All About Marriage

Narrative of the Interview

The couple were married for 25 years since their wedding in Dec 25, 1989. They choose not to give their names due to the intimate information they have given which I will talk about later in this paragraph. They have been open in the story of how they met which they say to have commenced in the university where they both studied Pharmacy. The husband, as a transferee, found comfort in the group of friends of the wife. Given the abundance of time they spent together in school and in extracurricular activities, they got comfortable with each other’s company. They have been open as well about the influence of their decision to be married. The couple, during college, were blessed by a love child. Both of them had to stop studying temporarily to be able to support their child. In this situation, because of their commitment to the church and desire to not live in sin, lead to their eventual marriage. The couple was very insightful when asked about the blessings in their married life. First, according to them, is the gift of having children who built them as a person and a couple. They have been well aware that in the act of parenting, they are conscious that they are building another personhood as well. They said that as they build another person in the body of their children, they are conscious that they are building themselves as well. They grow as their children grow. Another blessing is the fact and the assurance that they will have someone to be with when they grow old. The couple said that growing old alone is the least that they expect in the future. Lastly, the couple mentioned that material things are also a blessing in the marriage. Having income of two people, instead of just one, in their hands made life easier in terms of their standard of living. However, they said that this should not be the major goal of getting married and money should not be the reason for a marriage to occur.

When asked about the challenges, the couple is just as insightful. They have emphasized that marriage is consisted of 2 different people coming from 2 different families with different kinds of upbringing. The challenge is hardest when contrasting traits are being pushed to coincide by living together. The success of overcoming this challenge lies in the harmony that the couple can establish given those differences. Another challenge is acceptance. For the same reason--differences--that  is mentioned earlier, acceptance is needed for there is no such thing as a perfect husband and a perfect wife. As the husband said, a person married both the positive and negative qualities of his/her partner, so he/she must be ready to accept whatever is there that he/she will yet to know in the course of living together. In overcoming this challenge, patience is key.

The couple advised young people interested in getting married that they should bring with them patience and understanding extended to the infinity for they will be needing a lot throughout their married life. They also added that prayer is essential to keep the marriage going. The husband even shared something he called a “secret” which goes “a happy wife means a happy life.” The interview ended with the couple commenting on the people deciding to get married as courageous. Because having known all the problems they have to face in the marriage and hearing a lot of stories about broken marriages, they still believe in this special, sacred and divine bond.

Reflection on the Interview:

Prior to the interview, living together with one’s husband/wife seemed to be an effortless thing for me. Perhaps this thinking is brought about by childhood fairytales and further reiterated by media that projects getting married and living with the one we love is the goal and ending of every love story. Rarely do these sources show the problems that comes after the “living happily ever after.”

After the interview, I noticed that just as living together with the person we love is heaven on earth, living together with a completely different person is also hell on earth. Both experiences are inside marriage in a sense that we live together with the person we chose to love, at the same time, we live together with another person whom we would have to consider, which sometimes requires giving up our own desires.  Not only that, there will be countless of times where in the two people would not agree with each other. For the reason that they were both raised in two different families with different kind of upbringing, it is an added challenge to try to compromise between the different values they believe in. That is already a problem between two Filipino individuals. I can just imagine how this difficulty is magnified in inter-racial marriages when the two individuals are not just from two different families, but also from two entirely different societies.

During the interview, it did not seem to daunt me because there is a gap between the age. There is a thinking that I would not have to deal with the same problems since I am too young to think about those things yet. However, as I write this reflection paper, it finally daunted me. I realized that this problem is not too far from me. That not too long enough, I will have to deal with these problems as well and I would have to prepare myself as early as now. Perhaps, I can ask myself already what among my perspectives and opinions are flexible enough for compromise and what values must be retained as hard as I can. I also looked at being married just because of having a love child as a pressured marriage before. I, at first, doubted the love inside the marriage driven by a love child. However, as I look at the couple and as I apply the things I learned in TREDFOR, they might have married not solely for the reason that they love each other in the beginning, but also because of their love child. However, they managed to go to the next level from marrying just because they fell inlove to maintaining their marriage because they grew authentic love to each other--admitted by a decision and strengthened by a commitment. Within the marriage, in the manner where the husband always catches the wife's back on questions she had difficulty answering in the interview, I think I found the thing that kept them together for years. They have developed authentic love for each other that each will always be there to catch each other's back when they need to. This changed my opinion about people getting married out of other circumstances other than love. I figured that I should not look down on their marriage and discount their love. In fact, I should look at their example in a way that love cannot be there just when all is well. Love must be there even if the circumstance may ruin our original and conventional life plans (such as finishing college on time). I may previously call it pressure, I currently choose to call it decision.

