My Pilgrimage

It is no secret that I day dream a lot (SLMs, this should be no surprise to you especially). It is also no secret about what… as the one picture on facebook suggests, I am day dreaming about walking to Santiago de Compestella! I dream of walking up to the resting place of St. James and saying, ‘wow, this man knew Jesus Christ Himself!!’ I guess you could say, I dream of being a pilgrim.

The never failing Wikipedia defines a pilgrimage as “a journey of moral or spiritual significance.” The definition of a pilgrim, again, relying on Wikipedia is, “a traveler (literally one who has come from afar) who is on a journey to a holy place. Typically, this is a physical journeying…”  Yes, typically we always think of a pilgrimage as a physical journey to a religious, physical, worldly place. If we are blessed enough to afford the time and funds, many will take a pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem or Santiago or a Marian site.

… but what if we think about our entire life as a pilgrimage to Heaven!? Usually when I think about things like this, I have to bend the definition a little or tweak the meaning of something. But for this one no definitions have to change… just our perception on how we think about it! Life is indeed a journey and we do indeed hope to be journeying to THE holy place! We are all pilgrims in life. When we sin it is as if we are taking a detour (*detour* Jesus’ life and death made sin just a detour, never a dead end)… Reconciliation, the Eucharist and the other sacraments are guidance and direction to the ‘Holy Site’ (Heaven!); they lead us to where we want to go… they lead us to our Father.

So, although I day dream about walking in Spain or visiting Rome and Assisi, I should be dreaming about my ultimate destination (God willing!) of His Heavenly Kingdom and striving to model my life and put my feet on the path that leads there! If a Camino in Spain is part of that… THANK YOU GOD!

Dreaming of the day I will say, “Wow, I know Jesus Christ Himself!” …Working so that I can one day say that. …Shaping my life so that I can one day say that. That is what I mean by making your life a pilgrimage. Making a pilgrimage takes some dreaming. But it also takes work! If I dream of Santiago all day long, but never make the steps to get there… they are just dreams, and if it is just a dream, it stink because it never become reality. So yes, dream! For thinking of life as a pilgrimage, don’t dream about making the pilgrimage, dream about the end goal, because you are already on the pilgrimage!

Don’t let the dreaming hold you back from the ‘walking’… Don’t stop focusing on today because you are caught up in the dream (this, I think, is one of my biggest problems!). Today is the only way to get to tomorrow, and tomorrow is the only way to get to eternity in Heaven… so focusing on Today is how we have to get to THE Holy Place.

Just something that came to mind today as I was thinking and talking about El Camino de Santiago!

Peace!

~Dan

I realize I go between saying ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘we,’ probably making my posts torture for English majors, and I am sorry! I get confused because everything I write about are personal stories or things that are very relevant in my life, or things that I need to work on… But I am talking to everyone, so it all gets mixed up. It is just an engineer’s English (there is American English, British English, Australian English… then Engineers English)! haha

And, here are some pictures of a fabulous sun rise here in Wau on my way to mass in the morning... I like to take the longer way around so I can see the sun rise. Some days it is not so great... Some days I am so blessed to see such wonders! 

Enjoy! :)

Happy Mission Sunday!

Greetings from Wau!! 

Today was ‘mission Sunday’ here in South Sudan (and I think everywhere else too)! It was a good day here in Wau… we had a special collection that would go to benefit the mission as well as a sort of fair after the Arabic mass. Many of the parish families came out to help support the mission and have fun winning prizes for games such as ring toss, knock the bottles off the stand and a soccer passing game (I don’t know if these games have real names… but they’re basically the same ones you would find in the US…) I won just 1 game, dropping a coin into a cup in water (reminded me of the ones that Taco Bell always used to have!! Taco Bell offered burritos or tacos, we offered biscuits… but now that I won it here, I’m ready to go back and win some burritos!!)

But the day made me think about missions in general. Even though my ‘job title’ would be Catholic missionary, or ‘Salesian Lay Missioner’ but I don’t think mission Sunday is really talking specifically about people in South Sudan, or even those people described (in the traditional sense) as ‘missionaries’ in the US. I think it is talking about every person who believes in Christ! Every human has a mission, and thus, every person is a missionary! It is extremely important to find your mission in life. Christ called us to serve… not necessarily overseas, or with an official organization, but He called us to serve our brothers and sisters and our community! It is tough to call ourselves Christians if we are not living and working for a mission to serve others and extend His kingdom in the place we are at.

Pray about your mission. If someone asks you what makes you a Christian, and your best answer is “Because I go to Church on Sunday” or “Because I believe in Jesus” …FIND YOUR MISSION! Those are both extremely important things. And yes, our unified belief in Jesus IS what makes us Christian… It is like asking, ‘What makes you American?’ and answering, ‘I was born there’ when there are infinitely many more answers (ill mention some of the cliché ones like ‘freedom’ or ‘loving baseball’ or ‘apple pie’). Our faith needs to be more than the technicalities! Our faith needs to be a lifelong passion or mission. Something that draws us AND others closer to Christ. Below is an amazing quote about love:

“Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, falling in love in a quite absolute final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you will read, who you know, what breaks your heart, what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decided everything.”

-Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

That love that Father Pedro is talking about will answer what your mission is!! Fall in love, and make that your mission. Your mission will be what you put your heart into. Yes, we will all need to work and most of us will have families, but we must also find our mission as Christians! How will we glorify God? How will we bring others closer to Christ? Saying you believe in Jesus and going to Church can’t answer these questions fully! (I must admit… I am a bit spoiled, my job is my mission… and even if I have bad days, I still have to live my mission! J)

So, on this fabulous mission Sunday… FIND YOUR MISSION, fall in love with it, and LIVE IT EVERYDAY!! J

Ps. An extra prayer for missionaries in South Sudan is also greatly appreciated today!! J

For Your Viewing Pleasure...

Today's post will be dedicated to pictures! :) Just a few that I took over the past few weeks! They can show where I live, work, play and pray! :) 

Picture 1: I want to know.... have you ever seen the rain? Falling down on a sunny day? It is not a tornado... It is just raining, but i thought it was really cool to see the boundaries of the rain that was coming down!! (and it wasn't completely sunny... But the sun was there! But, i would still safely answer yes to my questions.)

Picture 2: This is the street that I live on. The door you can see is the Salesian sister's health clinic. Usually during their hours, there is a TON of women and children out front. They have a food program in the mornings and early afternoon.

Picture 3: You cannot see it very well, but this is the moon and a star underneath it. The moon is really cool because it is just a sliver. Then with the star beneath it... pretty awesome! Oh, and to make it even more perfect... that is the Salesian church here in Wau! Morning mass is at 6:45, it is really nice watching the sun come up through the windows at mass! :)

Picture 4: The Vocational Training Center (VTC) that I work at! I thought it was a nice picture with Don Bosco, the name and the S Sudanese flag flying!

I did not think of this when I was uploading the pictures... But i now realize that the 4 pictures I selected show (almost) perfectly the 4 oratory criteria!! Home- the street that I showed in Picture 2 is the road that I LIVE on. School- Picture 4 is the school I teach at. Church- This one is easy... Playground- This is a bit more abstract, but the rain coming down was taken when the community I live with went down to the river to swim and have some fun, play in the river!

So, hope you enjoy! :) Ill work on some more next time.. They uploaded pretty fast, so hopefully next time I can get some more up like this too!

Have Patience

I see that I am kind of slacking on the writing! L I might have mentioned this in one of the other posts… but it is because I go to bed right after dinner… and my ‘prime time’ for writing is after the hour of 9:00PM. But dinner is not until 8:30, and I have to wake up at 6:21 for morning mass. So after dinner, at 9:00 I have to do battle with my shower and get ready for bed. By the time I am ready for bed it is creeping up on 10:00 and I am left with only my 8 hours of sleep that I need to get to be able to function all day! So, eating dinner at 8:30 kind of puts a cramp in my writing… but I will see what I have in me before my ‘prime time’! J

I shall first start with a general update! Teaching is in full swing now, and I have had all of my classes a few times each. 4 classes of computer (2 are me showing, 2 are them working on an assignment I create), 3 classes of English, 3 classes of Math and 1 class of religion. This is all per week. Each class is about an hour or one and a half hours. These classes are being taught at the Vocational Training Center (VTC) and are for all of the different trades (electricity, carpentry, masonry, computers, printing, welding and auto mechanic). The students range from about 18 years old to 30 years old in my classes (the VTC students in general range from about 8 to 50 years old).

One thing I know I struggle with here is patience! I want to speak Arabic fluently… I want to be able to love fully... among a few other instances where I know my impatience can get the better of me! As the feast of Saint Francis was recently celebrated, I was thinking about his patience. I always see the saints as the guys up in heaven who did God’s will on earth (and rightly so, that is all true)… But I rarely think of their struggles… They were real humans; they sinned and had frustrations/hardships too! I always thought that if God came down and told me where I was going in life... life would be just peachy and I would never be frustrated or impatient again. But as I was praying about the life of Saint Francis, I thought about his calling. God said to him, “Francis, repair my church” So, here you have a man, who had a divine calling, ‘repair my church’. Life must have been easy after that right? Wrong! It must have taken even more patience than before the clear calling! How am I to rebuild? What do you mean? When? Where? These answers were not clearly given, as we know he started to rebuild the church at San Damiano, when God really meant HIS Church (I am not going to talk about this now… but also think about the INFINITE patience God has with us, and even his saints, too!). Now, I am not Saint Francis, so how this applies to me is in love. I get impatient here sometimes because I know I want to love to my full potential, but at times I catch myself being too impatient to pray for God to fill me with love first! It is impossible for us to love, if we first do not allow God to fill us with love! Yet, I find myself praying endlessly to be able to love everyone I see… but then I forget to pray for God to first fill me with love. It is as if I want to skip that vital step in the process of loving… I get impatient! L Much like the fabulous game Othello, ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’ (it takes a minute to realize that we must allow God love us BEFORE we can lo

I talked about St. Francis because one, he is one of the best examples of how we humans can live as Christ-like as possible and two because it was his feast day… But I also thought about St. John Bosco (as I am a Salesian missionary). He had divinely inspired dreams, yet was never given a clear understanding of what they meant until he saw them lived out! Imagine the patience that took!! Having a vivid dream children turning into wolves and then into sheep, but not having a clear understanding of what it meant until years later when he witnessed as close to that as nature would give! Patience like I cant even imagine!!

Ill leave you with a life changing song! (okay, that may have been an exaggeration… but it’s a good one! Thank you Tracy for showing me this!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kn6Z2Mop5I

I was going to put up a few more pictures... but the internet is slow today, so maybe later this week I will post some pictures!