Friday, March 30, 2012

Rain and cleaning

After weeks of summer-like heat, we finally got rain! It was so nice to go to bed and to get up to the sound of rain. It was nice also to have time to clean my house while it rained outside, wear my rainboots again and make vegetable chowder from my favorite cookbook...



“At night I dream that you and I are two plants
that grew together, roots entwined,
and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,
since we are made of earth and rain.”
Pablo Neruda, Regalo De Un Poeta/ Gift Of A Poet

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Decisions and Paulo VI in Fatima

On another trip to Fatima last Tuesday to prepare the 2013 TOB Symposium, I was hungry, had a headache and was a little stressed out for various reasons (with people and with a decision I had to make).

I was so amazed to learn that Pope Paul VI had visited Fatima on May 13, 1967 before publishing Humanae Vitae and had even talked to Sister Lucia (one of the three shepherd visionaries). I can just imagine the pressure he must have been facing not to publish this prophetic encyclical, even coming from a committee he had formed and that voted against it. Yet what does he do? Takes an express train (or flight I guess) to Fatima and prays for help. And what's the promise of Fatima? My Immaculate Heart will triumph.

I didn't see any apparitions or visions, but I was comforted in knowing that decisions are hard for everyone... they're messy and a lot is at stake. But if we get on our knees and let God guide us, His Immaculate Heart really will triumph!

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Pepsi and skin creams



Who says that you just "can't compare" abortion to the holocaust? These two news stories are terrible. Just be careful what you drink and put on your face.




Monday, March 26, 2012

Spring picnic

My really nice and funny friend that I met in Taize came to visit Lisbon last week and was nice enough to agree to having a spring picnic with my friend Sofia and I in downtown Lisbon. It was a beautiful day!


Friday, March 23, 2012

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

I'm back to listening to my favorite podcast ever...
This week's Sunday reading podcast:


My favorite thoughts:
  • The more connected you and I are with Christ, ultimately the more we're going to be connected to God the Father and be able to hear his voice.
  • The Greeks didn't know Jesus as well, but Phillip and Andrew did. So the Greeks went through people who knew Him well, to get to know Jesus. The same way it's through Christ that we know God the Father.
  • We are able to consume Jesus and His blood runs through our veins.
  • I will place my law within them... and Jesus Christ is the new law, the new covenant and God's going to put Jesus within us... the Eucharist, the sacraments.
  • It's through that intimate relationship with Jesus that we're going to have that intimate relationship with the Father.
  • Take time to thank God for all of those people that know Him well that God has put in your life, that have an intimate relationship with Him. And go seek them out, like the Greeks did to Phillip and to Andrew. Find out how they come to know Jesus.
Picture from Lifeteen.com

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Portugal on strike again

For the sixteen-millionth time in the past few months, I have to get a ride to work because there isn't any public transportation. This time it isn't only public transportation workers that are on strike, it's anyone that gets paid by the government... so schools, hospitals, etc. As the sign says below: General strike; I do it; you do it; he does it; we do it; you all do it; they draw back ...


I can't help but wonder... who's they? And what are they drawing back from? Is it really the government's fault that our lives are a mess? All I know is... it's not the government's fault I don't have transportation to and from work today!
Ah, Portugal.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Mother Teresa Quotes



     This book was absolutely amazing and I happened to read it during Lent... which totally transformed my Lent. "In this time of Lent, the time of greater love, when we look at all that Jesus chose to suffer out of love for us, to redeem us, let us pray for all the grace we need to unite our sufferings to His, that many souls, who live in darkness and misery, may know His love and life." (p. 325)
     Basically I learned about how God loves and wants to be loved, how we can love and be loved by God and others. I learned that my "imperfect" life is really perfect and how to offer suffering for God. When Mother Teresa taught a sick man how to offer his suffering in love, he died shortly after but said before dying "I wish I had more time to suffer now that I know how to suffer for God." And I'm happy I learned this early in my life and still have time to suffer. ;)
    