As said earlier, marriage is not at all pure misery. There are also blessings, as mentioned by the couple, such as children, and guarantee of company. Moreover, although not mentioned by the couple, another blessing is to be able to love and be loved. It may sound cheesy but I think this is the greatest blessing in marriage. It is like an avenue on where we can both witness and manifest the greatest power ever known in history. The power of love. It is the subject of almost all fields of art. From songs, to novels, to poems, to movies and etc. I think it is a blessing to experience this well known yet indescribable emotion.

In the end, I agree with what the couple said that marriage will need a long line of patience and a huge chunk of bravery to be able to conquer every risk and every challenge that comes with marriage. I think fairly enough, marriage also gives so much blessing from where we can get all the patience and courage we need to make the marriage last.

Interview with the couple

Wedding Picture of the couple

Narrative of the Theology of The Body

Father Max Aranilla started the talk with the question. Who am I? In answering the question, he gave 3 perspectives on where we have to pattern our search for ourselves: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal and Metapersonal. Intrapersonal meaning knowing oneself, interpersonal meaning knowing oneself while with other people, and metapersonal which means knowing oneself in relation to God.

In the course of discussion, he cleared several concepts that are often controversial when discussed within and outside the church such as Adam, temptation, forbidden fruit and eros.

One often criticized topic when the Bible is being talked about in a Philosophy class is the Genesis. In this topic, Father said that Adam does not necessarily mean only one man. In the Bible, he represented humanity. Also, Eve’s temptation to eat the fruit is not sin. He said that temptation is natural to humans. It only becomes sin when we give in to them. Same is the case for Eve and for us humans today in general. Prohibiting the intake of the forbidden fruit is not for no reason at all or not just because it is simply bad. God only did not allow Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit because the fruit of knowledge will be too much for man to handle. Knowing everything good and evil will only distort our minds and confuse us to what is good and what is evil.

This is related to our perception of the word “eros.” Sin distorted and disoriented the meaning of eros for us today. Eros is often viewed as a negative term rather than positive. Most of us are uncomfortable describing ourselves as erotic for it is connoted as sexual and obscene. Father mentioned that it is necessarily bad. The eros that is detached from worldly definition simply means deep desire,passion and love for something and not necessarily for another one’s body and flesh. This love and desire is so strong that it becomes possessive. He even described eros as a positive trait and that it is present in everyone. According to Father, being erotic is an inward form of love. We love something that we want it be with us all the time. This inclines us to ask and receive the gifts of God. If we only turn our eros in the right direction which is toward God and not toward its usual direction which is the flesh of another man, then we may be able to use eros in a positive sense.

Still in Genesis, he reiterated that man is made out of God’s image. Looking at ourselves makes us look at God and gaining self-respect, specifically respect for our bodies, would be synonymous to respecting God. Before the marital commitment, we must mimic God through the use of our bodies. Probably taking care of ourselves, using our bodies to do mission that will proliferate goodness and etc. Through those actions we use eros in a positive way since we seek the presence of God to be in our bodies. Upon the entry in the marital commitment, same as before, we also must mimic God. In marriage, the partner and the person are often told to be united by God which is true. Since they are already united, they must mimic God in unison. To do that, the relationship must mimic the trinity. The unison of the Father (the lover), Son (the beloved) and the Holy Spirit (the fruit of the love). This is why premarital sex and homosexual marriage is not right in the eyes of the church for it is not open to the 3rd persona of God which is the Holy Spirit. The image of God in those acts are distorted since it is incomplete.

Reflection on the Activity:

Many people live together without getting married because they think that marriage is a hassle having to tie a knot that will bind them and their partners in a union that will be inconvenient when they want to come out of the relationship already. This is especially true in the Philippines where in marriage is still considered to be for forever since divorce is not yet accepted. On the other hand, there are people getting married without even knowing the real meaning of marriage. I think without this course, I belong in the latter category. I would think that marriage is just an obligation if I do not want to be single for the rest of my life.  I have to get married if I want to be with someone since everyone, including my family, will judge me if I do not do it. In this sense, I agree to what Father said that our concept of good and bad had become distorted and disoriented.

The Theology of the Body helped me understand the meaning of marriage, why we do it, and why some relationships and acts outside marriage are prohibited by the church. The talk made me realize the importance of marriage and uplift my respect in the act and ceremony. It is not anymore merely that rites of passage in my perspective. My fears about marriage were lightened. In fact, I became excited about getting married in the future and telling all these things to my future partner. Perhaps the element of eros came into me that time. I wanted so bad to mimic God and Heaven in my future marriage.

