3 parents named to SF School Board

 

© 2022 Hector Viveros Lee

Welcome to Monterey

© 2022 Hector Viveros Lee

Happy Bday Nikky!
 

War is not the answer.

© 2022 Hector Viveros Lee

 

Dear Fr. Ray

© 2022 Hector Viveros Lee

 

March 7, 2022

 

Dear Fr. Ray:

 

I am sorry to hear the surgery did not go as planned and that you are in the ICU now. Perhaps you take the long view, knowing you are in God’s hands and argue that the surgery did go as planned.

 

I am haunted by the conversation we had last Monday when I went to visit you at Bellarmine. I was questioning the reason for suffering, maintaining that Jesus was caught up in the envy of the Jewish authorities and the desire of the Romans to exert their power.

 

You countered that Jesus suffered and died for love.

 

I am processing that premise. That the only and best thing we can do in our brief life is to love, a premise that seems facile and few would take issue with. The caveat, you maintain, is that love comes with a price—the price of suffering, of sacrifice, of pain and loss—and for many that price is too high. So we look for cheap love—a love that does not demand.

 

But no one—not even the most comfortable and rich—is exempt from suffering. So if we can’t escape suffering, why not douse its sting by allowing it to be the price for love.

 

There you are in the ICU with pain and discomfort trying to be what Jesus wants you to be: his Beloved.

 

Lord, the one you love is sick. Be with him.

 

Love,

 

Hector

Musee des Beaux Arts

Icarus by Peiter Breughel

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden 

 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

from the New York Times