Setya Novanto dan Pertaruhan MKD

Hari ini, 23 November 2015, Mahkamah Kehormatan Dewan (MKD) akan melakukan rapat internal berkaitan dengan dugaan pelanggaran kode etik yang dilakukan Ketua DPR Setya Novanto. Masyarakat luas tentu berharap bahwa kasus dugaan pelanggaran kode etik yang dilakukan oleh Setya Novanto dapat dilakukan secara transparan dan adil.

Dapatkah MKD memutus kasus ini dengan seadil-adilnya? Hal ini tentu bergantung pada nurani para anggota MKD. Jika mereka masih memiliki hati dan pikiran yang bersih maka tentu saja mereka akan berupaya untuk menangani kasus ini dengan baik. Namun jika tidak, maka mereka akan berupaya untuk menyelesaikan kasus ini demi kepentingan salah satu pihak.

Gawatnya lagi adalah jika ternyata di tengah penyelesaian kasus ini bergelimang uang sebagai jaminan lolosnya Setya Novanto dari lubang jarum. Masyarakatyang menjadi penonton dalam kasus ini nantinya akan sangat mudah menilai integritas MKD melalui putusannya menyangkut nasib Setya Novanto.

Mahkamah Kehormatan Dewan diminta tak mengulangi kesalahan mereka lagi seperti saat Setya Novanto lolos dalam kasus kehadirannya di kampanye Donald Trump. Keputusan MKD yang meloloskan Setya Novanto atas pertemuannya dengan Donald Trump telah menampar wajah lembaga tersebut di hadapan masyarakat.

Kasus "papa minta saham" ini akan menjadi pertaruhan bagi kepercayaan masyarakat kepada MKD. Jika MKD mengedepankan integritasnya maka masyarakat akan memberikan standing ovation, namun jika sebaliknya, maka MKD harus siap menerima penghakiman dari masyarakat.

Diambil dari:

http://www.kompasiana.com/yohanes_sandi/setya-novanto-dan-pertaruhan-mkd_565282f72f7a61fa038b458f

Who's gonna come to my funeral?

Beberapa hari yang lalu, seorang rekan saya melontarkan sebuah pertanyaan yang mengejutkan saat kami sedang berbincang ringan, Ia bertanya, "Suk nek aku mati ono sing ngrumat ra ya?"

Sontak saya terhenyak dengan pertanyaan tersebut. Spontan saya menjawab, "Ono. Aku bakal ngrumat kowe nek aku durung ditimbali luwih dhisik..."

Pertanyaan tersebut rupa-rupanya muncul karena rekan saya begitu kagum dengan besarnya penghormatan yang diberikan oleh umat Katolik di Keuskupan Agung Semarang ketika melepas kepergian Mgr. J. Pujasumarta ke peristirahatan terakhirnya.

Umat begitu "bersemangat" untuk memberikan penghormatan terakhir kepada Mgr. Puja. Mulai sejak jenazah Mgr. Puja disemayamkan di Gereja Katedral Semarang, di sepanjang perjalanan dari Semarang menuju ke Yogyakarta, dan hingga beliau dimakamkan di Kentungan, Yogyakarta, ribuan umat rela berdesak-desakan untuk sekedar melihat peti jenazah beliau.

Pertanyaan reflektif tersebut pun membuat saya berpikir ulang tentang hidup saya. Lantas, muncul pertanyaan lanjutan di kepala saya,. Sudah siapkah saya jika Yang Mahakuasa setiap saat memanggil saya? Sudah cukupkah modal kebaikan yang saya kumpulkan sampai saat ini untuk membawa saya pulang kepada-Nya? Apakah ada orang-orang yang rela menemani saya di saat-saat terakhir saya sebelum berpulang? Apakah orang-orang tersebut mau merawat saya yang telah lunglai tak berdaya?

Pertanyaan-pertanyaan tersebut terus berputar di kepala saya. Kemana saya harus mencari jawaban atas pertanyaan-pertanyaan aneh tersebut?

