To Josephine, from Taipei

 July 20, 1989

To Josephine, from Taipei

First, let me disabuse you of the common notion that everything works perfectly in Taiwan. It doesn’t. Three things have gone awry so far.

First, the weather. We flew in at the tail of a typhoon, and it looks like we’re about to run smack into another on our way out, but I can’t really bitch about that, can I? I just have to clutch my beads and hope that my shirt doesn’t end up drinking tea.

Second, a computer. They installed a brand new one, a COPAM, in the room upon our arrival (yes, this is a working trip all right) and, horror of horrors in this land of clones, the blasted thing refused to boot. Not their fault, though. It turned out the CPU was locked up. The resident nerd fixed that in a jiffy.

Third, we got lost. Our host wanted us to inspect one of his properties, an amusement park of sorts right beneath a dam in the city’s outskirts. Two problems: the driver didn’t know the way, and the directional signs weren’t where they should have been. As a result, we lost half a day just meandering about some pretty desolate and narrow byways.

Not that I was altogether unhappy, as our numerous detours gave me glimpses of day to day life in the countryside. These impressed me: the mountains were thickly wooded, every tiny patch of land as far as the eye could see was tilled, and there wasn’t a single “tambay” in sight anywhere.

Taipei itself, insofar as this brief visit allows me to tell, is a cross between Caloocan and Singapore. It strikes me as the quintessentially schizophrenic Asian city – occidental, organized and efficient on top, oriental, frenetic, and topsy-turvy at bottom. And humid as home.

Horrendous traffic jams on the freeways and main thoroughfares, where daredevil drivers of top of the line Japanese, American and European models and swarms of battered, puny scooters constantly try to outdo each other. Run-down tenement houses crowding humongous high rises. Tai Chi at dawn, Karaoke at dusk. Everywhere hordes of people in constant motion and great hurry. But at least the trees in the parks and lining the boulevards look healthy and happy.

Shopping here is decidedly an aggravation. The prices are astronomical, compounding which hardly anyone speaks English. A bane and a boon: though my pocket hurts, my sign language has improved.

Most items cost double if not triple what they do in Manila. In the hotel, a bottle of beer, Taiwan or Carlsberg, is around P80, a bottle of Coke P60. Outside, a cup of Blue Mountain coffee is P60 also, but at least it’s the genuine article. Really, Taipei is Tokyo with the price tags but without the quality, or Hongkong without either the range of choices or the haggling.

I can’t quite understand why so few speak the universal language. Not the giggly counter girls, nor the avuncular policemen, nor the septuagenarian (I swear) street sweepers. In our hotel, only the supervisors do, but only rudimentarily. And, of course, the Filipinos.

You’ll be happy to know there are some 40,000 of our tribe here now. Good news in that respect: we’re not openly disdained in these parts. I guess that’s because apart from the fact that our respective Chinese communities trade and cross-pollinate freely, Pinay maids in Taipei are not an ubiquitous, unruly breed as they are in Hongkong and elsewhere. Here, as the Brits say, we do not foul the footpaths. Not yet, anyway.

Otherwise, just a jumble of impressions:

The service on PAL compares favourably with that on China Airlines, which is still just about the stodgiest thing there is on wings: crime and fashion aren’t consuming passions: the “China Post” invariably looks like the handiwork of some campus publication staff, “sans” news, “sans” malice: department stores stay open until 9:30 p.m. and there are variety shows on TV close to midnight: not a single beggar or stray cat on the streets.

Can’t say it’s fun to live here, but safer than safe to do so it most certainly is. After home, this kind of anonymous dullness is refreshing.

In Praise of Benedict

 July 11, 1989

In Praise of Benedict

“Once there was a man who was revered for the holiness of his life. Benedict was his name, and he was also blessed with God’s grace.” Thus begins the Life and Miracles of St. Benedict, whose feast the Catholic Church celebrates tomorrow, written by Pope St. Gregory the Great, himself a Benedictine monk. Who indeed was Benedict, and how did he come to play such a vital role, not just in the history of the Church, but in the evolution of Western civilization?

Nothing we know of Benedict through his hagiographer Gregory prepares us for the disproportionate influence he has wielded on the course of religious and human events these past millennium and a half. He was born around 480 A.D., the scion of a noble Roman family. As a young student, he found life in the imperial capital so decadent and corrupt he decided to become a hermit and seek God. Subsequently, he established two monasteries for those who sought to follow his example. He died about 547 A.D. That is all.

But the age in which Benedict lived was one of conflict and violent change. The old Empire was dying. Barbarian armies under Attila, Alaric and Genseric had overrun the Italian peninsula, devastating everything in their path and all but extinguishing every vestige of Graeco-Roman culture. It was in such a setting that the way of life prescribed by Benedict for his monks started to assume crucial significance.

Strangely so, for all Benedict really wanted to do when he set down his Rule for monks was to provide them with a framework within which to pursue a regimen of ora et labora, work and prayer totally dedicated to God’s service, in an atmosphere of peace and quiet away from the hustle and bustle of secular living. But peace and quiet was precisely what the men and women of those troubled times most needed, and as all Europe plunged deeper into what we have come to know as the Dark Ages, it was the Benedict’s monasteries that they turned to for refuge and solace.

Order, strength, stability, security: in a world gone awry, these were the values these religious enclaves stood for, and their very construction made these values immediately apparent. Look at Monte Cassino, the second monastery Benedict founded on the summit of a mountain overlooking the road from Rome to Naples. The words massive, formidable, impregnable readily come to mind. Obviously built to last, it is now almost 1,500 years old!

