Reflection on the Feast of St. Francis Xavier

Monday,  December 03rd, 2007

Celebrating the feast of St. Francis Xavier today, remind me of a place that I spent for two years for my regency. I spent two great years with people full of spirit and enthusiasm who lived together in one community, namely Xavier High School Community. What unique about Xavier is: people who lived there came from different backgrounds. Most teachers and staff who joined the community as volunteers are coming from different countries. Averagely they are young people since they just graduate from colleges, even there are high school graduates. Similarly the students of Xavier also are coming from different islands of Micronesia. Despite of their differences, the community lived together in a tight bind like a family. 

While I was there, I often thought about this situation. I asked myself: what was it that made us attach between one another so strongly? I found out that most people who left Xavier still miss that place so much, either they are alumnae or ex-teachers. Once I reflected to different motivation that drove them to Xavier. Most of the volunteers come to Xavier, especially the American youngsters who join the Jesuit Volunteer Service, do not choose the place by their own. They come with a motivation to do good things for other people. They simply want to be “men and women for others”. Contrary with their teachers, the students eagerly come to Xavier since they know that is the best place to have education on the region. To come to Xavier means to have opportunities to get higher-level of education. It means they can have a better life. Most leaders of the Micronesian countries are Xavier alumnae. However, even with different motivation, both students and teachers are having same challenges to come to Xavier. They should leave their common, secure and stable condition, and move out to insecurity. They leave their family and friends, change to make new relationship with new people that they do not know, even people that they find have different languages to communicate. There are so many things new to adjust, and there are also risks to be failed to adapt with them.       

I notice from my reflection that God provides miracles to Xavierites, that’s how we called ourselves, instead of disaster because although we are coming with different backgrounds, we have a same spirit. We are coming to Xavier to make a better world. Kids learn a lot from their teachers how they try to give their best while teaching. Their spirit give witness to the students about what it is mean to life and to share it with others.

This reflection makes me believe Xavier is a blessing to everyone who ever experienced it. It reflects the spirit that moved the Saint himself and become a witness to the region of the works of God’s providence. Francis Xavier was an up-and-coming professor at the University of Paris when Ignatius met him. He had the whole world in front of him when Ignatius posed Jesus’ radical question to him, “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mt. 16:26) The question became a turning point for him. He was gradually turned from fine scholar to dedicated saint and spent his life in bringing Christ to the Far East.

I conclude my reflection today by inviting you to learn from the Saint that we celebrate today. Let God open us to a spirit of availability. Let he give us courage to hear and respond his calling in our everyday life. Let us not prevent our selves from risks and challenges that we may face as long as we are honest to our conscience that what we are doing only for the greater glory of God. Amen.      

Learned more about Xavier High School of Micronesia: www.xaviermicronesia.org    

Dedicated to people from Mabuchi Hill, Chuuk, Micronesia.

PS: to Xavierites, Happy Xavier Day! I miss you all so much …   

I’m Not There is an unconventional journey into the life and times of Bob Dylan. Six actors portray Dylan as a series of shifting personae - from the public to the private to the fantastical - weaving together a rich and colourful portrait of this ever-elusive American icon.  

(taken from I’m Not There - the official website, as a tagline)

I’m Not There is a biographical film reflecting the life of musician Bob Dylan. It depicts the iconic singer-songwriter through seven distinct stages of his life by using six different actors (Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett). It was co-written and directed by Todd Haynes.

The film has received a lot of press for telling its story using rather non-traditional techniques, much like the poetic narrative style utilized in Dylan’s songwriting. “The film is going to be inspired by Dylan’s music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again,” according to key producer, Christine Vachon.

The title I’m Not There is a reference to the Dylan outtake recorded during The Basement Tapes (Sessions). It was not included in the studio album The Basement Tapes and, for years, could only be found on the CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes and the later remastered version (still considered a bootleg) of that set A Tree With Roots. I’m Not There is one of the most famous and highly regarded outtakes, not just of the Basement Tapes, but of Dylan’s whole career. It was never officially released until it appeared on the film’s official soundtrack album.

The production began filming in late July 2006 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It premiered at the 34th Telluride Film Festival on August 31st and won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress honors for Blanchett at the 64th Venice Film Festival. It opened in theaters in Italy on September 7, 2007. It was also part of the Toronto International Film Festival and played on September 14, 2007.

