SunStar May 13, 2021 WHEN I was in graduate school, our professor required us to read Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was a three-part epic that dealt with Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It was heavy stuff and it took quite an effort for someone like me to read it. Honestly, I read it because it was required, never really got to understand it but it introduced me to a phrase called “in media res,” in the midst of things. That is another story.
Recently though, I accidentally stumbled across Dante’s Inferno while doing some research. (How I got to the topic of hell is again, another story.) This time, perhaps because of age, the Inferno became interesting. Rather than bore you with details, let me share with you the levels of Hell according to Dante. There are nine levels in the epic.
SunStar March 17, 2021 SIDDHARTHA is a story by the German author Hermann Hesse. It is all about the spiritual journey of self-discovery by a young man, Siddhartha. In one of the conversations, Siddhartha was asked what his talents were. He replied with I can listen, I can fast and I can wait. Let us deal with the first, first.
I can listen. Whenever I conduct seminars on Listening, I always use two quotes. The first is obvious and the second indistinct. The first quote is God gave us two ears and one mouth so we may able to listen twice as much as we talk. Obvious right? We can even see it. We should listen more and talk less but we all know that is not the case. In reality, it is more like four mouths and a single ear. Most people would rather talk than listen. Look around, better still listen around. So much noise, people talking, tweeting, posting like they were all experts. One time, I did an experiment. I posted something on social media just to find out if p
SunStar March 08, 2021 WE GOT to watch the film Fatima a few days ago. We are all familiar with the story of the three children, Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco and their encounter with the Virgin Mary.
This movie started with Sister Lucia in her old age having a conversation with a professor who liked to argue with her. Every time he would start discussing, Sister Lucia would just stare at him with some sort of benevolent look.
Then the film goes back to when they were all children and their experiences with the Virgin Mary. In one of the appearances, Mary told the children that they would suffer and suffer greatly. Soon enough the challenges came mostly from the mother of Lucia who ironically was religious. She truly believed that Lucia was being played by the devil. That too was how the parish priest took the apparition. Even the bishop who was some high strung and even arrogant joined in. (He could not believe that Mary would appear to children and not to him.) S