Piñol, Celso C.

BSMgt 3-E

MWF 5:50-6:50

A Perfect Fit

A Universal Voice

The Perfect Fit, Chapter 13 of Long Journey Home talks of the life of the prisoned
King. For 9 days he was Imprisoned and during that 9 days he wrote a twenty page which
is entitled, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. A letter for America’s civil rights movement come
from a man of faith, strong vision that inspires and direct. His book was said to be by
Taylor Branch, “A kind of universal voice beyond time, beyond race”. The letter includes
scathing attacks on white moderates, pithy pronouncements on the principles of justice,
and more. Furthermore, in his argument towards the Supreme Court’s 1954.

If the Facts Won’t Fit

In the context King said that there are 2 types of laws, first is the just law and
second is the unjust law “” All segregation statues are unjust, because segregation
distorts the soul and damages the personality”. in which we can see the bifocal vision of
the biblical family of faiths can be found in his words. The dynamic tension between the
truth of creation and the truth of the fall that makes the biblical faiths bot world affirming
and world-denying. Is the bifocal vision true? There are two mistakes in answering the
question first is people make “Impossible standards for truth”, the tests and tests and tests
of truths and “bypassing the question”, which is believing despite of lack of evidence.
Which leads us to the two things we can investigate beliefs to fit in evidence. First is to
examine beliefs in detail and to see the big picture.

At Peace with the Universe at War with the World

Our journey is unique and different from others and so is with Chesterton. He tries
to combine two different things which is being optimistic and being pessimistic. Which he
can relate to the Christian faith. He observes two things in the bifocal vision of Christianity
which is, which is loving the world without trusting it and the “Spike of Dogma”. God is
personal and had made a separate world from himself. The Christian optimism is based
on the fact that we don’t fit in to the world.” A false optimism of naturalism to be merely
prosaic. In which he discovers a true “unnaturalness” that had an astounding effect.

Accumulation of Facts

The accumulation of Facts base on Chesterton’s journey to seek truth was the Christian
faith gave him an optimism with a difference, a pessimism with a difference, and a
justification for both at the same time. He found it true in a way for his journey through life
and beyond.

Reflection (questions on pg. 150)

I don’t have an answer as to why we’re never fully at home in the world, but I do
have few ideas that I would like to share. Because, upon reading this chapter I have
realized that one of the most significant part of our journey is looking back to where we
came from. Our journey is unique (At Peace with the Universe at War with the World), we
walk in a straight, curved paths and different directions. We can take half steps with our
foot or a spread lift of our foot towards the other. These “steps” that we take are not
leading towards our home, but are leading us to the uneasy and unfamiliar paths of truth.

We can’t find home as we take a step forward to our longings, BUT these steps that seem
unfamiliar MAY somehow give us a retrospective familiarity our fragments of our home.
Like when I’ll be 90 years old or something, walking down paths of my childhood but
changed because of time. There are fragments behind these roads that we can feel home.

Injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere because injustices and

justices are like the glasses that are paired to a frame. Look on to the way of justice and
you’ll still see injustice. It is a threat to justice because it is paired with it, remove the glass
of injustice and you’ll be too blind. People who does not have a pair of glass for justice
will see injustice everywhere and with that they will be unfamiliar of such thing called as
justice. Injustice is a threat because it is a choice.
 Best News Ever

From Tearlessness to Tears

The two things that we have learned in the evil of humanity’s dark story. (1) It
hardens our heart to the point of Tearlessness, and it takes goodness to crack the heart
open. (2) Under dire circumstances of suffering, which might be thought to wound or
weaken faith in God, faith emerges stronger on the other side of hell on earth. In this we
can relate to the story of Philip Hallie, a philosopher which on time had studied the
darkness of the Nazi death camps and their perpetrators. He felt as if he was also a victim
in which he became cold and that lead him to suicide. But, one story that changed his life
was the article he found on a little village in the Haute Loire, France. In which he felt and
discovered the embodiment of goodness in opposition to cruelty. He met a woman who
was part of the story that saved her three children. The woman faced the audience and
said “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes.. And Le Chambon was
the rainbow”. The rainbow that signifies that after all evil, living will have its last word.

