The working title of this drawing is “Body and Blood of Christ”, inspired by All Saints’ Day. Explanation of the composition is at the end of this post. Last Sunday morning, Cynthia asked while we finally settled down inside the Church, “Why this eagerness?” Nothing escapes her observation, on me. That’s scary. True, of all solemnities, I am in particularly drawn to All Saints’ Day. Maybe it is the vivid images of the Book of Revelation, maybe it is the sheer number of Saints involved – ten thousands and counting – or maybe we or rather I am drawn into the stories of the Saints, how holiness can be manifested in mere humans, closer to our timeline, outside the Biblical literature. Maybe Heaven seems so real knowing some of us do make it there, somehow.
Some sermons are more engaging than others. It’s true. On that particular Sunday, the Priest began with a story of a little girl insisting that Jonah survived inside the stomach of a whale, as told in the Bible, for three long days. I should have paid more attention as I have no clue how the teacher comes into the picture. Anyway, the teacher corrected the little girl that no one can live inside a whale for three days, set aside getting swallowed by one. The little girl insisted that God intervened and spared Jonah’s life. And she continued, “When I go to Heaven, I will ask Jonah.” “What if Jonah is in Hell?” asked the teacher. “Then you’ll go and ask him yourself,” replied the little girl.
We all laughed.
I read in CNN that recently, our Pope has canonized Father Damien, the leper priest. The story of Father Damien is inspiring. He was on a mission on the island of Molokai in the Kingdom of Hawaii – a leper colony back in the mid 1800. After 16 years of caring for the needs of the colony, in which most who were healthy wouldn’t want to stay, Father Damien contracted leprosy and died. There must be a God inside Father Damien, one made such a comment in his deathbed when he finally believed in God after years of denying Father Damien’s preaching. When our Priest in his sermon accounted the brief life story of now Saint Damien (more in Wikipedia), I was deeply moved.
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Our band was in hiatus for half a year. Our drummer Wieke couldn’t join us in the last minute. That left the three of us. Time flies. Jason, Cynthia, and I have been jamming for 5 years. Started in the very living room we had our session last Sunday afternoon. During our practice, Cynthia showed us the print out of one of the emails I wrote during the infancy of the band, a list of to-do and what not. I cringed of course. And we had a good laugh. The session went well. We played some of the older stuffs. We took our time to review our recordings, keeping only the decent tracks for our listening pleasure.
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I woke up at 8 am on a Sunday morning feeling excited to review the brand new SanDisk memory card. The first time is always intoxicating. Like the first time I wrote book review for McGraw-Hill. Or my first time participating in a Nokia media event. Reviewing that memory card turned out to be less dramatic than I have anticipated. And I laughed at myself, in a good way.
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My zest for vegetarian diet seems infectious, to Cynthia that is. Saturday evening, right after I have washed the car, there was a heavy downpour. Checking on Facebook I read quite a few of my friend got stranded somewhere in town willing the rain to go away. Cynthia and I, on the other hand, braved the rain and had a delicious dinner at Living Greens – a vegetarian restaurant along Beach Road. That burger. That pumpkin soup. Thinking of my meal makes me hungry. And we made it back to watch F1 qualifying session in time, before 9 pm.
Sunday evening, was not so lucky. We were seated at the hawker center at AMK waiting for our vegetarian food to arrive, for 45 minutes. As the time was drawing close to 9 pm – the opening of the last F1 match this season – we left, with empty stomachs. Ordered a vegetarian pizza on the phone and it arrived in less than half an hour. Again, thinking of that pizza makes me hungry, now.
Strange to say, I was not at all upset by this little episode. It is a message, for certainty. In order to sustain a vegetarian diet, we or rather I need to be able to learn how to cook the dishes, delicious enough to want to eat a vegetarian meal every day. For 2 decades, I have been cooking meat dishes, and vegetable dishes are not meant to be main dishes. What shall I do now?
I have taken stock on what are the common vegetables sold in the supermarket – a lot more than I have imagined – wrote them down somewhere. Next, I need to find a nutrition table as a guide and design my own dishes. It may be a lot harder or easier than I think. Maybe I shall document my cooking journal here so that we can laugh about it one day.
We shall see.
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PS. Centered to this drawing is a celebrant holding up the chalice of the blood of Christ during the most solemn part of the Mass: through Him, with Him, and in Him. I got this image during the Sunday’s All Saints’ Day celebration. The larger encompassing triangular object I have envisioned as bread (like the oriental rice roll), a.k.a. body of Christ. The zip is important to this drawing. I hope to draw viewers into the pondering of what lies inside. To invoke the urge of opening the zip. But what is inside cannot be seen. Remains as a mystery, like the theme of our teaching. On the right is a button that signifies more than one way to access the mystery within.
I have also taken the artistic license to put in a bit of my personal life inside this drawing. The triangular object also depicts a guitar pick (as we jammed during the weekend) and Jenson “Button” has won the F1 season (as the season ended in the same weekend). Hence the button.