Here are some of my favorite quotes:
  • I used to get goose bumps at the thought of suffering - but now I embrace suffering even before it actually comes, and like this Jesus and I live in love. p. 20
  • That is the most important - to suffer and to laugh. p. 24
  • Now I really rejoice when something does not go as I wish - because I see that He wants our trust - that is why in this loss let us praise God as if we have got everything. p. 24
  • When I see someone sad, I always think, she is refusing something to Jesus. p. 33
  • "The strong grace of Divine Light and Love Mother [Teresa] received on the train journey to Darjeeling on 10th September 1946 is where the Missionaries of Charity begins - in the depths of God's infinite longing to love and to be loved." p. 41
  • "I thirst" is something much deeper than just Jesus saying "I love you." Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you - you can't begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him. p. 42
  • I know you are afraid for me. You are afraid that the whole thing [starting her congregation] will be a failure. - What about it? Is it not worth going through every possible suffering just for one single soul? Did not Our Lord do the same: what a failure was His Cross on Calvary - and all for me, a sinner. p. 65
  • By nature I am sensistive, love beautiful and nice things, comfort and all the comfort can give - to be loved and love. - I know that the life of a Missionary of Charity - will be minus all these. The complete poverty, the Indian life, the life of the poorest will mean a hard toil against my great self love. Yet, Your Grace, I am longing with a true, sincere heart to begin to lead this kind of life - so as to bring joy to the suffering Heart of Jesus. p. 66
  • How often, how very often He [Jesus] complained of delays - for whenever He asks for something, He says, people get extra careful about many things - but if the world asks the things are done so quickly. p. 81
  • The less we have of our own, the more we shall have to give - for love founded on sacrifice is sure to grow. p. 93
  • [Words of Jesus] My little one - come - come - carry Me into the holes of the poor. - Come be My light. - I cannot go alone - they don't know Me - so they don't want Me. You come - go amongst them, carry Me with you into them. - How I long to enter their holes - their dark unhappy homes. Come be their victim. - In your immolation - in your love for Me - they will see Me, know Me, want Me. Offer more sacrifices - smile more tenderly, pray more fervently and all the difficulties will disappear. p. 98
  • I felt my own poverty there too - for I had nothing to give that poor woman. - I did everything I could but if I had been able to give her a hot cup of milk or something like that, her cold body would have got some life. p. 132
  • Our work for souls is great, but without much penance and much sacrifice it will be impossible.- We have to do much more penance than even the Carmelites because of closeness of sin. p. 141
  • (From her spiritual director:) "For sufferings you have not to look for them. Almighty God provides for them daily: they are not always what we imagined, bodily sufferings and the sort, but interior sufferings, contradictions, failures of our plan, anxieties for the community, for the work, misunderstandings in our relations with other religious, or families; oppositions unexpected at times, etc." p. 142
  • I want to become a saint, by satiating the thirst of Jesus for love and souls. - And there is another big desire - to give the Mother Church many a saint from our Society. p. 144
  • Be kind to each other. I prefer you make mistakes in kindness - than that you work miracles in unkindness. Be kind in words. - See what the kindness of Our Lady brought to her, see how she spoke. - She could have easily told St. Joseph of the Angel's message - yet she never uttered a word. - And then God Himself interfered. She kept all these [things] in her heart. p. 196
  • I do not believe, Father, in that continual digging into one's spiritual life - by long and frequent visits and talks. The help you have given me - will carry me for a long time. - Our spiritual life must remain simple - so as to be able to understand the mind of our poor. p. 215
  • My dear children - without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the redemption. - Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. p. 220
  • People today are hungry for love, for understanding love which is much greater and which is the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. p. 233
  • We too must experience poverty if we want to be true carriers of God's love. To be able to proclaim the Good News to the poor we must know what is poverty. p. 234
  • Thank God we don't serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don't know where I would be. - Pray for me. p. 255
  • That's the most beautiful part of God, eh? Being almighty, and yet not forcing Himself on anyone. p. 260
  • I make my holy hour with jesus straight after Mass - so that I get the 2 hours with Jesus before people and Sisters start using me. - I let Him use me first. p. 270
  • God cannot fill what is full. - He can fill only emptiness - deep poverty - and your "Yes" is the beginning of being or becoming empty...Take away your eyes from your self and rejoice that you have nothing - that you are nothing - that you can do nothing. Give Jesus a big smile - each time your nothingness frightens you. - p. 275
  • Pray - I must be able to give only Jesus to the world. People are hungry for God. What [a] terrible meeting [it] would be with our neighbour if we give them only ourselves. p. 281
  • We could maybe have adoration everyday and so bring and weave our lives with the Bread of Life. - No greater love not even God could give than in giving Himself as Bread of Life - to be broken, to be eaten so that you and I may eat and live - maybe eat and so satisfy our hunger for love. - And He seemed yet not satisfied for He too was hungry for love. - So He made Himself the Hungry One, the Thirsty One, the Naked One, the Homeless and kept on calling - I was hungry, naked, homeless. You did it to me. - The Bread of Life and the Hungry One - but one love - Only Jesus. His humility is so wonderful. I can understand His majesty, His greatness because He is God - but His humility is beyond my understanding, because He makes Himself Bread of Life so that even a child as small as I can eat Him and live. - Some days back - when giving Holy Communion to our Sisters in the Mother house, suddenly I realized I was holding God between my 2 fingers. The greatness of [the] humility of God. Really no greater love - no greater love than the love of Christ. p. 283
  • We have no right to refuse our lives to others in whom we contact Christ... Let the poor and the people eat you up... let the people "bite" your smile, your time. p. 285
  • We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world. We are 24 hours a day with Jesus. p. 286
  • Many people are very, very concerned with children in India, with the children of Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. p. 292
  • I find the unborn child to be the poorest of the poor today - the most unloved - the most unwanted, the throw away of society. p. 293
  • Do we know who our own poor are? Do we know our neighbor, the poor of our own area? It is so easy for us to talk and talk about the poor of other places. Very often we have the suffering, we have the lonely, we have the people - old, unwanted, feeling miserable - and they are near us and we don't even know them. We have no time to smile at them. p. 296
  • Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people. They don't need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us, that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and to be loved. p. 296
  • Remember - love begins at home - our community - our family. p. 314
  • The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace. p. 315
  • I pray that nothing may ever fill you with pain and sorrow as to make you forget the joy of the Risen Jesus. p. 326

