Sunday, September 2, 2012

Journeys Without Encores


by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

 
     One of the advantages of being assigned to a European post is the vast opportunity it offers for traveling.   This is especially true if you are posted to a European country that belongs to the so-called Schengen zone – a group of European countries that have agreed, among other things, to do away with visa requirements as far as the cross-border travels of their citizens are concerned.   In the case of those assigned to Italy, for instance, possession of the carta d’identita (identity card) issued by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is enough, if you wish to travel to other Schengen countries such as France, Spain or The Netherlands.   You no longer need to apply for a visa to enter these countries.  Showing your carta d’identita to their border police or their immigration officers would suffice.  

 
     Not only that, low-budget airlines offer airfares that are so cheap, traveling from Italy to Spain or France can actually cost less than treating a couple of friends to dinner at a typical Italian restaurant.

 
     Yet, while in Rome, one does not even have to look beyond the borders of Italy to satisfy one’s desire to travel and see new places.  Every Italian region (nay, every province within a region) has something unique to offer;  it deserves to be visited at least once.
 

     Aware that my term in Italy would not last forever (the normal length of a foreign assignment being six years) and that it might take a while before I get assigned again to a European country, I tried my best to avail of every opportunity to travel both inside and outside Italy during my sojourn there.  I took the chance to visit Paris, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Lourdes, Barcelona, Montserrat, Madrid, Amsterdam, Geneva, London, Athens, Milan, Turin, Venice, Verona, Padova, Pisa, Cremona, Florence, Naples, Taranto, Sorrento, Pompeii, Palermo, Reggio di Calabria,  and a number of other Italian destinations, thanks to the ease and economy of traveling while in Europe. 


     It is often said that traveling broadens one’s horizons.  Indeed, being exposed to ways of thinking and living which differ from one’s own expands the range of one’s perspectives.   As a result, one becomes more flexible in one’s views and more tolerant of other people’s divergent opinions and beliefs.   No wonder, a lot of people claim that traveling is a form of education.  In fact, many people suggest that traveling should complement one’s formal education, for there are certain things that one will learn from traveling which one will never learn within the four walls of a classroom.


     My own limited experience in traveling has certainly pushed back the frontiers of my understanding in no small way.   But it has done one other important thing besides.  


     I have noticed that every time I travel to a place which I feel I may never have the chance to visit again,  I literally make every effort to ensure that it is going to be a most enjoyable and unforgettable journey.   Days before I actually take the plane or the train for my intended destination, I try to read every literature I can get hold of regarding the place I am going to see.   I try to learn about its history, its culture, its current economic, political, social and religious conditions.   I even try to learn a little of its language within the limited time I have before the actual journey.   Aside from the obvious practical advantages of knowing how to say “Where is the washroom?” or “How do I find my way back to the train station?”  a little knowledge of a people’s language will enable one to view the world through their eyes, so to speak.
 

     Moreover, as soon as I board the plane or the train, all my senses become more attuned to their surroundings than they would normally be.  It is as if my eyes, my ears, my nose, and even my mouth and skin would like to absorb every particle of the journey I am undertaking.   I notice sights, sounds, smells, and tastes I would have been oblivious to, had I encountered them along the roads of my everyday life.


     Finally, in my desire to make the most of the journey, I would not, if I could help it, allow anything to spoil the fun.  Snags and glitches that would have disturbed my balance under normal circumstances become petty and forgettable while I’m on the road.   I would not permit such “small problems” to ruin my trip.   I always remind myself:  I may never get the chance to undertake this journey again.  I want to be able to remember this moment, many years from now, with a smile on my face and the sound of laughter in my heart.
 

     The metaphor of life as a journey has been used for so long, it has become hopelessly trite for a lot of people.   Yet my travels have taught me that, hackneyed as it may be, the metaphor remains a good one; and it is worth keeping the image in mind as we undertake this “journey without an encore” – this “trip” we will surely not have the chance to take again after our time on earth is done.  I am, of course, speaking of the life you and I have been granted the privilege to live for a given number of years.


