A touching story

I am reprinting here a story forwarded by a friend. I have no way of checking its veracity but am reprinting it for what it is worth. It made me shed a little tear - literally - in my small corner at the office after reading it and I think it will touch other people's heart as well. I didn't edit a single line in this article and even allowed the portion about God because I also believe in God and the miracles He does in our lives.


Here's the article:


My name is Mildred Honor and I am a former elementary school music teacher from DesMoines, Iowa.

I have always supplemented my income by teaching piano lessons - something I have done for over 30 years.

During those years I found that children have many levels of musical ability, and even though I have never had the pleasure of having a prodigy, I have taught some very talented students.

However, I have also had my share of what I call "musically challenged" pupils - one such pupil being Robby.

Robby was 11 years old when his mother (a single mom) dropped him off for his first piano lesson. I prefer that students (especially boys) begin at an earlier age, which I explained to Robby. But Robby said that it had always been his mother's dream to hear him play the piano, so I took him as a student.

Well, Robby began his piano lessons and from the beginning I thought it was a hopeless endeavor. As much as Robby tried, he lacked the sense of tone and basic rhythm needed to excel. But he dutifully reviewed his scales and some elementary piano pieces that I require all my students to learn. Over the months he tried and tried while I listened and cringed and tried to encourage him.

At the end of each weekly lesson he would always say "My mom's going to hear me play someday". But to me, it seemed hopeless, he just did not have any inborn ability.

I only knew his mother from a distance as she dropped Robby off or waited in her aged car to pick him up. She always waved and smiled, but never dropped in.

Then one day Robby stopped coming for his lessons. I thought about calling him, but assumed that because of his lack of ability he had decided to pursue something else. I was also glad that he had stopped coming - he was a bad advertisement for my teaching!

Several weeks later I mailed a flyer recital to the students' homes. To my surprise, Robby (who had received a flyer) asked me if he could be in the recital. I told him that the recital was for current pupils and that because he had dropped out, he really did not qualify.

He told me that his mother had been sick and unable to take him to his piano lessons, but that he had been practicing."Please Miss Honor, I've just got to play," he insisted. I don't know what led me to allow him to play in the recital - perhaps it was his insistence or maybe something inside of me saying that it would be all right.

The night of the recital came and the high school gymnasium was packed with parents, relatives and friends. I put Robby last in the program, just before I was to come up and thank all the students and play a finishing piece. I thought that any damage he might do would come at the end of the program and I could always salvage his poor performance through my "curtain closer".

Well, the recital went off without a hitch, the students had been practicing and it showed.
Then Robby came up on the stage. His clothes were wrinkled and his hair looked as though he had run an egg beater through it. "Why wasn't he dressed up like the other students?" I thought. "Why didn't his mother at least make him comb his hair for this special night?"

Robby pulled out the piano bench, and I was surprised when he announced that he had chosen to play Mozart's Concerto No. 21 in C Major.

I was not prepared for what I heard next. His fingers were light on the keys, they even danced nimbly on the ivories. He went from pianissimo to fortissimo, from allegro to virtuoso; his suspended chords that Mozart demands were magnificent! Never had I heard Mozart played so well by anyone his age.

After six and a half minutes he ended in a grand crescendo, and everyone was on their feet in wild applause! Overcome and in tears, I ran up on stage and put my arms around Robby in joy. "I have never heard you play like that Robby, how did you do it?"

Through the microphone Robby explained: "Well, Miss Honor .... remember I told you that my mom was sick? Well, she actually had cancer and passed away this morning. And well ...... she was born deaf, so tonight was the first time she had ever heard me play, and I wanted to make it special."

There wasn't a dry eye in the house that evening. As the people from Social Services led Robby from the stage to be placed in to foster care, I noticed that even their eyes were red and puffy. I thought to myself then how much richer my life had been for taking Robby as my pupil.

