From Family and Friends

He came into my life in the Std X ‘A' as our Class Master at St. Stanislaus. He bustled into the room on the first day and greeted us with a warm, friendly smile. Quickly he learned our names and birthdays too. Everyone received a holy picture on his birthday without fail. English grammar can be tedious, but by dividing us into teams, he made it competitive and interesting.

Shortly after his Ordination, he was back at St. Peters' as chaplain of the Catholic Students Association (CSA), building our talents in public speaking, debating, singing and guiding us spiritually. He loved walking, he led us on a walking pilgrimage to Mt. Poisur, a distance of 10-12 miles. After fortifying us with the Eucharist and then later hot jelabies and sheera at 'Balaji' we were on our way.

Our class picnic was to Kanheri caves, we walked from Borivli station through the National Park — a real forest with no encroachers in 1956—to Kanheri.

Blessed with a rich melodious baritone he sang the Exultet, Trees, and the humorous Don't get married.

He left us again for England for special parish training and on his return to St. Peter's he revitalized the parish. With his clear diction all got the message of his homilies. After his transfer from St. Peters' I failed to keep in contact due to my job schedules and my tendency to procrastinate.

When I heard he was sick, I thought he would recover quickly, not knowing the seriousness of his illness and was deeply pained to leam on returning from a holiday last June, that he had moved on to join the Heavenly Choir, where I am sure he is delighting the Almighty.

- Harry D'Souza
(Brother of Fr. Sidney D'Souza, SJ, missionary in Tanzania.)

Who’s JENNIFER?

Being myself a 'past' Jesuit, and with the above in mind, I've been trying to figure out how the Jesuit way of life could connect with JENNIFER? That's Jesuits' noticing and noting India's Feminine Responses? The reason is that I was once under the impression that it was the nature of a man to be exclusively masculine and of a woman to be exclusively feminine! However, I have recently been reviewing a chapter from a book that has greatly expanded my horizons even as I have learned from it the facts of psychological bisexuality, and I am inclined to agree with the author that it's 'okay' for a man to say, I am both masculine and feminine. I am not both man and woman. I am a man with a feminine dimension. And since being a man implies being a person, it also means incorporating masculine and feminine dimensions into who I am.

Therefore, in order to feel comfortable with the fact that I am a man, I not only have to be comfortable with my masculinity, but comfortable with my femininity!

Better still, I could wrap it all up in a significant statement by Abraham Maslow who says that, "a man if he can make peace with his female inside, he can make peace with the females outside, understand them better, be less ambivalent about them, and even admire them more as he realizes how superior their femaleness is to his own much weaker version."(Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, New York, 1972)

- Terrence Fonn