     We only live once, and we will not live forever.   Yet how often do many of us live as if life were a reel of tape we could rewind and fast-forward at will?   We often take the hours and days of our life for granted.  And we throw away the joy of the present moment by wasting our time regretting our past mistakes and worrying about the future.  Before we know it, our chance to journey through life is over.  And we realize with sadness that we have barely enjoyed the trip.


     Not so long ago, I came upon the following poem attributed to a fifth century Indian poet and playwright named Kalidasa:

 
Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities
and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well lived, makes every
yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.


     If we’ve forgotten how to relish the irretrievable moments of our journey through life, it’s never too late to relearn it.  

Sunday, June 24, 2012

In Sartre's Neighborhood


by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

     I had long resolved that if I ever got the chance to see Paris, I would not leave the city until I had paid a visit to the place where Jean-Paul Sartre lived and did his writing.  So when the chance finally came, I searched every tourist book I could lay my hands on for any information on Sartre’s former neighborhood.  One tourist book implied that Sartre lived somewhere in Place St-Germain-Des-Pres, “the heart of old Paris, and a meeting place for the Left Bank intellectuals.”   It mentioned a Café de Flore which Sartre and his lifetime partner Simone de Beauvoir allegedly frequented, and which was likewise patronized by such literary figures as Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Boris Vian.   But, it said nothing about where Sartre went home to when night fell.

     “If I cannot find it in the books, I can always ask around,” I told myself as our plane approached Aeroport Charles de Gaulle.  On the bus from the airport to the hotel, I had the good fortune of striking up a conversation with a fellow passenger who introduced himself as “Zarrabi.”   It turned out that he himself liked Sartre, and when I asked him if he might be able to tell me how I could visit Sartre’s neighborhood, his eyes lit up, and he went so far as drawing a map for me, complete with the names of the streets I should take in order to get there.   But he couldn’t tell me exactly where Sartre lived.   “You can ask around when you get to the place,” he suggested.

     It was not difficult to find Place St-Germain-Des-Pres.  Part of the square had been christened "Place Sartre-Beauvoir"  in memory of the literary couple, and a street sign bearing their names greeted you just a few steps away from the subway exit.  A Romanesque church stood in the square and my tourist book said that it was Paris’ oldest church.  I went in, partly to see the inside of the church, and partly to inquire at the parish office where Sartre’s former apartment might be.   The lady who manned the parish office couldn’t tell me where Sartre lived either.  But she was very helpful.  She phoned several people for the information I needed, to no avail.

     I then walked to the Café des Deux Magots across the street and made my inquiries there.  No one in the place could tell me where Sartre used to live.  My efforts at the Café de Flore were equally fruitless,  notwithstanding the fact that Sartre used to be the establishment’s most popular customer.  The waiters, understandably, did not even know who he was.

     So I had to content myself with looking around the Café de Flore and imagining how it must have felt to sit at table with Sartre, Beauvoir and their literary and philosophical friends as they exchanged thoughts on the issues of the day and addressed the questions that have hounded man from the dawn of his ability to think.

     But it was quite a different story when I decided to visit the bookstores of Place St-Germain-des-Pres.  Although their managers and attendants could neither tell me where Sartre lived, they spoke of Sartre as if he were someone who just got out of the door and who would probably be back in a few hours.  His books filled their shelves, along with several CD recordings of his lectures.   Works by other authors were, of course, also on display.  But one could easily feel the special place that Sartre enjoyed in the bookshops of his old neighborhood.    

     Sartre once said, “And so glory, and the works you leave behind you, clearly represent a worldly equivalent of immortality.  In fact, people referred to it as immortality, and to great writers as ‘immortals.’”*

     As my train moved away from Place St-Germain-des-Pres, I realized how Sartre’s life was inextricably intertwined with the words he wrote.   He had become, in a way, immortal through the works he had left behind.  Sartre lived on through his books.  And I did not have to visit the cafés he frequented,  nor the apartment he used to live in, to know what kind of man he must have been.  

