First pass at a mission statement

This needs some work, and is perhaps more of a rant, but here goes:

Mission Statement:
I used to think that this was just for us, for those who would actually embark upon the journey together, however I have come to realize that we do this not only for ourselves, but also for anyone who has ever dreamed, and who has yet to realize that dream. The only unique characteristic we possess is the freedom to go and the firm belief that we will accomplish what we set out to achieve. Life is too short. There were multiple points along the way when my choices could have determined the rest of my life, and I would be “settled,” whatever that means, and would be living a more formulaic and established life. However, these choices never came to fruition, and I find myself a graduate with a master’s degree and all the aspirations in the world to travel the world, to explore and understand new cultures that I have only ever read about, or seen in some television special. Life is about what happens when you are planning for the next step, so apart from the general and unavoidable contingency planning, this trip will take place purely through spontaneity, and will show each participant what we are capable of. What the human spirit can accomplish when it is given the opportunity to thrive. I believe the human spirit can be molded to fit whatever situation and dreams lie in our minds, and that we should seek this reality, rather than to fit our spirit to some societal or economical mold. The human spirit thrives on adventure, on the unknown, on the frightening and the exciting. When is the last time you really felt your pulse pick up, or your heart flutter? What do you really want out of life? What would it take to achieve this? What are your goals, hopes, aspirations? What is your greatest fear?
Too often I believe our greatest fear is that we would have the opportunity to accomplish our greatest dream. We fear success, we fear failure, but it is often in those moments when we expose ourselves to fear, when we confront those things in life that truly scare us and make us feel uncomfortable, that we grow and become the people we have the potential to become.
Life is too short to simply follow the flock, to do what we think we should do, rather we should strive for what we desire to do in the deepest part of ourselves, and that springs to the outlying corners of our minds on those days when truly allow ourselves to dream.
This started as a mission statement, but perhaps is closer to a life philosophy. Never let someone else tell you what your dreams are, only you can discern and determine that by deepening your self-knowledge, and your relationship with our Lord and Creator. If something scares you, you will most likely benefit from confronting this fear and not hesitating to follow where this confrontation leads.
When have you felt most alive? What are the moments in your life that cling to your mind and refuse to let go? When have you felt most truly inspired? What does inspire you? If you can answer even some of these questions you are well on your way to finding fulfillment and joy in your life. We need this inspiration, this hope, this living on the edge to push us through what we never thought we could accomplish.
For truly, we are the music-makers and the dreamers of dreams…and if not us, then who?

This time of year

Graduation time. The time for the end of something long-fought and hard-earned, and the beginning of something new. New faces, new locations, new challenges and new struggles. Life is full of these it seems, and never seems to let down. This is why we have decided to do something different. I fear that life will simply lull or pound me into concession and submission. Submission to something I never necessarily asked for, and concession of all the crazy dreams and ideals of youth. So the call is to become the best version of yourself, or so the Matthew Kelly craze of late has termed it. I believe there is a lot of truth to be found in these words, and the real truth of the matter is that what it takes to become that best version of ourselves is very different for each one of us. For me, this means taking some time off with a brother and friend and attempting to travel around the world. Do you ever feel like life here in the states is conducted over some kind of safety net? That all of our risks and struggles are real, but if ever we should fall, there is always someone there to pick us back up again? Well, however unfortunately, I do not feel that this is real life. No one asked any one of us whether we wanted to be born, and the fact that we were born does not entitle us to anything. Perhaps you say it should, that every human person deserves dignity and the right to life, and I agree, and in this great country, the United States of America, these rights are often preserved. But at the same time we are sheltered and coaxed into thinking that we have it the best, and therefore why go anywhere else. That every other country in the world is essentially in disarray, and so there is no need ever to leave. That everything we here have is as it should be, and so we should not protest. Just go on about your life, get yours, and life will be fine. I hesitate, I chafe, I know there is something more and I want a piece of it. I want life to fight back, I want to have to struggle to make things work, I want a little taste of blood in my mouth every once in a while. This comfortable, established, and ordered life is certainly for some, and perhaps will better agree with me at some point as well, but not now. Now I take life by the horns and run with it, run to the far corners of the globe in exploration and expectation of finding the great truths of life hidden in some backwoods or alley gutter. I expect to find it raining in the Amazons of Brazil or in the concise steel structures of Tokyo. Life is lived by exploring new possibilities and new potentials.