Saya coba bertanya kepada beberapa orang terkait pertanyaan tersebut. Sebagian besar dari mereka menjawab, "Rasah aneh-aneh. Rasah takon sing aneh-aneh."

Tentu saja jawaban tersebut tidak dapat memuaskan hasrat saya. Saya terus mencari dan mencari jawaban dari pertanyaan-pertanyaan tersebut hingga akhirnya seorang rekan senior menjawab dengan lugas, "Sing sapa gelem nglakoni kabecikan lan uga gelem lelaku, ing tembe bakal tampa kanugrahaning Pangeran." Kalimat itupun masih bersambung, "Lan ojo lali, sapa sing nandur bakal ngundhuh..."

Jawaban tersebut membuka mata saya bahwa semua yang terjadi di dunia ini memang berakar pada hukum sebab-akibat. Apa yang kita terima bersumber dari apa yang telah kita lakukan. Jika yang kita tanam adalah bibit kebaikan maka yang akan kita tuai adalah kebaikan pula.

Mudahkah? Tentu tidak. Sebaik-baiknya yang kita lakukan kadang masih ada saja yang mencela. Lantas kita harus bagaimana? Kita memiliki pilihan akan apa yang harus dilakukan. Namun demikian, semua perlu kita kembalikan ke dalam diri kita lagi. Sudahkah kita sempurna sehingga kita tidak mau dicela? Atau, bersediakah kita dengan penuh kerendahan hati mengakui segala kekurangan kita?

Mgr. Pujasumarta, sang gembala umat, memiliki motto hidup Duc In Altum. Duc in Altum, mempunyai arti bertolak ke tempat yang lebih dalam. Mgr. Puja begitu menghayati motto hidupnya dengan terus merefleksikannya dalam hidup sehari-hari. Walhasil, Mgr. Puja hadir sebagai pribadi yang sangat sederhana dan rendah hati.

Mana yang akan kita pilih, menjadi sombong atau memilih untuk tetap rendah hati? Banyak ajaran-ajaran dan keutamaan-keutamaan yang kiranya dapat menuntun kita untuk mencapai hidup yang lebih baik. 

Finally,
Durung menang yen durung wani kalah, durung unggul yen durung wani asor, durung gedhe yen durung wani cilik.
Gusti iku dumunung ana atining manungsa kang becik, mula iku diarani Gusti iku bagusing ati.

Sing sapa gelem nglakoni kebecikan lan ugo gelem lelaku, ing tembe bakal tampa kanugrahaning Pangeran. - See more at: http://www.peribahasa.net/peribahasa-jawa.php?page=2#sthash.Vjds3W8q.dpuf

Sing sapa gelem nglakoni kebecikan lan ugo gelem lelaku, ing tembe bakal tampa kanugrahaning Pangeran. - See more at: http://www.peribahasa.net/peribahasa-jawa.php?page=2#sthash.Vjds3W8q.dpuf

Sing sapa gelem nglakoni kebecikan lan ugo gelem lelaku, ing tembe bakal tampa kanugrahaning Pangeran. - See more at: http://www.peribahasa.net/peribahasa-jawa.php?page=2#sthash.Vjds3W8q.dpuf

Paris Attacks: #prayforparis

Terrorism is a psychological warfare. Terrorists try to manipulate us and change our behavior by creating fear, uncertainty, and division in society. (Patrick J. Kennedy)

Three teams carried out the attacks in the French capital which killed 129 people and left more than 350 wounded, the Paris chief prosecutor says.

TIME wrote that there appear to have been attacks at six sites around the city, but three major attacks have emerged as the most deadly:
1. At least 100 hostages were taken in the Bataclan concert venue, during a performance by the American band, Eagles of Death Metal (the band was reported to be safe, although it was not clear whether all the crew managed to escape.)
2. At least 11 people died in shootings in two restaurants, Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon, which are right across the street from each other (it is not immediately clear which victims were in which establishments.)
3. Three explosions were reported at a bar outside the Stade de France to the north of the city, where thousands were gathered to watch France play Germany, and at least two are reported to be suicide bombings.

