Gaits and swag

Oh fleeting thoughts. At the moment I am sitting in a Starbucks near the Redline Belmont stop.  Out of the 43 locations in Chicago this is one out of a handful venturesome enough to stay open around the clock.  I take in the flow of life around me teeming with young energy; people sipping their tea, confiding about relationships, some knitting clothes with meticulous care for dolls which I'm sure are trending somewhere.  Outside, the night is well broken in.  An itinerant bustle of short skirts, fitted jeans, body piercings, gaits and swag of all varieties, and an altogether river of hipster existence wash over the streets coloring in the night.  I watch countless taxis (or is 'taxi' already in plural form? =) literally yards from me weaving about and turning the street corner a little too swiftly to be coupled with as casual a setting as this coffee shop.  It's hard not to smile at it all, feeling like this has got to be the perfect opening for some romcom (romantic comedy, thanks Jeff Sullivan SJ).  The whole thing makes you somber in a way, which seems comfortably fitting considering it's Good Friday.

Intermittently today, especially at this moment, I'm contemplating Christ indwelling in each of us.  This Christ who is one with the vast and endless ether which buoys the rest in the depths of our souls (if I may borrow some of the vividly capturing words of Annie Dillard).  There's this metaphysical ocean inside each of us raging, turbulent with feeling, with unresting creative potency, with unfathomable compassion for one another; a compassion beyond my physical courage to gaze at directly for fear of it consuming me completely and changing me.  But this is the very 'stuff' that our Christ was made of.  He gave himself if only to remind us for all times that this is the very 'stuff' that gives life to life itself.

Before I fly too far off on this metaphysical tangent into delirium, I'm just sharing that as I'm focusing in my mind on that man hanging there, my friend, our friend, our last hope; I feel grateful, saddened, and inspired beyond words.  Something stirs with immense strength within me gazing at His mangled body.  I can't deny a very odd coming-alive feeling happening at the core of my being.  What IS that?  Like Hoover Dam on the verge of bursting.

OK, I really need to use the restroom.

"Out of order." Nice.  Frkn delicious grande chai tea latte.

Worth it

Hello world.

Funny how that very greeting takes me right back to my first programming class at UC Irvine. My first ever C++ test system output was "Hello world."

God, 5 seconds into the grand resuscitation of my blogging career and I've already geek-wreaked it all up lol.

Either way, hello world. I am a Jesuit scholastic. If you were to ask me on the street you'd likely get "seminarian" as an answer, even though that's kind of a misnomer. No biggie really. Basically all you need to know about me at this chapter of my life is that I'm in my third year with the Jesuits, a religious order of the Catholic church, and I'm studying philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. Religious life in general stirs of a common conception that often leads people to ask us: Does our lives consist mainly of trying to be holy by staying in prayer all day long in a cave? No, we don't have caves. Some orders do, and whoa to the mortals who defy the prayer power of that breed.  Ours on the other hand leans more towards the apostolic persuasion; we are expected to be ready to minister abroad.  The term 'abroad' as defined nowadays has gone abroad itself taking on a good variety of shapes and forms (i.e., beyond just geographically).  That given, I can still safely say that I've seen more of the world in the last 3 years than I have in all the preceding years combined.

 Is it a hard life? At times, hell yes. Is it worth it though?  Again, hell yes.