reading the article about Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness in a recent issue of Time made me think. not about the existence of God, no. not that my faith is something that i've fabricated for myself either, like the triumphant aethists crowing over exerpts from Mother Teresa's letters to her SDs, saying that "now this is proof that God doesn't exist!"

but more about the faith Mother Teresa must have had to press on in spite of not feeling God at all in her life, her great love for Jesus, her Spouse, and what she said to a film-maker who came to look for her in his own search for God when he was in Calcutta.

"Your longing for God is so deep, and yet He keeps Himself away from you.. He must be forcing Himself to do so - because He loves you so much - the personal love Christ has for you is infinite.. The Small difficulty you have regarding His Church is finite. Overcome the finite with the infinite." Mother Teresa writes to film-maker Malcolm Muggeridge in 1970. the idea of God having to force Himself to keep away from us, His lovingly crafted creations and children, touches me more than you'd imagine. here we are, complaining about how "boo-hoo, poor me! i can't feel God in my life, i don't want to believe in Him anymore!" seems almost preposterous now when seen in context of what Mother Teresa says about His love for us. God's love for us must be so much more than our love for Him, so infinite as compared to the finiteness of the concept of love our puny human hearts can contain.

so then, the next question would be why would God want to keep Himself away from us? Mother Teresa found herself tormented by this question for almost the rest of her life after beginning her work in Calcutta, and even when presented with a possible reason as to why God would want to keep Himself away from her, she found it torturous to live in such darkness of the soul. and yet, she kept on. Mother Teresa's spiritual advisor Rev. Joseph Neuner tells her that 'the absence [she felt] was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus.' how can God's absence in Mother Teresa's life be what He wants of her, it seems is the next logical question that begs for an answer.

what i found so beautiful was that this absence of God was exactly what Jesus felt when He was dying on His cross that fateful day 2000 years ago. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?", He cries out in His passion. isn't this precisely what Mother Teresa felt? that God had forsaken her, and there she is, imploring and imploring, asking and asking, "Why have You forsaken me?" Mother Teresa told her fellow nuns in her order that she wanted to focus on sharing in the suffering of Jesus, among all the other commendable and imitable aspects of Jesus's short life on earth. when she realised that what she was going through - the spiritual darkness and nihilistic vacuum in her soul - was precisely what she was asking for, she recognised it as a grace, a blessing, and made some sense of her pain. because she had a unique part in Jesus's passion and suffering. this didn't make her life any easier to live as it was, nor did it make the spiritual vacuum any easier to bear. she's constantly described to be in 'torment' and describes the darkness as 'painful', and this makes her continuous trust in God even more amazing, to me.

which revealed one more thing to me: that knowing the reason behind the pain and suffering doesn't negate it or make it any easier to bear. accepting the reasons that explain your suffering will not make the pain disappear or make your yoke any lighter. all those isn't enough, and i know why. it's all in the level of the mind. you know why, you understand why, you accept why, but it's not gonna negate the suffering because your mind won't be able to sustain you. it's never gonna be enough. and even though Mother Teresa couldn't feel God in her life, she knew that He was there somewhere through the darkness and she never stopped placing her trust in Him. sure, she did stumble once or twice, she did question His presence, but ultimately she never stopped believing. and God sustained her, even though she couldn't feel it.

"I accept not in my feelings, but with my will, the Will of God - I accept His will." Mother Teresa said. she couldn't feel God's love, couldn't feel God's presence, and yet she accepted His will for her with her will. isn't that total trust? it makes me ashamed of myself everytime i compain that i can't feel God, and therefore He can't be real in my life. what kind of ludicrous argument is that? our feelings lie all the time; they're powerful and are a layer in our lives that's enmeshed as part of our being, and yet they're not the be-all and end-all.

