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 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.”

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 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.

As noted on the home page, Serra Boston’s mission is “to assist the Vocations Office of the Archdiocese of Boston in any way possible to foster, promote and support vocations to the priesthood and religious life.” The first meeting is Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 8am at St. Mary’s Parish in Waltham, MA.

This is one of the best sites I’ve done; the code is very well structured and I’ve used Google Sitemaps to (hopefully) increase traffic.  Hopefully it’ll serve as a good portfolio piece in addition to an important web presence for this new (but growing) organization.

Here is a cartoon showing the basics of Blessed Miguel Pro’s life and martyrdom. There are other biographies available on the web, but this gives the basics of his life and martrydom. It also seemed like an appropriate way of showing his life in a visual site like Flickr.

Here are actual photographs of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martrydom.

There are 3 photos (clockwise from upper left):

1. Blessed Miguel Pro’s last request was to be allowed to kneel and pray before his execution.

2. Declining the customary blindfold, Blessed Miguel Pro stands with arms outstretched in imiation of Christ on the cross. As he dies, he yells &161;Vivo Cristo Rey” (Long live Christ the King).

3. When the initial shots of the firing squad failed to kill him, a soldier shot him point blank in the head.

When in Mexico, we tried to find the actual site where this martrydom took place. As you can see in the next photos in this set, it can be somewhat hard to find.

The following photo iis a bank in Mexico – the site of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martyrdom is actually to the left of this building (as you’re facing it), down a side street.

The next photo shows the wall holding the plaque which commemorates the site of Miguel Pro’s martrydom.  It’s somewhat hard to find – the plaque is in the upper left, almost behind a metal pipe which contains electric wires running up the wall.

The next two photos show the plaque in more detail – the first shows the plaque itself, and the second shows the photo as it appeared in 2005.

The plaque is a bit misleading – the actual site of the martyrdom is across the street, below a staircase. Other than this plaque there is no indication that this is the site of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martrydom.

If you’re looking at the plaque and you turn around, you see the staircase shown in the photo below. Blessed Miguel Pro was apparently shot at the spot shown below, just below the staircase.

¡VIVO CRISTO REY!

For more information on Blessed Miguel Pro, see the following sites:

• Blessed Miguel Pro
• Wikipedia entry (with photos)
• Catholic Online entry on Blessed Miguel Pro

More to come.

The local media coverage of this event (check out WBZ’s coverage here) tended to simplify the Cardinal’s excellent talk – “Cardinal Sean goes to local bar, tells kids to turn off the TV and go to Church.” While it’s impossible to condense all of the Cardinal’s speech into a single sound bite, I think the media tended to portray the event as Cardinal Sean’s attempt to simply “revive attendance at Church” (as Keller says in the clip above). Most of the media didn’t mention that a lot of the young adults were already pretty dedicated to the church and asked some excellent and thoughtful questions, rather than being surprised at a cardinal in their local watering hole.

I was fortunate to sit in the front row, and I took a few video clips of his speech. Here are some links:

Intro: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5817752200747168297&hl=en

Speech: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2718382783437944078&hl=en (Speech is about 40 minutes long but is excellent)

Q&A 1: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5417439106441473392&hl=en

Q&A 2: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-3159251886096866001&hl=en

Q&A 3: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1238687512562623979&hl=en

Q&A 4: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=902358379646954255&hl=en

Q&A 5: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4574755861908795577&hl=en

Visit Cardinal Sean’s blog for other great photos and video from Cardinal Sean. I especially like his pictures of the Orthodox churches in St. Petersburg.

Time posted an interesting editorial on the atheistic nature of Harry Potter:

Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with Tolkien and Lewis.

What does Harry have instead of God? Rowling’s answer, at once glib and profound, is that Harry’s power comes from love. This charming notion represents a cultural sea change. In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.

More here.

I read this (spoiler-free) article before reading the book, and as I read the book I was struck by the “sacramental” nature of Harry Potter’s magic. Although it’s true there is no God (though Harry does say “Thank God” at least once, and the nature of souls is discussed at length), there is a strong emphasis on the idea that our actions have meaning beyond the physical world. Character’s choices and especially their decision to protect, love, and kill others factors heavily into the plot and the “magic” of the world.

Voldemort (like Milton’s Satan) is twisted into an evil form because of his choice to hate; Harry is protected and powerful because of his mother’s sacrifice of love. Characters in the novel often find that their actions (love vs. hate) dictate who they are, and the decision to perform “evil spells” (adava kedavra, imperio, etc) can have serious effects on one’s soul and outward appearance. Dark magic in the book is literally dark: the villains dress in black, appear in dark locations, and often have a snakelike or bedraggled appearance.

Often a character is surprised to learn that his or her actions have affected their personality, without their realizing it. I was reminded a bit of Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which proclaims that our bodies are a sacrament and what we do with our bodies shows how we treat this sacrament. This is not to say that Theology of the Body is just a form of Catholic magic, but it’s interesting to see how this supposedly atheistic text reflects the sacramental nature of reality.