The Spanish guru who left Silicon Valley to become a “servant of God” as an Augustinian nun

 

Montserrat Medina left her successful career as a Deloitte executive to “invest in her future for eternal life”

 

“I don’t know the reason why the Lord has noticed me. The only thing I know for sure is that I have found ‘the treasure’”. This is how Montserrat Medina (Valencia, 37 years old) said goodbye on her LinkedIn account a year ago from her successful life in the Olympus of technology -Silicon Valley- to enroll in a new project, not business, but spiritual: becoming a “servant of God” as a contemplative nun in the Augustinian Order.

She left everything “with great regret” to “heed God’s call to follow him more closely”. While he delayed the true answer, “that which compromises life”, he used all his talents that “the infinite goodness of the Lord” granted him to “accumulate riches in this world”. Among them, being awarded a scholarship for a doctorate in mathematical and computational engineering at the prestigious Stanford University (USA) or being part of the renowned Deloitte audit in its area of Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

After a journey between ‘briefings’ and ‘Big Date’, he now dedicates his time to preparing pasta, sweet potato sweets and praying in silence at the Monastery of Santa Ana, located in the Castellon town of Sant Mateu. A temple focused on the contemplative life with a business in hand: the online store ‘El horno de las Monjas’. There he performed spiritual exercises periodically during his aspirant period until he made the decision to definitively enter this totally cloistered convent.

In her written goodbye, Montse recounted the “deep knowledge of the dirt” of her soul as she misunderstood the “desired perfection” to achieve “thing in this world” instead of “doing the will of God”. “I have lived twelve years ‘succeding’ according to the world’s parameters: I have university degrees, I have founded a ‘startup’ that has acquired a Fortune 100 and at only 34 years old I have become a partner at Deloitte”, said the now Augustinian nun.

The company that she created in 2011 in California and later sold in Silicon Valley, called Jetlore, pivoted around digital marketing and managed to build bridges and business relationships with exclusive clients such as LG, Inditex or eBay Such was the success that the online payment giant PayPal ended up buying it for several million dollars. “You never know where you are going to be in five years”, Montse commented in an interview with a YouTube channel in 2016, although she certainly did not imagine being one of the thirteen nuns who make up the community of the Monastery of Sant Mateu.

The Spanish guru received recognition from the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, an international competition for entrepreneurs and executives, and her name was included in the list of 21 young Spanish women under 35 years who have revolutionized the world of startups. However, her existential emptiness increased at the same rate as her trophy case.

Saint John of the Cross

 

(Juan de Yepes Alvarez, Fontiveros, Spain, 1542 – Ebeda, id, 1591) Spanish poet and religious. Born in am impoverished Hindu family, he began working very young in a hospital and received his intellectual training at the Jesuit school of Mediana del Campo.

In 1564 he began studying arts and philosophy at the University of Salamanca, where he met, in 1567, Saint Teresa of Jesus, with whom he agreed to found two new orders of Carmelites. His reformed barefoot Carmelite order stumbled upon the open hostility of the Carmelite shoes, despite which he managed to hold several positions. After teaching at a novice school in Mancera, he founded the school of Alcala de Henares. Later he became the confessor of the monastery of St. Teresa.

In 1577 the intrigues of the Carmelites shoes and he was imprisoned in a convent in Toledo for eight months. Alfer escaping, he sought refuge in Almodovar. He spent the rest of his life in Andalusia, where he became a provincial vicar. In 1591he fell again into disgrace and was deposed from all his religious positions, so he planned to emigrate to America, a project that frustrated his premature death. Canonized in 1726, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

The Poetry of Sain John of the Cross

Although the verses that are preserved from him are scarce and were not publish until after his death, he is considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the time and as the greatest exponent of mystical poetry. During the months of his confinement in 1577, which he spent in complete isolation and subjected to cruel interrogations, he prepared his so-called major poems: Call of living love, Spiritual Song and Dark Night.

