|
Well, another semester has come and gone. I have forgotten just how much fun finals are - now I remember why I didn’t go to graduate school right after my first degree. J This semester ended very well and I’ve started to get a decent handle on reading Latin. I’ve got one more semester of undergraduate classes to go. I’ll be taking more Latin, the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, medieval literature, a spirituality course, and some more philosophy and continuing with my iconography. I still have 5 years of graduate school remaining after this year. Iconography turned out to be one of my favorite courses. The monk that teaches the course is really, really good and there is a wonderful spirituality around making an icon of the scenes of the bible. Icons are paintings on wood that depict scenes from the bible, famous saints and apostles and other religious topics. Icon making isn’t meant to be photo-realistic, but instead be very stylized with special colors, special ways of painting and so on – and those special techniques carry special meanings. In making a scene, it is meant to bring out all the meanings and theology of the event. It’s almost like reflectively reading a passage of the bible and re-creating what you experienced through the reading in paint. That is why making an icon is called ‘writing’ an icon instead of painting one. Last semester I finished up the icon of Kateri Tekakawitha (Native American Indian from St. Lawrence area). Now I’ll be moving on to a scene of my choosing. Hopefully I’ll get some pictures of that icon up on my web page soon. I forgot my pictures in Oregon; so I’ll send out another update when I get my web page updated. This year I have two new jobs. I’m a floor RA and also one of the 3 social directors for the seminary. This entails organizing social events and has been a lot more work than I first thought; but has been one of the most rewarding parts of this semester. We had a bonfire with hotdog cooking, s’mores and the like. It was great to introduce a number of the Hispanic guys to s’mores – something they had never had. The big event was the annual Jeopardy night which is a battle between the different dioceses studying here. Since it happens right near Halloween, the guys from each diocese dress up in some theme of their diocese. The Canadians dress in hockey uniforms, Samoans in their garb, the hosts dressed up in smoking jackets and wigs, and so forth. We have a whole Jeopardy setup with buzzers, and so forth. I’ll be writing a software package to replace the wipe-board version we currently use. Looks like my software skills aren’t going to waste. We also did some cooking events. We had a chili and salsa cook-off completion which went very well. One of the guys rented a hickory smoker and we made a whole ton of ribs, steaks and the like. It was dubbed the first annual “meat-toberfest” in honor of the local Oktoberfest that a number of you came to visit. During Halloween, we got a bunch of pumpkins and chopped them all up making pumpkin pie and watching movies. We had one of the Samoan deacons get ordained, so we had another pig roast. In another event, we went out to a local outdoor paintball arena and had a lovely day of shooting each other. It was great. Where else can you shoot a deacon and get a high-five from him 5 minutes later. J We spent the whole day out in the woods and then again in some speedball courses. We had about 40 guys playing and it was amazing fun. Most of us ended up with some really good welts and bruises. This semester I’m helping with teen ministry in Salem. It’s a really great program and I’m learning a lot from being with the group. They are very active in their community and have some really great programs and members. I found this to be one of my most enjoyable assignments yet. As promised from my previous email, I thought I’d relate the challenges and experiences in the seminary. The seminary is a powerfully growing environment – all aspects of your life are stretched to their limits: maturity, spiritually, emotionally, and academically. Each person struggles with things as different as each person, and each semester I’ve has been unique in its challenges too. The pressure comes from the fact that we have a great amount, and great variety, of things we are asked to do. In fact, more than we could possibly do – and that requires us to prioritize and make decisions. This semester I learned that how and why we make those decisions has been the focus of my challenges and lessons. This term, the challenges and lesson of love were in the forefront for me – how love, commitment, and decision are related. Even though it might seem counter-intuitive the way the world thinks, one learns a lot about love and commitment while at the seminary. It seems to be that love is a choice that we make, and we make that choice the thing that guides all of our other decisions. This applies to our relationship to God, faithfulness to a spouse, a vocation, or caring for others. Loving is something we do each day – it is when we bind all our daily decisions to stay faithful to that choice – to make a commitment to that choice. This is often painful and difficult because it means that we must often give up our own ambitions and expectations – because I’ve learned that often I am quite wrong about what I thought a relationship or situation should be like. It’s a strange contradiction – in binding ourselves to a choice, we become free to live according to that choice – but love is a beautiful contradiction. I’ve had to learn not only to be accepting of other’s struggles in learning to love and be faithful – but even my own failures. To understand that learning to love is a lifetime project for all of us. But more amazing than this is that as we make decisions to stay committed (to anything: marriages, vocations, our families, etc) we *change* who we are – we become a new person – a person who has been defined and shaped by our choices. Those choices can be of love or not. In learning all this I have hung a quote from St. Theresa of Avila up in my room, “It is not so much what you do, as the love you do it with that matters most” I have seen so much truth in this – and so much challenge. It doesn’t mean we have some happy, feel-good attitude all the time, as much as we daily and in all things chose to do what God has asked because we desire to stay faithful and committed to the end. For me, that is why I need Christ at the center of my decisions – because without Him I cannot see the truth of situations and make the right choices. Without Him, I only have half the equation of love because we by ourselves do not know the truth of who we are (His children), the dignity and value of each person, how we are to live together, and who He has individually called us to be. This is what real loving is and to love God before all else, and our neighbor as ourselves. So, the challenge of the seminary is the challenge of love – but to make choices that conform to him – not to my expectations. It is always hard to let go of misconceptions about how things should be, how I thought things should work, or what it would feel like. These struggles come out in every part of my life there – from helping others study when I have things to do, to being patient with human weakness, to saying no when I can’t give more time without sacrificing my other commitments. It asks me to refocus energies into areas I’m not good at, accept mediocre performance or failure again and again while I learn. To stretch myself to where I don’t feel like going and see the world, relationships, others, my actions and thoughts in God’s lens through daily prayer. To learn to listen to how Christ is speaking through each event and each person in our lives. That is why the more over-worked we seem, it’s actually a blessing in a way because it means we need to exercise our commitment in more and more daily choices. Married couples probably look at this and say, “Well, DUH!” And how very true! It doesn’t matter so much what state or vocation we have in life: single, married, religious, old/young, rich/poor, educated or not – what really matters in the end is our faithfulness – and that our greatest commitment is to God before and above all else. That in making our choices, we indeed become shaped by those choices. We either become our acts of love, giving and caring or we become acts of selfishness, destruction or separation. When God is made our first choice, He is the force that shapes all other choices in His image, and then we are truly changed in His image. This is ruler stick God uses in measuring our lives – how much we have loved. I encourage all of you this Advent season, to look at where you have placed your commitments. I have certainly seen plenty of areas in my life falling short. Sometimes they are ones we have chosen (work, spouse, friends, hobbies, extra curricular activities) other times they are not (families, relatives). Each of us is a gift to this world, a gift for those who come into our lives. Maybe we have made decisions that give that gift to our career more than our family or friends, maybe its our own desires to be comfortable than to reach out to those that annoy or anger us. Love is difficult and we may well fall flat on our face; but it is not so much what we accomplish as much as how and why we chose to do it that God calls loving. That is why we need Christ at the center of our decisions. Because then we can see the world as He does, and make the right choices – not just the ones we think are right and we are transformed into those choices – into the person Christ wishes us to be. So that’s the update. I’ll send out another email when I get the web page updated with new info and pictures. I’m thankful for all of you and your prayers. I hope you all have a blessed Christmas season. Until then, God bless and I keep you in my prayers, Matt |