The film opened in limited release in the United States on November 21, 2007. 

If you’re looking for an autobiographical film which tells a true life story or sort of this kind, you should not watch this movie. This one is unique, like one review that I read at IMDB. It is a “A film biography that’s complex, like its subject” (by Chris Knipp, 03 Nov 2007). It is complex since it really represent Dylan’s characters which for some may disturbed or felt uneasy by his statement and his music. Therefore, you may find that I’m Not There potrays six characters who resembled Dylan’s characters in different times. However, at the same time, by looking to these people, you may find they can be separated as different people who independently stood as themselves. Not one of them name as Dylan, or Robert Zimmerman, his real name. Their names, status and proffesions are varied. Their stories collide and entwine, adding up to an experience that is as fascinating and inexhaustible as listening to “Blood on the Tracks” or “The Basement Tapes.” 

Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with footnotes, as they track Haynes’s allusions not only to Dylan’s own music but also to the extensive secondary literature it has inspired, from books by David Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” some of which Haynes remakes shot for shot. And if you don’t understand or know Dylan at all, you may find this movie a puzzle and complex story which let you leave the theater with headaches. But, … with those mixture that Haynes just made to his film, maybe some of you may enjoyed it as a good movie, which is smart, outspoken and leave you to think a lot about what you had seen in it.

I’m not good at making a film critic, but I just read one that I think you should conssidered to read: ‘I’m Not There:’ The multiple faces of Bob Dylan, reinvented, written by A.O. Scott, who also made a good review for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. The Article was published on November 22, 2007 at International Heral Tribune, culture column.  

by the way, … there is an interesting article from a “not-so-late” archive at Tablet which related to: how catholics should see and consider Dylan with his outspoken words and musics. The article was written by Bill McGarvey, with title: “Don’t think twice, he’s all right” (The Tablet - 17 March 2007). Read it … it’s good, McGarvey told us that Dylan actually proclaimed the same concern with the Church who see the world in “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age … these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” (Gaudium et Spes)

also check these links:

official website

I’m Not There at IMDB

for more information about Bob Dylan:

Bob Dylan at Wikipedia

the official website of Bob Dylan at Columbia Records

Reflection for Monday Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time - 19 November 2007

Readings: 1Mc 1: 10-15, 41-43, 54-57, 62-63; Ps 119; Lk. 18:35-43

Certainly we agree that to life is to make choices. As human beings, we are surrounded by a large numbers of options. We have to make decision from things that very simple, like: a colour for your clothes, foods that you like to eat, books or movies that you want to read and watch; to things that very complicated or serious which will effect your entire life, like option to ask your love one to marry, or work harder and harder in order to pursue the career you wanted.  

            As we notice from the examples that I gave you, we know that we cannot grab all choices that we want. Very often when we decide something we have to give up other things as a return. Sometimes it is really easy to find what to choose since we know for sure about things that fit ourselves, but in some critical options, we do not have an easy task to decide since we often confused about what best that we have to choose. They require more from us. At the crossroad, we find pressures and domination from others, which brought us to tension and conflicts within our souls and our selves. Seldom we also have to face risks and dangers which ask ourselves to sacrifice our own life.

The reading from the Maccabees that we hear today does not only describe the struggle that the Jewish should faced during the most heroic times of their history, but also it reflect struggle that we, Christian have to face in order to be a true disciple of Christ. At that time, the Jewish people was divided by hellenization, which brought there along with Greek domination over Palestine. Some were willing to adapt to even adopt certain Greek costums, while others resisted. History made us knew who were made true choices. The sacrifice from those who refused to follow the Greek culture had known to be heroes of their faith and holy covenant. They chose God’s rather than obeyed to Greek rulers. However, if we put ourselves to those times, I think that we might agreed the choices they had were not as clear as we heard today from the reading.

These days, we faced the same problems like the Maccabees. There are people out there that were not really sure when they had to choose between God and wealth. Very often the choices that we have were not as easy as we learned from schools. Corruptions, business manipulations, law malpractices, political games, and false prophecies in religion are only some examples which illustrate the world we live today is a very confusing world.