For fear of being taken by “illuminists”, none of these works were published before 1618, when, with the exception of a spiritual canoer who was nine years later in Brussels, they were published under the title of Spiritual Works that lead to a soul to perfect union with God. In 1962 the work was published in Rome in prose Notices for After professed, written shortly before he died.

In his three major poems, closely related to each other, John condemned his own personal experiences, derived from the constat yearning that his sould would reach the ideal fusion with his Creator; the three compositions, in one way or another, describe the mystical ascent of the soul to God, and since they arose as a transits from a mystical experience that was expressed in allegories and symbols, Saint John of the Cross considered that they should be explained. This led to the writing of prose comments to the poems.

In Call of Living love, Saint John of the Cross recreates the emotion of loving ecstasy, while in Dark Night, which consists of eight lire, he uses the image of a girl who escapes at night to go o an appointment with his lover as a representation of the flight from the soul of the prison of the senses, in search of communion with God.

Spiritual song is the most complex and extensive work of his production. In it, to detail the different paths that the soul runs until it is possible to merge with divinity, it develops a recreation, as an eclogue, of the biblical Song of Songs. Through forty lire he describes the hunt for the Bridegroom (God) by his wife (the soul), who asks about him to the creatures of nature. After finding it, there is a loving dialog that culminates in the union of the two lovers.

Unlike Saint Teresa of Jesus, who adopts the colloquial tone and nourishes the effects of light to express the experience of communion with God, the poetry of Saint John of the Cross is constituted in a living language that, drinking in various sources, seeks the expression of arrow and the ecstasy of the mystical union; its purpose is to translate, or the less to let us see, that invisible and ineffable reality that is divine love, appealing to symbolism and the rich expressive and fascinate even non-believers, because their verses, by operating mainly as expressive ways of an intimate personal experience, do not compromise beliefs, traditions or cultures not shared by the subject.

As fruit of this mystical outburst, far from any logical discourse, predominate in the major poems of Saint John of the Cross the irrational, subconscious and intuitive elements that translate stylistically into a tendency to synthesis and a great expressive density predominate in the major poems of him. To communicate the experience sensations, dispense with any superfluous element and uses the noun abundantly, to the detriment of verbs and adjectives. In order to make known the joys that the mystical link produces, it uses with profusion the affective twists, repetitions, antithesis, chaotic enumerations, the sudden passage from one subject to another or allegorical references, based, for the most past, on the subject of profane love. It also does not exclude the popular and rustic lexicon, dialects and diminutives, which are presented alongside educated voices and words of symbolic content.

In this way, combining the ancient symbolism of the Song of Song with the formular typical of petrarquism, Saint John of the Cross produces a rich mystical literature that sinks its roots in themes theology and the medieval German and Flemish mystics. Its production reflects a wide religious formation, although it leaves the influence of 16^th-century song, especially on the use of profane love to symbolize and represent the mystical feeling of divine love. The stanza most used in his poems is the lira, although he shows equal looseness in the use of octosylling romance.

To this also contributes its tendency to abandon the discursive register and eliminate neutral links without aesthetic value to seek a constant juxtaposition of poetic elements of great plasticity. All this, together with the intellectual rigor that the author himself highlighted in this comments, gives the poetry a singular balance between his sensual images and the acetic and sublime impulse that inspired it, and makes it one of the summits of Renaissance lyrical in Spanish language.

Saint Teresa of Jesus

 

(Gotarrendura, Avila, 1515 – Alba de Tormes, 1582) Religious and Spanish mystical writer, also know as Santa Teresa de Ávila. Teresa de Jesus is the name of religion adopter by Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, probable descendant of converted Jews, and Beatriz de Ahumada, belonging to a notable Abulian family. His life and spiritual evolution can be followed through his works of an autobiographical natura, including some of his greatest works: Life (written between 1562 and 1565), Spiritual Relations, the Book of Foundations (initiated in 1573 and published in 1610) and his nearly five hundred Letters.