This ancient edifice bears witness, not just to divine zeal and spiritual fortitude, but likewise to human  organization and achievement. For Benedict was both a man of God and a Roman – and, therefore, also a very practical man. God provides, but man lives by the sweat of his brow just the same.

Behind the high and thick walls of monasteries like Monte Cassino were not only seekers after perfection and holiness, but hardworking and highly skilled builders, craftsmen, artisans, cooks and farmers, not to mention scholars, musicians, and scientists, constituting a large family perfectly capable of looking after its own needs.

Not only did they preserve and copy the theological, philosophical, literary and scientific texts of classical antiquity. They also constructed edifices, cleared forests, built roads and bridges, cultivated fields, raised livestock, poultry and fish, spun yarn, fed and clothed the poor, healed the sick, welcomed pilgrims and strangers. All these, at a time when the rest of known humanity in the west merely struggled to stay alive.

The great libraries, the soaring cathedrals of England, the large farms of Germany, the great vineyards of France as well as the books, blocks of stone, and the crop strains, machines and implements used to organize them: they are the enduring legacy of that obscure genius who started out looking for God in wilderness and ended up saving the world of mankind.

The Lord has truly risen!

 May 25 1989

The Lord has truly risen!

The wonderful thing about the gospels is they do not demand that we take the Resurrection of Christ at face value. Their authors, Luke and John in particular, take great pains to show that for the disciples themselves, the first Easter was no fait accompli.

Indeed, so totally traumatic must have been the passion and crucifixion of the Master that at the outset, these lowly fishermen found it virtually impossible to believe that He would come back from the grave as promised. He had died. They were lost. That was all.

Alas. The women were no help. At crack of dawn after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Salome, had gone to anoint the dead Jesus, found His tomb empty, and come back with some wild story about apparitions, but why trust them? They were probably still too distraught over the shocking events of the past few days.

Under the circumstances, the most plausible explanation was that robbers had broken into the tomb and taken Him away. Meanwhile, the priests at the temple were peddling quite another story. It was the disciples themselves who had stolen His body!

At that moment, the disciples could do no more than hide and huddle together, petrified by dark forebodings about what lay in store for them. For with the Master gone, who would save them from the Sanhedrin and an end as ignominious as His? How to mollify that unruly mob now loudly complaining they have been had by a false messiah and his minions? Spared either fate, where would they go and what were they to do with themselves next?

It is amidst such confusion and trepidation that the real story of Esther begins to unfold, a story of longing perfected by love, fear vanquished through hope, and doubt yielding to faith. In the end, as the gospels of John and Luke tell it, the Resurrection is all about human frailty overtaken and transfigured by divine grace.

A repentant sinner, two cowards, and an obdurate, ornery man: to these unlikely characters above all the rest Jesus revealed the real meaning of and import of His Resurrection.

In John we find Mary Magdalene remaining outside the tomb after the others have left, unabashedly weeping “Because they have taken my Lord and I don’t know where they have put him.” So distressed is she that when Jesus himself appears, she mistakes Him for the gardener and pleads, “Tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”

Her grief, persistence and courage are rewarded. Quietly, gently, in a voice she could not have mistaken for anyone else’s, He calls her by name: Mary! Immediately she recognizes Jesus and exclaims: Rabboni, Beloved Master!

He calls, she replies. He is risen. At that moment, everything else is superfluous.

Luke next recounts that later in the day, two disciples were going to Emmaus, ‘a village seven miles from Jerusalem.” Their hopes crushed, they were on their way home, distancing themselves from the terrors of the previous days and trying to come to terms with an uncertain future.

A stranger joined them on the road. It was Jesus, “but their eyes were held and they did not recognize him.” They told him the reason for their dejection; three days after he was crucified and buried, their Master had disappeared from the tomb. Their women were spreading strange stories but “Some friends of our group went to the tomb…but him they did not see.”

Patiently He explained Scriptures to them, but they were unconvinced. As it was growing late, they asked Him to spend the night with them at Emmaus. There, “When they were at table, he took the bread, said a blessing, broke it and gave each apiece.” Only then did the two recognize Jesus, but He had vanished.

But what they had failed to see with their eyes earlier they had felt in their hearts. For as they now realized, ”Were not our hearts filled with ardent yearning when he was talking to us on the road and explaining the Scriptures?” Mysteriously, unexpectedly, anguish had turned to stillness, sadness has given birth to joy.

No such thing for another disciple, however. John explains that when Jesus first appeared to the rest, “Thomas the Twin, one of the Twelve, was not with them.” When told that they had seen the Lord, he replied that he would not believe until he had seen the mark of the nails with his own eyes and put his hand in Jesus’ side.

Eight days later, he got exactly what he asked for. The Risen Christ stood in front of him and said,”Put your finger here and see my hands; stretch out your hand and put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe.” To which a shamefaced Thomas could only reply, as doubtless all of us will someday:” You are my Lord and my God.”

Beside an empty tomb, on the road to Emmaus, face to face with the Savior: at the sound of His voice, from the glow in our hearts, and at the sight of His wounds, we know that we woill rise as He is risen and rejoice our waiting.

To my brothers in Malaybalay, a blessed Easter.

The View from a Hill

 May 20, 1989

The View from a Hill

Where I try to do my centering every other month or so is atop this small hill amidst rolling fields in the shadow of Mt. Kitanlad in Bukidnon. The Transfiguration is a young community of Benedictine monks whose lives revolve around two basic activities: Ora, prayer, chanted dawn to dusk seven times a day, and Labora, work, which in this instance entails farming a 40-hectare tract planted to coffee, corn, peanuts, rice and bananas.

