Superfluous banter of the Jolieolie(wo)man

2006-03-24T18:03:00.000+08:00

" I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. what is broken is broken --- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived"

filling the gap (in a nutshell)

2005-12-10T21:26:00.000+08:00

what i've been doing for the past 3 months?

September: Read Pharma. Sleep. Read Med1. Sleep.Read Patho.Sleep.

October: Read Pharma. Read Med1. Sleep. Read Patho. Sleep.

November- December:Read Pharma. Drink Coffee. Read OB. Read Pharma then OB then Pharma then OB. Drink more Coffee...... read some more...... Sleep?! what sleep?

* dreaded-ly anticipating"

2005-08-21T00:20:00.000+08:00

"Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
wake me up when september ends

here comes the rain again
falling from the stars
drenched in my pain again
becoming who we are

as my memory rests
but never forgets what I lost
wake me up when september ends"

Stand still

2005-08-13T16:55:00.000+08:00

"We're living in repetition
Content in the same old shtick again
Now the routine's turning to contention,
Like a production line going over and over and over
Roller coaster "

- Redundant, Green Day

exams wk

2005-08-12T22:45:00.000+08:00

MURPHY'S LAW on EXAMINATION:
90% of the exam will come from the 10% you did not study.

sucks to be sick..... again

2005-07-22T23:30:00.000+08:00

'been feeling sick since med 1, worsen during surgery class, good thing i made it till pharmacology class (i'd rather passed out than take the special exams (*weird rationalization*, but logical i must say!), pretty much in a state of delirium during the exam (i dont remember half the things i wrote there *here's hoping i pass still*)

it's a long wkend (thanks to GMA for her SONA) and im sick....... great =(

2005-07-15T23:28:00.000+08:00

As fast as a blink of an eye
One can realize what he has all along but take for granted.
He'll realize it in an instant, and it will hit him real hard.
Suddenly he'll feel a new kind of sentience for what before seems ordinary
But a person does what he has always been accustomed to
What human nature dictates;
And no matter how profound that realization is,
Nothing will change
Feebleness outweighs it all
He'll just sit back, and psych himself up in order to forget
Faster than the blink of an eye

sms

2005-06-20T21:09:00.000+08:00

a very long txt msg rcvd which transiently woke me from my deep slumber at 1:11:14 am, but nonetheless worth the read.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light and not our darkness that frighthen us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlighthened about shrinking so that other people wont feel insecure about you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us"

Following your personal legend

2005-05-16T18:50:00.000+08:00

a system of twelve steps to help people to rediscover their "blessing" by Alan Cohen

1 Tell yourself the truth: draw two columns on a sheet of paper and in the left column write down what you would love to do. Then write down on the other side everything you're doing without any enthusiasm. Write as if nobody were ever going to read what is there, don't censure or judge your answers.

2 Start slowly, but start: call your travel agent, look for something that fits your budget; go and see the movie that you've been putting off; buy the book that you've been wanting to buy. Be generous to yourself and you'll see that even these small steps will make you feel more alive.

3 Stop slowly, but stop: some things use up all your energy. Do you really need to go that committee meeting? Do you need to help those who do not want to be helped? Does your boss have the right to demand that in addition to your work you have to go to all the same parties that he goes to? When you stop doing what you're not interested in doing, you'll realize that you were making more demands of yourself than others were really asking.

4 Discover your small talents: what do your friends tell you that you do well? What do you do with relish, even if it's not perfectly well done? These small talents are hidden messages of your large occult talents.

5 Begin to choose: if something gives you pleasure, don't hesitate. If you're in doubt, close your eyes, imagine that you've made decision A and see all that it will bring you. Now do the same with decision B. The decision that makes you feel more connected to life is the right one - even if it's not the easiest to make.

6 Don't base your decisions on financial gain: the gain will come if you really do it with enthusiasm. The same vase, made by a potter who loves what he does and by a man who hates his job, has a soul. It will be quickly sold (in the first case) or will stay on the shelves (in the second case).

7 Follow your intuition: the most interesting work is the one where you allow yourself to be creative. Einstein said: "I did not reach my understanding of the Universe using just mathematics." Descartes, the father of logic, developed his method based on a dream he had.

