2022 Reflection

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. I shall reflect over the things that has happened this year. I do not remember the things all that well, so I shall rely on God to enlighten my memory so I can remember what I have went through in the year of our Lord, 2022. The first thing I remembered in this year is that I had a spiritual experience which made me thought that I shall live good for the rest of my life. Yet it was a delusion, I was mistaken by thinking that each time I felt good means a great change of my life. Yet that is not what changes lives…

I wrote a bit about that spiritual experience, and I call it an “enlightenment”, how naïve I was. Then what I remember was also writing up a 40 page document on my spiritual journey, yet even that was a result of my naiveness. The first major memory of this year was my Sacrament of Reconciliation, which seems to be a major turning point in my spiritual life. In the previous year I have been meddling with this thing called pranic healing and so I have meddled with it in the beginning of this year as well.

However, thanks to internal discomfort and also internal objections coming from my rapidly growing Catholic Faith, I left pranic healing and this year I officially left all the groups I was joined in and also confessed the sin. Then, I still retained my tradition of conversing with the Lord using inner dialogue. However, my understanding of that conversation evolved and I eventually understood that it is not truly God speaking to me. In a sense it is God speaking to me but more accurately it is my conscience speaking to me in the name of God, declaring to me my deepest understandings of who and what God is to me.

However, I did learn something from those conversations. It is a revelation I still remember clearly and I honestly hold dearly. While I cannot be sure of when exactly did I actually encounter God or only my understanding of Him, I am sure that at that point it was a revelation of God. The Lord revealed to me the universal Christian mission, that is to preach the Gospel to all nations and also to the Church. Regarding the Church He revealed it as working as God’s instruments to surgically remove a cancer from the Church. This is what I remember until now, and while at first I thought it is my own special mission, I came to understood that it is God’s Will for every Christian and so every human being as well, for all people are called to be Christians.

In this year I developed many friends, mostly online friends from the discord servers which I joined. The main home server I am in now is the Catholic Forum where I gained several new friends around my own age as well. I also joined an Indonesian server where I gained several friends as well. I was partially obsessed to the servers for a time as I can speak a lot with them, but it was revealed to me that it is my attachment to humans and communication. As such, I slowly distanced myself from the servers as I became more mindful of the purpose I have in this life and what I need to do in my life.

In this year, I still possess many sufferings and they torture me greatly. I reread some of my past journals and the tortures are written all over. They all cause me to sin in 3 great places, gluttony, lust, and sloth. Yet as the year nears its end I attempt to be better in those 3 areas and sin less and less. Though how successful I am is not so certain. The growth process through the suffering is slow and painful. Yet now there is one doctrine or teaching of God that I hold so dearly in my soul that helps me fight everyday, that is the doctrine of free will. That I possess the strength to fight against all sin, and to do all virtue as God has endowed me with, is what drives me to actually use that strength of freedom to fight against sin.

The pain and suffering I endure caused me to fail in 2 great subjects, that is my internship and my university. I failed the first semester entirely as I could not withstand the stress and the pain of it all caused me to give up with everything and just do what I want to do, write freely. Yet the failures did not destroy me, they were a shame and I let myself down, but I got back up and resolved to do better by the grace of God. As such even as I am writing, I still possess the joy of Christ. As I surrendered the classes, I took up something else to fill my time, and that is writing. As I was provoked by a friend to begin writing again, I did.

In my writing, I developed a new method. This method is to make writings that would clearly be part of a historical canon of my writings. So I archived many of my old writings and compiled them in a single document. I forgot how many hundred pages that was. So now I have a blog which would be my blog for the rest of my life, and I am planning several series of texts that would be for the rest of my life as well and perhaps new series in the future as well. This canon would hopefully help me and other people to navigate through my writings more.

So what is my current state in the final day of this year? I possess the understanding of free will, and that as long as I am in a state of grace, I am united to God and even when I am outside of grace, God is still with me in some sense. I have lost dependence on inner voices and they rarely appear now. I still have a lot of work, but now I am at rest knowing that I have what I need to succeed and fulfill my duties to God, myself, and others. Ah I am now reminded of some things that also happened.

Thanks to my spiritual conversion, I joined several Catholic organizations, which are the Lay Dominicans, the Legion of Mary, Emmaus Journey, and now I am enrolled in a course called Personal Evangelization Course. It seems the sustenance of my life is owed greatly to these organizations, which helped discipline my spiritual life and thus increased my holiness over the times such that I managed to reach this point of my life. I am thus thankful to them for having helped me in my spiritual life and improving it greatly. That concludes the yearly reflection. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.