Launched only eight years ago, this monastic experiment has thrived because vocations have been plentiful and donations generous. In the interim membership has trebled and the number of buildings on site has doubled. Coaxing the land to produce, however, has been slower going.

This particular farm is no del Monte or BUSCO of Nieto-Zubiri fame. Seven kilometres from Malaybalay the landscape and the living is rural and rudimentary. The soil is rocky and acidic. There is water, but it must be sourced far beneath the surface. Rainfall is abundant but with the nearby mountains balding difficult to retain.

The monks are not trained farmers and cannot yet afford machines. Thus everything in the field must be done manually, a back-breaking and time-consuming process. Nevertheless soiling their hands is an absolute necessity because as a not so jovial note appended to a list of field assignments on their bulletin board warns, ”If you do not work, you do not eat!”

For the monks farming in these parts and in this fashion quite often becomes an exercise in frustration. So far only half of the land has been brought under cultivation. When the rains falter the crops wither on their stalks. The cash from corn and peanuts might keep a nuclear family from starving but will not indefinitely sustain 17 full-grown men.

There is barely enough rice for the community’s meals that are 80 per cent staple and 20 per cent viand, but the monks can no more complain about this than they can begrudge that most of their bananas are stolen for if they are vowed to poverty, their neighbours are fated to it, both of them for life.

Coffee which grows well in Bukidnon is a way out of this common destiny. The trees the monks planted four or five years ago are now starting to bear fruit. Last year the beans grossed them less than P100,000. This year they had hoped to do better, but with supply temporarily exceeding demand, Filipro, which controls the market in the area, will pay only P28 a kilo for their produce.

So far for now the monks have 40 large sacks of dried, husked coffee beans that aren’t going anywhere. They will not spoil, but in the meantime there are mounting farm expenses (for lime, fertilizers, water, seedlings) and a sizeable payroll to support. The payroll is for farmhands in the community’s employ, to save them from certain hunger.

And likely mischief. On the next hill shanties have sprouted belonging to former labourers who have been dismissed for thievery and worse offenses. They squat on government property that the monks have applied for to reforest at their own expense to keep the erosion problem under control.

For many months now the monks’ application with the DENR has languished, shunted from one office to another thanks to bureaucratic red tape. As Mr. Factoran’s high rhetoric fails to be matched by his subalterns’ uncertain zeal for nature conservancy, the squatters have grown bolder, refusing to budge, harassing their neighbours and freely living off the fat of other people’s land.

One suspects, in fact, that they and their ilk are up to worse a little further off. Two or three kilometers from the monastery the mountains begin. But three to four years ago they were covered thick top to bottom with towering pine trees, but no longer. There are mysterious bonfires on these mountains almost every afternoon and evening now, swaths of charred timber and ugly gashes the morning after.

But is this any more tragic than what now goes on right at the foot of these mountains? There, in the last two months since my last visit, some unknown Chinaman’s bulldozers and tractors have cleared a vast tract. He will be planting sugarcane.

In a replay of what has been happening on both sides of the highway from Manolo Fortich to Valencia, he has gobbled up many small and medium-sized landholdings, dispossessed numerous farmers and sharecroppers, and uprooted tubers, cereals and fruit-bearing trees wholesale to replace them with the crop that has turned Negros into a hotbed-basketcase.

Vagrants and squatters today, sacadas and insurgents tomorrow. Bountiful soil now, a veritable wasteland by the time this century closes as sugarcane, pineapple, ramie and such steadily sap the earth of its nutrients. Truly grim on final reckoning will be the wages of carelessness and greed in Bukidnon, once thrice-blessed and happy country.

Fuga, tace, quiesce. The monks have come here to seek true freedom of spirit in silence and repose, but the hill on which they pray can no more be isolated from the troubled world below, it seems, than their petitions can ignore the pain and sorrow those who inhabit it are heir to.

But herein precisely lies the very meaning of their monkhood. For in the end theirs is a sign of contradiction. By being in the world though not of it, their seemingly useless, helpless lives bear quiet, gentle witness to that divine mercy which alone avails, transforming human weakness into perfect grace.

A Logical Absurdity

 April 14, 1990

A Logical Absurdity

In the end, faith comes down to this: either it is given or it is not; either it is altogether absurd, or it is absolutely necessary. I suppose that is why, through the ages, believers and non-believers have had equal difficulty explaining their respective positions. Quite simply the God thing just boggles the human mind. Whether for a Thomas Aquinas or a Bertrand Russell it defies the most rigorous rationalization.

On such account, I rather like what the contemporary Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, a lapsed Catholic, once told an interviewer who asked whether he had ever considered any other religion: ”Between a logical absurdity and an illogical one, I would rather have the first.” In other words, whether you believe or not, you might as well go the whole hog.

The Catholic religion is built upon all kinds of rituals commemorating the sacred mysteries. None are more ancient and extravagant than those of Holy Week. None demonstrate what Eco refers to as a logical absurdity in more explicit and systematic a fashion. In but four short days unfolds the greatest drama of all times, a tale of defeat and triumph both compounding and compelling.

Thursday the Son of God, the Savior of the World is betrayed. Friday he suffers and dies on the cross like a common thief. Saturday he lies entombed, his life and teachings seemingly come to naught, his loved ones and followers thrown into blind terror and utter confusion. Sunday, as he had promised, he rises victorious from the grave.

