit from his wife.
There were no fan fares or big productions and Robert just waved from the porch as I walked out the door for the last time. In the course of a year, I'd done hundreds of loads of laundry and learned how to make a somewhat edible meal for eight people using 3 cans of pinto beans and some celery. I could change diapers, remove catheters, and fix the clock on a VCR.
Beyond all of that, working so close to death taught me just how sacred life is. How the meat of life - the things that really make up the meaning and the importance - are often the mundane. Shampooing your hair, being able to make and eat Macaroni and Cheese, deciding what you want to watch on TV. Over and over the clients I saw said that they missed the small things. They didn't care that they couldn't work or would never see Paris as much as they were upset they couldn't hold a pen steady enough to write a note. Isaac wasn't upset about never getting his Masters, he just wanted to drive his Chevy truck one more time.
Working at Omega House made me stop and really appreciate the gift of my own daily freedom. It inspired me to try to see the choices I make as not one more thing to stress about or become bogged down in, but as a gift of God. I have the freedom and ability to chose between riding my bike to work or taking the bus. I have choice and in that choice, dignity. God gave me autonomy and a mind and heart to assert myself and actively live my life, not passively experience it. In that light the 3 mile ride in 102 degree temperatures on the bike becomes another place to experience grace. Even as I sweat, I can see this as a moment that I chose to experience and try to enjoy it. Its my own attempt at embracing more of Therese of Liseux's "Little Way."
Living it up with the dying also taught me that life goes on NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS. Despite every manner of disability, disease, and despression our clients still found a way to live. Even though Vicente was so weak that he could not sit up by himself or even stay awake for longer than an hour at a time, he insisted everyday that he take a shower, bring him out to the living room, and then let him watch LifeTime TV movies. Often this routine became a pain in the ass, especially on the days when all hell broke loose and I often found myself wishing Vicente would just "Suck it up that he was dying and stay in bed." It was only later I began to understand exactly why it was so important to him to go through this ritual. He was fighting to live what little life he had.
Life doesn't cease when you start dying. There are still plenty of tv shows to watch, sandwhiches to eat, and arguements to have. Vicente taught me that my life shouldn't stall just because something goes wrong. A relationship ends - there are other people to meet. A job offer falls through - there will be other work. A day at work is horrible - there will be another day.
It's not a flipant attitude of just ignoring rejection and bailing when things go wrong. Instead of emotionally shutting down or mentaly checking out when life starts to get difficult, I've started to push myself to keep doing the things I love. Rather than let self pity and despair kick my life into a neutral gear, I push forward keeping my hope in a future opportunity I've just yet to discover. It's a point of view rooted in the belief that God always has more to give us. God's plan for me is frustratingly unclear and never smooth, but even the unpleasent turns have guided me toward personal growth and happiness. Omega House helped me realize that I have to live through these frustations rather than turning on a sort of emotional autopilot until I liked how the weather improved.
A year seeped in death became for me an examination of how much I was really living. As I close my JV year, I know I'll be feeling the ramifications of what I experienced at Omega House for years to come.
"Dying To Live" - jonny lang
You know I've heard it said theres beauty in distortion
By some people who withdraw to find their head
And they say there is humor in misfortune
No, I wonder if they'll laugh when I am dead
[Chorus]
Why am I fighting to live
If I'm just living to fight
Why am I trying to see
When there aint nothing in sight
Why am I trying to give
When noone gives me a try
Why am I dying to live
If I'm just living to die
You know some people say that values are subjective
But theyre just speaking words
That someone else has said
And so they live and fight and kill with no objective
Sometimes its hard to tell the living from the dead
[Chorus]
You know I used to weave
My words into confusion
And so I hope you'll understand me
When I'm through
You know I used to live my life as an illusion
But reality will make my dream come true
So I'll keep fighting to live
Till theres no reason to fight
And I'll keep trying to see
Until the end is in sight
You know I'm trying to give
So come on Give me a try
You know I'm dying to live
Until I'm ready to die
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July 11th, 2005
04:03 pm - Triumph of the Year
This 4th of July weekend I was part of a JVC vs. Nasa Employee flip cup game.
