ON the Feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude, celebrated on October 28, we are presented with the gospel episode where Christ spent the whole night praying in a mountain and when done, he proceeded to choose his twelve apostles. (cfr. Lk 6,12-16).

Somehow, we can make the conclusion that the choice of the apostles which was meant to cooperate and continue the work of redemption with Christ, that is, to carry out the essential task of doing apostolate all throughout time, must be the fruit of his prayer.

Christ must be telling us that for us to discern the need to do apostolate, let alone, to be effective and fruitful in it, we should also pray. Only then can we get the same spirit that drove Christ to go all the way of offering his life for the salvation of mankind.

If we really have a good prayer, one where we truly have an intimate encounter with God, we for sure would come out of it burning with zeal for love and concern for the others. Somehow, we would catch the fire behind these words of Christ: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Lk 12,49).

Yes, real prayer has that effect. If, on the contrary, we come out of it just thinking of our own selves, or worse, feeling low and dry, then we are not actually praying. Prayer will always sharpen our mindfulness and thoughtfulness of the others.

Prayer is by definition an act of love. And love in turn is always self-perpetuating. It never stops giving itself to God. As St. Francis de Sales would put it, “The measure of love is to love without measure.”

And because of our love for God, then our prayer which is an act of love for God will always lead us to love others. That is always the trajectory of a true, love-inspired prayer. Its vertical aspect never leaves behind the horizontal aspect.

Yes, if our prayer is real and done out of love, we will always come out of it burning with the zeal of love. We have to be wary of the danger to fall easily into complacency, lukewarmness, mediocrity. We should always be on the lookout for these perils.

We need to fill our mind and heart with love, and all that love brings—goodness, patience, understanding and compassion, mercy, gratuitous acts of service, generosity and magnanimity.

Yes, there’s effort involved here. Great, tremendous effort, in fact. But all this stands first of all on the ‘terra firma’ that is God’s grace, which is always given to us in abundance if we care to ask and receive it. Nothing human, no matter how well done, would prosper unless it is infused also with God’s grace.

We have to be wary of conforming ourselves, whether openly or subtly, intentionally or mindlessly, to worldly ways, to mere social trends, or to some inertia generated merely physically, hormonally, economically, politically, culturally, historically, etc.

We need to be most aware and sensitive to these dangers which are so common as to be part of what we call normal in life. Let’s train ourselves to smell out their symptoms and their approaches as soon as they arise. And then be quick to resist them.

May we always feel the urge to do apostolate in any given situation!

That short and simple Robert Frost poem was the centerpiece of my thoughts . The hypotheticals and what ifs of that Road not Taken, or the road less travelled lingers on my mind. It creates a fork of what action to take and indeed , we cannot trod on two roads . As the old song , we can’t be at two places at the same time. Thus, we have to take just one road .

The dilemma of choice is as old as as Man. It is biblical and also philosophical. Dilemma in its real sense must be between choices. Mostly on the choice between good and evil, between equally strong and heavy choices, between ideas or entity mostly on equal footing. These maybe comes as hard to make choices but in the end, there can only be one.

There are choices that comes easy and requires not much of weighing, but there are also those which requires major changes and major adjustments once the choice was finalized.
There comes a time when we heed a certain call, as the USA for AFRICA said in that highly successful song We are the World. And the dilemma to help or not to help was resolved by the simple adherence to the kindness that dwell on every man. When Africa was starving the group banded together all the known stars in the music industry alligned and created several award winning and heartrending songs.

There were clear dilemma hatched in the writer’s mind when they made screen plays on Movies . The Under Siege Steven Seagal starrer, the movie Sophie’s Choice , the main character was forced to decide which of her two children would be sent to die , in the gas chamber. In the movie Prisoners , a father tortures a man suspected of kidnapping the man’s daughter and indeed the man being tortured was an innocent man. Of course in the local scene of the famous song is that song of Bodjie Dasig , which harps ; sana dalawa ang puso ko…

In life we are pushed and forced on a dilemma and even if we like it or not, a choice has to be made. Thus, we have to live by that choice.

We have to be certain on a lot of things before we embark on a decision . My students in Problem Analysis and Decision Making had listed several decision making tools that has its own local terms. These are design to bust the dilemma into a problem that can be solved scientifically and logically, here are a few of our local way of solving problems and breaking the deadlock of a dilemma by these English Terms on its simple waray-waray counterpart:
Cost benefit analysis- timbang timbang han presyo ngan gasto.

SWOT Analysis- Pagkita han Kusog, ug Kaloyahan, Higayon ngan Kadelikadohan
Force Field Analysis-mga puersa nga nakaka apekto han imo proyekto or bisan ano nga himoonon.

Break-even analysis – pag dangaw dangaw or pag sukol kun san o ka makakabawi imo puhunan.

This are merely suggested local dialect parlance on how to arrived at the best solution to a problem or solve a dilemma, merely suggesting that we waray had been doing decision making, solving problems with tools that are embeded in our psyche, yet we have them labeled, in our own special way….

I just posted on my FB account that academic doctors, those holders of the highest academic degrees, should cease being mere researchers for life. Instead, they should become theorists in their respective fields.

By becoming doctors in their fields of discipline, they have assumed the ranks as creators and originators of ideas, principles, and theories. This means that they had embarked on that level when they should not anymore be content with just citing and recycling other people’s ideas—they should create their own and have it disseminated.

This makes such a position a thing to behold with awe, for it’s a rare one among the many vocations that people can pursue. Being a dignified status in society, a doctorate is something we look up to. And as such, we regard it with many expectations, with its holders supposedly behaving, in word and in deed, that they really deserve that status.
Why should academic doctors not dwell on conducting research for life? Well, it’s not supposedly for them anymore, given their elevated position in the knowledge hierarchy. It’s rightfully for the graduate and undergraduate levels that are still exploring the vastness of knowledge. Research is simply finding the gaps and gray areas that previous studies had missed, and trying to bridge those gaps.

Leave the graduate and undergraduate students alone to do this job. It’s quite inappropriate for academic doctors to be still preoccupied with this activity. They may engage in it once in a while, but never as a central preoccupation, zeroing in on it. Moreover, their research should be more of claims and stands. In short, they should be theorizing on things characteristic of their fields knowing that, as doctors, they have assumed mastery and expertise in those disciplines.

In what way can academic doctors do this? Well, they can write academic papers detailing their original theories and have these published in academic journals. These are the kind of papers that they should produce, not just correlational studies that have been duplicated and imitated perhaps millions of times worldwide.

Let me cite some examples from my own theorizing works, which are mostly published in international journals and have been read by thousands of readers. For my doctoral dissertation, I theorized that an editorial cartoon, though single-framed unlike comic illustrations, is a narrative item, complete with the elements of the story. In a paper published in an international journal, I theorized that research and academic papers, which are traditionally penned in a strictly formal language, can be better written using feature style for ease and interesting reads.

I can cite more examples even from other people’s works, but I guess I have driven home the point that academic doctors of our time, should be creating new ideas rather than just reviewing the literature. That’s not to pick up a quarrel—it’s to challenge them.