True, the whole story is absurd, but in the end, it is also logical, as logical as the very pattern of nature, the cycle of life and death that maintains and nourishes the earth, is necessary and ineluctable.

Most of us no longer see that, of course. But before scientific progress alienated man from the soil and other living forms; before it obliterated the distinction between night and day and blurred the passage of the seasons; and before it held up the possibility of an indefinite sojourn on this planet, faith merely confirmed to our Christian forbears the higher meaning of what daily they perceived with their own senses.

They saw the sun wane at dusk, as they saw darkness yield to light at dawn. In winter animals hibernated and the fields lay frozen and fallow, but all of nature stirred anew with the advent of spring. Vines withered and then flowered. Seed had to die before being sown and germinating into new life beneath the ground, and wheat when ripe was cut down and winnowed.

Today we have come to call Black Saturday. Understandably, for indeed it is the bleakest time of the year, numbed as we have been by the orgy of pain and sorrow of the past two days and still in the dark as to its real intent and final outcome.

It is winter in our soul as outwardly the Church manifests only emptiness and desolation: the altar is left bare, the sacrifice of the mass is not celebrated, and holy communion is given only as a viaticum. But the surrounding gloom is attenuated by our certainty of his rising. We know it will come, and soon.

Tonight, towards midnight, we will celebrate His resurrection. At the Easter Vigil, a single large taper will be lit and introduced into a totally blackened church. And as we chant Lumen Christi, the Light of Christ, we will each draw light from that source until all darkness is dispelled.

What we do externally we shall do internally as well, for later in the mass we will also renew our baptismal vows, promising to reject Satan, the father of sin and the prince of darkness, and to live in the freedom of God’s children.

For a Catholic, no rite could be more meaningful and poignant than this evening’s, and no truth deeper or more compassing than the passage from death to life it commemorates. Without it our Lenten observance would be pointless, and our Easter joy incomplete.

The Meaning of Sin

 April 12, 1990

The Meaning of Sin

In olden days, today was when sovereigns distributed Maundy money, specially minted silver coins, to the needy. The practice must have harked back to the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus. Doubtless the high and mighty of yesteryears resorted to this symbolic sharing of largesse to expiate their own perfidies. Through it they sought to bear witness to the message of Christ’s passion and resurrection, which is that of greed overcome through generosity, sin transformed by grace.

No such bounty awaits our people now in the hands of those who preside over their lives. Not only is there no reprieve from their grinding poverty; today, total darkness also threatens this parched land. To many these are clear signs that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn and that the anger of God has been unleashed. They are harsh warnings that without cleansing and contrition, there will be no redemption and resurrection.

At EDSA our prayers were answered: the sea parted to let us through and then swallowed the chariots of the pharaoh. But in exchange for our hour of deliverance, we turned contumelious and haughty anew. Our leaders schemed and squabbled. We grumbled and rebelled, resuming worship of false idols and graven gods. After four years of aimless wandering in the desert, surely the time has come to acknowledge how far we all have strayed from the law, from the path of righteousness.

We must accept that human frailty, rather than divine severity, has caused our plight, and the reason we have brought so much pain and suffering upon ourselves is that given every opportunity to do well by ourselves and others, we have chosen to do otherwise. That at its most basic is the meaning of sin.

To err when we shouldn’t and needn’t is failing sorry enough. But sin is not just wilful folly; in many instances it is also a deliberate refusal to share with our fellowmen what they need and what we can give to make life more equitable and bearable for all. Selfishness – lack of kindness  and compassion – is by far the more grievous offense, as it tempts others to despair of man’s goodness and God’s justice.

It is worse, not just because it is also more insidious and endemic. It is worse because at its root is pride, the sense, if not the conviction, that we deserve to live fully and others not, and that what we are and have is owed to our being better at what we do than the rest.

To sin, in such light, is to forget that we are all sons and daughters of the same Father, and that He has made us to be each other’s keeper and custodians of the same earth, whose goods we must therefore enjoy in common and in more or less equal measure. It is to lose sight of the truth that without Him we would not be, and that without his love and mercy we are nothing.

Above all, then, this is the lesson that Jesus, His Firstborn’s agony and death teaches us: the highest and greatest must be the last. For how can it be otherwise for us, when He who is without sin has seen fit to bear all our sins?

This is the time to remind ourselves of how far we are still from the ideal of total giving and self-forgetting, wherein the salvation of mankind ultimately lies. Today and tomorrow we must mourn, not just the dying of our God, but the reason why it had and has to be: our continued wavering in the choice between His cross and our silver.

Let us endeavour to see, in the dry and dark season that the blindness of our leaders and our own wastefulness have brought upon us, not just a reproach to inconstancy and weakness, but a call to penitence and pardon.

 

Of Nuns and Monks

 March 31, 1990

Of Nuns and Monks

Sad, but just about the only time the cloistered variety make the news these days, it sems, is when they get involved in a scandal. For instance:

Eight Poor Clares in Bruges, Belgium landed in the April 2 edition of Newsweek by providing handsomely for their retirement. They sold their convent for $1.4 million, bought a $110,000 Mercedes limo, a farm, and a string of race horses, and relocated to a chateau in the south of France. Agence France Presse, on the other hand, reported the other day that “A mother superior and an abbott in charge of neighboring religious establishments in Normandy, Northwestern France, have resigned after falling in love. It quoted the local bishops as saying the two had given up their posts “for sentimental and emotional reasons>”

Now such stuff may give some of our born-again brethren a rise, but those of us less given to passing judgment on other people’s faith should find therein an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the monastic vocation, on the joys and hardships of living the gospels in common.