No, I have never had a prodigy, but that night I became a prodigy ....... of Robby. He was the teacher and I was the pupil, for he had taught me the meaning of perseverance and love and believing in yourself, and may be even taking a chance on someone and you didn't know why.

Robby was killed years later in the senseless bombing of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995.

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I believe that we all can make a difference! Do we always act with compassion or do we pass up the opportunity and leave the world a bit colder in the process?

May God Bless you today, tomorrow and always. If God didn't have a purpose for us, we wouldn't be here!

Man does not live on bread alone

If you are a Christian, you may have heard the song "Amazing Grace." But have you ever thought of the man behind the song? It's John Henry Newton, a British sailor who was involved in the slave-trade in the 18th century and later embraced the Faith firmly.
I will not give so much details about his life because you can easily search it in the Internet. I just want to point out that his story is a proof of our search for something more sublime than our worldly existence.
It proves the truism of the Bible's assertion that man does not live on bread alone.
The story goes that John Newton, described as a man without any "religious conviction" before his firm embrace of the Faith, had a spiritual conversion after a storm almost sank his ship, the Greyhound.
It was said that at the height of the storm he muttered "God, have mercy upon us". Reflecting on what he had uttered when he returned to his cabin he came to believe that God was addressing him through the storm and thereafter slowly moved towards the Faith.
That led him to compose the song "Amazing Grace" with its haunting melody and lyrics "I once was lost but now am found". In his lifetime as lay minister in the Anglican Church he has composed dozens of religious songs.
That also led to his involvement in the campaign against slavery, his former trade, in the 18th century when merchant ships took foodstuffs and goods to Africa and then returned with slaves to be sold to Europe.
John Newton did not invoke God's name out of the blue. In his childhood, he was nurtured by his mother, Elizabeth, in the Faith but the virtues of Christianity did not sink into his heart and followed the lure of the sea in the footsteps of his father.
John Newton was among many people who found life's "light" in the Faith. There was C.S. Lewis, a former atheist, who later wrote religious books, the most famous of which is "Mere Christianity". The latest of note I know is Charles Colson, special counsel for former president Richard Nixon and the first to be jailed among the seven indicted in the Watergate scandal.
He was already toying with the idea of embracing the Faith after seeing the emptiness of politics before his indictment and pleaded guilty to the charges of cover-up in keeping the new-found faith.

I am fascinated with their stories because I myself was a former atheist who embraced the Faith after a long life storm.

Here's the appropriate gospel on the subject:

Scripture says; one does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. - Matthew 4:4

Musings on the death of movie legend Liz Taylor

I couldn't help muse on the life of movie legend Elizabeth Taylor who died of congestive heart failure last Wednesday. The story about her burial said that the funeral service, although held without much fanfare, was delayed by 15 minutes in observance of her parting wish that her funeral must start late. It was said that before she died she requested that someone would announce that even in her own funeral she wanted to be late.
I hadn't followed the life of Liz Taylor even at the height of her carrier but I surmise that it could have been her trademark to be late in her film shootings or any other endeavors and that even in death she wanted to be remembered for that. If my assumption is correct, I could conclude that she wanted to leave a legacy for people to remember her by. It seems to be a universal wish among us that we should be remembered even after we had left this world.
It is part of human nature to seek self-importance, a subconscious trait tied to our pride. It was this pride that made the Beatles boast during their Manila tour at the height of their career that they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Such a claim, whether coming from the Beatles or anyone of us, has no purpose at all. It only betrays human insecurity.
Whether we admit it or not, we are driven by our sense of insecurity to seek some achievements. It is because there is some unknown void in our hearts that we wanted to fill, a void that drives the thinkers among us to find meaning in our lives, a void that we can never fill because, to borrow the title of a Lady Gaga song, we are born this way - imperfect, besides being mortal.
Taylor' stardom did not fill that void in her being. An Associated Press story about her death said that in her lifetime she married eight times to seven men and had acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and pain killers and was treated for alcohol and drug abuse. This is the same story replicated in the lives of movie star Lindsay Lohan, singer Whitney Houston and many other celebrities who went into drug abuse.
Neither wealth, fame nor power can fill this void. We will always feel the need to look for something more sublime, a feeling of inadequacy that drives many of us to embrace religion despite the advances of science because science itself has no adequate answers to the mysteries of life.
I don't know the spiritual side of Taylor's life but the AP story said that her *roughly one hour (funeral) service began with poetry readings by actor Colin Farrell and Taylor's family and included a trumpet performance of Amazing Grace", a popular Christian song written and composed by John Newton, who embraced the Faith after long years of living without "religious convictions" as a slave trader in the 18th century.

