As you might have heard from the news there were floods down south here in Johor due to the continuous downpour during the past few days. Thank God the rain's stopped now - except for a few drizzles here and there every now and then.
Ever since the start of the holidays I have been on a reading streak to compensate for my lack of reading consistently for nearly 6 months. Because I read so little my English deteriorated. (*sigh*)"Christmas isn't Christmas
'Til it happens in your heart.
Somewhere deep inside you
Is where Christmas really starts.
So give your heart to Jesus
You'll discover when you do
That it's Christmas,
Really Christmas for you."- Christmas Isn't Christmas by Jimmy and Carol Owens
Goodbye Stephen King. Hello Gabriele Amorth! Ahem. I mean Father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of Rome. Do not be fooled by it's publisher (Ignatius Press), An Exorcist Tells His Story is not your typical Catholic literature, it ain't boring and it ain't for the faint hearted; just say that I am very motivated to pray after reading past the first few pages. So for those of you who are looking for good true-story "horror" literature, this is for you.
Our parish sacristan, Uncle Desmond passed away two days ago. It is somehow weird for me to accept the fact that this person whom I saw alive one week ago was dead one week later. The discontinuity of life and death was so... abrupt, that I needed some time to digest the change. I guess funerals serve more purpose for the living than for the dead; it helps those who mourn to move from denial to acceptance - to have the firsthand knowledge that this person whom they know is truly and utterly dead.
"...join your right hands upon this cross, in full realisation that if one of you should abandon the other, you let go of the cross. And if you abandon the cross, you have nothing left, for you have lost Jesus. Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, with your hands on the cross, declare your consent before God and His Church."
My hard disk crashed. I hope my data is still retrievable. Please pray that it is. God help me. People pray for me. Argh. I am lost for words. :(
As humans we are relational creatures and our identity is rooted in relation to others or certain attributes. Take my name for example :"Celestine"; it brings little meaning by itself because it is just a mere word but when it's in relation to other words/images such as: "male", "Catholic", "psychology student", "Tan", "Chinese" and so on, I have built some sort of identity for myself. Notice that I am in relation to my gender, religious beliefs, major, surname (i.e. clan/family) and race (i.e. my features/culture); without these I have virtually no identity - which goes to show how relational we are and how we are dependent on relationships just for the mere sake of establishing an identity. 
The idea of Christian love is agape (selfless love). It is an unconditional kind of love and those who love in this manner, loves despite the shortcomings of another. God loves us with agape, He loves us despite our sin ("While we are still sinners, Christ died for us.", Romans 5:8). Ironically the reason we see the manifestation of God's agape love for us is because of Man's separation from God (i.e. sin). Perhaps the author of the Exultet realises this and included the following line:
For ONE Night Only @ KDU College, Petaling Jaya.
RM5 Cover Charge, includes refreshments.
Interested? Contact me at celestinetan@gmail.com
"Two friends discover faith, direction adn the truth. An actress whom we all like to hate. A bitter past haunts a bitterer couple. A girl finds beauty in ugliness. A man and a woman make love over dinner. A fellow Malaysian makes the country proud. And a group of roommates bring back the dead - all within fiftynineminutes."- the oral stage presents fiftynineminutes, original short plays and monologues
---
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably ... is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...". The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 8`(@H". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, F×<>
"Madonna is currently touring the world and performing a mock crucifixion just to tick off the religious. Madonna’s been doing this for awhile, yet I don’t remember one Catholic riot occurring."
"By quoting from a robust exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor and a learned Islamic scholar, Benedict XVI was not making a cheap rhetorical point; he was trying to illustrate the possibility of a tough-minded but rational dialogue between Christians and Muslims. That dialogue can only take place, however, on the basis of a shared commitment to reason and a mutual rejection of irrational violence in the name of God."- George Weigel writes in The Pope Was Right, Los Angeles Times
"So while there are very good reasons for criticizing that emperor's knowledge about Islam in his medieval polemical dispute, to demand an apology from Benedict for quoting him in an entirely different context seems rather misplaced."
