Entering New Life

The school where I'm enrolled has a partnership with another school in Texas. A group of us was there for some short classes for most of last week. This weekend we've been very close to the border, learning more about people's experiences here.  The connection between where I am right now very near the border and the heinous events of last week? The way I see it, it's arrogance upon arrogance upon arrogance. The vast majority of the land in the United States being stolen directly from Native Americans, the land where I am right now stolen as part of the colonial imperialist bellicose Manifest Destiny policy of this country, including against Mexico, and thus the arrogance of not only trying to enforce thus obviously invalid and therefore ridiculous immigration laws, given that this is stolen land, but the arrogance of openly, deliberately, and brazenly murdering Nicole Renee Good. 

As this year is coming to a close, I’ve been reflecting on how different my life looks on the last day of the year from how it looked on the first day of the year. On January 1, I was still at my Human Resources job, living in a studio in the woods in the Santa Cruz mountains. On December 31, I’m sitting typing this blog post in my dorm room. I’ve finished my first semester of studies for my Master’s of Divinity degree. Although the dorm is almost entirely devoid of students other than me right now, normally I’m surrounded by other students in dorm life, in classes, and in the library, reflecting the spiritual community I’ve so cherished and enjoyed here.  Today as I’ve been pondering how the last day of this year is so different from the first day of this year, I’ve been recalling how I felt the same about 2010, the year I entered the Peace Corps. At the beginning of that year, I was still at the lawyer job I’d held for nearly eight years by that point, and I was still living in a...

  Yesterday I attended the funeral Mass for one of the monks here on campus who recently passed away at the age of 100. During the homily, the priest was talking about how we need to make the right choices so our obituary will say what we want it to say about us.  Tonight, I just got back from the 9:00 p.m. Sunday night student Mass. In the Gospel reading for Mass today, we hear Jesus tell us to stay awake, because we do not know the day or the hour.  We do not know when the time will come to pass from this life to the next. We need to stay awake to be able to make the right choices, so that when our time comes, we will have lived the life we have wanted to live. 

Usually every Thursday at the School of Theology we enjoy Convivium , a wonderful community custom where students and faculty and staff gather for lunch. Yesterday at Convivium we were enjoying Reuben sandwiches.  At one point during the meal, a Scripture professor and I passed each other on our way coming back from getting second helpings of food. He said to me, "I went back for Reuben." I replied, "Not Issachar." 

Last week, here on campus, in connection with my Liturgy In Culture class, I attended a wonderful lecture on indigenous roots of the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The visiting presenter, Dr. Timothy Matovina, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, explained to us that, in addition to Spanish colonizers' devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, indigenous people fostered devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.  [While he has previously published works on this topic, in his remarks here on campus, he was conveying results of his more recent research that will be in a paper he plans to get published soon. For that reason, I won't mention specifics from his research (and once his paper is published, I'll come back to this blog post and include a citation for his article so anyone interested can then read it).]  For now, I'll just say that in his lecture, he mentioned that he studied what natives centuries ago actually said in their own words about Our Lady of Gua...

This week, on the first day of class, the professor, during our History Of Christianity I class, put some questions on the board for us students to discuss with each other in small groups. Then he said that our answers were not the most important part. What's more important, he said, was to explore together.