            Still, we must make choices. But, the way we chose certainly does not as same as the world had chose. In the Gospel, we find an example. The blind beggar exactly knew whom he should follow. He ask Jesus what he wanted and he knew from that moment his request also require option that he willing to take, to follow him to Jerusalem. One thing that made him followed Jesus, he just falling in love at once to the Lord.

Who Are the Saints?

Gospel Commentary for the Feast of All Saints’ Day

By Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap

Taken from Article on Zenit.org

ROME, OCT. 31, 2007 (Zenit.org).- For some time now, scientists have been sending signals into the cosmos, hoping for a response from some intelligent being on some lost planet. The Church has always maintained a dialogue with the inhabitants of another world — the saints. That is what we proclaim when we say, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” Even if inhabitants outside of the solar system existed, communication with them would be impossible, because between the question and the answer, millions of years would pass. Here, though, the answer is immediate because there is a common center of communication and encounter, and that is the risen Christ.

Perhaps in part because of the time of the year in which it falls, the feast of All Saints’ Day has something special that explains its popularity and the many traditions linked to it in some sectors of Christianity. The motive is what John says in the second reading. In this life, “we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” We are like the embryo in the womb of a mother yearning to be born. The saints have been “born” (the liturgy refers to the day of death as “the day of birth,” “dies natalis.”) To contemplate the saints is to contemplate our destiny. All around us, nature strips itself and the leaves fall, but meanwhile, the feast of the saints invites us to gaze on high; it reminds us that we are not destined to wither on this earth forever, like the leaves.

The Gospel reading is the beatitudes. One in particular inspires the selection of this passage: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, they shall be satisfied.” The saints are those who have hungered and thirsted for justice, that is, in biblical language, for sanctity. They have not resigned themselves to mediocrity; they have not been content with half-measures.

The first reading of the feast helps us to understand who the saints are. They are “those who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.” Sanctity is received from Christ; it is not our own production. In the Old Testament, to be a saint meant “to be separated” from all that is impure; in the Christian understanding, it is, rather, the opposite, that is, to “be united” to Christ.

The saints, that is, the saved, are not only those mentioned in the calendar or the book of the saints. The “unknown saints” also exist: those who risked their lives for their brothers, the martyrs of justice and liberty, or of duty, the “lay saints,” as someone has called them. Without knowing it, their robes have also been washed in the blood of the Lamb, if they have lived according to their consciences and if they have been concerned with the good of their brothers.

A question spontaneously arises: What do the saints do in heaven? The answer is, also here, in the first reading: The saved adore, they prostrate themselves before the throne, exclaiming, “Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving …” The true human vocation is fulfilled in them, that of being “praise to the glory of God” (Ephesians 1:14). Their choir is directed by Mary, who continues her hymn of praise in heaven, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” It is in this praise that the saints find their happiness and joy. “My spirit rejoices in God.” A man is who he loves and who he admires. Loving and praising God, we identify ourselves with God, participate in his glory and in his own happiness.

One day, a saint, St. Symeon the New Theologian, had a mystical experience of God that was so strong he exclaimed to himself, “If paradise is no more than this, it is enough for me.” But the voice of Christ told him, “You are very poor if you content yourself with this. The joy you have experienced in comparison to paradise is like the sky painted on paper in comparison to the real sky.”

—————–

[Translation by ZENIT]

Father Raniero Cantalamessa is the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for the feast of All Saints are Revelation 7:2-4,9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Mathew 5:1-12a.

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The beatification of Franz Jägerstätter was consoling, inspiring and uplifting

By John Dear SJ

Created Oct 30 2007 - 10:50There were many consoling, inspiring and uplifting moments last Friday, Oct. 26, in Linz, Austria, at the beatification of the anti-war hero Franz Jägerstätter. The resounding applause for his 94 year-old widow Franziska. The reading of the declaration. The unfurling of the 30 foot banner with Franz’s photo and the sight of dozens of bishops and cardinals standing up, looking up — at last! — to Franz. But the most moving was the presentation of his relics. Franziska kissed them, gave them to a cardinal for the cathedral in Linz, then wept. She knows it now. Franz no longer belongs to Austria. Now he belongs to the world. And his work is just beginning.