Why do we fall in love?

Why do we fall in love? Or why do we have to look for a life mate? I don't know if you have ever asked yourself this question, but this has always puzzled me. Some of us fall in love in an early age while others are dazzled by love much later. But just the same we fall in love, unless we are abnormal.
Love is a powerful emotion, so beautiful when your love is reciprocated but devastating when you are spurned. Love made Menelaus launched a thousand ships to regain Helen from Paris in Homer's mythical story "Helen of Troy". It made Elizabeth Browning compose her famous poem if you still remember her immortal lines, "How to I love thee? Let me count the ways." It sealed a death pact between the Shakespearean lovers Romeo and Juliet.
Love can bring magical moments when you brush elbows or shoulders with the one you love or have a crush on in high school while you share an umbrella on a rainy day and wish that that day drags on to eternity. It can make you quiver during the first time you hold hands. The narrative can be endless because love is an emotion that is hard to fathom.
But why do we fall in love? Or more precisely, why do we look for a life mate? There might be so many explanations but the closest I can come up with is less romantic - it's a basic biological compulsion to make life go on and on. Even single-cell living things are attracted to one another to make a union and reproduce. Of course, we know that creatures in the upper rung of the evolutionary chain have their own ways of falling in love and of attracting each other. But humans have the most sophisticated ways.
Unlike animals who would make a coupling act anywhere and anytime they feel like doing it, we humans have the tendency to romanticize love in the same way that we romanticize life. We don't want to live as mere reproductive machines hoodwinked by nature to procreate. And so we try to invent so many ways to shower the one we love with lavish affection.
But behind our sophistication - a nice dinner date, a token gift of roses, the soulful exchange of furtive glances and the gentle touches - lurks the basic and compulsive need to let life go on, although we always strive to rise above life's banality because behind our mundane nature we are driven by some lofty ideals that make us more than atoms.
That brings us back to the mystery of life.

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

Science: A window to God's infinite wisdom

I have just read today an article "Sperm mystery solved" in The Scientist magazine. The article, culled from a study published this week in the scientific magazine Nature, says scientists have "solved a 20-year mystery regarding the molecular mechanism by which human sperm detect an egg."
I will not discuss here about how a man's sperm find the egg of a woman which is necessary for fertilization for a baby to be born. The article is replete with technical terms which I may not be able to explain clearly in layman's terms, I myself not having acquired an expertise in science.
For instance, here's a paragraph from that article:
"Prior to fertilization, a cloud of cumulus cells surrounding the egg release progesterone, the female sex hormone, triggering a calcium influx into the sperm. This flood of calcium causes the sperm to beat their flagella rapidly, an action necessary to penetrate though the egg's protective jelly-like protein coating ..."
The next paragraph says it has remained unknown how progesterone activates sperm.
What got my interest in the article is not the process of how babies are born but on the mystery of how a human sperm could find an egg as if it were guided so that life could go on and on. From my readings in other fields of science of which I have a fairly firm grasp, it occurs to me that living things have an inherent tendency or the instinctive will to survive. It's like heeding the Bible's advice to "go and multiply".
From cosmology, or the science of the universe, to evolution, there seems to be a pattern that our world is so designed for life. This is a tack that has been taken by the Intelligent Design movement led by some creationist scientists who, as I know it, include the molecular biologist Francis Collins.
For instance, our sexual desire is so designed to be compulsive that no matter how intelligent we are we cannot escape indulging in sex. This raises some question like why do we have to live, fall in love, have children and then die?
This and other mysteries in life have always puzzled me since I returned to the Faith after a decade of atheism. While most Christians abhor science as an enemy of religion. I don't find science to be an antithesis of the Faith. I look at science as a window to take a peek at the marvels of God's infinite wisdom.

