This morning I received a card signed by the General congratulating me on my 25th anniversary as a friar of the Order of St. Augustine. Frankly, I wasn't expecting this anniversary until 2013 because for years now, the idea has been floated around by a canon lawyer in our Province, that the anniversaries of religious profession should be counted from the time of solemn profession. I don't know where our canon lawyer's idea comes from.  But I know that a religous becomes a religious canonically on the first profession, so I accept the congratulations with gratitude.

The card forced me to think of those twenty-five years. Where have they gone? I still remember the excitement of that morning at Guadalupe-Viejo's ancient church -- the original "Lumang Simbahan" -- for the celebration of the profession rites. Fr. Berdon, the then and current Provincial, received the vows. Twenty-five years after that, around the same time, I was seated in front of the TV watching the Lakers beat the Orlando Magic in its blowout Game 2 win in the NBA finals (Thursday evening in the States but Friday AM here, June 5, GMT +8). So when I saw the card on my desk this morning, I began to think: where have I been those twenty-five years?  And so as an exercise in prayer, I made a list of how I’ve been these past years and tried to see what those years mean to me. 

Cartoons can be a great way to bring across the message of the Scriptures. This it does through a rereading of the Biblical message and present it to a "visual" generation in an attractive way. But there is also a price to be paid, since "rereadings" can distort rather than enhance. "The Flying House" is a cartoon series intended to bring the Bible closer to a generation that is attracted to cartoons. In this particular sequence on the Temptation of Eve, Genesis 3:1-24 is rendered into a cartoon with Tim Curry playing the role of the Snake. The presentation fills in some gaps in the biblical narrative which is terse and lacking in details (since it is characteristic of biblical narration to allow the audience to exercise the imagination). For example, the cartoon sequence makes us understand that Eve has been gathering fruits that day when she met the Snake. Second, it was not until she met the Snake that Eve recognizes the "forbidden fruit." Later, Adam will realize he had eaten from the fruit already indicated as "verboten" by God because of the lightning that occurs after he bites on it. The darkening of the skies and the lightning becomes an indication that something wrong has occured. Third, Adam was out working tending the olives, says Eve, when the Serpent asks her about him. The absence of Adam in the Temptation of Eve is a notable absence but in the cartoon rendering it becomes excusable. In the Genesis account, it is precisely this absence that makes him guilty of "sin". By not doing his job as "shomer" -- protector of his garden -- Eve -- from the wiles of the crafty "Enemy", he contributed to their fall from grace. His eating from the fruit only confirmed a "sin" that was yet to become revealed. Fourth, the phrase "forbidden fruit" does not appear in the Genesis narrative, but it has become popular culture's way of squeezing in just a few words a reference to "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." By that appellation, it becomes easier to remember an important detail in the narrative; at the same time the appellation also distorts the overall intended effect of the story. In the story from Genesis, the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (read "experience") of good and evil, ushered into human history all that was ambiguous. Where there was only life before, now there is both life and death; where there was only truth before, now there is both truth and falsity; where there was happiness alone, now there is both happiness and suffering. The ambiguity of existence now becomes patent because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Just after writing the article on note-taking, I found a software application that can help one take, organize and process notes with a computer. I have discussed some information managers in this website but not one of these come close to Biblioscape which started out as an organizer for bibliographical references. Biblioscape version 8 has a text editor, a very simple graphics editor (for creating charts) and in the Professional and Librarian editions can also function as a draft outliner with word processing functionalities.

I was wondering where our turtle went until the altar boys washed my hands…

I had a project long ago before I got an internet connection and a scanner of illustrating some scenes from the Scriptures. I came up with two nice drawings and then forgot about it. Below is an image map of the plate. Click on an area to see a larger view of it.

Samaritan woman at the well | I am the Bread of LIfe | Image Mapper

Just what is life,
is it just a passing dream …?

So goes a song I wrote for musical play that was performed many years ago at San Agustin Center of Studies.  What reminded me of the song was an old cartoon I did in 1995 about an experience I had on my first year at the University of San Agustin — Iloilo.  A first year or second year student approached me one day asking the question “What is life?”  The question impressed me since I knew there was no faculty of philosophy in that university.  So before I gave him a definition of life, I first asked him why he asked the question in the first place.  It turned out that it was an assignment for a class in biology and that the teacher had required the students to ask the same question to as many people as they can.  After that encounter with the student, I drew the following cartoon (Note that I look much much better than the old priest I depict in the illustration). Click on the upper and lower panels for a bigger picture of each.

There is an article from Life-Hacker which puts forward Thomas Edison as an example of a successful note-taker. The author describes Edison's note-taking ability thus:

Famous inventor Thomas Edison is probably the most experienced note-taker in the world. His diary which is still maintained as an important part of the United States historical record contains five million (5,000,000) pages. Important developments such as his work on perfecting the light bulb and electric lighting systems are captured in great detail. He never met a sheet of paper he didn't like.

It is a bit late now, but this post is still relevant: it does not only give an overview of the readings for the rest of Easter, it also gives a hint as to how to present the readings as if they come in a series. I say "as if" because the lectionary does not really have a well arranged system of presenting the Paschal mystery especially as it bears on the Resurrection of Christ. However, anyone who would be patient enough -- people like Raymond Brown -- to examine each part of the liturgy of each Sunday throughout Easter can find some thread that connects all lectionary selections leading to a Christology and a theology of the Spiritual Life. For this year (B, 2009), I have tried to work on the Second Readings for Easter; the Gospel readings are the same ones which I worked on three years ago. Links to the available articles are provided below. The Sunday Thoughts for each week will be given as they become available. The same thing goes for the articles on the Second Reading.

I was going through the web and found this entry I made in the old Bible Workshop. The article is called "An Insight Into Divine Love" and was posted on March 21, 2006. I am reposting it here because it contains a copy of footnote 52 of Dives in Misercordia which is actually a good biblical theology note on God's love.

It is not very often that I look at a Bible Dictionary to see how this or that scholar has compiled the nuances of a Hebrew or Greek word to shed light on a particular bible passage. But tonight as I was preparing a post on Psalm 24, McKenzie's Bible Dictionary was very handy in giving me the materials I wanted. In the article on Psalm 24, I write about the three dimensions of God's love as expressed in the Hebrew words "chanan" "racham" and "chesed", God's unconditional love, motherly love and covenantal love respectively. There is a word for love in Hebrew, and it is "ahab", the word rendered in the New Testament as "agape". But since the psalm did not give me an opportunity to write about it, I left it unmentioned. John Paul II in footnotes 60 and 61 of Dives in Misericordia speaks about "chesed" and "rachamim" (viscera misericordiae) as God's covenantal love and motherly love respectively, what I usually refer to as the masculine and the feminine love of God. In footnote 52, he gives us a more comprehensive treatment of "hesed" "rahamim" and "hanan" in the context of Divine Mercy

The most recent addition to AgustinongPinoy is a website that extends Res Biblica. It is called The Bible Workshop. It was created to meet the needs of some of our parishioners who are engaged in the biblical apostolate. It has articles on the Sunday Gospels written in the form of a how-to. The method of study that underlies these "how-tos" is exegetical diagramming called "the Sentence Flow." The Sentence Flow is not original to me. In fact, others have written about it.