I also resorted to respecting myself more. Before I only thought of the phrase as, “okay, so we can picture God as having the same physical features as ours.” It is limited to features such as he has one head, four limbs and etc. Father having said that we are “almost”, only a limited version of God made a positive impact in me. I thought that I owe to respect myself because I have a God in me. It also empowered me since I thought that, although I would not be omnipotent like Him, I think I will be potent enough to make good things happen just on my will. Overall, I think the TOB taught me respect. Respect for myself, respect for my future partner, respect for God and respect for marriage as a whole.

Theology of the Body Talk

Sythesis Paper:

         At first, I found our TREDFOR meetings to be confusing because we did not readily discussed its supposed topic which is about our chosen vocation. We started talking about reviewing the past TRED classes, enumerating what the Bible says about Christ and the role of the important people played in his life. However, as we get through the discussion, I learned so much about these things. They are lessons that I wish I would have understood years before and I wish were embedded in my being since I became conscious about my own decisions in life. One of them is the value of love. I am ashamed to be a Catholic/Christian without realizing that this is the way to heaven. After knowing this, I asked myself, where have I been after all these years? Have I been under a rock? I think that more than the literal and trivial facts I have learned from catechism such as memorizing the names of the 12 apostles, mysteries of the rosary, apostles creed and etc., I should have learned and understood the very essence of Christianity first rather than being immersed in these traditions. Knowing the foundation of Christianity and Jesus’ sacrifice, I came to appreciate Christian virtues more. I became more proud of the values we follow. More than that, I put more regard and respect in the value of love. Before TREDFOR, though I believe in the happiness that is brought by love, I thought that love is a concept that is overrated and too idealistic. Given the present context of skyrocketing number failed marriages, I thought that love fades and love gives us happiness for now but pain later. In TREDDFOR, as cliché as it may sound, I realized that love really makes the world go round. Everything God did for us was out of love. God gave us freewill because he loves us. Jesus sacrificed his life out of love. The greatest gift we can ever give to God is our love. The greatest thing we can do to our neighbor is to love them. Lastly, the greatest thing we can do to ourselves is to love ourselves and allow ourselves to give love and be loved.

       I know loving is not the easiest task to make even though it is one of the easiest words to say. In loving other people and God, I thought we ought to find things that we can love first about ourselves so that we will have love to give to other people. Integrating it the lesson on Theology of the Body, we must seek to have something before we can be able to give it, since we cannot give what we cannot have. In the reflections we have been asked to make, I were able to take time to look inside myself. Reflect on my opinions and perspectives: what I like, and what I dislike. This made me know more about myself and know what qualities I can love about myself. Now that I have accepted and loved myself now, I seem to be more thankful to God everytime I wake up in the morning, everytime I look at the mirror and etc. I became thankful to God with everything I have rather than being upset about the things I do not have. This made me think that God must have loved me so much to raise me this way and I must return His love. And this led me to step 2 which is loving God more. In loving God more, I paid more attention to our discussions about Jesus specifically about how he taught love should be shown. As seen in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said that we must love our neighbor even more than ourselves. It does not matter if it is our friend or our rival. The greatest commandment is to love. And that leads me to the 3^rd step which is to love the people around me. I cannot say that I have done it and I think it will be a work in progress for a long time. As of now, I have my friends and family to love, but I think this 3^rd step includes me finding the person whom I will really love and this is where marriage comes in.

       Going back to Step 1, in finding the person I would be fit to marry, I must know first myself. In TREDFOR, we were asked to answer the Marriage Expectation Inventory and this questioned my thoughts about the problems of family life that I would have never asked to myself had not we been doing it in class. Moreover, I felt right about preparing myself starting this time for marriage—assessing my capability to give authentic love and evaluating myself whether I am emotionally mature. People argue that who we become is made by our family, friends and society. Some people argue that everything about ourselves will be decided by us alone. I think, after learning what we have learned in TREDFOR, that it is partly true for both. Our family, otherwise called in TRED as the system, affects us as a person. However, like life itself, our family is a blessing that is only given to us. What we do with our life, our family and our identity still lies in our hands. We can choose what of these characteristics we want to retain in ourselves and what we want to remove. I choose to think of it as a manifestation of our free will. God gave us a kind of family that we have now in the hope that we are going to be a person in line with his plans. However, he still leaves a space for us to discern an identity for our own. In the end, the goal is building and knowing ourselves first before entering marriage with the person who we thought matches our identity.