"We have to find out where they came from... and how they were financed," Francois Molins told reporters. He said seven attackers had been killed, and that all had been heavily armed and wearing explosive belts. Friday's attacks hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars. (BBC)

Barack Obama said that terrorist attacks on Paris were an “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share,”  as he promised the full support of the United States for France.

“We stand prepared and ready to provide whatever assistance the government and the people of France need to respond,” Obama said. “We are going to do whatever it takes to work with the French people and nations around the world to bring these terrorists to justice.” (TIME)

“It is an act of war prepared and planned outside, with complicity from within the country,” French President Francois Hollande said. “It is an act of absolute barbarism. France will be ruthless in its response.”

These attacks have provided shocks not only for people in France but also all over the world. The sounds of humanity came louder as the tragedy happened. It does not really matter who is responsible for the attacks. What matters is that all people must be committed to gather and fight against terrorism by spreading love and affection everywhere.

There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.
― Tony Benn

Sugeng Tindak Mgr. Pujasumarta

Jumat, 13 November 2015 menjadi saksi saat ribuan umat Katolik melepas gembalanya Mgr. Pujasumarta ke peristirahatan terakhirnya di Kompleks Pemakaman Seminari Tinggi Kentungan. 

Bukan banyaknya pelayat yang menjadi perhatian utama saya di hari itu. Ada yang lebih menarik untuk disimak yaitu bagaimana ribuan umat yang hadir di tempat itu begitu mencintai dan menghormati Sang Gembala. Mereka ada disana bukan sekedar untuk melayat. Mereka datang karena cinta mereka kepada Mgr. Pujasumarta.

Telah kita dengar banyak pejabat pemerintahan yang mengucapkan bela sungkawa atas kepergian Mgr. Puja. Juga bisa kita baca di berbagai media bahwa banyak kaum selebrita yang juga berbela sungkawa. Sungguh hal yang lazim mengingat Mgr. Puja adalah pimpinan tertinggi umat Katolik di sebagian wilayah Jateng sampai ke DIY.

Bagi saya, apa yang dikatakan orang-orang terkenal tersebut sudah menjadi suatu hal yang biasa. Namun, ada satu hal yang lebih menarik ketika saya berbincang dengan orang yang notabene adalah umat biasa, bukan pejabat dan bukan selebritis. 

Ada seorang rekan kerja saya yang menjadi pengagum Mgr. Puja sejak dahulu. Ia bertutur banyak tentang kenangan-kenangannya bersama Mgr. Puja. Ia banyak berinteraksi langsung dengan Mgr. Puja baik saat beliau sudah menjadi Uskup Agung Semarang maupun jauh sebelum itu. 

Rekan saya tersebut pernah "umuk" kepada saya bahwa Mgr. Puja pernah bermalam di rumahnya.

"Kae lho kamarku. Mgr. Puja wis tau sare ning kamar kuwi lho." ,ujarnya.

Ya.., Mgr. Puja memang pernah bermalam di rumah rekan saya itu, tepatnya di Ds Semagung, di dekat Sendangsono.

Lantas saya bertanya, "Kok ya karsa ya Mgr. Puja sare ning ndesa ngene iki. Wong banyu wae angel...?"

Sebuah pertanyaan bodoh yang mudah sekali untuk dijawab dan disangkal. Mengapa? Karena Mgr. Pujasumarta adalah orang baik. Beliau adalah pribadi yang sederhana dan rendah hati.

Kesederhanaan dan kerendahan hati Mgr. Puja adalah kekuatan utama beliau. Beliau sungguh sadar bahwa menjadi pemimpin umat bukanlah meletakkan diri diatas umat. Mgr. Puja benar-benar mempraktekkan prinsip kerendahan hatinya yaitu bahwa memimpin adalah melayani. 