We took an early lead, they almost caught up, but were finally destroyed in a final 4 round winning streak.
That's right people - I beat Rocket Scientists at a game of physics. Well, and beer, but mostly physics.
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July 6th, 2005
03:23 am - "You just don't know how to share"
Awhile ago, Johnny wanted me to started a running list of some of my one liner philosophy. I've had quite a few winners this year -
"Community means confessing your irrational fears and praying they won't be brought up again in public."
"Community means not throwing the dead cockroach at someone so hard it would actually land on them."
"Community means letting your roomates play songs they like at parties, even if it kills the mood."
"Community means being ok with the fact your roomate just 3 seperate types of pasta while cooking for no appearent reason."
I thought this would be easy.
I assumed my mostly laid back nature when it came to cleanliness and plans would make me the world's best community member. Everyone who warned me about how hard it was just didn't know how to share.
But its messy. Community's messy and its hard and its painful. The few times I have cried this year all but one was because of something that happened at in the house, not something at work. Being forced to sit down when I was furious and pray with these people and listen to them talk about faith was pure torture. There were times I was sure there was no way those jackasses worshipped the same God I did.
But without a doubt learning to love these people has been and is a real and undeniable manfiestation of the Eucharist. This year, our lives have been broken and shared, whether we liked it or not.
A friend of mine said that the power of the Eucharist is how personal and physical is it. We hold, chew, and swallow the real presence of God. Christ is torn apart and passed around again and again to bring us together and to bring us to God.
That's what community is. Being held accountable to other and to your own standards, being chewed out for your selfishness and your hypocrisy, being swallowed up by frustration and disappointment at times. And somehow, during all of it, you become more and more the person God wants you to be and realize that loving people just as they are really does make life a hell of a lot better.
Sure, community living isn't the answer to everything. They aren't always what I need - they dont' know how to deal with me when i'm upset and I think I'd honestly pay 5 bucks for a hug right now, I've had so few this year. But they are also the people who have made me laugh so hard my stomach cramped up and eat my homeade 'pasta' (which was terrible) and said it was good (which was a lie). They've been there through family struggles, lost jobs, and migraines. No matter what happened this year (or how much I may have wanted to be) I was never alone.
Its not always mature and its often painful. But in my house tomorrow is always a new day. No matter what stupid thing I said when I was drunk the night before or how badly I snapped at someone, I can still come down those stairs the next morning, sit on that couch and know someone will watch West Wing with me.
I told someone recently that I believe that parts of my personality have changed inevitably after this year. I don't think I'll ever feel lonely or isolated like I used to before. Its just not possible. You can't share your self with people like this for such a long time and not take something of them with your for the rest of your life.
So here's to Ali, Amanda, Dan, Johnny, and Phillips. God Bless Alamo House.
"In Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of the race in which God himself became incarnate. The sorrows and stupidities of the human condition can no longer overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." - Thomas Merton "Conjecture of a Guilty Bystander"
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June 30th, 2005
04:48 pm - "Vox Dei, Vox Populi. The Voice of God is the voice of the people."
Within six weeks of introducing a new bill in Congress to close the SOA/ WHINSEC, one hundred members of Congress co-sponsored the legislation. There are currently have 113 co-sponsors of HR 1217, the legislation introduced by Rep. McGovern that would close and investigate the SOA/ WHINSEC. THis is now in the strongest position to close this school since they won a vote in the House of Representatives in 1999.
http://www.soaw.org/new/
As some of you may or may not know my friend Brian DeRoen is currently in prison for an act of civil disobedience at the last SOA protest. He's getting out this friday and I can't think of a better way to show support for him than to write your congressmen to encourage them to sponsor the bill. Brian's story is also featured in a documentary that is in the process of being finished called "On The Line." Here's the website http://www.onthelinefilm.com/
The following is Brian's statement from his trial as to why he decided to cross the line at the SOA protest.
Brian DeRouen Trial Statement
by Brian DeRouen
Your Honor,
The missal reading for today Wednesday January 26th comes from 2 Timothy 1:8. It reads “Do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord, nor of me, a prisoner for his sake; but bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.”