8 Don't be afraid to change your mind: if you put a decision aside and this bothers you, think again about what you chose. Don't struggle against what gives you pleasure.

9 Learn how to rest: one day a week without thinking about work lets the subconscious help you, and many problems (but not all) are solved without any help from reason.

10 Let things show you a happier path: if you are struggling too much for something, without any results appearing, be more flexible and follow the paths that life offers. This does not mean giving up the struggle, growing lazy or leaving things in the hands of others - it means understanding that work with love brings us strength, never despair.

11 Read the signs: this is an individual language joined to intuition that appears at the right moments. Even if the signs point in the opposite direction from what you planned, follow them. Sometimes you can go wrong, but this is the best way to learn this new language.

12 Finally, take risks! the men who have changed the world set out on their paths through an act of faith. Believe in the force of your dreams. God is fair, He wouldn't put in your heart a desire that couldn't come true.

yet another "one of those days"

2005-05-10T01:30:00.000+08:00

Scorching sun

Sleepless nights

Vivid visions

Bitter sweet nostalgia

Why do I keep remembering what Ive been meaning to forget? (or do I?)

...

......

2005-05-07T17:15:00.000+08:00

Scenery without solace is meaningless....

humdrums

2005-04-18T19:56:00.000+08:00

it has been a while since i've updated..... being busy with nothing ironically can be a bit of a frenzy. your mind thinks of a lot of things to do ( majority of which are absolutely out of this world) and by the end of the day you realize that you've accomplished absolutely...... nothing.

2004 Bar examinations

2005-04-08T19:00:00.000+08:00

The results of the 2004 Bar Examinations have been released and 1659 out of the 5249 barristers made the grade for a passing average of 31.61%.

383. CAUTON, III, Lucas Niccolo M.

384. CAVALES, Peme J.

385. CAWAS, Richard O.

386. CANEBA, Jannice Leigh D.

387. CANETE, Nemeson B.

388. CANOSO, Peter V.

389. CENDANA, Modesto A.

Congrats achi! =)

Haiku # 1

2005-04-05T21:07:00.000+08:00

Love like illusion
Blinded from what is outside
Has left me jaded.

Neechan =)

2005-04-04T23:40:00.000+08:00

With the graduate at Westin.

Congrats neechan!

JPII

2005-04-03T11:20:00.000+08:00

“Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence.”

Pope John Paul II (May 18 1920 – April 2 2005)

Raising our Hands

2005-03-30T23:20:00.000+08:00

Abi and I went to the orientation for the new volunteers of Hands On Manila (HOM) in Powerbooks, Greenbelt 4. It was overwhelming to see that the place was completely filled,( some were actually standing already) by the time it started.

The orientation was opened by the speaker by quoting the HOM slogan, "When asked who among the Filipinos were ready to make a difference, WE raised our hand." A slide show presentation was shown next to introduce the different non-profit organizations affiliated with HOM.

I actually liked to join each one of them (well, except the sports organizations) but most of the locations were in QC which is far from where I reside

At the end of the orientation, we've decided to join KHYTHE. It is an organization in which you spend time by playing or with different bed time activities with pediatric cancer patients in hospitals such as east ave, V.luna, nat'l children's and POC.

I'm also thinking about volunteering in another program which is called Saturday Academy 2 in Pangrap Shelter. I always wanted to volunteer teaching kids but I never get the chance to do so, and I think now is the a perfect opportunity for me to try it out and to see if I can balance it with my schedule coz I wanted to continue Sat academy for the entire year.

all fired up.... (on phonecalls, friends and cookies)

2005-03-29T23:47:00.000+08:00

9:53 am: I was awaken by the ringing of my cell phone. It was from Andy. She promised to keep me posted regarding those students who’ll take the remedial exams for the different subjects since it was announced last week that faculty will show the list today. For a brief second, I just stared at my cell phone blinking the name Andy on the screen for whatever info I’ll be getting on the other line. I’ve been worrying for the past week now because I really think that I’d be taking a remedial exam on anatomy. I got really low scores during the second shifting and I did screw up during the grand final exam which was worth 20% of the entire grade of that subj.
When I finally answered the phone, Andy’s enthusiastic voice calmed my nerves. And what she told me next, sounded like the best melody or whatever you might call it in my entire life….. “ Jolie, wala ka sa list! Wala tayo sa list! Hindi tayo mag re-remedials!” if words were food, I think what Andy had just told me would keep me nourished for the entire month! Finally, I’m officially an incoming second year med student! And best of all. I can now plan without hesitations and worries the things I’ll do for the entire summer vacation.