Kerendahan hati, kesederhanaan, dan kehangatan Mgr. Puja sungguh menjadi ciri khas beliau yang akan sangat dirindukan umat. Akhir kata, kesucian Mgr. Pujasumarta terpancar dari hidupnya yang terpuji.

Duc In Altum
Bertolaklah ke tempat yang dalam.

Nyanyian Langit

Malam ini tak seperti biasanya. Bulan tak nampak di atas sana dan bintang-bintang pergi entah kemana. Malam ini tampak sendu bagiku dan seakan melengkapi malamku yang tiada berbintang ini. Aku resah. Ya! Aku resah. Hanya aku tak tahu harus bicara pada siapa. Dia yang ingin kutumpahi keluh-kesah jiwaku telah berkelana jauh ke alam mimpi.

Langit yang suram jadi kawan sejatiku malam ini. Langit ini nampaknya tahu betapa lemah dan lelahnya aku malam ini. Aku ingin sekali bercerita pada langit. Tapi, siapakah dia? Dia pasti akan mendengar semua kisahku. Aku tahu itu. Hanya saja, dia tak menjawab sepatah kata pun pada semua yang kutanyakan.

Jadilah seribu pertanyaan di kepalaku tetap menjadi pertanyaan yang aku pun tak tahu kapan akan terjawab. Toh, semua yang kutanyai tak ada satu pun yang memberi jawab.

Orang mungkin berpikir, tolol sekali ada orang yang bicara kepada langit. Tetapi mereka yang mengatakan hal ini, pasti tak pernah tahu bahwa hanya langitlah yang tak pernah menolak untuk mendengar segala keluh-kesah sampai sumpah serapahku. 

Ia tak pernah marah walau aku sering mengumpatnya. Ia pun tak tersenyum saat aku memujanya. Akan tetapi, meski ia tak bicara dan tak menjawab, ia tahu isi diriku karena hanya ia yang selalu mendengarku dengan seksama-setia tanpa pernah berkata tidak terhadap hadirku. Langitku adalah aku dalam diamku.

Why honesty?

This morning, I gave a presentation on honesty to new students at my school. It was such a difficult thing to present this topic. I personally feel that I haven’t been 100% honest in my life. It was hard, quite hard, both in preparation and delivery, but it’s gonna be much harder in the application. I realize that once I speak to the students about honesty they will watch me every day and I can’t imagine what they will think about me if they find me dishonest.

However, this task gives me an opportunity to look at myself. How honest am I? It’s the first question which came up when I prepared the presentation. I’m not a really good guy. I also live in a world of lies that can easily force me to be dishonest. I thought hard and I tried to find an answer whether I’m the right man to present this topic or not.

What went on afterwards was far beyond my presumption about myself. I found out that no matter how bad my past was, I had to give values to the life itself, more specifically to my students. I began to think about the future by thinking how I can contribute to this world.

Let’s begin now. We live in a very challenging world where many things are measured by what we have and what we don’t have. Frankly speaking, it’s all about wealthy, money, competition, etc. We forget that life is also about how to live it as it has to be and that we are all God’s creature who should create harmony in our life.

Harmony can be created by respecting each other and one of the ways to respect each other is by being honest. Honesty means being truthful in our thoughts, words, and actions. Being honest means choosing not to lie and cheat in any way although it’s not easy not to lie. We lie to avoid troubles, to look good to others, to hide behind failures, and also sometimes to avoid hurting somebody else’s heart.

Although, it’s very human and normal that sometimes we lie, we’d better try at our best to be honest. Honesty may hurt others, but it’s always better to tell the truth than to lie. Therefore, truth should be accompanied by affection and empathy. The nature of being honest is to create harmony in our life and harmony is always related to affection.

Let’s be honest for a better living. If it’s too difficult to be honest to others, start to be honest to ourselves first. We can never be honest to others without being truthful deep inside our heart. It’s not easy, but we can give it a try.  If we are honest, our character will always shine through. Listen to our heart and see what happens. God bless you all.

