Surprising Grace

I had the chance to watch Disney’s “Mulan” 2020 recently. It is not a genre of movie I am usually a fan of, but somehow - quite surprisingly - it stuck with me and I resolved to write a blog post about it. (Warning: spoilers to follow!)  *****  Becoming Who I Am  But where to begin? There are so many reasons why this movie is thought-provoking (aside from its "behind the scenes" controversies, which are not the subject of this post). At base, perhaps, is that it is a coming-of-age story... a story about someone discovering their own unique gifts and using them... a kind of story that never gets old, as we are all living it to some extent, young or old. I used to think that coming-of-age was something that happens once when you are a teenager or young adult, but at 33 - an age at which I used to think my life path would be settled - I am discovering that the process goes on! Perhaps at certain ages one wrestles with the question of “who I am” in a more pointed and existent...

Road to the Holy Sepulchre Our guest writer this week, Grace, is a Singaporean Roman Catholic. Her last post on this blog reflected on four years of law school. One and a half years later, she tries her best to capture her experience on "Sequela Christi": a Franciscan pilgrimage for young adults through the Holy Land, Rome, and Assisi. The photographs accompanying this post are her own.  ***** Road to the Holy Sepulchre 5.25am. I (not a cold-weather person by any means, and definitely not an early-morning person) trundle out of the hotel in the cold, my hands encased in gloves and shoved into my jacket pockets. I am joined by a few pilgrims, but for the most part, we’re too tired to talk. As we walk away from the hotel and get closer to our destination, the stones beneath our feet get older, our path more steeped in history. When, for a brief moment, we make a wrong turn in one of the Old City’s many alleyways, the brief sight of another group of foreigne...