Mother Teresa's example speaks very very strongly to me about not giving up in 'connecting' to God, in seeking His face, in trying to reach out to Him and feel His love. she couldn't feel it for much of her life, and yet she never stopped trying. it makes me feel a lot less of a hypocrite when i talk about God and yet think that i can't feel him and so what i believe in can't be real. it makes me believe that God IS there regardless of whether i feel Him or not, feel His love or not.

aethists and scholars may be rejoicing over Mother Teresa's letters because to them, it's proof that God doesn't exist. my lit lecturer posted an article about her letters on my module forum and suggested that Mother Teresa is the perfect Conradian heroine - the epitome of using something (in her case, religion and God), to fill up the void and abyss that exists in all humankind. that we are all essentially nothing and the loneliness we feel deep in our souls is cos there is absolutely nothing - nihilism at its best. God isn't real, he's just something we fabricate to fill in the nothing.

but i think that Mother Teresa's letters prove to me without doubt that God exists regardless of what i feel in my heart, and it strengthens my faith much especially these days when my feelings are swirling about in me in horrifying dizzying torrents. she's proof that you don't have to feel God for Him to be real, for Him to work in my life.

it's an amazing testimony that really speaks to me and reaches out to somewhere deep in me. the writer of the Time magazine article, David Van Biema succintly puts it, "if she could carry on for a half-century without God in her head or heart, then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope with less extreme versions of the same problem." and i am very much heartened.

i am immeasurably tired and i am so emotionally spent. too many things to think about, my brain is constantly buzzing with activity. i don't want to pour out my heartaches or secrets online, and i'm not going to. but i'm so tired, i just want there to be a fullstop for once and not just another comma.

a woman's heart is really something men can never comprehend. that, i am beginning to see now for myself. i don't even fully understand the secrets of my heart, sometimes. they're just lying in wait, undercover sometimes.

it doesn't mean that when one keeps silent about her world, all's well in it. sometimes, the things that aren't said are more important than the things that are. all the constant chatter, all the mess of words and language bandied around each day. but the things that aren't said? sometimes they hover thick in the air and makes the silences more pregnant than ever. silences can be full of things unsaid. just listen. cock your ears and listen to the silence. i can almost hear my unsaid words ringing in my ears, pulling at my heartstrings. the ever-abundant energy to eat innumerable lunches - you don't see the total shutdown of the brain when she falls into bed at night from exhaustion.

so many untold stories. each of us have some.

then you chance upon something that makes you rethink your convictions. i know, paradox, isn't it? to have to rethink a conviction. a conviction doesn't need to be thought about again, you're convinced. but note how many times i've repeated the word 'convinced' and yet are you even the slightest bit clearer about what the word actually means? you chance upon something that makes you hold your breath for one millisecond and blink 5 times to check, double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check and quintuple-check what you see with what you know. the second seems to last for an eternity, doesn't it? it's like one of those movies where the director slows everything down onscreen in an effort to bring across the idea to the viewers that that moment lasts for an eternity. i don't need a director to slow down any images for me, i'm my own director and my second slowed down to the eternal absoluteness of freezing in time.

you hear words you don't want to hear, feel the tears you don't want to cry dripping down your nose and off your chin. blink and take a deep breath - and yet the tears won't stop and the words won't stop ringing in your head. and all this while, that awful tugging at your heart that reaches to somewhere deep within you and pulls at your soul for what it's worth, and you feel the eyes of your soul cry tears you can't see. tears that hold a second's worth of misery and brokenness in their water-and-salt molecules, each tear a concentrated drop of despair. if only you could imbue the sadness encapsulated by each innocuous drop your soul cries - you'd understand how it would feel to never be happy ever again. to feel that somewhere something inside you has been broken beyond repair and try as you might to reach in and grab it, the shards are too scattered to gather and what was is now nothing.

you try to understand how Love can be something that judges, that places her opinions and intentions above yours. i understand Love as something that ought to be given unconditionally, no matter what your opinions are and even if i don't agree with them. i'm not being hypocritical, i'm being unconditional. you try to understand how Love can be something that hurts you, stabs you. what happened to the beautiful, light, fluffy thing she's supposed to be? which is the copy of which? the dark, fatal beauty of the Love i know, or the bright, airy pleasantness i thought i knew? you don't spew out the words 'i love you' without thinking about the implications. i don't. there're very few people i've really loved in my life, the rest i try to but end up failing more often than not. how many of the people i love realise that i've placed Love as i know it now on them but they think it's just an innocent young girl's confusion between Love and her flightier cousins Infatuation and Like? i hate it when i introduce Love to people and they mistake her for Infatuation, i hate it when i introduce Love to people and they reduce her to Like.