You Only Live Once

Yeahh, you only live once. We only live once. At least, that’s what we know about our present life. Though some people or some religions say that there’s a life after the life we live now but that’s, in my opinion, is unproven. So let’s just focus on our current life because it’s what we’re facing now.

I’m not going to teach you many things about life since many of you might have more experiences than what I have. I’m just about to share my thoughts about what I see in this wonderful world. Once again, honestly, I won’t teach you about life. I’m not that great to be a mentor of life.

All right, let’s start our discussion. Nowadays, life seems to be so stressful for some people. There are many causes of stress. Some of them are financial problems, being fired from job, job demands, the death of the one we love, an illness suffered by a member of the family, family problems, unhealthy social life, and many more.

Those causes can disrupt the harmony of our life both as an individual and as a member of the society. Then, how to get rid of our problems? It’s not an easy question to answer. As I know, there are some problems that we can solve and some problems that are very difficult to solve or, even worse, we can’t solve them because we don’t have control or power over them.

What can we do, then? The first thing to do is to act positively toward our problems. If we fail to control ourselves, then we’re likely to be stressed or, worse, depressed. Everybody can feel stressed. Nobody can avoid feeling stressed. I don’t believe that there’s somebody who never feels stressed. It’s impossible. We’re just common people, aren’t we?

However, in several cases, some people are unable to control their stress until physical symptoms force them to realize that they have to take serious actions. Sometimes, they leave their stress unchecked until it makes them ill. The solution might be to learn to recognize that they are stressed and to do something to minimize the stress and they should try to avoid additional stress. Knowing what is likely to cause stress can help us get rid of our stress.

Is that easy? Of course, not, but we must try every way to be aware of ourselves and to understand ourselves better. See ourselves deeper by having a reflection. Have we done everything properly? Or, did we make stupid mistakes that brought us to stress? Making some questions directed to ourselves and answering them personally might help us. We can also try at some points to put our burdens aside and to relax. Enjoying our life might be a good idea not to be stressed out. Make sure that we get enough fun out of life. If we can’t face the stress alone, seek support from others by sharing our problems might be helpful to minimize and to offload our stress.

Once again, we only live once. We must never let anything destroy our life. Keep calm and enjoy the ride. God bless you!

Let's be Happy

Who never feels sad, disappointed, or any other bad feelings? I guess nobody. Everybody must have ever felt those kinds of unpleasant feelings and it is pretty normal because we are just human beings who walk through our own paths that have different challenges and obstacles. It is impossible that we never get problems and difficulties in our life, impossible.

Nevertheless, should our problems destroy our life? The answer may vary. It may be “yes” when we are drowned in our problems without finding a way out or, even worse, we are trapped in our sadness so deeply that we do not have courage to get out of our problems. Or, it may be “no” when we keep on believing that a bad situation will end soon and we believe that there is still a hope to get back to the right track again.

The solution is actually in ourselves. Whether or not we will be happy depends on our attitude toward it. Do we see a problem as a part of our life or otherwise? Do we see a failures as the end of the world or otherwise? We actually have got the answer in ourselves.

The key is optimism. We should have a positive outlook to face everything in front of us. We must understand that life does not always turn out the way we plan. We have to see life as a journey that can be fun at a point and can be very difficult at another point. If we have the awareness that life is a learning process, it will be easy for us to feel happy whatever things might happen to us.

Life is full of choices and happiness is really a choice. We can choose to be happy or not. We can choose to accomplish our mission in this world nicely or not. Living our life is not easy but we can choose to enjoy it or to cry over it. If we choose to be happy in our life, start to think and act positively. Peaceful mind will lead us to better life. Don’t waste our time regretting what happened in the past but let’s begin to see the future happily. Be thankful for everything that we have got and enjoy every single step in our life will make us happier. Finally, let’s choose happiness as our mental state to face the world. Don’t worry, be happy. 

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. (Guillaume Apollinaire)