9:57 am: I got up from my bed and I announced to my family the news.

10:30 am: I got on-line because I wanted to tell my super friend, Issa the good news. I figured she’s in the office right now and the easiest way to contact her was through the yahoo messenger. We promised each other to meet at least once a month, but I’ve been canceling the dates we planned for the past 2 months now. I wasn’t even able to celebrate her birthday last February, and until now, I still feel bad about it. I promised myself that I’ll make it up to her as soon as I have nothing to worry about.
We’ve immediately set a date, and we’ll be having a sleep-over at my place this Thursday We also planned to attend the graduation of a close friend of ours this Saturday.
Gary my co-intern and friend from GABMMC was also on-line, we talked about the things that we did for the holyweek. I told him that the only activity we did for the holyweek was the bisita iglesia. It surprised me when he asked how many churches we visited coz I thought that it was standard to visit 7 churches. He told me that some people actually visits 14 churches. This was new to me.

11:00 am: I read Jan’s, our class president's email. She posted the list of the names of students from our class who will be taking the remedial exams and those who failed the subject. I was really saddened when I saw the list. Even though our class had only been together for one school year, and there are still some I don’t know by name, I already feel a certain bond and attachment with the entire class. I was really troubled when I saw the list.

11:25am: I called Abi to tell the news and also to tell her that the Hands on manila’s (HOM) orientation is tomorrow already at PowerBooks greenbelt 4, 6-7pm. HOM is made up of different non-profit organizations which provides different volunteering opportunities. It aims to mobilize people through volunteer service within the Metro Manila. What’s good about the organization is that you can choose from a variety of projects you can attend to which suits your interest, location and schedule.
Abi and I planned to join HOM months ago. Their orientation came in a perfect timing.

2:00pm: I decided I have to go to makati to clean the condo. I suggested to Abi that she should stay for the night after the orientation since it would be dangerous for her to go home by herslf at night. The place has not been used for the past two weeks so I surmised that it needed some cleaning. And also I needed to check if there's stll food on the fridge since Issa and I will stay there on thursday.

3:00pm : I arrived at the condo and started cleaning the bookshelves first. My sister whose already graduating from civil law this monday, stayed here for the entire month of march, since she needed to concentrate studying for her finals and revalida. the entire shelves which contained the entire collection of SCRA (supreme court resolutions) was a bit of a mess. It took me a while arranging the books and modules at the lower part of the shelves. While dusting some of the books, I thought to myself what if I, like my two sisters entered law school instead of med school. My achi until now is still entertaining the thought of me getting into law school. I don't see it happening.

3:45 pm: I'm finally done with the shelves plus wiping all the glass tables. I went to the fridge to note what I should be bringing for tomorrow. I was really surprised to remove exactly 169 sachets of ketchups from the vegetable compartment. (which I think in my fridge should be properly labelled--- the ketchup sachet compartment) Majority of the sachets came from pizzahut, the rest came from mcdo, jollibee, greenwich, tropical hut delivery. all of which probably accumulated starting my 6 months stay here last year during my intership in makatimed.

4:30 pm: I'm finally done cleaning the place. after 10 minutes my mum came to pick me up. she brought food. ( mcdo: another ketchup to start the collection again!) after eating, i took a shower while she helped changing the sheets and then we went home.

5:45 pm: at home, logged in the net again to check on the HOM website. marge was also on-line and we chatted for a while about the "list" again. and I told her about the HOM projects.

6:45 pm : I called anj. we haven't talked for ages and i truly miss her alot. she's I think one of the first few people I got to know on our first day in first year in college and weve been good friends since. Our friendship grew stronger during my internship year in college though we were assigned in different hospitals. We did alot of catching up and I'm so happy that she's enjoying her work and the company she's in right now.