Nuns and monks turn their backs on the world and embrace poverty, chastity and obedience on the Lord’s assurance that between Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, it is the latter who has chosen the better part. While Martha busied herself with running the household, Mary merely sat and listened at Jesus’ feet. She was the first contemplative.

To those who follow her example, leaving mother, father, brother and sister behind, Christ has promised a hundredfold in this life and everlasting happiness in the next. So why are the Poor Clares feathering their nest, and why are these superiors abandoning their respective communities, the religious families of which they are both father and mother, to take solace in worldly love? The answer, of course, is human frailty.

We seculars who live in an over-stimulated environment normally equate human frailty with lust, the weakness of the flesh. Contrary to lore, however, not all problems inside the cloister are reducible to sex or the lack of it. The young and hot of blood doubtless find celibacy a major stumbling block, but the more advanced in religious life frequently find the other two vows even more problematic.

The nuns in Bruges, for instance. The eldest, who is 93, can neither see, hear nor walk. The others can’t be that much younger or better off health-wise. What you have here is eight retirees living by themselves in a convent probably built for 50, with no one to take care of them or help out with the housekeeping chores.

Being Poor Clares, they presumably have no regular source of income. Mostly they must rely on donations to subsist, but in most places the days of generous benefactors is long gone. It should be struggle enough for these sisters to feed themselves regularly and pay for the heating on time. Where will they get the funds to repair buildings more ancient than themselves? And what happens if one of them gets hospitalized or requires major surgery?

With the old, it is insecurities, rather than urges, that are a problem, but what about those in between like the two superiors in Normandy? We do not know about the lady but the gentleman is a Benedictine abbot of 49. Normally abbots are not appointed, but elected by the members of the community themselves. Presumably, therefore, we are dealing with a person of considerable maturity, talent, and leadership abilities. What happened?

The simplest explanation would seem to be that the fellow fell madly in love. But in most instances, we know that love is only the symptom, rather than the malady itself. In this case, perhaps we’re looking at a classic case of what students of human behaviour call a mid-life crisis, from which not even men and women of the cloth are spared.

Quite simply, a person wakes up one fine morning feeling empty and unhappy, troubled that his or her existence is meaningless, and that everything is for naught. Accedie, ennui is what the old monks used to call it, to cure which spiritual demon they took cold showers early in the morning, fasted on  bread and water, and spent many hours on their knees.

For many that harsh penance worked, but now that we enjoy, post Vatican II, the so-called liberty of the children of God, we are inclined to be more gentle on ourselves, and therefore also less rigorous in our observance of monastic discipline.

All right for our nuns and monks to be human, I guess, but isn’t the Lord and Master they serve a jealous one? Then and now, I’m afraid he doesn’t look too kindly on half-measures.

 

Hermandad de Semana Santa

 March 30, 1989

Hermandad de Semana Santa

I’ve come from my Malaybalay hegira to an empty house, what with the family off to the beach in Bataan for the remainder of the week. Just as well, because reentering city clime after five days of awesome silence amidst pines, fog, stars and fireflies is daunting enough without the bustle of working parents and the racket of restless children.

Earlier I had wanted to join them on a trip to the old town in Sorsogon to observe the traditional Lenten rites, but plans changed overnight after word came through that the south road has become a virtual obstacle course, unsafe at any speed.

So I find myself marooned with the usual options: Visita Iglesia on Maundy Thursday, the Good Friday procession in San Pablo, San Fernando, or Bacolor, and the vigil at San Beda towards midnight of Holy Saturday. In between, there will be time aplenty to read, update my journal, write letters, clean out files, and spruce up the house for Easter.

Aurora Cruz was right the other day, of course, when she lamented the passing of the Christian Holy Week of our grandparents and remarked that, “When one social web disappears without an adequate surrogate, an uncomfortable vacuum ensues.”

But not, she bears reminding, in Agoo up north. There, this past decade or so, her old friend Joe Aspiras has been trying to revive all the rituals of Semana Santa, largely succeeding in restoring their religious character  and involving the entire community, patriarchs and urchins alike, un a colourful and moving panoply of ancient customs and traditions.

Literally the whole town is in ferment and flux the whole week as people from the furthest-flung baranggays converge on the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad and the adjoining Plaza de la Virgen for the various events.

Kicking off the festivities is the traditional blessing of the palms on Palm Sunday, followed by the Estacion General and Via Crucis through Agoo’s main streets on Holy Tuesday. The public chanting of the Pasion at the public plaza begins on Maundy Thursday, immediately after the re-enactment of the Washing of the Feet and the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament inside the Basilica.

After the Siete Palabras in the afternoon of Good Friday comes two processions: that of the Santo Entierro at six, participated in by all the carrozas or statuaries depicting the various scenes and personalities of the Passion, and at eleven, of the Soledad.

Both are spectacular, but though the first is the more lavish production, the effect of the second is more dramatic.

When Joe first stepped into the picture, most of the old carrozas were either in a sorry state of disrepair or had simply disappeared, and the procession was a puny, half-hearted affair. Today, there are 27 of them, most life-sized and refurbished or crafted by the best artisans of Betis and Paete on commission by scions of Agoo’s principalia or Aspiras’ many equally devout friends from elsewhere.

Bejewelled, brilliantly illumined and enthroned on banks of massed fresh flowers, the images take nearly all of three hours to traverse the poblacion. That is because behind each carriage walk whole baranggays, brass bands and religious, civic and school organizations, making the town glow ethereally with thousand of lighted tapers.