Monday, March 19, 2012

March 17: St. Patrick's Day party

St. Patrick's day was spent at home with friends... for me, the best way to do it. It included...

A clover garland...


A clover banner (Santa Trindade Adoro-Vos = Holy Trinity I Adore Thee)...

A reason for luckiness by each guest...

St. Patrick prayer cards brought by a creative friend...

Green veggies...

Shamrock-shaped tarts (turned out blurry!)...

Green mint-chocolate chip cookies (with mint extract and green food coloring)...

All ideas from Pinterest ;)

Friday, March 16, 2012

Thunderstorms and rain

We had a thunderstorm yesterday and the rain was very welcomed after weeks and weeks of strange summer-like heat we've been having. I'm glad winter hasn't left yet and I hope we have a rainy spring.

I'm preparing for a St. Paddy's day party tomorrow... hope you have a joyful weekend!


"Thus we see that the darkness was actually the mysterious link that united her to Jesus. It is the contact of intimate longing for God. Nothing else can fill her mind. Such longing is possible only through God's own hidden presence. We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us. Thirst is more than absence of water. It is not experienced by stones, but only by living beings that depend on water. Who knows more about living water, the person who opens the water tap daily without much thinking, or the thirst tortured traveler in the desert in search for a spring?" (about Mother Teresa, from Come Be My Light, p. 216)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Learning to love my failing life

My wise friend told me over coffee today that it's good I think my life is a failure. That it means I'm open to whatever might happen. I think she might be right. So I don't have a vegetable garden, two dogs, five kids and another on the way, an artistic house, the clothes I'd like to have, etc. So I'm single (as in not married), working in something unrelated to what I'd like, have a work schedule that's opposite most people, live five million miles away from everyone I love and have to take a train to even hang out with anyone. So...?

I'm finding out this IS my life and I can accept the apparent failure and it not being "what I wanted it to be" as a willing sacrifice out of love. I'm finding out I could live this way the rest of my life and that's okay. That taking trains for coffee dates and picnic dates, teaching kids grammar, being in contact with the people I am in contact with... that's my life! That's also my mission field and where I can be happy/grow/be sanctified. And the fact my youth group is tiny, has about five million obstacles and is definitely "failing" in the world's view might be a way to keep my pride in check. And if I love doing it and I love the teens that go... so what does it matter if it's "successful" or not? Whether I get paid for it or not?

I'm finding all of this out while reading the best book ever: Come Be My Light. It's a life-changer.