Life ranges from his childhood to the foundation of the first renovated convent of San Jose de Avila, in 1562. Thanks to her she knows her childhood fondness to read lives of saints and the then popular calvary books, that Miguel de Cervantes would parody in Don Quixote de la Mancha a century later. In 1531, her father placed her as a pupil in the convent of Augustine nuns of Santa Maria de Grace, but the following year she had to return home suffering from a serious illness. Determined to take the Carmelite habit against his father’s will, in 1535 he fled his house to head to the convent of the Incarnation. He saw the habit the following year, and in 1537 he made his profession.

At that time a time of anguish and illness began for his, which would last until 1542. During these years she confesses that she learned to trust God unlimitedly and that she began to practice the method of prayer called “recognizing”, explained by Francis de Osuna in his ‘Third Spiritual alphabet’. She rejoiced from his ailments, she began to instruct a group of nuns of the Incarnation in the life of prayer and to plan the reform of the Carmelite order to restore the ancient rigor, mitigated in 1432 by Pope Eugene IV.

She then began to be favoured with visions- imaginary, and “intellectual”, visions that would happen throughout his life and that determined his crises to find out if that was the spirit of God, or the deceit. Its ideal of reform of the order was concretised in 1562 with the foundation of the convent of San José. Then begins a new stage in his life, in which the dedication to contemplation and prayer is shared with an extraordinary activity to achieve the triumph of the Carmelitean reform.

From 1567 until his death, he founded in Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladold, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Beas, Seville, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Palencia, Soria and Burgos. In 1568 the first reformed male convent was erected in Duruelo, thanks to the collaboration of San Juan de la Cruz and Father Antonio de Heredia. She drafted the Constitutions (1563), which were approved in 1565 by Pius IV and which are based on the following points: life of prayer in the cell, fasting and abstinence of meat, renunciation of rents and properties (communal or private) and the practice of silence.

To help his nuns realize their ideal of religious life, he composed Camino de Perfection (written between 1562 and 1564 and published in 1583)  and The Homes or Castle Inner (1578). The reaction of members of the former Carmelite observance reached its climax in 1575, when they denounced the barefoot to the Inquisition. A brief from Rome, in 1580, ordered the separation of the two orders.

In 1604 the process of canonization of Teresa began. In 1614 she was declared a beate, and in 1622 she was canonized by Gregory XV. In 1970 she was proclaimed a doctor of Church, being the first woman to receive this distinction. In addition to the above-mentioned works, he left the following written: Meditations on song, Exclamations, Visiting barefoot, Notices, Ordinances of a brotherhood, Notes, Spiritual challenge, Vejamen and about thirty poetry.

 

Saint Francis Xavier

 

(Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta: Castle of Xavier, 1506 – Island of Sancian, China, 1522). Spanish missionary. While studying philosophy and theology in Paris he met Ignacio de Loyola, who recruited him for his project to found a new order. Francis made his first vows in Paris (1534), or a priest in Venice (1537) and participated in the foundation of the Society of Jesus in Rome (1539).

Since them he has been consecrated to missionary activity: in 1541 he was sent to India as a pontifical legacy, with the mission to evangelize the lands located east of Cape Good Hope, responding to a request from John III of Portugal. In 1542 in Goa (the capital of Portuguese India), it carried out intense activity caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, preaching Christianity, converting natives, negotiating with local authorities and defending justice against the abuses of settlers.

Its apostolate spread across southern India, Ceylon, Malacca, the Moluccas Islands and Japan. As he was preparing to enter China to continue his work, he died of pneumonia at the gates of Canton. He was canonized in 1622 and declared patron of missions of the Catholic Church.

Biography:

Francisco de Jasso was the youngest son of Juan de Jasso y Atondo, president of the Royal Council of Navarre, and María de Azpilicueta y Aznárez, head of the lordship of Javier, defenders of the cause of Juan de Albert in front of Ferdinand II the Catholic in the war that determined the annexation of Navarre to the Crown of Castile (1512-1515). After the death of his father (1515) and the demolition of the towers and walls of Javier’s castle by order of Cardinal Cisneros (1516) as a result of the support given by his brothers Juan and Miguel to the uprising in favour of the dethroned Navarra king, Francisco Javier oriented towards the ecclesiastical career and the cultivation of the humanities, which he studied in Leyre and Pamplona.

