My Father's House as     My World of Meanings

My Sanctuary

Other posts:

The Creed

In my father's house, there are many rooms.

How does a person make sense of the world? Most people rely on the sense that people in their culture (or religion) make of the world. To some extent, it is to accept what Sartre calls the “okay world”.

When I was in high school, I actively resisted the sense my peers made of the world and tried to create my own sense of meaning. This foundations of this project pretty much took me nine years to put together.

This personal sense of meanings is what I call My Father's House, my shelter of meanings. It is in thoughts and frames, in what my wife calls my architectonic, that I find my sanctuary.

The foundations of this house were made explicit in The Creed which was articulated at a particularly rough moment in my life (My father was dying, I had just gone through a bout of pneumonia, I was contemplating quitting my job, I failed to become one of the Ten Outstanding Students of the Philippines that year and was sorely depressed about it). In a sense, everything proceeds from this creed and I think until now, 13 years later, the creed and the basic structure of the architectonic remains the same.

This is why this website makes sense for me. What I write tends to be articulations of the same basic architectonic involving applications to particular situations or concepts. There are developments in the architectonic along the way and these developments come about as a response to new situations or puzzles (Thanks to Tonette Angeles and Philo 101 for the language). In recent years, for example, love has increasingly become tough love, and the call has increasingly become to walk not with the powers of the mind but by faith. In a sense, it is an architectonic in progress but one which has not experienced any major tectonic shifts (just tectonic movements :-)

This is also why the tone tends to be canonical and doctrinal, almost inhuman. What is found here are answers to questions that I have grappled with and if they are here, that means that the questions have been susbtantively resolved. I get criticized sometimes for sounding like I know all the answers, just like when I was being interviewed for valedictorian. I just keep telling myself that a person who seems to know the answers is someone who has grappled with the questions.

There are still many questions I ask some of which are well on their way to being answered. Others, like the question of miracles or the phenomenon of democracy, are nowhere near resolution. Because My Father's House is a shelter of meanings, I am contemplating opening another website, possibly a blog, where I ask questions to which I do not have answers.

Some might say that these are my illusions, my act of faith and hope in what I choose to believe (some people might even think that this architectonic is bound to come crashing down, a challenge I am used to confronting in my everyday life. I find that few people have faith in me and those who do rarely say so publicly. I think I am too much of a rebel to be openly associated with). Each piece I write is an attempt to consolidate experience into one basic framework, into the creed as it were.

I have a suspicion that some people are turned off by the name of the site and the religious content found in many of the pages (and the amateurish graphic design (if it can even be called that)). The name of the site itself reeks of religion, if not evangelization. But Father here is essentially myself, my own sense of taking care of myself. Father is my own experience of living with myself through the questions and Father is that part of me which gently suggests ways to find meaning in the world.

But I still do owe my two other fathers. Quite obviously, I owe a lot to God and spirituality, particularly to Ignatian spirituality. It should be apparent from The Creed and from much of what I write that I owe much to St. Ignatius and the Jesuits and my experience of the Ignatian retreat. For me, the foundation is God's infinite love and because of a lot of spiritual direction, I tend to frame my life in terms of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. Special thanks to Fr. Bogs Tapiador, Sister Angeles, and Fr. Tom Green for helping me to have confidence in being myself before God. (It should also be noted that I owe much to Victor Frankl and his book, Man's Search for Meaning. I found hope in his thought that we can make every event meaningful and that is what it is to be human).

I also owe a lot to my real father who provided my primary experience of God's love. Anthony de Mello says “Behold God beholding you and smiling”. My experience of my father is that he was someone who beheld me and always found reason to smile.

So welcome to my father's house in all its senses. I can only speak for myself and my life but maybe in speaking about myself, you will find yourself transported to the womb of your own sanctuary.