Evil as a Way to Good

Elconore Stump tells us that “This evil is a mirror for us. It shows us our world; it
also shows us ourselves. We ourselves. You and I, that is, are members of the species
that does such things.” We either look away, shut out the sight, to oblivion, reform, and
loathing. People who becomes accustomed to evil and bad news until their hearts are so
hardened that we don’t mind the evil as much” and hen good news cracks your heart and
we get surprised with the “true goodness”. Stump’s conclusion was to fight for the facile
skeptics that all evil as contradicting God’s existence. To wrap up, Stump believes that
for whom focus on evil constitutes a way to God.

Twist of the Corkscrew

The third stage to our quest for meaning: The seeker must go on to examine in
close detail its keystone belief. Examining Jesus of Nazareth as something fully factual
and historical but also as something more, as evidence about person whom countless
millions have come to recognize and therefore trust and worship as the ultimate case of
heart-cracking goodness in human form. The first twist of the corkscrew lies in exploring
preliminary conclusions that are far from a matter of power and glory, the record of the
real Jesus points to the mystery of his unlikely significance.

Second-Person Engagement

A second twist that comes from the second-person engagement, a recognition that
the factual and historical evidence for Jesus is inseparable from the personal mission of
Jesus and the personal quest of the seeker, it is used when the force of logic isn’t enough.

Truth and Christ

Dostoevsky believe that “to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound,
sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ; and I tell myself with a
jealous love not only that there is nothing but that there cannot be anything. He believes
that truth and humanness exist only if God exists. And no demonstration of love is clearer
than of Jesus.

An Encircling Blaze

According to the writer, Dostoevsky believes that the truth about Jesus of
Nazareth is there to be faced and examined and known in all its unvarnished facthood.
But the confirmation of that truth comes from engagement that passes through the factual
to intuitive recognition of the personal. The evidence of Jesus is something to be sure of;
recognizing what Jesus shows us of the heart-cracking goodness of God is something to
be passionate about.

Reflection (page 166)

I am a Non-practitioner of my Religion (Catholic). For society, my religion labels

my knowledge towards the biblical faith which includes the stories, the evidences, and
who Jesus is. Shamefully, I do not know who Jesus is in biblical context. The only thing
that I know is that he is our savior and was crucified for our sins. Personally, Jesus for me
is someone who I see to exist. He is always there, watching, listening. But never did I
believe that he was guiding. The Agnostic Theist side of me believes in a God that exists.
But I don’t know if such God is true. Relating it to the question as to who Jesus is. He is
someone that exists but through time and people, has erased the opportunity for core
evidence. On the other hand, the Catholic me proclaims that he exists in his holy form
and has left us time, space, energy, matter in which people can create opportunity to seek
for him. To wrap up, Jesus for me is truth that is above all materialistic evidences.

Never More Ourselves

To Pay or Not to Pay

The title above comes from a phrase in “Letters to Olga” which was written by an
imprisoned Havel. In his trivial illustration of riding a transportation vehicle without any
conductor, thus this situation highlights the dilemma of Havel which is to Pay or not to
pay? Conscience? Or something outside or higher. His thoughts about the link between
responsibility and invisibility was pushed to a link between responsibility and identity. In
which he said “By casting doubt on my own sense of responsibility, the shock I
experienced, of course, cast doubt on my identity as well.

Full Participation

The fourth stage in the quest for meaning, a time for commitment. A responsible
action of taking a step forward. Realizing the “Now we believe” on journey home towards
God. This is the stage where we try to avoid the intrusions in which people just simply
and sell faith that insults our integrity and diversity as human beings and the sovereign
freedom of God. Faith requires full participation, in which there is no such thing as “leap
of faith” but rather “step of faith”, things are not blind and unreasonable. Faith should be
thoroughly rational yet also wholly personal.

The Way Lion Kills

A step of faith has three vital components and these are knowledge, which grows
into conviction, which grows in trust. Know something, find its truth and commitment. The
full embrace of responsible faith is prominent in the climax of C.S. Lewis’s journey from
atheism to theism. In which he concluded that “the moment of faith is a moment when no
part of us is excuse. With no ifs, no buts, no conditions, no escape clauses, all we are is
challenged to rise to the choice and shoulder the responsibility for our answer.
 Launch Out into the Deep

Launch out into the deep are words that can be found in the gospel of Luke.
The story of Peter and Jesus, where Peter was addressed and ordered. This phrase
moved the writer to push on to the conflict and not play it safe. And in the end, he was
committed no matter what conflict.