I stand before you having been found guilty. In your opinion your guilty verdict is an example of justice being done. While many both inside and out of this courtroom would disagree with you on this matter, I do not. You have made it clear during the past two days that the law of the land and the idea of justice requires you to find me guilty. I respect your decision in this matter but I do not believe that the justice you have brought to this court is today’s highest achievement. Similarly, I do not believe that the laws of this nation nor the authority with which you have been invested are of the highest order. But I thank you your honor for I truly believe that through the two of us a higher power and a higher justice are at work.
I have intentionally engaged in civil disobedience as I recognized that my faith, my hope for justice, and my genuine desire for the peace and safety of all the people of the Americas, North, Central, and South has required me to do so. Today you have also acted according to your conscience, employing your intellect and knowledge of the law, to reach a just verdict and in a few moments will do the same in regards to your sentence.
I am thankful that you and I have been brought to this occasion, as it is one that I have encountered many times in my studies of theology and non-violence. I in no way hold myself in the same company as the prophets and heroes that I am about to mention. I also am not suggesting that you your honor are personally similar to any person that I am about to mention. I am merely recognizing similarities between their circumstances and the one that you and I are currently sharing.
In Mark 3:1-6 Jesus is in the synagogue on the Sabbath; a day during which it was illegal according to the religious law of the day to work. Fully aware of this, Jesus told a man with a shriveled hand to stand up, and in front of the Pharisees and all others present, broke the law by healing the man. As a result those charged with the protection of the law were required to hold Jesus accountable.
In 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement came to Birmingham, Alabama. They gathered there to organize and peacefully protest against segregation. At that time Bull Connor was the police commissioner in Birmingham. As commissioner of police, Connor felt that he was obligated by his position to stop the marchers and defend segregation. When King and others marched, Connor first had the leaders arrested, next adults were arrested, and finally Connor filled the jails with children, an action he saw as his duty. The Civil Rights demonstrators had broken the law and he had no choice but to enforce the law and for the common good discourage others from lawlessness.
In 1983 Father Roy Bourgeois intentionally broke the law by dressing as a high-ranking military officer and engaged in civil disobedience. He climbed a tree next to the barracks where Salvadoran soldiers were housed on Ft. Benning and played archbishop Romero’s words spoken to his own people, ordering them to stop the violent repression of their Salvadoran brothers and sisters. For this action Father Roy was sentenced by this federal court in Columbus, GA to a year and a half in prison. I realize that you were not the judge in his case but I presume that like you, that judge believed that it was his responsibility to protect the law and dissuade others who might follow in Father Roy’s footsteps by sentencing him to prison. Myself and the other defendants on trial this week are a clear indication that similar to you, that judge was wrong. Our presence in this court proves that voices for justice cannot be silenced by the threat or reality of a prison sentence.
Some do not see the effort to close the SOA/WHINSEC in the same light as the civil rights movement. This is because for many Americans the crimes perpetrated by graduates of this school are invisible. Most Americans have not been tortured as were Sister Diana Ortiz, Father Roy Bourgeois, and untold thousands of our Latin American sisters and brothers. Most Americans have not walked the streets of El Mozote, El Salvador or heard Rufina Maya’s description of the massacre, which occurred there. The U.S. government however, is not ignorant of these atrocities, they have simply chosen to deny them at worst, or ignore them at best in order to maintain that SOA/WHISEC has a right to exist.
The hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from the repression of the poor in South and Central America is in every way a holocaust, which every American must be made aware of in the interests of true homeland security. People must be made aware of the fact that right down the road soldiers are being trained to fan the flames of injustice and oppression.
I am grateful for the events of the past few days in this courtroom for they have made it that much harder for the people of this nation to remain ignorant of this disgraceful school and it atrocities. I believe that we are now one step closer to the end of this shameful institution and I thank you hour honor for the progress you have helped our movement to make.
Peace and God Bless
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June 19th, 2005
05:14 am - A Drive By Reflection on Community
I stumbled on this quote today and thought it describes well the importance of and why I love community.