This celebration, for me, was the best events in the institutional church in recent decades, and one of its most political, daring and hopeful. If the institutional church now says Franz was right, then Ratzinger was wrong, nearly all the Catholics of Austria and Germany were wrong, and the church has the potential to wake up and return to the Gospel nonviolence of its ancient history. Franz he is still a force of controversy throughout Austria, but he is the closest saint in recent centuries to resemble those daring, early Christians. This is exactly what we need: saints who inspire us to follow the nonviolent Jesus, say No to war, resist the culture of war, speak out for peace, work for justice, and combine the full mystical and political dimensions of faith.

The witness of Franz Jägerstätter has been at the heart of my own journey. My grandmother gave me a booklet about Franz while I was at Duke University, trying to decide what to do with my life. I was stunned by this story of a young father, husband, and farmer, born on May 20, 1907, who was called into active service by the Nazis in February, 1943, politely refused, was imprisoned in Linz, condemned to death for “undermining military morale,” and beheaded on Aug. 9, 1943. His witness encouraged me to become a Jesuit and an advocate for peace, justice and nonviolence. “Consider two things: from where, to where,” Franz wrote his godson from prison, just a few weeks before his execution. “Then your life will have its true meaning.” I’ve been trying to take his good advice.

In 1985, I read Gordon Zahn’s ground-breaking biography, In Solitary Witness, while living in a refugee camp in El Salvador. In the 1990s, I made a pilgrimage to St. Radegund to pray at Franz’ grave and visit Franziska and the Jägerstätters. It was a joy and a blessing to embrace her and her family last week. (We also learned that my friend Gordon, who has suffered for years with Alzheimer’s, just entered a hospice program and may be approaching his last days.)

On the night before the celebration, nearly a hundred Pax Christi members from Austria, England and the United States gathered for a meal and reflections on Franz’s life. The two-hour Mass on Friday morning was broadcast live on national TV in Austria and Germany. Afterwards, our Pax Christi contingent processed through the streets of Linz, stopping first at the bishops’ house where Franz went for counsel only to be told to fight for Hitler. (It was there, Franziska says, that he emerged from the building feeling very sad and said, “They don’t dare themselves, or it’ll be their turn next.”) Then we stood in the courtyard of the building that the Nazis turned into a prison, where he was held a few months before being transferred to Berlin. (His cell, on the second floor overlooking the courtyard, is now a business office.) Then we crossed the Danube, took a tram up the mountain to a church overlooking the city and the Alps, and enjoyed a special lunch. Later, many attended the new opera written about Franz, and celebrated a feast in honor of Franz and Franziska hosted by the governor. A holy day to remember!

Throughout the pilgrimage, I reflected on the famous dream Franz had, which pushed him to say no to war. In 1938, he dreamt of a beautiful train and huge crowds rushing to board it. Then he heard a voice saying, “This train is going to hell!” Next he saw a vision of many people suffering. He awoke terrified and told Franziska, then later wrote about it from prison. The dream, he wrote, was about Nazi patriotism, idolatry and warmaking.

But I wonder if his nightmare was about all patriotism, idolatry and warmaking, our global rush to violence, killing, war and nuclear weapons. His dream describes our quiet, steady support for American imperialism, military domination, war on Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate greed, environmental destruction, and ignoring the cry of the world’s poor. Franz wrote fiercely about the loss of our soul. We are losing our souls and we don’t know it, he said. “I would like to call out to everyone who is riding in this train: ‘Jump out before this train reaches its destination, even if it costs you your life!’”

That is what many of us are saying. Like Franz, we’re trying not to get on the train to hell, even though crowds rush to board it, and we’re crying out, “Don’t get on this train. Don’t support the culture of war. Don’t make nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. Don’t spend your life becoming rich while 900 million starve. Don’t worship the flag of empire. Become a conscientious objector, a nonviolent resister, a public peacemaker, a Christian.”

But what astonishes me most is that Franz didn’t just reason his way to oppose an unjust war (which is what most good people conclude about him: he realized that Nazi warfare was unjust, so he refused to fight, and did the right thing.) I believe Franz went much farther. With Franziska, he climbed the heights of faith, the kind that moves mountains. “He prayed all day long,” one of his cellmates testified. He received daily Communion, gave to those in need, spoke out as necessary, tried to teach his priests and bishops, prepared for death and tried to do all things for the honor of God. He became a person of deep mystical prayer, and made the connection between Gospel politics and Gospel spirituality. By the time of his death, I submit, Franz understood that to follow the nonviolent Jesus and give one’s entire life to God meant that you could never kill, support war, or compromise with evil.