and feelings. you're so reliant on them and yet you wish you were free of them and would rather embrace logic. feelings, what men derogatorily trash as characteristically 'female'. emotions, what some people denounce as 'not deep enough' in spiritual experiences. don't discount the power of emotion in an experience, don't tell them 'it's only an emotive, you don't know what it's like, really.' do you know what it's like, really? do you know the power of emotions, in the first place? if only you knew. you'd not dare decry those who feel and act on their feelings again.

i've run out of words to say, but you cannot imagine the torrent of images bashing themselves at the gates of my mind trying to break free to let themselves be seen and heard in some form of coherence. so with this, i part for now - but i know this for a fact: that i've said less than what i haven't said.

i'm getting a little tired, physically. and it's only the 2nd week of school! i'm slowly slipping behind on my reading schedule already and my allowance has ALL been spent. so i'm just waiting in great anticipation for my tuition pay this end-of-month..

i hardly have time alone to myself anymore. i'm not complaining, just.. stating. takes some getting used to, i must admit!

friday can't zoom nearer any faster.

it's been a long time since i last blogged, it seems. i'm increasingly having less time to do anything other than my readings or stuff related to that, and sleep is getting hard to come by! i'm out a lot, travelling a lot, on the phone quite a lot - which leaves me little time to do my own things at home besides keeping up with my readings.

i just watched Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August for a Japanese film module just now. Tuesdays are my film-watching days since i have such a long break from the 8am lecture till the 4pm one. it's rather thought-provoking and it's left me with a lot of thoughts in my head about the way the film was edited and shot. i do think i'm not quite the film critic, i haven't the predisposition nor the eye for that sort of artistic beauty. but i am able to tell when the director is trying to bring across a certain message through his shots, camera angle, editing process, background music, things like that. and when i can tell, i can appreciate and think about what he's trying to tell me, us.

these days, i seem to think about my world in articles. i look at everything around me and live through them, all the while thinking about whether whatever's happening to me would make a good article and how i'd develop it further. after watching the films, i'm also slowly starting to think of my world in through a movie. i wonder at how my life would be depicted on screen, how those times i lived through and felt so keenly would be shown on a film. the pain - how would it be brought across to do the actual feeling justice? the happiness - how would it be told to the audience so they can feel my euphoria?

my mind's whirring through a million and one things these days. so calm on the surface but so many things going on inside, still. not entirely bad to be thinking though! there're the whitish good thoughts, and then there're the blackish bad thoughts. and then, there're those greyer ones that're neither good nor bad, just thoughts. i've realised that i'm still completely unable to sit through the entire memory of the last 2 years in one sitting and not flinch. in fact, tears still prickle my eyes every single time i happen to recount in my head. i hate it when the prickly tears turn into trickles down my cheeks. that's when i feel like i'm really crying - and that just means that the past isn't really the past yet, right? when i remember, it just feels as though i'm reliving everything again and the stabbing hurt from the incident/instances still stabs as hard now, many months later.

when does the past cross over through time somehow, reach out its hands through the silken threads of time and space, and grip me here and now to replace my present with the shuddering, hurtful ghosts the Past contains? how does it? is it cos i let the Past cross this threshold of dimension and time? or does it manage to do it, regardless of whether or not i do anything to 'let it'?