The questions are asked: how much money do you have? What about all of the shots, vaccinations, visas, etc.? My answer is another question: how much does it take to travel the world? And are you going to let the little things stop you from chasing your dream?

There is the famous platitude that one should shoot for the moon, and if one fails to reach it, that person will still find themselves among the stars. This trip is not so much about the external reality, but more about what kind of changes and impacts the external reality is going to have on our souls. This trip is a journey of the soul if you will. A quest to find ourselves, with the knowledge that we will be stretched, will be challenged, will have let-downs and triumphs, and at the end that we will come out stronger people for what we have sought and achieved, whether this be an accomplished journey around the world, or simply an expedition to the West Coast and back. And so I venture to ask you:

What are your dreams? And what are you doing to make them a reality in your life?

Good Luck Fr. Dennis!

This picture encapsulates the event that brought three friends together to celebrate the life and ministry of a great man by the name of Fr. Dennis Miller. A priest at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Student Center since the beginning of my own time there, he has been a support and an inspiration for the family and student communities alike that together comprise the parish population. My time at Iowa State University was challenging as I was forced to confront the realities of life to which I was rarely exposed during the greater part of my life up to that point. I vaguely recall visiting St. Thomas and feeling somewhat comfortable there during one of my first campus visits to Iowa State, but of course it was also quite different from my very conservative and traditional home parish in Rockford, Illinois. Nonetheless, despite the somewhat more scarce periods of kneeling during mass, and the sung Alleluia after the Gospel reading, I adapted and came to enjoy my new experience of Catholicism. Many good friends were an invaluable support during this time, not the least of which being my high school buddy and one of my best friends of all time, Andy May. Other men and women supported me and helped me to see that despite the imperfection of the human elements of Catholicism and the issues with St. Thomas Aquinas as a parish specifically, at the heart lay the reality of an encounter with Christ, and the need to share that with every single person encountered in our lives. This is what Fr. Dennis continually communicated to me, and was one of the reasons that I stuck by the Church, and ultimately served as a leader within it, a peer minister over the course of my junior year at Iowa State.

During this time, Fr. Dennis was the voice of reason and truth, explaining the intricacies of what it takes to become a Catholic priest, and constantly sharing his experience of the faith through discussion, and his wisdom and knowledge through conversation and the passing on of books and catechisms and any resources or materials that he saw fitting to my spiritual needs at that point in time. Fr. Dennis, was, and as I realized upon seeing him this past week, still is a figure that I look up to as a friend, and as a role model. There is a sense about him that inspires some measure of awe in my heart and soul, and I think it is the beauty of his devotion to his vocation. He still never hesitates to offer a smile, and truly carries a deep sense of joy with him that proves contagious to everyone that he meets. He is both a leader and a man of the people. He has left an indelible mark on the students that he has taught and pastored at St. Thomas Aquinas, and I know will continue to do so in the six parishes of his future assignment. I pray that God bless and continue to inspire him, and that the Holy Spirit remain constantly with him that he will possess the strength of faith and passion for people to continue to provide the spiritual sustenance and intellectual challenge that the world needs.

God bless and keep you Father, and thank you for all the ways in which you have impacted my life. I would not be the man I am today without your support and teaching.