“Just as those who believe in Nazism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival,” he wrote from prison, “so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference: we need no rifles or pistols for our battle but, instead, spiritual weapons…Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.”

On the morning of his death, Fr. Albert Jochmann, the pastor of Brandenburg, visited Franz in his cell, brought him Communion and heard his confession. He also offered a Bible. “I am completely united with God and any reading would disrupt my union with God,” Franz said to the priest’s amazement. That day, he wrote to Franziska in his last letter, “The heart of Jesus, the heart of Mary and my heart are one, united for time and eternity.”

Who dares say such a thing? The recent collection of letters by Mother Teresa, which I read on the plane to Austria, testify clearly that she never felt such union with God. Few do. Franz did. It was the natural culmination of his steadfast, wholehearted pursuit of God and God’s reign of peace, which required both nonviolent resistance to idolatry, empire and war, and full-time devotion to prayer, worship and nonviolent love. As the world’s violence worsens, I think Franz will emerge as one of history’s greatest saints.

Franz never gave up on the church, even though every single priest, pastor, chaplain and bishop he knew advised him to fight for the Nazis, for the sake of his wife and children. He held his ground, felt sad, and prayed for them. On the day of his execution, Fr. Jochmann told Franz about an Austrian priest, Fr. Franz Reinisch, who had recently been executed for refusing to fight. This report consoled Franz a great deal. (Now we know that some 4,000 priests were killed by the Nazis.) Like Franz, we have to reach out and convert every priest, pastor, bishop and cardinal who supports war, nuclear weapons, and patriotic imperialism to the Gospel wisdom of active love, nonviolent resistance and steadfast peacemaking.

Because Franz Jägerstätter broke new ground, we do not have to do this work alone. Yes, we may be harassed, even arrested and imprisoned, but unlike Franz, we will not be alone. We can join and form communities of peace and justice to help each other take a stand for peace, support one another, and speak out in one voice against our nation’s wars and injustices. Together, we can build movements to say our No to the School of the Americas, the U.S. war on Iraq, bombing Iran, and building nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, and like Franz, help one another plumb the mystical depths of Gospel nonviolence until we, too, are completely united with Jesus, Mary and the God of peace.

“We must do everything in our power to strive toward the Eternal Homeland and to preserve a good conscience,” Franz wrote from prison. “Though we must bear our daily sorrows and reap little reward in this world for doing so, we can still become richer than millionaires–for those who need not fear death are the richest and happiest of all. And these riches are there for the asking.” “There have always been heroes and martyrs who gave their lives for Christ and their faith. If we hope to reach our goal some day, then we, too, must become heroes of the faith.”

“If one harbors no thought of vengeance against others and can forgive everyone,” he wrote, “he will be at peace in his heart — and what is there in all this world more lovely than peace? Let us pray to God that a real and lasting peace may soon descend upon this world.”

“The crucial lesson to be learned,” Gordon Zahn declared, “is that, however hopeless the situation or seemingly futile the effort, the Christian need not despair. Instead he can and should be prepared to accept and assert moral responsibility for his actions. It is always possible, as Jägerstätter wrote, to save one’s own soul and perhaps some others as well by bearing individual witness against evil.”

“Through his bitter suffering and death,” Franz wrote, “Christ freed us only from eternal death, not from temporal suffering and mortal death. But Christ, too, demands a public confession of our faith, just as the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, does from his followers. The commandments of God teach us, of course, that we must render obedience to secular rulers. But only to the extent that they do not order us to do anything evil, for we must obey God rather than men.”

“A prophet with a global view and a penetrating insight.” “A shining example in his fidelity to the claims of his conscience.” “An advocate of nonviolence and peace, a voice of warning against ideologies, a deep-believing person for whom God really was the core and center of life.” This is how the bishop of Linz described our blessed Franz last week. Let’s hope and pray for more saints, prophets and martyrs like Franz, and try our best to emulate him.

please also visit NCR at http://ncronline.org/

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Martyrdom A Real Possibility, Says Pope

Encourages All Christians to a Life of Daily Sacrifice

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 28, 2007 (Zenit.org).- After noting the beatification of 498 Spanish martyrs, Benedict XVI affirmed that all Christians should be ready to give their lives for Christ.

