Of Partings and New Years

Thank you again to Prof. Ted Te for sharing this to us. Very timely as we struggle to find words to say farewell to the old year and well, other goodbyes we stubbornly refuse to make (again in boldface are words we would have highlighted on paper):
Saying Goodbye
James F. Donelan, S.J.

Goodbyes have always been an inspiration to poets, and what has caught their poetic fancy most is the contradictory nature of the experience. Emily Dickinson says partings are all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell. Shakespeare’s Romeo puts it simpler: Partings, he says, are such sweet sorrows. We smile through our tears and cry through our laughter.

But goodbyes are more than sentimental moments. They are one of nature’s sacraments–sacraments in that they involve a mystery, an insight into the heart of things. there is a mystery involved in going away, in that simple experience of saying goodbye that touches each one of us, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily.

Was it a Merry Little Christmas?

I was wailing about spending Christmas Day without a significant other when a friend sent a text message that He Whose Birth We Remember was born to die alone. That shook off the whatever blues clouded my Christmas Day.

We are never truly “loveless.” It’s a shame that as we grow older, we tend to delimit love to just the romantic kind. We take for granted the truly unconditional loves – our parents whose happiness seem to lay solely in our happiness, our siblings who sometimes forego their dreams just so we could pursue our own, our little cousins who think the world of us no matter how messed up our lives could be – these loves never leave us for another, they would never break our hearts, these are the loves that are really for keeps. And His love that just never gives up on us, even after we have long given up.

Hope we all had our own Merry Little Christmases. This is also a chance for this weblogger to say thank you for being on this journey. What a ride it has been!

Convention of those wounded in love

From Paolo Coelho’s recent Warrior of the Light issue:

General provisions:

A – Whereas the saying “all is fair in love and war” is absolutely correct;

B – Whereas for war we have the Geneva Convention, approved on 22 August 1864, which provides for those wounded in the battle field, but until now no convention has been signed concerning those wounded in love, who are far greater in number;