Seeking Wisdom

I turned 21 yesterday and it got me to thinking, as birthdays will do. That thinking was spurred by my new favorite laptop sticker which I got from SEEK conference. There’s a line sketch of St. Maximilian Kolbe ( who volunteered to die in another man’s place at Auschwitz ) circled by the words “Your life is not about you.” I appreciate the reminder every day, and I’m trying to live it. But that also reminded me of the various things I’ve realized life wasn’t about in the past four or five years. I think I’m still pretty far from understanding what life is about (I just turned 21 yesterday) but here’s a non-exhaustive list: Your life is not about fun. Your life is not about what you want. Your life is not about you. And that’s the order I, and I think most people, will experience them in. Given that these negations require an assertion this naturally creates four periods I can see in my life. My life is about fun. My life is about what I want. My life is about what’s...

The Gospel Acclamation for today is John 8:31-32 “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, says the Lord.” Which is a nice promise. That’s the kind of reward we hope for from following Christ. But there’s something to be gained from looking at a slightly different version of this acclamation. “Si se mantienen fieles a mi palabra, dice el Señor, serán verdaderamente discípulos míos y conocerán la verdad.” The practice of looking at biblical verses in a foreign language is pretty common in sermons and homilies, though people usually seem to look at the Greek or Hebrew as they’re closer to the original Gospels in terms of number of translations. I’m looking at Spanish because I don’t speak Greek, Hebrew, or Latin, but also because I think there’s always something to be gained by observing scripture through a slightly different prism. One thing that shines through this passage is the verb “to know.” In English we have no ...

What does it mean to talk to someone? To be painfully analytical: My brain sends impulses to mouth, lips, and tongue to coordinate with my diaphragm and conjure a complex mixture of fricative and non-fricative sounds at a volume loud enough to be audible so that somebody else’s ears can perceive that pressure wave through a mechanism that’s far too complicated for me to understand or explain, ultimately sending an electrical signal to their brain with some message that I did or did not intend. That gets interpreted and so on. Cartesian Dualism bookends this process with two souls that possess wills that manipulate those brains and so on down the line. So what we really mean when we say we’re talking to someone is that we’re making noise with our body (probably, hopefully, meaningful) and that other person’s body has the machinery to decode that meaningful noise, if we speak the same language. Who’s the “we” here? Is it that thing Descartes would call a soul, or the bodies ...