"For sufferings you have not to look for them. Almighty God provides for them daily: they are not always what we imagined, bodily sufferings and the sort, but interior sufferings, contradictions, failures of our plan, anxieties for the community, for the work, misunderstandings in our relations with other religious, or families; oppositions unexpected at times, etc." (p. 142)


Beet & apple juice with a coworker


Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Mine and Henry David Thoreau's Dream House...

"I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without ginger-bread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, - useful to keep off rain and snow; [...] a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of a window, and some on settlessome at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremoney is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and every thing hangs upon its peg that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifesta as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, - in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you." (Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, chapter on "House-Warming")

From pinterest

Monday, March 12, 2012

Quotes from Walden

I had the pleasure of finishing Henry David Thoreau's book Walden, about his life "out in the wild" living by Walden Pond, next to the pond at my neighborhood park. This book really widened my view on life and really made me rethink my priorities. I wish everyone would read it! Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book...


  • "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools; for these are more easiliy acquired than got ride of."
  • "But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and theives break through and steal. It's a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
  • "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."
  • "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"
  • "It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them."
  • "Most of the luxiuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect ot luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor."
  • "There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?"
  • "Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself."
  • "As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements;' there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance."
  • "In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial."
  • "I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead."
  • "After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man any where on this globe,' -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."
  • "To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
  • "What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!"
  • "No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?"
  • "Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk."
  • "Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport."
  • "Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries, every day, with new experience and character."
  • "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."
  • "In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."
  • "Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
  • "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring."

Friday, March 09, 2012

Becoming a longing

I finished Christopher West's latest book and it's wonderful, amazing, gorgeous (if a book can be gorgeous). I highly recommend it! It really shed light on a lot of things in my life. Like for example why the coffee and lunch dates with friends (I've been trying to make a more regular part of my routine) make me want more and more coffee and lunch dates. The more friendship and love I get, the more I want. It's been making me aware of my own solitude and emptiness.


"It will enable us to rediscover 'our own finiteness and at the same time our longing for the infinite, that we are not self-sufficient, that we have not the source of joy within ourselves" (p. 214).

"The publicans and harlots enter the Kingdom before the just becasue they are well aware that they cannot save themselves; knowing the wretchedness of their condition, they are open to the Love that has come within their reach. So [their turning to Christ] is not only the result of guilty feelings. It is the consciousness of a desire that cannot be satisfied, the inner emptiness crying out to be filled with it knows not what" (p. 214).

"Prayer, properly understood, is nothing but becoming a longing for God." (Pope Benedict, quoted on p. 207)

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Saying no while saying yes

I rejected a job offer yesterday. It was a tough decision, but I'd like to think that I said no while having what I'm saying yes to in sight. I said no to: extra work, a possibility of getting more work and hours through this school in the future, a possibility of earning more money, an "open door" of being able to choose between this job and my current job in the future, etc.

I said yes to: more frugality and learning how to save, more time for working at friendship, to tennis with Sofia, baking and sharing treats with people I like, exercise and taking care of myself, more time to pursue getting paid for something related to my degree (theology) and a job I really enjoy.


PS Check out my post at IgnitumToday... Integration: The Object of a Catholic Education

Monday, March 05, 2012

Real love grows

It has been a long time since I have spent an entire weekend without plans, taking my landlady her rent and saying yes to her cup of coffee. And after so much quality time talking at the park and just "being with" my BF, I can really say with conviction what someone told me two years ago: real love grows... I hope you love each other less than tomorrow and more than yesterday.


Onto a week that is starting out crazy already... my hopes for this week: priorities, making decisions and friendship (sharing with others and listening). And yours?

Friday, March 02, 2012

Society is a requirement

Today was a much-needed FREE morning to clean my house, go grocery shopping and make chocolate muffins, all pretty basic necessities. Even though my mornings and early afternoons are free (I work evenings), I usually fill them up by going into Lisbon by train and meeting people or running errands of some sort. Usually that 1 1/2 hour each way is worth it just to have lunch with someone special, my BF or a friend. This week was cloudy (weather-wise and mood-wise for me!), but it turned out pretty good actually, and I think it had something to to with those special lunch dates. And the muffins.

Clouds during my train ride


"The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of his nature. Through the exchange with others, mutual service and dialogue with his brethren, man develops his potential; he thus responds to his vocation." (Catechism of the Catholic Chuch, #1879)