“Love God and love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

       

        Oh how I have taken this sentence for granted. Prior to TRED, this is a babble of words with an almost empty meaning for me. Comparing it to the contemporary context, it is like the phrase “I love you,” overly used, but rarely meant when said. Since I understood the value of this sentence (love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself), I think this have been my mantra. This will be the lesson from TRED that I will take with me in my deathbed. Who knows, perhaps this will lead me to heaven. As I experienced the past couple of weeks, to love another person is to see the face of God. School has been extra hard for me this term since I am already on my graduating year. I was almost always on the brink of giving up. Everytime the thought came to me, I will always be reminded of the reason why I am doing this. I never studied hard because I think it will land me to a good job in the future (because we all know it is not true). I studied hard because I want to make my parents happy. My love for them, my desire to make their efforts to send me to school worth it, that drove me to continue studying as hard. Only then did I understand the irony of loving. My love for my parents causes me my burden of studying hard, at the same time, I do not want to let go and lighten myself out of that burden because I love my parents. I do not want to make them sad. Not settling with just a passing grade, but trying my best to get good marks. Relating it to marriage, I think it made me more optimistic to the sacrament. The fact of loving another person to the point that the love is so strong to be able to mimic God in the family (the union of the lover, the beloved and the fruit as said in TOB) is really heaven on earth. It overpowers every risk, challenge and skepticism in marriage.
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A message for the frustrated priest:
Caveat: This has nothing to do with my grade or my requirements and I do not wish this to affect my standing. :)

Of all the things I have experienced this term, I am most afraid of one thing: that is forgetting the things that you have taught us in class. More than once, I wished I can go back to the days of our meetings just so that I can be prepared for the times that I will need to be reminded of these things. The things you said struck me so deep that I would not forgive myself if I forget them. It brought meaning to the things I often thought to be overrated. Everything you said deepened my understanding of life, love, prayer, family, marriage, and even myself. I have thought of even recording your lessons to my phone just so that I can listen to them again in the future. I know I will need them and I am very thankful for DLSU making us study this module. More-so, I am even thankful to God for putting me in your class.  I have thought twice whether I would really want this part of the blog to be sent to you because I did not want it to sound cheesy, corny or what not. However, I continued to send this because you deserve to hear this. Honestly speaking, flowery words aside, I really do not know what kind of person I will be and what kind of marriage I  will be expecting to enter in the future without this course. Thank you, Sir. This changed my thoughts and perspective in life.

As for your failure of being priest, I hate to say, but I am kind of thankful that you have been a professor instead. I feel like one mass from you is not enough for me to appreciate and absorb everything you told us this term. I hope, even if  you expressly said that you would have been more happy had you succeeded in being a priest, may you still find happiness in this alternative path that God gave you. Please do not be sad, please do not regret. You deserve to be happy because there are lives and minds that you have changed walking this path.  

If it is okay, I hope you will still be welcoming my questions regarding life in general even if I am not your student anymore. I know life is short, yet I know I spent 3 hours a week in the best way possible. I cannot express enough how grateful I am to spend three months of my life sitting in your class.

THANK YOU SIR!

Beyond the Big Bang

The question of where everything came from is not new to us. Most likely we have asked this question back from the days when we were still toddlers perhaps—when we were inquisitive as ever. We asked ourselves about the beginning of almost everything—from the smallest atom to the grandest universe. I was surprised to be told, during my intermediate science back in my elementary level, that both can be present in a single story—the grandest thing we can ever know came from the smallest thing we can ever think. The theory of the big bang—only this time that I understood it this well and realized why people believed this as the strongest theory about the beginning of the universe.

The said theory, as said in the film, is not a product of an overnight thinking. It took years and years of thinking of the most prominent people known today in the field of science namely Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemy, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and Fred Hoyle. So now that we know their names, a bigger question would be what did they contribute to our knowledge of the universe?