Responsible for every hour

Commitment marks the opening up of a life of growing responsibility. Only the man
whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his
virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible
action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make
his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. (Bonhoeffer)

Reflection (page 179)

I find the questions that seeking raises to me to be heavy. Because I know, that
when I try to focus on something, I’d drop everything else. I would draw myself out of
anything and deepen or put myself on one thing. In other words, it’s not that I am unable
or lack commitment and conviction to do something. But I am paralyzed as to where
should I start. What scenarios would be the best time to think hard, I don’t think that the
best answer can be found by just living out life. In my opinion the best answer that can
suffice me would be by going over boundaries, by making use of the extreme
circumstances in life would help me to be motivated, and focus as to what I really need in
my life.
 The Hound of Heaven

The Secular Saint

A story of Simone Weil and her pursuit to truth. Simone Weil is a philosopher,
activist and mystic. Furthermore, she was an extremist for her passionate commitment to
truth and her zigzag quest for meaning. She fought in the Spanish Civil War and joined
the French resistance movement and was intolerant of lazy thinking, white lies, and
compromise of any kind. She has a profound feeling for affliction, in the end she was no
less severe with herself. She did not fear death, because dying is for attaining the truth.

Christ Came Down

Weil’s lifetime quest for meaning “It is not for man to seek” or even to believe in
God”. Her journey was punctuated with “contact with Catholicism that really counted.
Which was across the celebration of the feast of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. The
second experience came in 1938 during two days Weil spent in Assisi. The third and
climactic experience came during tn days Weil spent over Easter at the Benedictine
abbey of Solesmes in northwestern France in which she said in her experience “Christ
himself came down and took possession of me.” And admitted “The question of God is
unanswerable, the problem insoluble.

Found by God

Weil’s story highlights another universal feature of the for commitment an

unmistakable awareness that although we start out searching, we end up being
discovered. We must search for God, even leave our land and our people to find him.
But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He
has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All time we think we are the
lion. In the end, the lion is God.

The Real Terror

Back to life of C.S. Lewis, what really arrested him was the threat of life, not
death. The theism he was coming to was not safely abstract and remote, an ideal he
could admire yet control; it was suddenly alive and stirring. He’d developed the analogy
that if ever Shakespeare and Hamlet were ever to meet, “it must be Shakespeare’s
doing. Hamlet could not initiate nothing.” His greatest fear has come in the Trinity Term
of 1929. I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed.

Different Goals, Different Means

The decisive part of our seeking is not our human ascent to God, but his descent
to us. Without God’s descent there is no human ascent. The secret of the quest lies not
in our brilliance but in his grace. What puts us on the way is not the daring and ingenuity
of our discovery of paths, but the disclosure of the who has preceded us on all our paths.

Because He Wants You

The realization of the need to do more than change a little or even a lot. Complete
change that conversion begins. We need to be completely converted to lead us in the
right direction. The crucial event for the seeker is the decisive moment when “God came
in”.

Reflection (page 192)

My journey and search for truth have the air of abstract, though my search has
been quiet lately, there are still things that I would want to know and consider before I
move in to the next step. I am still in complete control of my search. I choose to standby
for a while and trying to be decisive as to when will I start the real “search”. These people
inspired me to find at the end of my journey a unique fulfilling answer to my questions.
 Truth or Nothing

Egg-Boxing

The story of Kenneth Clark, known for his encyclopedic wisdom, urbane
sophistication. He was the youngest ever director of the National Gallery. He brings art
to the masses. But he had another side from himself, his melancholy and childhood
sense of neglect. Sutherland, a painter tried to capture Kenneth Clark’s portrait. But
Clark was too mercurial to be pinned down. His expressions flicked constantly. There
was this protective device and the ironic detachment and self-deprecation that became
his signature style for writing his autobiography. The Other Half, which was the second
volume of Clark’s autobiography. Reviewers saw demon’s, a spin chilling experience.
But his friends understood his writings as protective devices to insulate himself. The
“egg-boxing” allowed him to safely separate things as his darker childhood memories
and his involvement with several mistresses.