7:45pm : our conversation was cut short since her kuya has to use the phone. actually, a few minutes back i suddenly felt dizzy and I can feel myself burning up.. must have been the heat and too much excitement combined.

7:48pm : I was officially not feeling well. one of my sisters saw me, and she noticed that I do not look good and she knew right away I wasn't feeling well. But it didn't stopped me from calling another friend of mine, Ng. I called her yesterday to greet her happy birthday but she wasn't at home. it was on impulse that i dialled her number after talking to anj, upon which later on she told me that she was about to call me the same time i dialled her number. I think that we were really meant to talk tonight since she was having problems with a common friend of ours.I hope though that I've given her the right advice and I sincerely wished that things would eventually turn out fine for them coz i both care for them alot.

9:45pm: we ended the call, coz I was starting to get dizzy again and my temperature seems to be rising. I took some meds then I went to the den to take a nap.

10:15pm: I still insisted to join our nightly rosary. by the end of the prayer, I felt a whole lot better already. after the rosary, I told my mum I wanted to bake the choco chips batter we made last monday. I just felt the sudden urge to do more tonight. I managed to bake 3 dozens of cookies. I also got a txt from abi saying she might not make it tomorrow. ( i hope not)

11:36pm: here i am in front of my pc. my head hurts when I lie down and I cant sleep. nag pa ka bibo ksi eh. tsk tsk.... i'll probably wont remember typing half of the things i wrote down here when i read this tomorrow......woah..... the room just spun. i have to force myself to sleep now.

In culmination of the holyweek.....

2005-03-28T13:48:00.000+08:00

From Jesus to Christ
How did a Jewish prophet come to be seen as the Christian savior? The epic story of the empty tomb, the early battles and the making of a great faith.

By Jon Meacham
Newsweek

March 28 issue - The story, it seemed, was over. Convicted of sedition, condemned to death by crucifixion, nailed to a cross on a hill called Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth had endured all that he could. According to Mark, the earliest Gospel, Jesus, suffering and approaching the end, repeated a verse of the 22nd Psalm, a passage familiar to first-century Jewish ears: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" There was a final, wordless cry. And then silence.

Why have you forsaken me? From the Gospel accounts, it was a question for which Jesus' disciples had no ready answer. In the chaos of the arrest and Crucifixion, the early followers had scattered. They had expected victory, not defeat, in this Jerusalem spring. If Jesus were, as they believed, the Jewish Messiah, then his great achievement would be the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth, an age marked by the elimination of evil, the dispensation of justice, the restoration of Israel and the general resurrection of the dead.

Instead, on the Friday of this Passover, at just the moment they were looking for the arrival of a kind of heaven on earth, Jesus, far from leading the forces of light to triumph, died a criminal's death. Of his followers, only the women stayed as Jesus was taken from the cross, wrapped in a linen shroud and placed in a tomb carved out of the rock of a hillside. A stone sealed the grave and, according to Mark, just after the sun rose two days later, Mary Magdalene and two other women were on their way to anoint the corpse with spices. Their concerns were practical, ordinary: were they strong enough to move the stone aside? As they drew near, however, they saw that the tomb was already open. Puzzled, they went inside, and a young man in a white robe—not Jesus—sitting on the right side of the tomb said: "Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here, see the place where they laid him." Absorbing these words, the women, Mark says, "went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid."

And so begins the story of Christianity—with confusion, not with clarity; with mystery, not with certainty. According to Luke's Gospel, the disciples at first treated the women's report of the empty tomb as "an idle tale, and ... did not believe them"; the Gospel of John says that Jesus' followers "as yet ... did not know ... that he must rise from the dead."

For many churchgoers who fill the pews this Holy Week, re-enacting the Passion, contemplating the cross and celebrating the Resurrection, the faith may appear seamless and monumental, comfortably unchanging from age to age. In a new NEWSWEEK Poll, 78 percent of Americans believe Jesus rose from the dead; 75 percent say that he was sent to Earth to absolve mankind of its sins. Eighty-one percent say they are Christians; they are part of what is now the world's largest faith, with 2 billion believers, or roughly 33 percent of the earth's population.