In 1525, probably already acquired the tonsure, he moved to Paris to complete his training; he entered as an intern at the College of Santa Barbara, where he made friends with Pedro Fabro and Ignacio de Loyola. In 1530 he graduated from as a teacher in the arts and went on to teach philosophy with the position of regent professor at Dormans-Beauvais College, while studying theology. In order to acquire ecclesiastical benefits, in 1531 he requested in 1531 the council of Pamplona to grant a canonja , claiming his status as a Navarra cleric and his degree in arts.

However, his relationship with Ignacio de Loyola, who intended to attract him to the project of founding a new religious order, as well as his displeasure with the university environment and the impression caused by the death of his mother and sister, which took place at that time, determined Francisco Javier to abandon his promotional claims within the ecclesiastical establishment. Together with Ignacio de Loyola and five other comrades, gathered in the Parisian chapel of Montmatre, on August 14,1534 he vowed vows of chastity and poverty, of life consecrated to the apostolate and of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or, in the event that the latter was not possible, to make himself available to the Pope.

In 1537 he moved to Venice, where he met with his companions in order to travel to Rome to obtain the papal blessing before starting his pilgrimage; during his staying in Venice he received news of the concession of the requested cononja, to which he renounced, and the beginning of the war between Constantinople and Venice, which meant the indefinite delay of the trip to the Holy Land. Ordained a priest on June 24 of that year, he devoted himself to preaching in Bologna until his departure to Rome, where Francis and his companions met with Paul III and definitively abandoned their pilgrimage purposes.

During their stay at the Holy See they managed the foundation of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, to which the Pope granted his verbal approval in September 1539. That year Ignacio de Loyola learned that Jonh III of Portugal asked missionaries to march to preach Christianity in his possessions in the East Indies and entrusted the task to Fracis Xavier, who in March 1540 left for the Portuguese court to organize the expedition, with the title of pontifical legacy for all lands located east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Started the trip in Abril 1541, he arrived in Goa, the capital of Portuguese possessions in India, thirteen months later. He carried out an active evangelizing work in this city, especially since the foundation of the school-seminar of Santa Fe for native priests, and of dedication to the sick and prisoners. In September 1542 he organized a missionary expedition to the coast of Pesqueria, in southeastern India, to preach Christian doctrine among the villages; established a Christian community and provided it with a catechism in the indigenous language. After that, the evangelization of Travancor and Ceylon, Madra and Malaca and the Moluccas Islands began. Francis Xavier administered baptism to thousands of natives, overcome the opposition of the Brahmins and established a assiduous correspondence with the members of the Society of Jesus in Rome, whose news, to which his reputation as taumaturgo gave rise to numerous missionary vocations among his companions.

After a new stay in India and Malacca, dedicated to reorganizing the established missions and providing them with operations rules, he went to evangelize Japan, when he arrive in 1549; he preached for two years in Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi and Bungo, establishing favorable contacts for his work with the Japanese Daymians or feudal governors, although the opposition of the Buddhist monks greatly hindered his activity, in the face of the few conservations achieved in Japan, it was persuaded that to succeed in its company it was necessary to evangelize China previously, since it considered that the Japanese had assimilated the culture of this empire and that, therefore, the example of Christianity in China would exert decisive influence on Japan.

Claimed by the missionary communities of India, he returned to Goa in 1551, where he began the necessary procedures to organize his intended trip to China, hindered by the prohibition in this empire over the entry of foreigners into his territory. After his appointment as a provincial of India, which had been constituted as the independent Jesuit province of Portugal, he left for China with a Portuguese embassy in April 1552, but had to stop in Malaca, where he spent two months trying to overcome the resistance that Governor Alvaro de Ataide opposed the project.