Passion

Passion drives us! It fills us and pushes us ever onward, through every trial and struggle. We need it as much it needs us to have a purpose. We feel it in the adrenaline-filled moments that define our lives, and yearn for it in the ordinariness of daily life. Yet where does it go? How in the world does it leave, and where does disembodied passion have to go? Who can it inhabit? These are things we cannot know, and yet we do know when it is there, we know when it fills us, and interestingly enough these occurrences can be pinpointed and linked to certain activities or pursuits in our lives. This is a topic I continually return to, because I feel it is so extremely critical.

Our bishop spoke this past weekend on hearing and following the call of God, and how doing so brings great peace into our lives, and that following our own will or the will of the Evil One will only bring us an ever more profound feeling of desolation. Why in the world would we seek the latter? I would posit that not only does following the will of God bring peace, it also brings passion! It brings with it the pursuit of something greater than ourselves. It is in these moments that we forget ourselves and really look to the joy of those around us that we feel this sense of peace and are filled with these feelings of passion.

I want all of you to have passion in your lives! Chase your dreams and do what you must do in your lives to feel fulfilled! Follow every possibility, pursue every opportunity and never hesitate to improve yourself and yet always look to those around you. Seek love with temperance, success with magnanimity, joy with generosity!

Intimacy

Is it wrong to want a little bit more than the typical interaction of today, where we are connected to the rest of the world through this thing that we call the internet and world wide web, and yet do not even interact with the people that we live with, and much less with the neighbor next door? What is this world coming to when families stay in touch completely digitally and do nothing to go beyond this primitive yet technologically advanced form of communication. All of these developments that happen on a daily basis, that enable each one of us to be an ever more efficient cog in the great machine of an economy like the one in the United States, and by extension a significant cog in the wheels that turn the international economy, seem to draw us farther and farther away from one another. Certainly we are all connected, but in reality we only ever get snippets of one another as we carry on with our constant work. Ironically I write this post, ostensibly hoping that someone will read it, agree with me, write me a brief comment and carry on reading and writing at the lightning pace that we now recognize to be the standard and a good one at that. How far have we come when we are judged on every single thing that we do, that our writing is our speaking, that we live by virtual example? Is this right? Can this even be possible? I used to think of my online presence as an opportunity for fun, and know that plenty of people still treat it as a means of altering themselves from what they actually are in real life, to what they truly want and dream to be online.

Perhaps I am too hasty in writing this off, but I feel that all of us truly need that interpersonal interaction that makes life worth living. Maybe this comes in the form of a spouse or children, or a community in which we live, but if we do not receive this sort of intimacy in our lives, if we do not truly experience the love that sets us apart from the animals, then we are nothing more than they are, running around on little wheels and at the end of the race still nothing more than just rats.

The web and internet that connects us can be a very good thing, as long as at the end it leads us to encounter one another more deeply and grow to understand what life is about and what we are intended to do with it. For life is too short, and nothing can replace the feeling of a hug freely given and freely received. These are the things that make life worth living and without which life becomes terribly lonely and boring. And this is something that not one of us could ever truly desire for our lives in our heart of hearts. Every day I walk around and see people thirsting for attention and a good conversation "in-person". These online chats, and email conversations are great to a point; to keep us in touch, and facilitate communication on events and happenings, but when it comes to real-life questions, how good is it? Really?

Sometimes I desire to run away from it all, from the rat race that encourages us to step on one another in order to get ahead. Every time I am presented with the opportunity my heart immediately gives way for the person that comes after. If I want something badly enough I suppose I will offer up my best effort and hope that I do come out as the selected one, but the more I live, the less I am inclined to compete in this cut-throat economy. Rather teach those who will be going out and making the decisions in this world how to form moral judgments and live lives worth living.

Intimacy is where at all starts. Something that we need throughout our lives, and if we have not found it, it is something that must be the goal of a continual search, until we reach a point that we can speak with anyone and cheer them up. A friend recently told me the story of the young man who was carrying a large load of books home from school one day, and the other young man who saw him get knocked over and ridiculed by another group of boys, and then ultimately decided to help the young man, which lead the two to become the best of friends. From here they reached high school graduation, upon which the young man who had carried the books was named valedictorian, and in making his speech to the graduating class and all present, described how on that day he had cleaned out his locker because he didn't want his mother to have to do it later as he was going home to commit suicide.