The Pope said this today before leading the midday Angelus, and after the largest beatification ceremony in the history of the Church, held today in St. Peter’s Square. In the celebration, presided over by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, the Church recognized as blessed 498 martyrs from the religious persecution in 1930s Spain.

The Holy Father said, “Adding such a great number of martyrs to the list of beatified persons shows that the supreme witness of giving blood is not an exception reserved only to some individuals, but a realistic possibility for all Christian people. It includes men and women of different ages, vocations and social conditions, who pay with their lives in fidelity to Christ and his Church.”

The Pontiff said that fidelity to Christ, even to the point of giving one’s life, is rooted in baptism.

“Their example gives witness to the fact that baptism commits Christians to participate boldly in the spread of the Kingdom of God, cooperating if necessary with the sacrifice of one’s own life,” he said. “Certainly not everyone is called to a bloody martyrdom. There is also an unbloody ‘martyrdom,’ which is no less significant, such as that of Celina Chludzinska Borzecka, wife, mother, widow and religious, beatified yesterday in Rome: It is the silent and heroic testimony of many Christians who live the Gospel without compromises, fulfilling their duty and dedicating themselves generously in service to the poor.

“This martyrdom of ordinary life is a particularly important witness in the secularized societies of our time. It is the peaceful battle of love that all Christians, like Paul, have to fight tirelessly; the race to spread the Gospel that commits us until death. May Mary, Queen of Martyrs and Star of Evangelization, help us and assist us in our daily witness.”

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Cardinal Urges Religious to Get Blogging

Says Internet Youth Forums Need Real Christian Message

ROME, OCT. 28, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s vicar for the Diocese of Rome expressed his hopes that religious men and women increase their use of information technology, and thus take advantage of what he called a new form of apostolate.

Cardianl Camillo Ruini spoke to the religious at the Pontifical Urbanian University during the diocesan gathering of the Union of Major Superiors of Italy, which represents 1,287 communities and 22,000 religious in Rome.

According to the Roman diocesan weekly RomaSette, Cardinal Ruini said: “A priest from Novara told me that the theme of ‘Jesus’ is very much discussed by youth in blogs. The focus, though, comes from destructive books that are widespread today, and not from Benedict XVI’s book ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’

“What will the idea of Christ be in 10 years if these ideas triumph?”

The true Jesus

The 76-year-old prelate admitted, “I don’t understand the Internet, but especially young religious ought to enter blogs and correct the opinions of the youth, showing them the true Jesus.”

“The teaching emergency is central in Benedict XVI’s concerns,” the cardinal said. “For him, education in the faith coincides with service to society, because to form someone in the faith means to form the human person.

“Simply giving motivations for living defeats nihilism and gives value to the human person, a value that is based on Christ himself, the fact that God became a man.”

The cardinal asserted that an educator’s testimony and content can matter more than pedagogical techniques.

He called for catechists to be creative in finding occasions for promoting Benedict XVI’s book, saying it shows the solidity of faith in the historical Jesus of the Gospels, and bases the identity of the Christian in a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Ruini said that in Catholic schools, “the religious can witness to Christ in all their lessons, in the sciences, in history and even in Italian literature, in an inseparable union of faith and culture. Your creativity ought to find new techniques for the vocational challenge, which ought to develop in step with society.”

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Indonesia in International Herald Tribune, taken from Opinion Column, web version.

The invisible giant of Southeast Asia

Published: October 29, 2007

By Philip Bowring

JAKARTA: ‘We have to be brave enough to ask: What would the world do without Indonesia?” When she recently posed this question to her compatriots, Indonesia’s trade minister, Mari Pangestu, had in mind the country’s role as premier global supplier of various important commodities.

But the question could as well have been asked about Indonesia’s wider relevance to the world. Boastful it might sound, but the remark offered a counterpoint to the nation’s extremely low international visibility, a result of the mix of deference, inward looking politics and persistent lack of leaders willing to make an articulate stand on the world stage.

Indonesia is about to become the president of the UN Security Council. That is unlikely to alter its international profile, but it does provide occasion to look at why Indonesia is rather more important than it usually appears, and at why it fails to leave much of a mark.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous nation, the largest predominantly Muslim country, the third largest (after India and the United States) democratic country, a 3,000-mile-wide archipelago dominating key international waterways - the Malacca, Sunda Lombok and Makassar straits.

