If you don't already receive it by e-mail or snail mail,
you can read my latest sponsor letter under the 'my mission' page tab.
hope you enjoy. and now that that is finished, more updates will be coming to the blog...so much to tell you!
pax.
7.21.2011
7.13.2011
'dig' it // dig deep.
Action is character.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
love it. (blogspot//tumblr)
spread it. (tweets//texts)
support it ($$//Dear God)
dig.it.
http://digdeepwater.org/
7.06.2011
updates on the kitchen
so the kitchen is almost finished.
tomorrow is the last day of painting (Carlotta and Bernadetta are coming over to help me paint!) and then I need to do some heavy duty cleaning before Claudio comes over to figure out how to install the donated kitchen.
It is bound to be a headache because the kitchen layout of the woman who donated the kitchen was completely different than how the water and electricity in our kitchen is arranged. I'm sure we'll need a miracle or two to make everything work so you can start praying now :)
we also need a new kitchen floor because as I came to find in removing all the cabinets and what-not in preparation for painting, the laminate is pulling away from the walls on all sides, the running board no longer attached to the the walls and floor, thus exposing it to the leaking sink among other things and causing large portions of the floor to buckle and detach, not to mention causing damage to the wooden floor boards beneath the laminate. so if you know anyone who is keen on donating a kitchen floor...send me an email :) otherwise...we'll focus on the fact that God has just provided us with this lovely new kitchen and try not to look at the floor :)
updates via pictures...
first step: scraping the old plaster/paint/wallpaper stuff off the walls and ceiling
(Jaci helped with the hardest part...the ceiling....tell you about her later)
(finished thanks to help from Jaci and Raph)
third step: sandpapering the re-plastered walls
(thank God for Monika and Liz or else this would never have been finished!)
fourth step: painting!!!
(Liz and I pretended we were Michaelangelo for the day and painted the ceiling...
then I applied a second coat and now all that is left are the walls!)
oh and thanks to liz, we were wearing some pretty cool hats!
mugshots
Jaci (taking the picture): "Would you really be that happy if you were in jail, Liz?"
kinda like a gangsta
I signed up for a bank account with Erste bank back in January.
Then, a week later, Alina created a bank account as well, and we told them I referred her.
Lucky us....for referring her, I (we) received 4 coupons to the movies with popcorn and drinks!
The particular cinema they were good for only show the latest hollywood movies, which I am not that interested in seeing, nor do I have the time to waste on them. The expiration date for the coupons was coming up on June 30th and we surely weren't going to use them, so I give them to Aberu's sons as a little 'Happy Summer' present. Aberu hates going to the movies even more than I do, and her husband wasn't free to take Nahum to the movie he wanted to see, so I told him I would go with him.
we say Pirates of the Caribbean 4....in 3-D, as Nahum insisted it was the only way to see it.
I told him he looked like a 'gangsta' with his 3-D glasses.
He said he didn't know what a 'gangsta' was.
buh.
7.05.2011
ch.ch.check. check it out...
a pope.
on an ipad.
pushing a button
to launch a vatican media website.
then 'tweeted' about it.
then 'tweeted' about it.
über cool.
www.news.va is the link.
everything you could want to know about what is going on in the Roman Catholic world.
-------------------------------
check out this little beauty especially on art + the church...go to this link and push the button at the end of the article to hear the mp3.
Sixty works of art are currently on show in the Vatican to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Benedict XVI’s ordination to the priesthood.
An exhibition by the title of "Splendour of Truth , Beauty in Charity “ fittingly located in a place, the Paul VI Audience Hall, named after the 20th century pope who famously renewed the friendship between the Church and art after many centuries on the 7th May 1964 . A celebration which took place in that cenacle of art and artists : the Sistine Chapel .
A friendship, continued by Blessed John Paul II and renewed once again by our present pope in that very same place in November 2009.
And when the Holy Father Benedict inaugurated the current exhibition in the heart of the Vatican on Monday July 4th, thanks to the Pontifical Council for Culture headed by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi , he began by recalling that 2009 November gathering of artists in the Sistine pointing to the role art has in modern society at a cultural level , in terms of eloquence and fruitful dialogue.
