When I read Peter Drucker’s book called "Managing the Nonprofit Organization," the idea "no parishioners" struck me. So I directly quote it. In one church that has twelve thousand members, there are no parishioners. There are only paid and unpaid ministers; everyone is put to work at that level. That’s a goal; not yet […]
Go, Fr. H.Paul!
I am born to be a football player in Korea. Football is the easiest game in the world and everybody loves it except the United States. They call football soccer which had confused me because their football is not football in a sense of using hands most time and sometimes kicking. Since there is a […]
Departures-Death, Another Name of Life
Death would be a dreadful thing that we don’t want to face. What about touching the dead body? No way! For Asians, it is much more taboo not to touch a corpse. However, the taboo doesn’t change the fates that the people in Departures have to find.
Departures makes the heavy topic-death-humorous and easy to look. A cellist Daigo Kobayashi is suddenly unemployed when the orchestra is dissolved. He sells out his cello and with his wife Mika he returns to his hometown, Yamagata where his lonely mother died two years ago. One day he finds a job ad that guarantees good payment, low-hour work and no experience required. He thinks the job is involved in a travel agency because it advertises “working with departures.” But when he arrives for the interview, he curiously eyes the coffins in the office. The boss hires him on the spot, offering him a big amount of money that he couldn’t refuse. Finally Daigo asks what the job is like and is stunned to learn what he has gotten himself into: the ceremonial “encoffination” of corpses prior to cremation. The boss explains the ad is misprinted because it is not working with departures but with departed.
Man’s Search for Meaning (Victor Frankl)
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was originally publicized in the titles of “A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp” and later “Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything” to talk about how to remain optimistic in the face of pain, guilt, and death.
I always want to reread the book especially in English. And after doing that, I find myself inspired and filled with wonder and awe of being a human being again like Victor Frankl. Now I would like to share his insights on suffering and human capacity to respond to it, taking the excerpts with my comments.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which respond to it…Forces beyond our control can take away everything we possess except one thing, our freedom to choose how we will respond to the situation. We cannot control what happens to us in life, but we can always control what we will feel and do about what happens to us.
It is a grand theme that covers the most important concept of Frankl’s insight, that is, Logotheraphy. This theoretical concept is beautifully described:
We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
“Father, for I have sinned…”
Every Saturday afternoon, I listen to the words, “Father, for I have sinned…” In the small confessional, I encounter various lives—a second grader’s first confession, a troubled teen’s complaints, an engaged couple’s duets, a single adult’s loneliness, a married man’s midlife crisis, a widow’s nostalgia, and etc. Today, I met a woman who has […]
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