NOTE
     *Sartre by Himself, transcript of the film directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, translated by Richard Seaver (New York:  Urizen Books, 1978), 17.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

A Meditation on W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain"

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ


     A group of travelers find themselves stranded on an island in Samoa.  The schooner which is supposed to bring them to their destination has been quarantined because one of the crew has contracted measles (a serious and often fatal disease in that place and time).   Among the travelers are two couples (the Macphails and the Davidsons) who have become somehow close in the course of their journey.   But, the intimacy that has arisen between them (Maugham quickly points out) is due more to propinquity rather than to any community of taste.   Indeed, no men can be more different from each other than Dr. Macphail and Mr. Davidson.  Dr. Macphail is an open-minded physician who has a lot of empathy for other men’s peculiarities and frailties, while Mr. Davidson is an overzealous and self-righteous missionary who cannot hide his contempt for other men’s weaknesses and sins.   Mr. Davidson is, in fact, obsessed with fighting sin with all his might and “saving” sinners no matter what the cost

     Also stranded on the island and billeted in the same inn as the Machphails and the Davidsons is a prostitute named Sadie Thompson.   Young and, in a coarse fashion, pretty, but expectedly uncouth and “immoral,” she soon earns the ire of Mr. Davidson.  At first, she proudly defies and challenges Mr. Davidson’s “right” to intrude into her life.  But, when Mr. Davidson utilizes his political connections to show her how capable he is of punishing her for her defiance, she capitulates and even acquiesces to his efforts to “convert” her from her sinful life.  The strange thing, however, is that despite her “conversion” and the “spiritual bond” that has developed between her and Mr. Davidson, the latter is still bent on giving her the punishment he believes she deserves:  sending her back to San Francisco where she has a standing arrest order for her past crimes.  In fact, Mr. Davidson relishes, in a rather demented way, the prospect of seeing her suffer in prison.  To him, such “cleansing” – no matter how painful -- is a necessary step to her salvation.  His convoluted theological rationale for such a stance is summarized in the words he says to Dr. Macphail, in reply to the latter’s intercession that Ms. Thompson be spared such punishment:  “Ah, but don’t you see?  It’s necessary.  Do you think my heart doesn’t bleed for her?  I love her as I love my wife and sister.  All the time that she is in prison I shall suffer all the pain that she suffers…  You don’t understand because you’re blind.  She’s sinned, and she must suffer.  I know what she’ll endure.  She’ll be starved and tortured and humiliated.  I want her to accept the punishment of man as a sacrifice to God.  I want her to accept it joyfully.  She has an opportunity which is offered to very few of us.  God is very good and very merciful.”  He continues:  “I want to put in her heart the passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she would refuse.  I want her to feel that the bitter punishment of prison is the thank-offering that she places at the feet of our Blessed Lord, who gave his life for her.”1  No amount of pleading and weeping on the part of Ms. Thompson can make Mr. Davidson change his mind.   And as the day of her deportation to San Francisco nears, Mr. Davidson is filled with an inner excitement that makes him behave almost like a man going insane.  

     When the day of her deportation arrives, however, Mr. Davidson’s corpse is found lying on the beach with its throat cut.   In Mr. Davidson’s right hand lies the razor with which the deed has been done.   All indications point to the fact that Mr. Davidson has taken his own life.

     Dr. Macphail cannot, at first, understand what made Mr. Davidson do it.  Until he learns from Ms. Thompson that the night before her deportation, Mr. Davidson had succumbed to his carnal desires and taken advantage of her like all the other men she had known. 

     We can better understand the strange character of Mr. Davidson if we take a closer look at his “spirituality,” i.e., the kind of relationship he had with his God.   And since one’s relationship with God is largely determined by one’s view of God, it would be instructive for us to examine Mr. Davidson’s peculiar view of God. 