I will continue this topic in the next blog. I don't want to bore my readers with very long articles. I hope you have liked reading my blogs and would try to make some comments.

The way we are

I woke up today harking back to my youth in a remote farming village in the Philippines where I grew up. The village has the sea on one side and the hills on the other. There are some parts of the village where the hills slide into the seashore.
I often watched the turquoise sea from those hills while greasing four carabaos - indigenous Asian farm animals used for plowing rice fields - when schools closed during the summer vacation. The wide open seas often made me dream of neon lights in the cities that I used to see in the movies.
Like most lucky dreamers, I had made my dreams come true and have had a taste of night life under those neon lights, only to find out later that those neon lights are symptoms of hurried and harried lives. I found out that life in the city is not a fairy tale where the denizens live happily ever after.
While harking back to my youth in the farm, I remember the saying by an anonymous author: "Man is a fool, when it is hot he wants it cool, when it is cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not." That's a nice way of describing our discontent with what we are and what we have.
Our discontent prompted us to invent tools way back in ancient times that historians marked as the dawn of civilization. That dawn ushered in the industrial revolution that has complicated our lives. Those who feel or starting to feel the pressures of the fast city life will find this story very familiar.
Whenever I think of my youth in the farm, I miss the swarm of fireflies that used to wrap the trees in our backyard and long for the rustic life that I had left behind.

Please read my other blog Fun in life with link salt-funstories.blogspot.com

The Mayan doomsday prophesy

The 8.9 earthquake that triggered a giant tsunami and killed thousands of people in Japan has raised another doomsday warning, especially from those who are deep in religion. This is a throwback from the  time of John the Baptist who warned "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand". In modern times we have seen similar scenarios of people, many of them odd balls, wearing signs "repent for the end of the world is near'.
One of the most intriguing doomsday prophesies come from those who are convinced that the ancient Mayan Indians saw and recorded the date of the world's doom on December 21, 2012,the Gregorian date when the Mayan calendar ends. This prediction lent some currency of truth because the Mayans were reputed to have been well-studied.
The Maya is among the extinct tribes of ancient people of Mesoamerica with a vast interconnected empire filled with rich art, education and destruction. They have a written language based on pictographs much like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Mayans were said to have an understanding of mathematics and understood the value of zero long before its discovery in the Eastern parts of the world.
Their understanding of numbers and astronomy made their calendars more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that we are using. Many people believe that the end of the Mayan calendar prophesied the end of civilization while believe that it is simply a change of enlightenment in the current time.
Terrifying Mayan predictions about the end of the world have their roots in ancient astronomical observations. Mayan astrologers meticulously recorded the movement of the stars, and created a lunar calendar, allowing them to keep track of the five cycles they believed the world was divided into and also of events of the natural world.
They seemed to be able to use this calendar to predict rainy seasons, storms and hurricanes. They also began to notice a galactic alignment; it is believed they witnessed the alignment of the sun with the center of the Milky Way, something that happens only once every 26,000 years. Could they have ended their calendar on the date of this next alignment or does it mean that the sun centering itself with the galaxy will trigger the energy to end the world?
Receding icecaps in Peru have recently been able to provide a clue as to what the ancient Maya may have interpreted as the end of the world. An area once boggy and green and vegetative, become suddenly covered in ice. Rooted wetland plants have been discovered as the ice continues to recede.
Carbon dating has revealed that these ancient plants were virtually snap frozen 5,200 years ago, at the end of the last Mayan world, and the beginning of their new calendar. Could this be the kind of global event that influenced Maya mythology, and can dramatic climate changes in the past say anything about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012?
Could the Mayan people really have foreseen the increase in population for instance, the burning of fossil fuels all changing the composition of the atmosphere, it is coincidence, however, that now, 5,200 years later, we appear to be seeing a new climate change. Could this climate change end up being something even more devastating then the Maya ever envisaged?
The evidence of abrupt climate change more than 5,000 years ago could have influenced Mayan prophecies. Is it just coincidence that this previous change happened at the beginning of the new Mayan calendar? It seems feasible that the Mayans experienced a great climate change, and could have fed some of their prophecies for 2012, but is it also coincidence that the climate change we seem to be experiencing now have been foreseen centuries ago?
One explanation is that there will be a galactic alignment of the Milky Way, our galaxy, on December 21, 2010, On that date, the earth will enter the center of the elliptical plane of the Milky Way where the gravitational pull of a super massive black hole is at its strongest.
The theory says that each time the earth goes into this alignment every 58,000 years life extinction event take place. Since the earth entered into this alignment in 2008, there has been a dramatic increase in changing weather patterns, increased earthquakes around the world and volcanoes that have been extinct coming to life.