my reality now becomes my past every now and then and i get so lost in the moment that i feel every sensation as keenly as if i were living then right here right now. this is so dejavu-ish! i had this same thing in j2, when the littlest things would trigger bittersweet (in every sense of the word) memories and force me to relive them in my mind. same thing now, my reliving of whatever past i have can't be fast-forwarded or muted - everything is as it was and i have to live through the agonisingly sweet and familiar and maddeningly normal scenes as though i were going through it now. on one hand, i don't want to pull myself out of those memories because as they were then, they weren't painful. they were pleasant, more than pleasant. i felt safe. but the maddening thing is that as i relive those scenes in my head as though they were happening to me now, i am also living with the knowledge i have now that i didn't have then - that they wouldn't last at all and that a couple of months down, i'd be mired in self-pity, hatred, frustration, and so many other things that i can't even begin to list them down. it's like being cursed with the gift of foresight and you can see how your loved ones die one by one and still have to look at them in the now with the same eyes.

i'm afraid to think that anything will last, now. everything seems so transient! no wonder people need tangible signs of love, care, concern, commitment etc. those intangibles which mean a whole lot more don't count for anything when you're striding the line between what was and what is to come.

i still cannot believe i was insane enough to sign myself up for an 8am class! my brains must've been mushed up then or something, i cannot understand why i go on these bouts of insanity and cause myself to suffer for one whole semester.

first day of school yesterday! on one hand, i was rather excited to be back to another school term, to having to juggle 5 modules' worth of readings and work, to putting that rusty ol' mind back to work again. and the mods i'm taking are quite exciting this sem! lit - which i've been wanting to do since forever, some new media modules that include an intro to interactive media (which will let me take the gaming modules next time!), mass media and culture, and film and anime in postwar Japan! all things i'm interested in, so i'm looking forward to learning.

but i'm so incredibly tired, and it's only the second day of school! travelling to and from school every day is so yucky, and i've only done it for all of one day. my brain is fuzzy from lack of sleep right now, rah. i'm not upset, just tired! think i should try to do work faster so i'll be able to sleep earlier every night. i'm absolutely determined to work myself hard this sem and keep to the readings i'm supposed to do on time. need to do well. i wanna go on exchange the sem after to Australia.

funny, my writing ability seems to have deteriorated with the beginning of the school term. my sentences are all irritatingly choppy and my brain feels suspiciously empty.

the YISS conference over the weekend by Fr. Gino was surprisingly good. i say surprisingly not because i didn't expect Fr. Gino to be superb or anything other than fabulous - but because i dragged myself to St. Theresa's church on Saturday with such bad grace. i was literally having to drag my physical self all the way to Bukit Merah because i had a million and one reasons for not wanting to go. i felt disgusting cos i could feel the cramps starting up (i had just gotten my period that Saturday morning); i felt horrible and grouchy towards every single person and i just felt like snapping at every single living thing; i'd argued with my mother over everything i was wearing before leaving home - from top to earrings to shoes.

so many excuses for not wanting to go, so many ways i could justify my reluctance to attend the conference.

but i was real glad i went though, even though God had to drag me kicking and screaming, almost against my will. i attribute my ability to turn up for the conference in spite of my strong inclination to just heck it and allow my anger and irritation and pain from the cramps to dissipate over an afternoon spent at home to God - not me. in the end, i wasn't that deaf as to ignore the Spirit telling me to just shut up and go, and i'm so thankful.

after the weekend, i feel like i'm a changed person. not because of the weekend - though they were definitely mighty good and superb - but because the sessions precipitated a realization within myself and an acceptance of certain gifts God has so graciously bestowed on me but i have been keeping in poor stewardship all this while.

my attitude towards prayer and my spiritual life has been changed deeply. not a hundred-and-eighty-degree change, as many people often describe their encounters with the Holy Spirit and the embracing of Jesus as Lord and saviour of their lives; but my change seems more subtle, and yet i recognise it so clearly.

it all stemmed from Fr. Gino reminding me again about the definitive choice we have to make as Catholic charismatics - a resounding YES to Jesus, and an equally resounding NO to sin in our lives. even though i may have made that choice for the first time once before, it doesn't necessarily mean that i don't have to consciously remake this choice over and over again as i stumble and grope my way out of life's snares and obstacles. i realise that i thought i had made that choice before, and so, no longer have to bother with continuing to choose Jesus completely and reject sin totally in my life. which, up until the weekend, i didn't realise.

