Here are links to a square icon I created of the Virgen of Guadalupe, as well as a wallpaper for a large iMac.  Click on either to view high-resolution versions

I thought others might like to have la Virgen on their computers, so I posted these images to Flickr for all to download and enjoy.

Blessed Miguel Pro – his photos, originally uploaded by Jobriga.

This image is quickly becoming my most popular Flickr photo – 114 views as of this writing. It is wonderful to think that Flickr can, in some small way, help show more people the story of this saint’s martyrdom.

While reading The Liturgy of the Hours during Lent, I came across the following reading:

While all the runners in the stadium take part in the race, the award goes to one man.  In that case, run so as to win!

Athletes deny themselves all sorts of things.  They do this to win a crown of leaves that withers, but we a crown that is imperishable.

I do not run like a man who loses sight of the finish line.  I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing.

What I do is discipline my own body and master it, for fear that after having preached to others I myself should be rejected.

I recall being incredibly moved when I read this passage; I read it at a time when I felt I had “lost sight of the finish line.”  For me, shadowboxing is sleeping in on the weekend instead of getting up early, taking too many coffee breaks, surfing the net instead of coding sites.  It’s the tendency to coast when I could be pushing further – running “so as to win.”

And now when I come across challenges, and have the choice to sidestep it or push myself, I think of this passage – so that “I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing.”

The Pilot provides an interesting opinion piece on the concept of “Existing in Embryo,” which our culture seems to have lost:

I have in mind what might be called the notion of “existing in embryo.” By this I mean: we acknowledge that it is possible for the “substance” of a thing already to exist at the very beginning of its growth, and that it have all of the reality of the fully existing thing, only requiring time for increase and maturation. This “substance” is not yet manifested. It is real, but it is hidden. All of the reality of the fully developed thing is present, but it does little to make its reality felt. If we do not acknowledge it, it will not force us to acknowledge it, and we can if we wish destroy it, as its existence, although real, is frail…

I encountered recently the notion of “existing in embryo” in separate discussions by two popes. In “Love and Responsibility” by Karol Wojty a I found a striking passage in which he claimed that “attraction is of the essence of love and in some sense is indeed love,” and then he drew attention to how sometimes a married couple can look back to the first moment of their mutual attraction and say that their love already existed there as if “in embryo.”

Full (and interesting) article here: Existing in Embryo

I truly started to believe in God while gazing up at a starry sky in Australia.

I spent a semester abroad in Australia during the second semester of my junior year. During of our many fascinating journeys around the country, we visited a family of Aborigines in Broome, a small town located in the upper left corner of the continent. We camped overnight on a beach far from any electric lights or signs of civilization, we caught fish and giant turtle for our dinner, and cooked our meal on a campfire under a cloudless, star-filled sky.

I took a small star-gazing chart with me to Australia, so that I could recognize the unfamiliar constellations in the sky. As a child in Newburyport I could always pick out the Big and Little Dippers, the “W” of Cassiopeia, and Orion’s triple-starred belt. The sky Down Under had a new sky to explore, such as the bright Centaur, the zig-zag Hydra, and of course the Southern Cross.

The Southern Cross lets you find the South Pole star, just as the Big Dipper lets you locate the North Star. From the beach in Broome I could see both constellations in the sky – the Southern Cross pointing to the South Pole star visible above the horizon on the left, with the Big Dipper pointing to the North Star below the horizon on my right.

As the hours passed that night, I saw the movement of the sky. The sky appeared to be a great dome with the South Pole and North Star as pivot points, with the stars slowly and silently moving from the horizon to the sky above and then over my head and behind me. Their progression was nearly imperceptible but still noticeable; for the first time I could visualize the great mechanism of the stars at work. Each star was an individual piece of the grand design, all set in motion by an unseen hand, all organized into a great machinery constantly moving over my head, beneath my hands in the sand, driving the ocean and Earth and air around me just as it ordered the sky above.

Sometimes when I am thinking through a complex problem, or assembling pieces of information on a web site, or creating a collage, I get that same sense of the divine – the sense that this world is not created at random, that God is ordering everything around me.

Since then I’ve sometimes struggled with my faith, I’ve doubted if I should be a Catholic, and I’ve been hard pressed to explain my beliefs – but since that night, I’ve never doubted that there is a God.