I’m currently working on an upgrade of one of the web sites I manage.  The current site is a collection of static pages with PHP includes, while the new site will be powered by the latest version of Wordpress.

I’ve enjoyed using Wordpress as a content management system.  The new templating system is relatively easy to use, and gibes well with what I’ve learned from my professional experience with web sites.  I think it’s a great lesson in CMS development as well - determining what’s dynamic vs. static, what’s styled in CSS or structured in HTML code, and what the various colors and fonts need to be to make the site readable.

Advantages of using Wordpress vs. static updates include:

• Word-like text editor to enter and edit content, without the need to know HTML.
• Automatic ability to push new pages to multiple news feeds.  Write a post or page, tag it with keywords, click “submit,” and it automatically goes out over Google News.
• Fancier functionality.  No more manually updating the right column; I click “post” and all the links update.
• Individual pages.  Let’s say you Google “Pray for Priests magnets” - you get http://www.serraboston.org/news.php, but you have to scroll halfway down the page to get to the relevant content.  With the new site, each page of content should appear as its own web site, with links to similar articles.
• Fancier functionality than my current blog, which also needs an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

I’d post a preview, but I hope to have the fully dynamic site online in a few days.

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.

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.

This year my mom offered me a few dozen pins that said “Keep Christ in Christmas.”  I handed them out at the St. Clement Young Adults’ monthly social, and wore one to work the next day.  It seemed hypocritical to ask others to wear them and not wear one myself.

Usually people saw the bright red pin, lean in, and asked what the pin said, to which I would reply: “Keep Christ in Christmas - want a pin?”  Some people took the pin, others didn’t.  One coworker said “No thanks; I’m not a Jew for Jesus.”  Another saw the pin from a distance and thought it showed a skull and crossbones.

I found that nobody was offended and everyone was extremely respectful.  I sometimes entered into rather interesting conversations about faith and tradition - another coworker mentioned that he sometimes used his lunch hour to pray at a local cathedral.

I’ve become a lot more comfortable with my Catholic identity in the past year; it felt good to wear my religion on my sleeve (or shirt pocket) rather than keeping it hidden.  I enjoyed being a bit more overt with my faith and hope I can continue sharing Christ’s love with others during this new liturgical year.

Merry Christmas!