Picking up on this theme of "the Church and Art ", Veronica Scarisbrick goes back even further in time and places the current exhibition in the Paul VI Audience Hall into context.
Join her as she takes us back to that day on May 7th 1964 when while the Second Vatican Council was in full swing Paul VI set the ball rolling in the field of art …
In this feature she’s put together you can hear the voice of Paul VI on that occasion and also to the comments of two guests: an American Cardinal who was a personal friend of Paul VI and an English Monsignor formerly an official from the Pontifical Council for Culture .
Listen: 00:09:21:98
the year of the priesthood: they need our prayers now more than ever
Austrian Priests to Disobey Pope
Vienna - More than 250 Catholic priests in Austria are ready to disobey the pope and allow women to preach, the head of a progressive clergy platform confirmed on Wednesday.
Helmut Schueller said the Priests' Initiative he leads has been pushing for admitting women and married men into the clergy for years, without results.
The movement published a manifesto earlier this month, and its members have let trained laymen and female religion teachers preach.
They have also defied the Vatican by administering the sacrament of Holy Communion to divorcees and to people who have left the church.
"I think we will create a forward thrust in the Church by making these practices visible," Schueller said.
The platform's views are shared by a majority of the clergy, according to a poll conducted one year ago. It showed that 80% of Austria's priests would like to end the marriage ban for their profession, and 51% would like to admit women in their ranks.
The Catholic Church, however, has reacted sharply to the priests' initiative.
The Vatican is aware that there are not enough priests and it is legitimate to voice concerns, said Bishop Egon Kapellari, the deputy head of the conference of Austrian bishops.
"But it is something else entirely to call for disobedience, to threaten the unity of the global Church and to revoke common obligations," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
- SAPAThe movement published a manifesto earlier this month, and its members have let trained laymen and female religion teachers preach.
They have also defied the Vatican by administering the sacrament of Holy Communion to divorcees and to people who have left the church.
"I think we will create a forward thrust in the Church by making these practices visible," Schueller said.
The platform's views are shared by a majority of the clergy, according to a poll conducted one year ago. It showed that 80% of Austria's priests would like to end the marriage ban for their profession, and 51% would like to admit women in their ranks.
The Catholic Church, however, has reacted sharply to the priests' initiative.
The Vatican is aware that there are not enough priests and it is legitimate to voice concerns, said Bishop Egon Kapellari, the deputy head of the conference of Austrian bishops.
"But it is something else entirely to call for disobedience, to threaten the unity of the global Church and to revoke common obligations," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
"For the priestly office is indeed discharged on earth, but it ranks amongst heavenly ordinances; and very naturally so: for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete Himself, instituted this vocation, and persuaded men while still abiding in the flesh to represent the ministry of angels. Wherefore the consecrated priest ought to be as pure as if he were standing in the heavens themselves in the midst of those powers." - St. John Chrysostom
7.03.2011
im an american (insert thick country drawl here)
|lovely things|
dusk on a hot 4th of july evening
patriotic nails
truly american bbq's
fireworks
and sparklers
polar pops
(Austria is missing out. bigtime)
american-tasting coca-cola
with...ICE CUBES....lots of them
50 beautiful, united states
freedom and independence....rather lovely too.
all to be enjoyed and defended responsibly. joyfully. fully.
-----------------------------------------------
due to my american, work-a-holic blood and the fact that even on independence day I am still a volunteer in Vienna :) ...i won't be celebrating all day like the rest of you ...but i will be listening to these as I finish painting the kitchen!
I 'like' this
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.
I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.
Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. (Think about it...I think this is one of his most powerful assertions)
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. (and here, you will probably think of that old adage "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" but I would venture to say that surviving the pain isn't about making you stronger, but about making your life as beautiful as it is meant to be, helping you to be as beautiful as you are meant to be) When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.
When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.
Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.
BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.
And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.
Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.
And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.
How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?
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