"The hardest thing to do is to stick together - mates, family, marriage, community. Its like resisting gravity, like King Canute sitting in his chair trying to talk back the tide. But we can and we have and we will turn the waves around. The alternative is too predictable. When you rid the room of arguement, you empty your life of the people you need the most." - Bono
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June 14th, 2005
11:15 pm - "Even 'Family Life' in my Catholic grade school was more educational than this..."
See if you could pass one of President Bush's sex education tests....
The test is funny at first, but the report on what is actually being taught in abstinence only programs is almost scary, especially the section on how the curriculum undermines girls self image.
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/sexed/index.html
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June 13th, 2005
12:46 pm - "Condoleeza Rice? Oh Hell no. She's whiter than you are...."
Last Monday at work, I learned who the HNC was.
"HNC" means Head Negro in Charge and, Patricia and Rhondalyn told me, was a term used by the black community to point out a trend in American media and life.
"Black folks get one person at a time. Y'all can only stand to let one black person look smart, intelligent and powerful at a time. Otherwise people get real nervous," Patricia told me.
"I dunno I think its less being pushed down as much as the news just doesn't pay attention to any of the positive black folks," Rhondalyn said. "If you're on TV, you're either the HNC or a gang banger or some skank looking for your baby daddy."
They cycled through a list of HNCs - Martin Luther King Jr, Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell. That night at the YMCA, I caught some of the news as I dried off from the pool. Sure enough, every black person featured in a story was either a criminal or a victim of crime.
A few days before all of this we'd watched "Do the Right Thing" by Spike Lee. Its a racial morality tale about riot that breaks out in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year. The riot is triggered by white officers police choking a black man, Radio Raheem to death while trying to detain him. The rioters end up destroying a pizza parlor owned by an Italian man and his two sons. The store is torched, but the men are essenially unharmed. We put the special features on and Spike Lee said that when asked about what upset them most in the movie, black audiences almost always said the death of Radio Raheem. White audiences almost always said the destruction of the pizza parlor and many had forgotten that Radio Raheem had been killed by the end of the movie.
Those daily and sublte nuiances of racism always frustrate me the most. The fact that some members of the staff and part time volunteers at Omega House always forget or interchange the names of Norma, a CNA I work with, and Irma, a woman taking care of her boyfriend who is a patient at the house. Yes, the names are similar sounding, but the two women look nothing alike. They are, however, both hispanic.
Our boss talks to Norma like she's a housekeeper. I always seem to get nervous when i'm waiting at the bus stop and a black man is the only other person there. Sometimes currents of racism just seem hard wired into us.
"Are we gonna live together, together are we gonna live?"
At the end of the HNC conversation after speculating - and being shot down - on who the HNC is right now, I finally told Patricia to just tell me who she though it was.
"Girl, that's easy - LeBron James!"
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May 30th, 2005
08:53 pm - For those who defend our freedom
The following is an email I recieved on memorial day from Chris O'Neil - the immensely talented writer and boyfriend of a close friend of mine from Marquette. Chris is in Iraq and has been for almost a year.
Greetings-
I write to you now in a dusty computer lab in the southern oil city
of Basrah...might as well be Dallas...it's all Bush-run territory
anyway. I suppose that's the handle now, this weekend will mark the
start of summer for most of the nation at large; picnics, camping
trips, first loves, and sweet grass...the hot winds send the kids to
the lakes and the parents to their porches...campfires and and ghost
stories.
Speaking of ghost stories...
This weekend is also about remembering those who won't be attending
any of these annual rites of passage...for their names are marked
in granite in D.C. and mourned by mothers, fathers, brothers, and
sisters...the old will dawn their uniforms and march proudly in
their home towns, while some are still hiding from the nightare from
which their never awoke.
Almost 1,700 young lives have been lost in this great farce...over
12,500 wounded, and thousands more will carry the scars that one can
only recieve during the horrors and fear-grip of combat. So fly the
colors and be merry but know that summer has already begun for a lot
of us over here...and more young lives will be lost in this scandal
for bidding contracts, and oil rights in the name of democracy and
the American way of life..
I ask this.... remember them.
peace, chris
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