Blogger's note: I am not a scientist and just made a quick esearch on this from the Internet. This is not done to frighten people or drive them to embrace the Faith. I just believe that  we have to educate ourselves with whatever literature comes our way to enable us to make our own opinion instead of listening to rumors. I encourage everyone to do his or her own research. I always believe that education is a continuing process.

Lessons to learn from the Passion of Christ

Christians are currently observing Lent, a season that culminates with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Calvary and his resurrection three days after. I am aware that there have been so much debate on the 'historicity" or historical basis of the life of Jesus. This is a debate that I would like to skip.

I do not read the Bible literally. I appreciate reading the Scriptures for their themes, the way I read thematic short stories or novels. The Bible is a great book, not only for its literary elegance, but also for the lessons it offers us to be applied in our daily lives.

The Parable of the Sower, for instance, comes to me as a clear depiction of our worldly struggles in the journey to the world beyond. To those who are not familiar with the parable, it's about seeds sown by a sower. Some seeds fell on the wayside and eaten by birds, some fell on stony grounds with little soil and sprang at once but died also at once when the sun rose, some fell among thorny weeds that choked them.

Christians who are familiar with the Bible know that the seeds were the gospels, the grounds were the hearts of people. Many people just don't listen to the gospels and don't allow the seeds to grown in their hearts. They don't find the relevance of the gospels in their lives. There are also many who want to heed the gospels but are choked by the weeds around them.

The weeds are the temptations of our worldly desires that always threaten our faith in God. Amid the weeds of temptations, most of us keep on struggling to "run the race," if I may borrow a phrase from the Bible, while others drop out as the weeds choke their Faith.  The weeds are our worldly ways - the lure of the flesh, wealth, fame and power.

I don't want to pontificate. I am in no position to take a "holier-than-thou" attitude because just like anybody else I am as much of a sinner. I think it is enough that I have depicted the reality of our spiritual struggles in this secular world before I move on to the lesson that we have to learn from the crucifixion of the Christ Jesus. I think I have found a relevance of Christ's crucifixion to our life.

Being a former atheist, a question always comes up to my mind when the subject of Christ's crucifixion is put on the table for discussion: if He is God or the son of God, why did he allow himself to be crucified when he could have used the powers of nature like thunders and rains to show - and frighten those who persecuted Him - that he was indeed God or the son of God.?

The traditional answer is that He allowed His crucifixiou to fulfill what was written in the Scriptures - that He should die on the cross. While many Christians readily take that answer without questions, for the atheist it will not suffice. It is begging the question and would raise another question - "why should He die on the cross?" Those who are familiar with philosophy know that this would lead to a series of never-ending questions.