Yet the journey from Golgotha to Constantine, the fourth-century emperor whose conversion secured the supremacy of Christianity in the West, was anything but simple; the rise of the faith was, as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." From the Passion to the Resurrection to the nature of salvation, the basic tenets of Christianity were in flux from generation to generation as believers struggled to understand the meaning of Jesus' mission.

Jesus is a name, Christ a title (in Hebrew, Messias, in Greek, Christos, meaning "anointed one"). Without the Resurrection, it is virtually impossible to imagine that the Jesus movement of the first decades of the first century would have long endured. A small band of devotees might have kept his name alive for a time, even insisting on his messianic identity by calling him Christ, but the group would have been just one of many sects in first-century Judaism, a world roiled and crushed by the cataclysmic war with Rome from 66 to 73, a conflict that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem.

So how, exactly, did the Jesus of history, whom many in his own time saw as a failed prophet, come to be viewed by billions as the Christ of faith whom the Nicene Creed says is "the only-begotten Son of God ... God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God ... by whom all things were made"? And why did Christianity succeed where so many other religious and spiritual movements failed?

The questions are nearly 2,000 years old, yet in this culturally divisive American moment, a time when believers feel besieged and skeptics think themselves surrounded, a reconstruction of Jesus' journey from Jewish prophet to Christian savior suggests that faith, like history, is nearly always more complicated than it seems. For the religious, the lesson is that those closest to Jesus accepted little blindly, and, in the words of Origen of Alexandria, an early church father, "It is far better to accept teachings with reason and wisdom than with mere faith." For the secular, the reminder that Christianity is the product of two millennia of creative intellectual thought and innovation, a blend of history and considered theological debate, should slow the occasional rush to dismiss the faithful as superstitious or simple.

As the sun set on the Friday of the execution, Jesus appeared to be a failure, his promises about the Kingdom of God little more than provocative but powerless rhetoric. No matter what Jesus may have said about sacrifice and resurrection during his lifetime, the disciples clearly did not expect Jesus to rise again. The women at the tomb were stunned; confronted with the risen Lord, Thomas initially refused to believe his eyes; and at the end of Matthew's Gospel, some disciples still "doubted."

Their skepticism is hardly surprising. Prevailing Jewish tradition did not suggest that God would restore Israel and inaugurate the Kingdom through a condemned man who went meekly to his death. Quite the opposite: the Messiah was to fight earthly battles to rescue Israel from its foes and, even if this militaristic Messiah were to fall heroically in the climactic war, then documents found at Qumran (popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls) suggest that another "priestly" Messiah would finish the affair by putting the world to rights. Re-creating the expectations of first-century Jews, Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University, notes: "Like the David esteemed by tradition, the Messiah will be someone in whom are combined the traits of courage, piety, military prowess, justice, wisdom and knowledge of the Torah. The Prince of Peace must first be a man of war: his duty is to inflict final defeat on the forces of evil." There was, in short, no Jewish expectation of a messiah whose death and resurrection would bring about the forgiveness of sins and offer believers eternal life.

Yet a sacrificial, atoning role is precisely the one the first followers of Jesus believed he had played in the world. In the earliest known writing in the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes that Jesus "gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of God the Father."

Where did this interpretation of Jesus' mission come from? Like the New Testament authors, conservative believers often argue that Jesus is the Christ "according to the Scriptures" of the Old Testament—that the Hebrew Bible does in fact envision a messianic sacrificial lamb who will redeem the sin of Adam. There is a general argument that all of Biblical history had led to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and then there are what scholars call specific "prooftexts" (including Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, among others) in which the early Christians found foreshadowings of Jesus' life and mission. Yet anyone reading the ancient Israelite texts outside the Christian tradition may not necessarily interpret them as prologue to the New Testament; the Biblical books have their own histories and tell their own stories. To think that Christianity negates God's covenant with Israel, meanwhile, is misguided and contrary to canonical apostolic teaching. God's choice of the Jewish people is eternal, Paul writes, no matter what: "... as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers ... the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."