He finally reprimanded the trip to the island of Sancayan, where death occurred before the Chinese reed arrived that was to transport him to Canton. His remains were transferred to Goa in 1554, where his cult spread quickly. At the beginning of the 17^th century the process of his beatification began, proclaimed by Paul V on October 25, 1619; appointed patron of Navarre in 1621, on March 12 of the following year he was canonized by Gregory XV, together with Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Pius X declared him patron of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1904, and Pius XI patron of all missions in 1927. His party is celebrated on December 3.

 

Lebron James’ Lakers and Tyrese Haliburton’s Pacers, to the first NBA Cup final

 

Indiana’s team surprises the Milwaukee Bucks with the star performance of their base, while Los Angeles roams the New Orleans Pelicans

 

The NBA’s most laureate team against another who has never won a title. Los Angeles Lakers veteran LeBron James vs Indiana Pacers of rising star Tyrese Haliburton. The NBA Cup final, the new American professional basketball tournament, is served and is quite a surprise. At the start of the competition, no one would have bet on a final like this, but the cup is the cup, even if it is the first time it has been played. Single-game qualifiers in such an equal championship lend themselves to any outcome. On Saturday in Las Vegas the honors of the new trophy will premiere.

On the way, all the favourites have been left. The first to fall were Nikola Jovic’s Denver Nuggets, which didn’t even go beyond the group phase. The Boston Celtics stumbled in quarters with Indiana, which Thursday was also able against Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Milwaukee Bucks (128-119).

The NBA Cup has seen a star grow. Tyrese Haliburton is for now the tournament’s most prominent player. Since he began his NBA career he has been able to maintain averages of more than 40% hit on 2-point shots and about 50% in field shots. At 23 years and 1.96 meters tall, the base was already the third best rookie of the season of its premiere, the 2020-2021, with the Sacramento Kings. In February 2022 he entered a transfer for which Domantas Sabonis left the Pacers for California and he ended up in Indiana. Last time was his first full season and he already made a hole in the All Star in Salt Lake City, after showing an inappropriate maturity of his age and a range of resources difficult to stop. In their matches against the Celtics and against the Bucks he has consecrated himself and the Pacers caress what can be his first title.

In front of Boston, he scored the first triple of his career with 26 points, 13 assists and 10 rebounds without any loss of ball. He was key to his team’s triumph, as was Thursday. Against Milwaukee he has scored 27 points, 15 assists and 7 rebounds. We’re playing the right way and we’re surprising the world right now. “We’re going to keep doing it”, Haliburton said at the end of the game.

Myles Turner scored 26 points for Indiana, while Obi Toppin contributed 14 in a six-hit series on eight field shots. The Indiana team is unleashed in attack all season, with 128.3 points on average, and 132.6 in cup games.

Giannis Antetokounmpo scored as much as he could and scored 37 points and 10 rebounds for the Milwaukee Bucks. Damiam Lillard scored 24 points; Khris Middleton,20, and Brook Lopez,18. However, Indiana’s alternatives far ousted Milwaukee’s, adding 43 points to 13. “Our bench really made a difference in today’s game”, Indiana coach Rick Carlisle said. “We have one of the best benches in the NBA, if not the best bench in the NBA”, Haliburton said. We are a very deep team, with many different players who can bring their grain of sand. I’m sure we have a lot of guys that people aren’t very familiar with, but they’re sure to be very familiar with”, he added.

The semifinal was fairly even until the end. The first quarter ended Milwaukee’s lead 27-29. In the second, Indiana’s alternates were in charge of opening the gap with a 36-22 partial. The Bucks recovered in the third quarter and came to the decisive moment with an advantage for them (91-94). Indiana was plugged in the last quarter, with a 14-8 partial and Haliburton’s successes at the key moments consolidated and expanded that advantage in the face of Antetokounmpo’s impotence.