Surely there are many and it would be a long story that is probably already a published book elsewhere, but for the sake of this limited paper, here is a run through. Given our naturally centrist perspective, Aristotle, being one of the early thinkers of the world, came up with the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. With our knowledge today, of course we can say that this is not any near the truth, but it is surely a good start especially for it started other studies by other observers such as Claudius Ptolemy. Basing on Aristotle’s earth centered universe, Ptolemy tried to observe the pattern of the movement of the planets and predict its future movement. He collected beautiful but quite chaotic information. Looking at these observations, Nicholas Copernicus tried to make sense of these patterns and he did successfully by, instead of the earth, he put the sun in the center of it all. However, he didn’t publish this theory immediately with the fear of probable issues with the church. Kepler agreed to this concept of heliocentrism. However, instead of a circle, he concluded that the planets orbit around the sun in ellipses—in this formation, as the planets go nearer to the sun, they move faster and move slower as they get farther. Meanwhile, observation and data collection would not have been so easy and accurate without Galileo Galilei’s invention: the telescope. This magnified the celestial bodies so much that they discovered a lot of things—craters on the moon, satellites of Jupiter, and rings of Saturn to name a few. Galileo also made some experiments and in one of them, he concluded that things fall in the same rate of acceleration regardless of their mass. This gave a start to the connection and a world changing discovery of Isaac Newton. Now, one of the biggest questions would be: What keeps the planets in this order? This question was given answer by the genius of Isaac Newton. Given Galileo’s free fall conclusion, Newton thought of the moon falling to the earth and earth falling to the sun and so are the rest of the celestial bodies in the solar system—he called it gravity. This is the force that puts order to everything in the universe—from an apple in a tree to the stars in the universe.

Finding answers to questions about the universe did not end there. It continued and is still continuing up to the modern period and one of the greatest modern scientists—probably the greatest scientist that had ever lived—would be Einstein. He thought of the universe as laid out in the fabric of interconnected space and time.; to him, space and time were not different variables. Although Einstein wanted to believe a static universe, his concept of space-time tends to suggest an expanding universe not to mention his failure to find a constant that can counter the force of gravity against his space-time. Because of his failure to embrace the theory of the expanding universe, other scientists stated the obvious for him such as Father George Lemaitre, one of the first people to propose the big bang, who suggested that the universe came from a very hot cosmic egg, also known as the primeval atom, which exploded and is continuously expanding today and Edwin Hubble who found out, through the most modern telescope of his time, that the sun is only one of the billions of stars in the milky way galaxy and that milky way is just one of many other galaxies in the universe. He also suggested that stars are going farther and farther away. Another is Fred Hoyle who argued that stars are made up of hydrogen and helium and every other element were just products of the combination of these elements.

I have never understood the big bang theory with details this keen. All the previous lessons gave me a very vague story which made it hard for me to believe. As a student, this film made me more open to this theory and further theories to be developed about the beginning of the universe. This is not to say that I denounce the creation theory or my belief of the supernatural creator, it is just that at some point, I believe that science and religion can co-exist—such as when answering the question of where did that cosmic egg came from. Also, knowing in detail how they came up with the knowledge we now know, as a student, I felt that it is not too late for this generation and the generations to come to contribute ideas about the origin of the universe. Surely we already know a lot of things—thanks to the brilliant people mentioned above—but, certainly, we have more yet to learn as well. 

Inherit the Wind

             I have had a lot of questions on religion in mind before I entered college, and I must say, these questions kept on increasing year by year as I become more immersed in an environment of learning and thinking. This environment includes, but is not limited to, courses in Philosophy, History of Ancient Europe (when wars of religion is in its height) and TRED classes not to mention the whole Lasallian community altogether.

            Some of my questions are voiced out and repeated in the arguments in the movie and, perhaps, might have again increased my inquiries, but as the movie progresses the mind full of questions was driven to one of the answers.

            When I voiced out my questions to my Dad, he is almost confused as to why La Salle, a Catholic school for crying out loud, would allow professors and courses that would trigger question forming for doubting religion to happen. I also asked the question to myself, but I was glad I found the answer to one of our questions—it is because La Salle believes in thinking, in learning, in academic freedom as much as it believes in faith in God. Thus, my stand, if I were to be asked about which to believe or at least, if to free the accused in the movie or not, I would decide likewise with the judge. I would free him. Not because I do not believe in God, but because I believe in the freedom of people to think, to believe and to know what is right and what is wrong. I support in giving all the options to people. Making all accounts regarding the Bible and the evolution open for everyone to see and everyone to know about, for knowledge about both parties is the only way for them to develop a fair judgement.

            In the end, the world is not black and white. It is not about believing on one side and regarding the other as false. While there is truth in science, there is also truth in religion and while there are inconsistencies in the Bible, there are also mistakes in science books. Science and religion, I believe, complements each other. Science books determine the hows and Bible determines the whys. Same is true in our life. In the Bible we may find the purpose of our lives. And as to how to achieve this purpose, we may find in books that we have in the very library of our university.

The link of a copy of the movie cited:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cv9kR1njdE