Christianity does owe the basic elements of its creed to Jewish tradition: atoning sacrifice; a messiah; a general resurrection of the dead. Until Jesus, however, no one had ever, apparently, woven these threads together in the way the apostles did after the Resurrection. ("Messiah" appears fewer than 40 times in the Old Testament, and when it does, it refers to an earthly king, not an incarnate savior from sins.) The heart of the matter was, as Paul wrote in First Corinthians (circa 50): "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day ..."

From the beginning, critics of Christianity have dismissed the Resurrection as a theological invention. As a matter of history, however, scholars agree that the two oldest pieces of New Testament tradition speak to Jesus' rising from the dead. First, the tomb in which Jesus' corpse was placed after his execution was empty; if it were not, then Christianity's opponents could have produced his bones. (Matthew also says the temple priests tried to bribe Roman guards at the tomb, saying, "Tell people, 'His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep'"—implying the body was in fact gone.)

The second tradition is that the apostles, including Paul, believed the risen Jesus had appeared to them; writing in the first years after the Passion, Paul lists specific, living witnesses, presumably in order to encourage doubters to seek corroborating testimony. Paul seems quite clear about what the skeptical would find if they checked his story. Less clear is what we should make of the later, differing Gospel accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus. Sometimes he appears as flesh and blood; at others, he can walk through walls. Sometimes he is instantly recognized; at others, even close followers fail to understand whom they are speaking with until Jesus identifies himself. Most likely the post-Resurrection stories represent different traditions within the nascent faith. The contrasting details do not help the Christian case on logical grounds, but the Gospel renderings do affirm that the tomb was empty, and that believers thought the resurrected Jesus had appeared to some of them for a time.

Written after Paul, the Gospels speak of sacrifice, redemption and resurrection. Yet we cannot responsibly skate around the Gospel reports that the disciples were initially mystified by the Resurrection. What explains the skeptical disciples' transformation from fear and wonder to clarity and conviction about the empty tomb and its significance in the history of salvation—that through his death and resurrection Jesus would redeem humankind?

Perhaps recollections of the words of Jesus himself. Though many scholars rightly raise compelling questions about the historical value of the portraits of Jesus in the Gospels, the apostles had to arrive at their definition of his messianic mission somehow, and it is possible that Jesus may have spoken of these things during his lifetime—words that came flooding back to his followers once the shock of his resurrection had sunk in. On historical grounds, then, Christianity appears less a fable than a faith derived in part from oral or written traditions dating from the time of Jesus' ministry and that of his disciples. "The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that ... he shall rise the third day," Jesus says in Mark, who adds that the disciples at the time "understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him."

That the apostles would have created such words and ideas out of thin air seems unlikely, for their story and their message strained credulity even then. Paul admitted the difficulty: "... we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." A king who died a criminal's death? An individual's resurrection from the dead? A human atoning sacrifice? "This is not something that the PR committee of the disciples would have put out," says Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. "The very fact of the salvation message's complexity and uniqueness, I think, speaks to the credibility of the Gospels and of the entire New Testament."

Jesus' words at the last supper—that bread and wine represented his body and blood—now made more sense: he was, the early church argued, a sacrificial lamb in the tradition of ancient Israel. Turning to the old Scriptures, the apostles began to find what they decided were prophecies Jesus had fulfilled. Hitting upon the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, they interpreted the Crucifixion as a necessary portal to a yet more glorious day: "... he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities ... and with his stripes we are healed." In the Book of Acts, Peter is able to preach a sermon in which Jesus is connected to passages from Isaiah, Joel and the Psalms.

Skepticism about Christianity was widespread and understandable. From a Jewish perspective, the first-century historian Josephus noted: "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man. He worked surprising deeds and was a teacher ... He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks ... And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has not disappeared to this day." In a separate reference, Josephus writes of "James the brother of the so-called Christ." A good Jew of the priestly caste, Josephus is not willing to grant Jesus the messianic title. In Athens, Stoic and Epicurean philosophers asked Paul to explain his message. "May we know what this new teaching is which you present?" they asked. "For you bring some strange things to our ears ..." They heard him out, but the Resurrection was too much of a reach for them. In the second century, the anti-Christian critic Celsus called the Resurrection a "cock-and-bull story," and cast doubt on the eyewitness testimony: "While he was alive he did not help himself, but after death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment and how his hands had been pierced. But who say this? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery, who either dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had a hallucination due to some mistaken notion ... or, which is more likely, wanted to impress others by telling this fantastic tale ..."