But Indonesia is not taken very seriously as a Muslim country. Though the Muslims of the Middle East and Arab world in particular have much to learn from the tradition of religious tolerance at the heart of the Indonesian state, the Muslims of west Asia, and the Arabs who claim some special status as source of the religion, have scant interest in learning from the East.

While the outside world gets excited over the economic rise of China and India, it seldom stops to notice the equally remarkable transformation of Indonesian politics in the 10 years since the downfall of the 30-year authoritarian rule of President Suharto.

It now has the most open, extensive, decentralized democratic system in all of Southeast Asia, achieved possibly at some cost to economic growth but with little localized disorder, and with settlements of the Aceh and Timor Leste issues to its credit.

It is also a remarkably plural society to which the position of Pangestu, a woman, and ethnic Chinese and a Christian attests, and a cultural vitality that puts much of a money-obsessed region to shame. It is of course not without communal tensions and occasional bloodshed. But it provides a salutary contrast to its small higher profile, wealthy neighbors, Malaysia, a country of growing religious intolerance and deepening racial divide and Singapore, a state whose social and political development lags far behind its foreign investment-driven economy.

Yet despite its attributes and size, Indonesia’s influence is slight. Its efforts at being a player have been half-hearted, and even its national airline does not fly to Europe. It should be the natural leader of Jakarta-headquartered Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), this year celebrating its 40th birthday. But Indonesia’s diplomatic voice is almost silent.

If any Asean country has a chance of persuading the Burmese junta to change its ways, to democratize gradually without falling apart, it should be Indonesia. It has made such a transition, albeit from a very different and more successful type of authoritarian government.

Unlike Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, it does not have local commercial interests dictating policy to Burma. But a reluctance to stand up, to divert from a Suharto-era doctrine of “non-interference,” to seize Asean leadership rather than be player in a leaderless team, has left the running on Asean’s approach to Burma to the likes of Singapore, home from home for the Burmese generals and their wives.

Likewise with its economy. Indonesia may never has been a “tiger” economy and suffered more than any country from the Asian crisis. It may still have more problems with corruption and bureaucracy than its major Asian competitors. It even has had the temerity not to succumb to every foreign investor demand by providing levels of employment protection unheard of in China. Nor does it enrich its politicians as does China’s Communist party. On a longer view, the 40 years since China and Indonesia were both traumatized in the mid-1960s, it has done creditably.

Foreign eyes may be on China and India. But looking ahead natural resources are likely to be scarcer than the cheap labor of those two countries. It is also less dependent, at least than China, on Western demand for Asian manufactures. Indonesia’s mix of resource, base, attractive demographics, vibrant culture and domestic demand potential have mostly gone unsung, not least by a government so focused on domestic issues and local politics.

In short, Indonesia and the rest of the world could benefit much from knowing each other better.

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Pope completes second encyclical, a meditation on Christian hope

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Guys, … there’s a new movie. Sean Penn directed the movie and Emile Hirsch take the leading role. The story originated from a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer. I didn’t read this book yet, neither I’ve seen the movie. But, I browsed every information about it, … and all of them saying similar words, “it’s awesome!”

I can’t wait to see it by myself. It’s worth to see. For now, I just can give you some links and a copy-post from International Herald Tribune website about it. Believe me, … don’t miss this good art work. You won’t regret it.

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REVIEW

Movie Review: Sean Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’

By A.O. Scott

Published: September 21, 2007

Into the Wild Directed by Sean Penn (U.S.)

There is plenty of sorrow to be found in “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer. The story begins with an unhappy family, proceeds through a series of encounters with the lonely and the lost, and ends in a senseless, premature death. But though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything
but. It is infused with an expansive, almost giddy sense of possibility, and it communicates a pure, unaffected delight in open spaces, fresh air and bright sunshine.

Some of this exuberance in the film, with releases worldwide through February, comes from Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young adventurer whose footloose life and gruesome fate were the subject of Krakauer’s book. As Penn understands him (and as he is portrayed, with unforced charm and brisk intelligence, by Emile Hirsch), Chris is at
once a troubled, impulsive boy and a brave and dedicated spiritual pilgrim. He does not court danger but rather stumbles across it - thrillingly and then fatally - on the road to joy.