Meanwhile, the semi-final of the Western Conference had much less history. The current Lakers are an irregular team, but except in their days of nonsense they are far superior to the Pelicans. New Orleans held only the first quarter (29-30 in their favour). In the second they sank (38-24) and in third they disappeared (43-17). He reached the last quarter with a 110-71 advantage in favour of the Lakers or, what is the same, with the semifinal more than resolved. In the end, the distance widened even further, to 133-89 at the end of the game.

Darvin Ham, the Angels coach, decided to give rest to LeBron James, who went to the bench with 30 points in just 23 minutes, and Anthony Davis, who scored 16 points and 15 rebounds in 31 minutes.

The NBA has bet heavily on this new competition format, similar to the traditional European cup tournaments, with a strong promotion, new designs of the pavilions and the excitement of the single-party qualifiers. The new tournament seems to have boosted television audiences in this early part of the season.

In addition to the title, the champion team players will receive a $500,000 prize each. The runners-up will have $200,000 a head, while those of the two losing semifinal teams charge $100,000 and the players of those eliminated in the quarterfinals, $50,000. This Saturday the best player of the tournament and the ideal quintet will also be chosen. LeBron Jamen and Tyrese Haliburton have plenty of ballots.

A 407 million-year-old mushroom declared the oldest pathogen

 

A funncial plant pathogen preserved in the fossil collections of the Natural History Museum has been identified as the oldest disease-causing fungus.

Potteromyces asteroxylicla, who is 407 million years old, has been named after the celebrated author of Peter Rabbit’s history and mushroom enthusiast, Beatrix Potter. The discovery is published in Nature Communications.

Beatrix’s drawings and his study on the growth of fungi, which in some cases advanced decades to scientific research, have earned him the reputation of being an important figure in mycology.

Potteromyces was discovered in fossil samples from Rhynie Chert, a fossil site in Scottland. The site is known to a community of early devonic plants and animals, including bacteria and fungi.

The new study, completed in collaboration with mycologists from the Royal Botanic Garden of Kew, suggests that fungi that cause diseases, such as ash, that currently decimate native ash in the United Kingdom, and fungi that can circulate the nutrients on which plants and other organism depend to survive, have a historical precedent in Potteromyces.

The Dr. Christine Strullu-Derrien, a scientist associate at Natural History Museum and lead author of the study describing the new species, say in a statement: “Although other fungal parasites have been found in this area before, this is the first case of one that cause a disease in a plant. Moreover, Potteromyces can provide a valuable point from which to date the evolution of different groups of fungi, such as Ascomycota, the largest fungal edge”.

Strullu-Derrien found the first Potteromyces specimen in 2015. Their reproductive structures, known as coniioforos, had a unusual shape and formation as had never been seen before.

Equally unusual was the fact that this mysterious fungus was found attacking an old plant called Asteroxylon mackiei. The plant had responded by developed dome-shaped growths, proving it must have been alive while the fungus attacked.

In order for the team to determine that it was indeed a new species, another case of the fungus needed to be found. This is because the nature of fungi differs greatly among individuals.

Confirmation was achieved when a second specimen was found in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland in another slide from Rhyne Chert.

Climate activists throw mud onto the facade of the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice

 

A group of environmental activists threw mud on Thursday on the facade of the Basilica of Sant Mark in Venice, in a protest that has resulted in the arrest of at least six people.

Several of these activists have used fire extinguishers to throw the mud on the south façade and a column of the basilica, located in the central Sant Mark square. Then several more have come together to display a banner on which you could read “Reparation Fund”, the campaign promoted by organization Last Generation.

The maintenance staff of the church itself have been able to clean up much of the dirt, although the architect of the basilica, Mario Piana, who has arrived at the site shortly after the incident, has harshly condemned this protest action, according to the RAI network.

The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, has also expressed on social media his discomfort at an action he considers “very serious and shameful”, “it is legitimate to express discrepancies, but always with respect for the law and our cultural and religious heritage”, said Brugnaro, who criticized “vandalism” as a method of “finding solutions” in the field of the environment.