The question had puzzled me for a long time, even after I had rejoined the church. The answer that I have found at best is that it was in keeping with Christ's teachings of love and humility. Humility is a Christian virtue that does not augur well with our secular world because we believe more in the worldly virtues like being "smart" and aggressive to get ahead in life. But the Bible says that the ways of the world is not the ways of the Divine. This clear in the Old Testament (Isa. 55:8-9) "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither your ways are my ways."

That brings us back to the Parable of the Sower. Driven by our pride - or, worse, arrogance, we often resort to the "ways of the world" in a blind pursuit for the glitter of wealth, fame and power. I think you will agree with me that we often step on the toes of others and even cheat or commit crimes just to get ahead in life, Humility, a lesson to learn from the Passion of Christ, is an antidote to our tendency for self-glorification.

I am not saying here that we should not try to get rich. I don't see anything wrong with our pursuit to get rich. I haven't come across any passage in the Bible that says we should stay materially poor in our journey to the life beyond. What the Bible counsels us is that we should love God above all. In loving God we should stick to His ways, not the worldly ways.

There's a widespread misunderstanding even among Christians that money is the root of all evil. I find this to be a big misconception. What the Bible says is that the lust for money is the root of all evil. The emphasis in on lust or love for money. We can be rich but not selfish. Generosity and worldly riches can go together. We can use wealth to help others and not use it so that others will envy us.

This also is in keeping with Christ's another teaching that we can not love both God and mammon with equal passion. It's either we love one more intensely and betray the other. This could be aptly demonstrated in the cases of taxi drivers finding wads of money left in their cabs. It's either the cab driver look for the owner and return the money or keep it for himself.

It isn't rare to hear people comment "stupid driver" after reading news about a cab driver returning money to the owner. That kind of thinking is the way of the world. What the taxi  driver did  was in keeping with the ways of the Divine - the lofty virtue of honesty.

In the New Testament, we will notice that the central theme of Christ's ministry is love for God above all and then love for our neighbors. Against this backdrop, I surmise that humility and other virtues, which are not easy to keep in our worldly struggles, are the lessons that the Passion of Christ try to teach us. These are our cross that He wants us to carry for the sake of peace - for ourselves and the world/

Embracing the ways of the world and putting God at the back burner won't bring us peace. Experience tells us that the ways of the world often bring enmities and troubles if we do not balance it with the lofty virtues which I always associate with the Divine. Myron Rush, a former Texas businessman who became a preacher, says that material wealth does not give us a sense of security. Only God does.

I know from experience that it is true. We could lose or job or wealth anytime, but if we cling to faith we will bounce back. There are people who commit suicide when they lost their job or fortune because they depend much on their wealth to sustain their pride, if not arrogance.


Please the article "When God closes doors" on how I clung to faith and trust God during one of my worst life storm.

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Freedom: A lofty but elusive concept

While watching TV at the waiting room of a hospital where my wife had a checkup for the pains in her hands, I took notice of a protester in Libya holding up a placard with the word "Freedom." She was among the residents in an eastern enclave of the North African country supporting the insurrection seeking to end Muammar Gadaffi's four decades of iron-fist rule.
I wanted to write a blog on that day but had to forgo my passion to accompany my wife. And I remembered my professor in political science when I was in my second year in college. One day, he raised a question that sank deep into my brain for the rest of my life. "If we have freedom, as we always say, how come we can't jump up to 20 feet high?" At first I thought it was a crazy question.
Our classroom fell silent. "The answer is in your textbook," he intoned. When no one dared to raise a hand, he went on. "The answer is that freedom is not absolute." He then told us to always seek the practical applications of theories we were learning in school. "Memorizing all the theories you are learning in school will not make you literate."
I amused myself with that memory while waiting for my wife to come out of the clinic. How true that our freedom is not absolute. In that particular case, my choices were limited to writing my blog or accompanying my wife. Of course, any husband knows that the choice was clear, as a 7-Up commercial had put it. It's safer to take a risk with the wrath of a storm than with the wrath of a wife. At home after my wife's checkup, I felt like not going to work, which starts at 12 noon, and had to drag my feet in going to the office.
In politics, as in our personal lives, freedom has its own limitations. Of course, we know that. Ditto with our social interactions. There are always laws, rules or ethics to follow. Our freedom ends where the freedom of others begins. Democracy is a self-regulating respect for one another's freedom or rights. That's even true with non-living things. You can not put two books in one place at the same time. You have to put one on top of the other. There's a law on that - the law of physics.
Probably, we can only have absolute freedom when we become no longer flesh. I used to read stories on near-death experiences and it amazes me that those who claimed to have had such experiences spoke of an ethereal world where there was more freedom like flying freely in space, seeing one's life on earth played back before one's eyes as if one was in so many places at a given time and the absence of worries. Religion tells us that if you stack your cards with divine aces in this game called life you will win heaven, a place called paradise.
Could the lofty but elusive concepts we are pursuing in this world are but our intuitive reflections of what life is  in a world beyond?