But why invent this particular story unless there were some historical basis for it—either in the remembered words of Jesus or in the experience of the followers at the tomb and afterward? "Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood," says Aeschylus' Apollo, "there is no resurrection." Citing the quotation, N. T. Wright, the scholar and Anglican Bishop of Durham, notes that various ancients may have believed in the immortality of the soul and a kind of mythic life in the underworld, but the stories about Jesus had no direct parallel. And while Jews believed in a general resurrection as part of the Kingdom (Lazarus and others raised by Jesus were destined to die again in due course), Wright adds that "nowhere within Judaism, let alone paganism, is a sustained claim advanced that resurrection has actually happened to a particular individual."

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological. Either from a "revelation" from the risen Jesus or from the reports of the earliest followers, Paul "received" a tradition that the resurrection was the hinge of history, the moment after which nothing would ever be the same. "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain ..." Paul writes. "Lo! I will tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet."

At this distance, such passages are stirring and have the glow of victory about them, but Jesus can be confounding, and he forced the early believers to become masters of theological improvisation. First the Kingdom failed to materialize at the time of the Passion, forcing the disciples—at least the male ones—into hiding. Next came the initially mystifying Resurrection. Then came ... nothing. A central prophecy preached in Jesus' name, his Second Coming on "clouds of glory," failed to happen. "Truly, I say to you," Jesus tells his disciples in Mark, "there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power."

And yet, as the decades of the first century came and went, the world wore on. In writing the Gospels, and then in formulating church doctrine in the second, third and fourth centuries, Jesus' followers reacted to his failure to return by doing what they arguably did best, for by now they had a good bit of practice at it: they reinterpreted their theological views in light of their historical experience. If the kind of kingdom they had so long expected was not at hand, then Jesus' life, death and resurrection must have meant something different. The Christ they had looked for in the beginning was not the Christ they had come to know. His kingdom was not literally arriving, but he had, they came to believe, created something new: the church, the sacraments, the promise of salvation at the last day—whenever that might be. The shift of emphasis from the short to the long term was an essential achievement. Because they believed Jesus' resurrection had given them the keys to heaven, the hour of his coming mattered less, for God was worth the wait. Drawing on imagery in Isaiah, John the Divine evoked the ultimate glory in his Revelation: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new."

Not everyone saw the same visions. There were many different Christian groups at first, including Gnostic believers, some of whom, contrary to other apostolic traditions, thought Jesus was more divine than human. According to Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Gnostic doctrine was noted for its "denial that the Savior was possessed of a material, fleshly body." Ignatius of Antioch, a second-century bishop, ferociously argued the opposite, writing that Jesus "was really born, and ate and drank, was really persecuted by Pontius Pilate, was really crucified and died ... [and] really rose from the dead." Such a view had to be the case to track with the early understanding that, as Paul wrote, Jesus "was descended from David according to the flesh." Among the faithful, the notion that God would manifest himself in human form and subject himself to pain and death inspired martyrdom and suffering. Writing about Rome under Nero, Tacitus reported that Christians "were crucified or set on fire so that when darkness came they burned like torches in the night."

Still, the faith, intensely focused on Jesus, endured. "In Jesus Christ, Christianity gave men and women a new love, a very compelling story, and it meant becoming part of a rich, dense community," says Robert Louis Wilken, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia. In his book "The Rise of Christianity," the sociologist Rodney Stark calculates that the number of Christians rose from roughly 1,000 (or .0017 percent of the Roman Empire) in A.D. 40 to nearly 34 million in 350 (or 56.5 percent of the total population). Stark argues that once the early church "decided not to require converts to observe the [Jewish] Law, they created a religion free of ethnicity," a religion attractive not only to Gentiles but to the Jews of the wider Roman world. Christians also benefited from their own charity work. In an age of plagues, they took care of the sick; the apostate Emperor Julian hated the "Galileans" and their "support not only [for] their poor, but ours as well." Such mission work attracted converts, Stark says, as did the church's decision to value women. And by largely banning abortion and female infanticide, Christians increased the ranks of women who could in turn bear Christian children.