The second procession is vastly more subdued and solemn. Only the statue of the Sorrowful Virgin, the Dolorosa, is borne aloft. Solitary, she goes round looking for the Dead Christ, accompanied only by women garbed from head to toe in mourning black. There is no music. The only sound heard is the shuffling of unshod feet, both tender and calloused, on the pavement.

The Soledad, I like to think, is my own personal contribution to Agoo’s religious festivities. Four or five years ago, I remarked casually to my old boss that, of all the features of Holy Week in Bicol when I was growing up and sideways, it had left the most profound impression. Aspiras introduced it in Agoo almost immediately after.

This is the reason why, I imagine, he has now recommended membership in a unique new feature of the sacred rites in that town, the Hermandad de Semana Santa, which entitles me to wear a special medallion and scapular and binds me to certain duties and responsibilities, among which are as follows:

   ..partic ipation in, as well as support for the liturgical rites of the Holy Week such as decoration of the Basilica, sponsorship of masses and other religious events, the feeding and housing of participants in said events when necessary and possible…

The membership also envisions that I will one day look after a carroza of my own in Agoo. It is for life, to be passed on to my heirs on my demise. I hope they will be as exceedingly proud of this rare honor when their turn comes, as I am, because it endeavours to keep a most precious heritage of our people alive for all time.

 

Sufficient Unto the Day

 February 27, 1990

Sufficient Unto the Day

For me a day in Baguio has always sufficed. A two or three day sojourn is grace, and more a heavenly windfall, fervently desired albeit yet beyond reach. But no matter how briefly, you come up each time laden with every care in the world and come down recharged, serene and ready to afce the onslaught of a dry and dizzy city.

I was up this weekend to visit an ailing aunt. A nun, she lives and works in a hospital run by her congregation. She entered the convent in 1940, and will shortly celebrate the 50^th anniversary of her religious life. At 72 she has known no other.

My aunt suffers from acute diabetes. So frequent and severe have been her attacks in the recent months that the mother superior, a gentle Cebuana half her age, thought I might speak to her about going down to Manila. She thinks it is time. My aunt knows it is.

More and more these days her mind is on the Bridegroom’s coming. But though eventually she would like to be laid to rest with her other sisters behind the motherhouse in Antipolo, for now she prefers to do the waiting up there. Largely unlettered, my aunt is guileless and stubborn as a child. Clearly there is no point arguing.

Meanwhile she is all childlike joy in anticipation of her jubilee. That and my anointing. About the first I can only be sanguine. Of the latter she seems absolutely certain. I pray that hers be both longer life and beatific vision.

My travelling companion, another aunt, opts to spend the night in the hospital. No nun myself I roam the city seeking cushier lodgings elsewhere, but where? Homey Inn Rocio is too far, and stylish Burnham Hotel just off Session Road is booked solid. In the end I land where I most desire to be, that other Baguio of ancient towering pines and more discrete charms.

The Safari Lodge on Leonard Wood Road fully lives up to its name. Over its main hall looms the grisly stuffed head of a black elephant, ivory tusks intact. Around are many trophies of owner Celso Tuazon’s big game junkets to Africa. My room is vast but the bath is filthy. The only other guest is Tessie Tomas, who is here to write. By nine the place is boarded up and all the lights are out.

I sleep fitfully, tired from the long trip but also anxious not to miss the early mass at the hospital chapel. By five-thirty I am silently cursing sour Nescafe Instant at a hamburger and sushi deli below the cathedral and marvelling at how much of the old mission town still remains: a local station was airing, not rock or jazz, but the day’s homily.

Even St. Augustine would have been pressed to improve on the readings Sunday, the last before Lent. First Isaiah: “Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet, even if she forget, I will never forget you.” Then Matthew: “Look at the birds in the sky…Think of the flowers growing in the field…do not worry about tomorrow……” Truly my aunt has chosen the better part.

Later my other aunt and I tour John Hay and South Drive leisurely. As she hies off to the market I amble down to Session café, only to find a dreary new high-rise where it used to be. Refurbished the Star is brighter but lacks character; I linger at the counter of dingy Dainty bakery instead, before parking myself on a bench in Burnham to bask and peruse the papers.

Manila’s reek of EDSA; Baguio’s hardly make mention. All the front page of Saturday’s Gold Ore carries is a photo of soldiers, activists and Coryistas encamped on cathedral grounds four years ago, while only Pablito Sanidad bemoans Cory’s betrayal in his Sunday Midland Courier column. Here the real hot items are the granting of autonomy to Ifugao, the ejection of squatters from the Busol watershed, and the suspension of the city’s lotto permit.

More honest and engaging are the signs posted around the park. On one tree: “Please don’t hurt me / I too feel pain / I give you fresh water / I give you fresh air / I always bow down to you / why do you cut me down?” Beside a pumping shed: “Water is not made from magic, it is a carefully manufactured product, don’t waste it.” In Baguiol’s lung, I am happy to report, the trees and the flowers seem gayer today.

The nun looks lost when we say goodbye. My travelling companion is devastated, I am speechless. The afternoon sun blisters as we hit Manaoag to pay homage to Apo Baket, the North’s most renowned and ravishing virgin. I do not light a candle, but touch the hem of her skirt, asking that she guard my loved ones and guide my journey to Rome. Long after dark we sneak back into the city unimpeded and untainted by EDSA frenzy.

“Each day has enough trouble of its own,” says Matthew. Maybe not. This one only had light.