Do you think that an email or a Facebook message could have stopped him from doing this? Someone saying that they liked his status or his photo and wanted him to take some meaningless survey would have changed his mind from the act he was well on his way to committing? I don't think so. Yes all of these connections are wonderful, but at the end of the day it comes down to one-on-one interaction, conversation about anything or nothing, that keeps us living and breathing and desiring to keep living and breathing. Argue with me all you want, I will hold this point until the day I die. Life is too short to have only this "impoverished" form of communication with others. It is high time that we stood up from behind our computers and went home and told our mothers that we love them. Sit and listen to what they have to say. I hate to break it to you, but money is not all that matters in this life. Yes it is good to live well, and but how much does it take to live so, and how much of your time are you being forced to sacrifice for this good life?

Perhaps others can live the crazy life, always working, but when I look deep into their eyes and souls I sense a yearning for something more. Yes money is important and we should not forget this, but do not forget about the importance of relationships in your life, the people that are closest to you cannot be replaced and they can disappear in an instant. Facebook, email, all of the things online and internet will be there for a long time to come, but not the people who we should care about the most.

Apathy - Flojera

Is it bad to say that I don't care anymore? How can one be so motivated one day and so uninspired the next? Please don't take this the wrong way, I am fine, but simply consider the question. We here spend our lives building our resumes and impressing people, always inordinately aware of the effect that we are having on people and the subsequent impressions that they are developing about us. Certainly, in the context of this temporal world, these impressions and opinions are significant, but how come I cannot bring myself to mind? Anyone I could cite as a reference would speak well of my character and my ability to see the world so clearly, to enter into a startlingly surprising depth of relationship, however would they really be able to say that I can perform the tasks set in front of me. Perhaps I have been in this academic environment for too long and my judgement is skewed, perhaps I did not sleep well enough last night, perhaps I am sincerely losing my mind, but any of these possibilities notwithstanding, I am so uncertain, so done, so confused about where the future will lead. I am prepared to give myself to anything at this point. To whatever splashes across the radar. I am not thinking clearly at a point in time when this is exactly what is needed. How does it seem that everyone else has the shark-like tenacity and sense of focus to hone in on exactly what they are seeking and to go for it? Why is there this strong sense of confusion, and thereby this sense of apathy - flojera or laziness that overcomes my spirit and leads me to write here instead of doing what I perhaps should be doing to finish my education. How much longer will my sanity hold out? What have I come here to accomplish?

All these questions lead me to think that perhaps I need a nap. I need to work at discerning that to which I am called in this short life. In truth it is not worth it to me to work my tail off so and at the end have only a document to show. I want true progress, true change, true results that I can look back on and feel the joy of accomplishment. Even if what I create may someday be destroyed - something tangible to cling to in my world that is so often governed by the intangible. My heart cries out for life for something real, for something that cannot be quantified into anything real, that cannot be put into words but must be lived! Write I gibberish, or write I something that gets at the heart of our existence? Are we but rats or are we men? What do we here seek to achieve? To establish systems and societies that organize our lives, but dampen our spirits? My heart is not found in such things, my heart is found outside the box, at times outside myself.

For what do we need the system? For what the order and associated complications in life? I am sick of organized and logical arguments. I can feel inside the truth of what I believe and I simply want to live without being bound by the structures that surround me on all sides. Are you with me? Or does it matter? For these things get at the deepest part of me, which is unlike anyone else in this world, and perhaps only God can understand....