The Awkward Problem

The impetus towards faith in Clark’s life came from three things that mattered most
to him. His deep love of nature, passion for art, and eventual conviction that the nobility
of civilization cannot survive without spiritual roots. In his works there was this clear artistic
inspiration and spiritual illumination which he found in the power of creativity. And his
religious experience that too place in the Church of San Lorenzo. Which gave him a state
of mind that lasted for several months, and, wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward
problem in terms of action. IN the end he said “I think I was right; I was too deeply
embedded in the world to change course. But that I had ‘felt the finger of God’ I am quite
sure, and, although the memory of this experience has faded it still helps me to
understand the joys of saints. In which he declined but later in his way to deathbed he
had a conversion and grasped the hand of God that he brushed aside.
 Your Knees or Your Heels

His story highlights another component in the fourth phase of the quest: The trust
may be pressing, conclusions may be compelling, but there’s no inevitability of faith and
commitment. We have choice to either conform our desires to the truth, which leads to
conviction, or we may seek to conform the truth to our desires, which leads to evasions

Truth Twisting

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us. Huxley admitted that he
“took it for “granted” The Ends and Means “I had motives he wrote. For not wanting the
world to have meaning. Huxley had a classic case of bad faith. His irrationality is blatant.
Bad faith, a self-serving projection, a life lie for him and his elite friends, an ideology. In
which he claims to be guilty and said that the philosophy of meaningless was essentially
liberation from a certain political and economic system of morality.

Short Term Versus Long

The stage of this search tells us that there is this moral dimension to knowing. The
seekers quest for meaning is different from a miner’s search for gold. I is the openness
to grow and change is a precondition for the successful discovery.
Truths Captive
We must conform to truth – or more accurately, become captive to it. It is not how
we thoroughly search for the truth but how searchingly the truth has examined us.
Reflection (page 204)
Even though I have not established a concrete knowledge of my journey, I believe
in a “Truth or nothing” in my search. The reason for that is because there is nothing I’d
long for more than truth. To conform the truth as I have found it to my desires as I know
them.
 Entrepreneurs of Life
Something Definite
A sense of purpose and fulfillment is the single strongest issue flowing out of the
quest for meaning. This leads us to final point about this road map to the seeker’s quest
for meaning. To know our purpose on earth, some became artists, scientist, and
builders often labor to create a unique work that live for ever in their name. All other
standards of success wealth, power, position, knowledge, friendships grown tinny and
hollow if we don’t satisfy our deeper longing. Kierkegaard wrote “The thing is to
understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth in
which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
Too Much to Live with, Too Little to Live for
The three factors that fuel our search for significance without precedent in human
history. (1) the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our
experiences as human beings. (2) the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives
has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity
for choice and change in all we do. (3) our fulfillment is thwarted by this stun fact: Out of
more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is
the very first to have no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life. We
have too much to live with and too little to live for.
A Known Destination
We’re on a journey, so we’re truly travelers, with all the attendant costs, risk, and
dangers of traveling. Never in this life can we say we’ve arrived. But we know why we’ve
lost our original home and, more important, we know the home to which we’re going, the
one who waits us there, and the one who goes with us on the journey.
Visionaries who add Value
Our journey is to answer the call of our creator, in which he alone knows our
reason for being by which calls us into a life of purpose. Human purpose cannot be
found in the means but only in the ends. We are all entrepreneurs of life, use our talents
and resources to be fruitful and to bring added value into the world as we journey.
There’s so much in life that we did not choose and cannot change. But were still, always
essentially people of significance men and women whose entrepreneurial capacity to
exercise dominion, assert influence, and multiply fruitfulness is at the heart of our
humanness and the secret to make the most of our journey in life.
A Motive for a Lifetime
Building a commitment faith in discovering our sense of purpose to engage life
on the journey. A life time cannot represent a single motive, but if the single motive is
the master motive of God’s calling, the answer is yes. God’s call is our unchanging and
ultimate what, why, and wither.
 We may often wind, and hard though the road may sometimes be, what lies
ahead at the journey ‘s end is home. To attain the kingdom of where there is no end.

Reflection
In this last Chapter of Long Journey Home which is the Entrepreneurs of Life,
helped me wrapped up on the things that I should focus on and helped me see the
perfect and imperfectness of life. And that in Our journey we always push and extend
our potential in finding ourselves, and in doing good in life in which we are bound to find
the kingdom of no end.