Numbers tell only part of the story. Whatever one thinks of Christianity, the history of Jesus gave birth to a new, lasting vision of the origins and destiny of human life, a vision drawn from the religion's deep roots in Judaism. Everyone is created in God's image; there is, as Paul said, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"; all are equal, special, worthy. In the Christian world view, says the Roman Catholic theologian George Weigel, "we are not congealed stardust, an accidental byproduct of cosmic chemistry. We are not just something, we are someone." The promise at the heart of the faith: that God, as the fourth-century church father Athanasius said, "was made man that we might be made gods."

So many theological questions linger, and always will: Did Jesus understand his relationship to God the Father in the way Christians now do? Luke claims he did: "The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected ..." Jesus says, "and be slain, and be raised the third day." Did he grasp his atoning role? John claims he did: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." But how much of this is remembered history, and how much heartfelt but unhistorical theology? It is impossible to say. "How unsearchable are his judgments," Paul writes of the Lord, "and how inscrutable his ways!" And they will remain mysterious until believers, in Paul's words, come "face to face" with God.

In the meantime, we are left with an exhortation from a favorite text of Saint Augustine's, the 105th Psalm: "Seek the Lord, and his strength: seek his face evermore." As the search goes on for so many along so many different paths, Paul offers some reassuring words for the journey: "Be at peace among yourselves ... encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks ... hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil"—wise words for all of us, whatever our doubts, whatever our faith.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

booksbooksbooks......

2005-03-23T17:18:00.000+08:00

Last year, i got so excited when i found out that powerbooks is giving out a discount card that is if you completed their track card.... the track card is a card containing 75 boxes each box corresponding to 200 pesos and you present it upon purchase and they stamped the box corresponding to the amount you purchase. completion of the card in a year would mean a powerbooks discount card (meaning you have already spent 15 thousand worth of books..... unfortunately they dont sell medical books there) as someone who considers powerbooks as a second home, getting that discount card meant a lot for me, and so since the time i got hold of my track card, i started book shopping everytime my schedule would permit me to, knowing that at the end of the year, i'll be a proud owner of a powerbooks discount card.....( in retrospect, i realize how lame i've become)
right now, my trackcard is stamped till the 45th box.

so what's the point of me rambling about a track card then?
well, my achi just went to powerbooks recently to buy the succeeding books of the terry goodkind series, i got really excited when she said that she'll be completing the entire collection ( about 10 books i guess) because that would mean a lot of stamps for my track card. I forgot to give her my track card the day she bought those books , but she did brought me something when she got home..... guess what it is????? nope not a new track card....not a discount card....... but something close to that..... its an application form of a discount card from powerbooks you can get for just 100 pesos with or without a track card........... nice.

i had just finished rearranging my book shelves and now im looking at the whole set of books i've bought but have not read.............

but as they say, you should look at the brighter side of things that's why now i know that (1)i'll forever be preoccupied reading non-medical books this summer (2) i have a new bookmark in the form of my half filled trackcard. saya!

for my first book, im now reading....

in between anatomy modules that is..... (not!)

something to ponder on

2005-03-22T18:17:00.000+08:00

something i read while browsing the net......

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

learning greek.....

2005-03-21T21:39:00.000+08:00

Tonight i'm learning how to study greek from my super friend, Issa. greek in my dictionary means something entirely foreign to my world.... i.e. making a blog. why force myself to do something which even at this early point is making my head ache then?well.....
(1)i promise marge i'll make one again ( yep again, meaning i made one before, but for some reason i only created an account then i didn't bother opening it again) plus i always keep my promise
(2)issa has a cool blog and i want one too...... ( though i do not even understand what HTML stands for)-
(3)i wanna see how interesting i could write my sedentary life.-i've never had a journal in my life before so why not start now, an on-line one at that!
(4) torturing myself is one of my favorite hobby

anywayz.... enough of this..... i'd better start trying understanding the rest of this stuff.....