Overwriting

I think I am somewhat resolved to the fact that the United States' economy calls us all to this harried pace, which in many cases does not allow us to think about our lives meanwhile they fly by us, and we are left lost as to the reasons why we have chosen anything that is currently a part of our lives. Perhaps I overreact and am not thinking clearly, and perhaps I am simply lazy, and based on this last opinion I am starting to try to pick up the pace a bit. But I will say that I will never go so fast as to sacrifice who I am in favor of anything financial. Though I see that hard work does indeed pay off, I am uncertain that this is truly going to prove fulfilling for me in life. For the moment yes I need work hard and push to fulfill all the obligations put upon me, however I am not beholden to anything in this world beyond my life within it. Once this is done, no one can hold me to them, and so up to this point I have lived my life quite recklessly, but I daresay, quite daringly as well. Maybe I have a misconceived notion of daring, but I believe this is simply being willing and ready to greet whatever circumstance and to always follow your heart wherever it may lead.

I do not want the conventional life. I do not want to work forty hours a week and come home every night to my family awaiting me, or maybe I do, but not today, not tomorrow, not for a long time to come. I want the world, I want to touch the person that lives in you and call him or her out to live the life that is greater! To reach up to God in love, and then be able to reach out to one another. To change the face of this planet by your simply living inspired! You cannot be anyone other than yourself, but we all need to be inspired to do so. If your life is boring to you, change it, find a way to make it more interesting, regardless of what changes this may take. If you cannot change the big picture, alter the little things, make arrangements to do something fun every day, something that inspires you and fills you up and enables you to push on.

Perhaps I am a dreamer, and I know that I may be. But all I want from you is that you would dream too. That together we change this world to make it a place where everyone has the opportunity to achieve their dreams. Unfortunately we are right now in a great quandary. There are so many who squander the opportunities they have been given, and others who have ten times the inspiration of those who have squandered, and yet have nothing before them but poverty and endless restrictions and red tape.

What about these members of society? Do they get to dream? Let us hope that in the time to come we change our own lives and hearts so that we can dream, and so that our dreams help make it possible for others to realize their hopes and dreams. There are so many voices telling us that these things are black and white, but they are not. It takes a lifetime to come to know oneself, and around ever corner is a new opportunity to learn about ourselves and to adjust our lives to better include these so that we may live each day truly inspired and truly alive! And the bigger question, and greater difficulty is what a friend of mine once had posted on her door, that our job, our vocation, our mission, is that which lies, "where your greatest passion meets the world's greatest need". Or something to this effect...I think we have something to learn from this...

Keep living and learning and loving...together we will find our way, in the light of God's ever present, ever living Truth. Onward Christian soldiers!

Fire and Eyes

Has anyone ever asked you what you live for? Have you ever asked yourself? What is is that makes you jump out of bed every day and greet the day, eager to continue along the path that is your life? Is there anything in particular?

I live to see people come alive, to see the fire of passion for life rise inside of them and overcome them, and they are filled with joy and the inspiration to push on. When I see someone in despair it is as if my own heart sinks with them. I love when I see love, I despair when I see despair, I hope when I see hope, I can identify and empathize with any feeling. But I most love when people come alive. I have seen this in people's eyes, there are movies in which the camera zooms to the eyes as they observe the bonfire behind the camera and the reflection of the flames roil off the lens of the protagonist, however the fire burns so much brighter and truer in real life. It flows from the soul up through the corpus and into the ever-expressing, ever-observing, ever-readable eyes. The flame burns inside, and the person smiles and life is right again.

It has taken me my lifetime to figure out that I don't know exactly what makes me come alive, but I know when I feel it. Thus the importance of grasping those moments and situations in which our hearts are light and our love is true, remembering them and treasuring them and recreating them and reliving them at every possible opportunity. The road to fulfilling life begins with self-understanding. What do you enjoy? From there stem all the good things that God has in store for us in this life. For God truly wants for us what we most want in the truest part of ourselves. In being true to ourselves, to our desires, hopes, and dreams, we are being true to God. Be faithful, believe, and to thine own self be true, and you will be amazed at what you and God can do.