The world of Lady Gaga

Am back. After almost a week of absence. I had been doing an article for both the Saudi Gazette in Saudi Arabia and the Philippine Daily Inquirer in Manila. I work as an editor at the Gazette and write on the side for the Gazette's Expat Life weekly supplement and the Inquirer's Global Pinoy weekly page

Anyway, for this blog, I got the appetite to write about Lady Gaga and her ilk after my wife and I fetched our 14-year-old daughter from school this afternoon. On our way home, our child suddenly asked me if I knew the meaning of illuminati. "Do you mean illuminate?" I asked. "No, it's illuminati," she said. "Well, I don't know. It's the first time I heard the word," I said, then quipped. "Why did you ask?"
She said it's because her classmates told her that Lady Gaga, Rhiana and other singers whose names I failed to track down are illuminati. "And what does it mean?" I asked. It means, she said, that they don't believe in God. "They might have meant atheist," I said. But she insisted, "No, it's illuminati."
At home, I looked up the word illuminati in the dictionary and found it. It means "the enlightened, a name given to various religious sects, and especially to a society of German free-thinkers at the end of the 18th century." The other meaning is "people who claim to have special enlightenment."
I could think of Lady Gaga and Rhiana as free-thinkers if we take the word with reference to people who don't believe in God or give a room for doubts about His existence. If they have made any claim of being spiritually enlightened, I have no quarrel about it, either. Even nuts can make such a claim.
As I sat down to write this blog, I started to think how the meaning of words have kept on changing. In my younger days, I always associate the word enlightened with the intellectuals. Nowadays, the word seems to have been associated also with people who do not believe in God as if those who believe in religion have become morons.
I surmise that this all started from the time Copernicus disproved the Church's belief that the sun revolves around the earth. That was followed by the eras of Galileo and other great thinkers that pushed the Church against the wall and  ushered the age of enlightenment, known also as the age of reason because it was an era in which reason was advocated as the primary source of legitimacy and authority.
Let us fast-track forward the tape of time and we come to the age of Lady Gaga and her ilk. Their age, which is also ours, is a byproduct of the inventions of science that have made this world so complicated. Ours is an era of compartamentalized, hurried and harried life. If I may borrow an analogy, we have left the pan of simple living for the hell of an exhausting life.
Entertainment, which I used to think as a preoccupation of people who had nothing to do in life, has become a mainstream industry that gives people like Lady Gaga an income way beyond what most of our intellectuals get. Like religion, reason is losing ground to a new fad. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has complained that the new generation of Americans are reading less and partying more. We know the drift is not confined to the US.
I often hear the songs of Lady Gaga from the stereo of my car when I go to the office, drive home or take my family elsewhere after work. Although I could not make head and tails of her songs "Ra-ra-a-a-a ... Roma-roma-ma-ma ... Ola-la-Ola-la-la" or "Paparazzi, do you love me?" the young generation across the world loves her music.
There must be more to life than reason but must our life's journey lead us farther into the abyss of a sliding mundane drift?