Beyond Sceptic Moths and Cynic Rusts

 February 13, 1990

Beyond Sceptic Moths and Cynic Rusts

Tomorrow is the Feast of St. valentine. It is the day of the year traditionally set aside for lovers, of which there are too few, or fools, of which there are too many. When, depending on your station in life, a diamond geegaw, a bouquet of flowers, a date in a fancy restaurant or a motel, or just a card is made to cover for 364 days of oblivion or infidelity, lassitude or indifference.

For not a few it will be a day of frantic waxing to forestall the inevitable waning of that most rare and precious commodity – love. The feast’s red symbols remind of fragility as much as they proclaim intensity: roses that bloom so gloriously but wilt too fast, hearts that throb so vigorously and then break into pieces of their own accord and at the slightest touch.

Love is not a permanent state. It is a fleeting moment. Learn that and make the best of life’s most gratuitous gift. Forget it and resign yourself to a limbo of pining and regretting. What did e.e. cummings write? “Be of love a little more careful than anything else.” In the end only those who love carefully – warily – understand that it is life, rather than death, which has no limits.

Show me a Hallmark card that says all that and I’ll celebrate this feast. Otherwise, I’m taking the advice of a girlfriend in New York who has made it a habit to report sick on Valentine’s and curl up in bed, alone. I have a mind to do exactly that this year and every February 14 hereafter.

I might because the very idea of compressing all my affective faculties into one day of frenzy repels me no end. And I might to damn the notion that the only way to love is to be busy and dizzy about it, for my own limited experience of such matters proves the contrary.

Love is not anticipation or manipulation; it is surprise. And I have found (as well as lost) it in the most unlikely places, at the least expected of times:

In dead of winter, keeping holy silence with a friend by a fountain in the Tuileries; alone in my garden, contemplating a scraggy pine my father planted the morning he died;; on a deserted beach in Bohol, breaking out into a hymn to the God who made sky, stars, and sea with a soulmate. But mostly, as the autumn of life impends, on rereading letters from those who have loved me in words I know for certain will last longer than I shall.

Sex? Yes, that too, in the sudden rushing of the blood to my head, the little deaths that coupling brings, now alas but too rarely. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Now it is no longer the rage of the sharing and the abandon of the melding, but the perfect comprehension the smallest, tenderest gestures bring – a look, a caress, a sigh speak just as eloquently of desire, evoking past and promising future pleasures too ineffable, too profound.

To love is to be weak, not strong. It is to recognize in this, the apex of my life, that I am vulnerable and porous, still pervious to pain, still capable of wonder: that to be whole, I must be incomplete, and not anything I myself am and do can fill the vacuum. To love is to accept why there must be space within and distance without, because both are necessary for the savouring, the forgetting as much as the remembering.

To love, finally, is to understand as well as I am understood. It is to submit to a love always stronger and deeper than my own, and to be thankful that even in my innermost recesses, where not words nor gestures nor even pain or wonder will touch me, I am, because He is. To quote Chesterton:

In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,

And fatted lives that of their weakness tire,

In a world of flying loves and fading lusts

It is something to be sure of a desire.

To love is to will one thing only. It is to be pure of heart.

Of Peace, Poetry and Passion

 January 9, 1990

Of Peace, Poetry and Passion

As in the past, I would have declared yesterday, Three Kings, the official end of the Christmas season at home, had I not chanced upon Divina Paredes-Japa’s article in the Sunday Globe making a case for January 8, the feast of the baptism of Jesus, as the more appropriate date. So my Douglas Fir, brittle brush as it has become, comes down today (this was written Jan. 8) instead.

Not that anyone really paid much attention to it these past three weeks. Indeed it was the one thing in my household that enjoyed a modicum of peace – for that read oblivion – during this period of agitated incertitude. Now I consign it to the trash bin outside the house, where perhaps it will wait another month before our garbage men deign to notice it, as I, like most, struggle to catch up with the rest of my life.

So what gives currently? Going by the papers, peace in our time. A pooled front page editorial on the subject the Citizens’ Crusade for Democracy and Peace with Justice (now isn’t that a mouthful?) wanted it to be, but I see that only four dailies (aside from this one) I subscribe to have obliged.

They are, in order of fervor rather than sobriety, the Inquirer, the Globe, the Star, and the Times. For the benefit of those who read none other than the national newspaper (Malaya of course), some excerpts from the fiery pens of the nation’s top editorial writers:

“How long must we continue living under the gun? Why do we allow armed men to rule our lives?...How long will we tolerate this situation where a military maniac with an itchy trigger finger has his bloody hands on the throat of an entire nation? – Inquirer (though verily I am reminded of the famous Oratio contra Catilinam: “Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra…”)

Last December 1, the military destroyed in one morning what had taken our people three and a half years to build…The military today is the greatest single, immediate threat to democracy in the progress of our country.” (underscoring supplied) – Globe, the COS’ paper of choice, which by the way is also bent on ferreting out who’s been doing violence to the national budget.

“We have too long languished under the spectre of darkness, we have too long been hostage to bloodshed and violence. We are threatened on all sides by enemies of the people. The Marxist Left who would impose their godless ways on our deeply religious culture. The fascist Right who would bring back the greed and power lust of the tyrant. And the misguided mutineers who for the glitter of gold or misplaced self-righteousness would bring us back to an even more stultifying Dark Age.” – Star

But the editorial which appeals to me the most is the Times’:

“With mindless profligacy, we have squandered the legacies of nationhood and nobility won for us by our forbears who knew what love of country truly meant and unstintingly gave the fullest measure of their humanity to its fulfilment. In our time, and by our own hands, the shining bequest of almost a hundred years of struggle towards freedom and unity has become so much dross.”

