All The Same Yet All New

T.S. Eliot puts it well when he said “the end of all journeys will be to return to the place from which you started and know it for the first time.” Four years ago I enrolled in this same class, in the same room and with the same professor who has maintained a vibrant quality as ever. I have to admit I am back partly because of my vow of obedience to my Jesuit superiors. After two weeks I return to where I all began, asking the same questions all over again “Was ist das - - die Philosophie? What is being as Being? What does it mean to say that the table is Tabling? The grass Grassing? The tree Treeing?”
Yet now I think I am back with the same wonderment. I thought I could readily give an answer to those seemingly “archaic” questions any moment now. But I see it was not as simple as I first thought it to be.
One thing I have learned so far is that in my every effort to grasp reality or to comprehend my own smaller realities like my life, my mission, my apostolate, my relationship with others, they escape me. Because of that I know I will never fully know reality.
Four years have passed. I trod a road that accorded me with life-changing experiences and realizations. I was schooled in a novitiate that plunged me into seminars and integration workshops in the effort to know better myself, my God and the religious life that I made a vow to enter. Now I am led back to the questions of Being that are no different from the grass Grassing or the tree Treeing. Surprisingly, what I find in the end are not answers but a continuous astonishment of my own being. Those many years become like a fleet of wing in the face of Being. But in spite of that I know it is more than enough consolation for me to realize that I am flying towards that track or path. I know I will never run out of wind to return to where I all started and know things there for the first time.
(Reflection about doing Philosophy SY 2004-2005)