and how do i continue to keep making that choice for Jesus and reject sin? by praying. praying deeply, praying everyday, and meditating on the Word of God because that is God's love letter to us, anyway. God may not speak to me in bolts of lightning and rumbling thunder, in a fiery burning bush or in the parting of any sea - but He definitely can and will speak to me through His Word. how could i have not realised that until now? you have no idea how much more i treasure my Bible now that that realisation sunk in. i used to gobble up books pretty darn quickly, and lap up every single word and description in the books as the scene came alive in my own mind and the beautiful words of the prose washed over me. i loved reading, i loved books. i had and have a gift of reading and of words, of understanding sentences quickly and well. i don't understand how i could have failed to realise that my Bible is a book too, and the most beautiful and delectable one at that, too. it's better than my Harry Potter collection, my Blind Assassins, or Lolitas, anyday. those are fiction, the tales they tell are but tales - even if they are quite breathtaking and epic in scale, allowing my mind to run wild and free in the fieldscape of my imagination. the Bible is a personal love novel from my God to me, it's not imaginary or fiction, it's real. the promises God makes in the pages of the Bible; fantastical as they may sound, they're real and true, and i know that now ever so much better.

i love praying, now. i really want to expand my knowledge on my spirituality and so many other things pertaining to the mysteries of the Godly realm. put that gift of intellect to good use and deepen my spirituality rather than to just read for the sake of reading. the beauty of the gift of intellect is that once my intellect is convinced of something, it translates into my heart pretty soon after.

my eyes have been growing pimples in them, lately.

first my right eye, now my left eye! looks like mom's Eye Bright pills aren't really working, eh? they're supposed to be improving my eyesight - acting as antioxidants and all, but well.. heh. more thingys have taken to growing under my eyelids lately, rendering blinking a rather painful reflex action.

i've really been trying to tune my body clock back to normal sleeping patterns, but it's not working! i have to really drag myself out of bed at 10am every morning when the alarm rings. maybe i should aim for 930am, soon. i'm hoping to be able to jump out of bed bright and cheery at 9am every morning when school term begins in 2 weeks!

these days, inane things to blog about keep coming to me. like my sudden improvement in doing housework, my also-sudden desire to read more literary books besides Harry Potter. oh, and also my increasing need for a vaccum cleaner to work its magic in my room.

what other unimportant things i feel the need to blog about? oh, the stupidity of the CORS system. the sudden onslaught of pms on my system - something i haven't felt for the longest time ever, i even thought i was pms-free! the eruption of bumps all over my forehead. the warped weather these days which i think is largely due to global warming - we're gonna suffer the consequences of global warming and air pollution, soon. my teeth are getting crooked again and i think it's time to take out the trusty ol' retainers of my teenage years and put them on nightly, again.

planning for SEP after my CORS headache is over. planning for an internship next holiday, too. i'm this close to the working world, i'd better start getting ready cos 3 years ain't a long time. my spending habits have improved in the last month, largely due to my self-imposed imprisonment at home to ensure i don't spend. but i feel like shopping again, and i think it's cos of the influx of cash in my wallet again now that August has arrived and July has left me far behind.

my heart's at peace now and i'm no longer the angsty, upset kid i was a few months ago. so complicated, i was! i'm a lot less messed up now, and i think it's cos i don't mess myself up and let God lead me into doing whatever he wants me to do. i've given up trying to struggle for my own happiness, it just doesn't work. i've found out that God's way is always the best for me, but i tend to meander onto other possible paths and take detours and roundabouts before getting to that destination. but then again, if i hadn't trodden on those paths that i did, i wouldn't be the sum of who i am today, either. cried much, hurt much, but also learnt much, and grown much.

i don't deny that some things still bother me. but it isn't like, a pressing bother. it's more like those that come into your mind very randomly and unless you entertain the thought, it leaves you alone again soon after.

and, i need to exercise.
and sleep now. it's 330am. shucks. i'm not helping my lost cause.