     Mr. Davidson obviously looked at God as a vindictive judge who could never be satisfied until a sinner had fully paid for his sins.  It was, therefore,  inconceivable to Mr. Davidson that God could forgive a sin as deep as the one he had committed:   destroying the soul of a person he was so close to “saving,” and ruining his own soul in the process.  He could not bring himself to believe that God could forgive any sin as long as there was a sincere repentance on the part of the sinner.  His distorted view of God precluded such a possibility.   In the end, believing that he was “doomed” beyond redemption, he saw no other way out besides taking his very own life.

     Incidentally, Mr. Davidson’s view of God and the despair to which such a view drove him echo those of another man who lived almost two thousand years ago.  Judas, unable to believe that God could forgive him no matter how humanly unforgivable his sin was, also felt that he was beyond redemption and consequently killed himself.

     The truth is:  many of us will probably do the same thing if we view God in that same manner.   For, whether we like it or not, we shall all fall into sin, in one way or another, in the course of our lives.  No amount of human effort towards untainted holiness can eradicate our human propensity to sin.  To put it figuratively:  no matter how hard we try to reach the heavens, we shall always fall back to the earth -- just like the rain (hence the title of Maugham’s story).  We are human beings and we will remain so as long as we live.  Our humanity and all the weaknesses that it contains will always remain a part of us.  We can only go so far when it comes to transcending our human limitations.  This painful reality is part of what the writer Stephen Vincent Benet once called the “sadness in being a man.”2

     The good news, however, is that our God does not really expect us to fully overcome our humanity while we are still in this world.  He accepts and loves us for what we are: human beings who can never save their own selves by their own efforts, human beings whom He and He alone can save.  Certainly, He wants us to do our best in trying to transcend the limits of our humanity.  But if we fail – as, for sure, we often will, despite our sincere efforts – God will, so to speak, bend over backwards as many times as necessary to forgive us and offer us the chance to start anew.

     The Bible proclaims this good news about our God in a number of gospel parables:  the prodigal son, the lost sheep, the lost coin…  It is also touchingly expressed in psalms like Psalm 30, verse 6:  “For his anger lasts but a while, and his kindness all through life.”  Our God is an infinitely merciful God.  While He is also a God of justice, His mercy far outweighs His sense of justice.

     Unfortunately, this good news about our God often sounds too good to be true to many people.  I remember the worried reaction I used to receive from some parishioners whenever I proclaimed this good news in my homilies while I was still a priest.   The reaction was worse whenever I mentioned the position of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar:  that God’s mercy is so unfathomable, it is possible that even Judas had been spared the punishment of eternal fire.  They would point out to me the negative implications of such a position for our practical life.  They would retort:  “If God is that merciful, then what’s the use of trying so hard to live a Christian life?  I might as well live my life as I please.  After all, as long as I repent just before I die, God will surely forgive me.”   “And what about justice?  If God will likewise forgive the serial killer who murdered my father, or the young drug addict who raped my daughter, where is His sense of fairness?”   “How will God do justice to the victims of willful mass murderers like Adolf Hitler?”

     Von Balthasar, of course, clarifies that “the defense put forward by ‘our advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous’ (1 Jn 2:1)…  does not give us carte blanche for new sins; on the contrary it presents us with the most urgent challenge to start loving, at last.”3   Still, I must accept that his position indeed poses a number of complications when applied to our practical life.   Even the so-called “Final Option Theory” (which proposes that no matter how sinful our lives have been, God will still give us the chance to make our “final option” at the end of our lives; and it is our “final option” – either for or against God – that will determine our ultimate fate) is not without similar complications.  

     But then, doesn’t the Bible itself remind us that God’s ways are not men’s ways?  Our human mind can never fully comprehend how God can be infinitely merciful without violating the other values that we hold dear, such as justice and fairness.  It is one of those things about God which we can never fully understand while we are still here.  And we are definitely in no position to require God to make His actions and decisions neatly fit the pigeonholes of our minds.


NOTES

     1W. Somerset Maugham, “Rain,” in A Pocket Book of Short Stories, M. Edmund Speare, ed. (New York:  Pocket Books, 1998), 159-160.
     2Stephen Vincent Benet, “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in Speare, 22.  
      3Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Prayer, Graham Harrison, trans. (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 47.