But e pluribus unum, as Soliven Maximus reminded us yesterday, “We rush to speak for democracy. But we reserve the right to express our loyalty to it in words of our own choosing.”

For violence is not only mutiny, I dare suggest. Making the masses submit meekly to food prices that are scandalous as our elite fritter millions away of parties, or letting them queue in the rain for hours while the rich and powerful zoom around in Benzes and Pajeros: these marginalize and do violence to our people as well.

Another 4,000 of our countrymen join the ranks of the poor, the hungry and the homeless everyday. That is not gentle peace. That is oppressive tyranny and cruel slavery, for which in the end there will be more than just another coup to pay, trust me.

Meanwhile I am for poetry and passion, as in this priceless gem from Chesterton titled “The Great Minimum” that I have decided to adopt as my mantra for the decade:

“It is something to have wept as we have wept/ It is something to have done as we have done,/ It is something to have watched when all men slept,/ And seen the stars which never see the sun.

“It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,/ Although it break and leave the thorny rods,/ It is something to have hungered once as those/ Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

“To have seen you and your unforgotten face,/ Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,/ Pure as white lilies in a watery space,/ It were something, though you went from me today.

“To have known the things that from the weak are furled,/ Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;/ It is something to be wiser than the world,/ It is something to be older than the sky.

“In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,/ And fatted lives that of their sweetness tire,/ In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,/ It is something to be sure of a desire.

“Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;/ Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen;/ Let thunder break on man and beast and bird/ And the lightning. It is something to have been.”

To one and all at the threshold of the new millennium: Sursum corda!

To the Rich belongs the Choice

 January 3, 1989

To the Rich belongs the Choice

If the rich are different for you and me, it is because, on final reckoning, they can preach true freedom of choice, where the poor enjoy none.

When I first came upon Bea Zobel’s piece on freedom of choice, I must confess I made little of it. Unlike her, the subject of population growth and family planning little excites me. To each her light, to each his darkness.

Three kids were all my parents wanted. I prefer none but am happy enough to leave to others the task to multiply and crowd the planet whichever way they want.

In China, India, Bangladesh, and Armenia, there have been cataclysms aplenty to set the balance of nature aright. I believe in a higher providence at once merciful and cruel but always wise. I go by that unseen hand that writes our fate with crooked lines.

But the good lady protests a wee bit much. Day after day these past two weeks, I have seen the papers heralding her courage and compassion. I do not know the purpose of such persistence, but I have a rather clear notion of how it thrives, and I do not like it.

If Mrs. Zobel could have her way, she would leave to each and every creature the right to choose the brand or method of birth control she or he prefers. She is for total freedom of conscience in such matters, and so are most of us.

But three things I think need reminding her and ourselves on that account. First, neither science nor conscience is infallible. Second, having embraced our brand of faith, we are bound by it. And third, the poor really have very little choice.

Forty years ago the atom was power in our hands. Today we fret about the threat of holocaust from thousands of nuclear warheads as from hundreds of Long Miles and Chernobyls whose awesome capacity for annihilation we are impotent to contain.

Twenty years ago hitherto our savants worried that we were peopling the globe to extinction. Of late alarm has been raised that we are achieving that extinction, not through overpopulation alone, but through greying societies whose creative energies are sapped by selfishness and over-indulgence.

I assume even Mrs. Zobel would cringe from outright foetal murder, so let us not belabour that method, even if, not unknown to her surely, it is now indiscriminately prescribed in various countries near. Let’s look at “caps” and pills instead, for about these we are less squeamish.

The growing legions of women whose reproductive apparata have been irreparably damaged by IUD’s in the United States has all but brought that contraception to a dismal finish.

And in Germany at least, where the tablet has been a fixture for two decades, the havoc it has wreaked on women’s hormonal constitution has led to its being made available to the end-user by prescription only.

So much for science’s wonders. So others have learned, and so we have not. For lo and behold, all the discards of more “civilized” nations have now become our bane. Outmoded, expired, unsafe, these “wonderful” gadgets are now being dumped on us, and we are reckless in gratitude.

Kawawa naman the poor. There are just too many of them. Let us cure their blights by lessening their numbers. In the process, we can also hold on to the status quo: our maids in uniform, our streets empty of beggars, our backlots rid of squatters, our groceries and shopping malls chockfull of imported wearables and comestibles.

After all, our perverted logic tells us, what ails us must also ail them. We would spare them the weight loss and diminished verve that comes from bearing five children. Tough luck. Would that the millions of others out there had the same luxury of unburdening themselves of such complaints before a paediatrician, a good Catholic, a fine human being.

For them life is a vastly rougher proposition, a perilous gamble. To afford to see a doctor as they must in their twilight, they must first ensure that three of their five offspring survive infancy, two get to school, and one finishes and lands a decent job.

Will less mean more? Supposing we got them around to having just one or two siblings instead. Can we guarantee them more food, more schools, and more opportunities for gainful employment thereby?

Can we promise them a government that is more conscientious and caring, and new breed of elite who are less wasteful and extravagant? Because if we only want less of them so there can be more of us, then all we have is a cop out.

Let the rich then privately salve their troubled souls all they want. The clarity and purity of their conscience being inversely proportional to their worldly stock, the eye of the needle is their lot.

The poor, at least in that regard, have an easier time of it. Harsher though life be for them, the mischief of God appears a better option than the avarice of fellow man. We should not begrudge their believing that his rules are fairer and his surprises kinder than our in the end.