In letters to his friends, parts of which are scrawled across the screen in bright yellow capital letters, he revels in the simple beauty of the natural world. Adopting the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, rejecting material possessions and human attachments, he proclaims himself an “aesthetic voyager.”

Penn serves as both his biographer and his traveling companion.

After graduating from Emory University in 1990, McCandless set off on a zigzagging two-year journey that took him from South Dakota to Southern California, from the Sea of Cortez to the Alaskan wilderness, where he perished, apparently from starvation, in August 1992. “Into the Wild,” which Penn wrote and directed, follows faithfully in his
footsteps, and it illuminates the young man’s personality by showing us the world as he saw it.

What he mostly saw was the glory of the North American landscape west of the Mississippi: the ancient woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, the canyons and deserts farther south, the wheat fields of the northern prairie and Alaska, a place that McCandless seemed to regard with almost mystical reverence. Penn, who did some of the camera
work, was aided by the director of photography, Eric Gautier, who previously turned his careful, voracious eye on the wilds of South America in Walter Salles’s “Motorcycle Diaries.”

An enthusiastic reader (with a special affinity for Tolstoy and Jack London), Chris is in many ways the intellectual heir of 19th-century writer-naturalists like John Muir and especially Henry David Thoreau, whose uncompromising idealism - “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth” - he takes as a watchword. (Had he survived,
McCandless might well have joined the ranks of latter-day nature writers like Edward Abbey and Bill McKibben.)

His credo is perhaps most succinctly stated by Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advised that “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study Nature,’ become at last one maxim.”

One problem with this strain of American thought is that it sometimes finds expression in self-help nostrums and greeting-card sentiments. But the movie’s theme, thankfully, is not so simple or so easily summed up in words.

Penn, even more than Krakauer, takes the Emersonian dimension of McCandless’s project seriously, even as he understands the peril implicit in too close an identification with nature. The book took pains to defend its young protagonist against the suspicion that he was suicidal, unbalanced or an incompetent outdoorsman, gathering testimony from friends he had made in his last years as evidence of his kindness, his care and his integrity. The film, at some risk of sentimentalizing its hero, goes further, pushing him to the very brink of sainthood. At the same time, though, “Into the Wild” resists the impulse to interpret Chris’s death as a kind of martyrdom or as the inevitable, logical terminus of his passionate desire for communion with nature.

Instead, with disarming sincerity, it emphasizes his capacity for love, the gift for fellowship that, somewhat paradoxically, accompanied his fierce need for solitude. Though he warns one of his friends against seeking happiness in human relationships - and also rails incoherently against the evils of “society” - Chris is a naturally sociable creature. And “Into the Wild” is populated with marvelous actors - including Brian Dierker, a river guide and ski-shop owner making his first appearance in a film - who make its human landscape as fascinating and various as its topography.

The source of Chris’s wanderlust, and of the melancholy that tugs at the film’s happy-go-lucky spirit, is traced to his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), whose volatile marriage and regard for appearances begin to seem contemptible to their son. Fleeing from his mother and father, Chris finds himself drawn, almost unwittingly, to
parental surrogates: a rowdy grain dealer in South Dakota (Vince Vaughn), a retired military man in the California desert (Hal Holbrook), a middle-aged hippie (Dierker), and the hippie’s companion (Catherine Keener), who seems both carefree and careworn.

This story seems to have liberated Penn from the somber seriousness that has been his hallmark until now. “Into the Wild” is a movie about the desire for freedom that feels, in itself, like the fulfillment of that desire.

Which is not to say that there is anything easy or naïve in what Penn has done. “Into the Wild” is, on the contrary, alive to the mysteries and difficulties of experience in a way that very few recent American movies have been. There are some awkward moments and
infelicitous touches, - a few too many Eddie Vedder songs on the soundtrack, for example, when Woody Guthrie, Aaron Copland or dead silence might have been more welcome - but the film’s imperfection, like its grandeur, arises from a passionate, generous impulse that is as hard to resist as the call of the open road.

also check these links:

Into The Wild (Film) at Wikipedia

Into the Wild (Book) at Wikipedia

Official web site from Paramount

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