by EMMANUEL R.
FERNANDEZ
Nowadays,
learning a foreign language is so much easier than it used to be. One does not even have to go to a language
school anymore. One can learn online via
computer applications (or apps) that offer grammar e-books and other virtual reading
materials, assessment tests, interactive games and even conversation
opportunities with fellow online learners.
Moreover, there are countless foreign-language movies and other video
clips on the internet that one can watch in order to learn more about the
language one wants to study.
This was not the case in the mid-1970s when my classmates
and I studied Latin under Father Peter Michael, the German-American missionary-priest
of the Society of the Divine Word who served as Latin Professor of the Mary
Help of Christians Seminary (MHCS) from 1971 to 1976. Aside from the dearth of learning materials
at that time, Latin itself was not an easy language to learn, primarily because
it was (and still is) what the field of linguistics calls a “dead
language.” It has no living native
speakers. There is no place in the world
where you can sojourn and imbibe the language while interacting with its
Latin-speaking inhabitants. Not even The
Vatican can claim to be such a place.
To Father Michael’s credit, he tried to make his Latin
lessons as easy and as fun-to-learn as he possibly could. He even used teaching
methods that were quite advanced. For
instance, he personally created a prototype of sorts of what we now call
“infographics.” To help us etch on our
minds the rules of Latin grammar, he drew figures that were accompanied by
Latin rhymes which were as easy to memorize as nursery rhymes. He even used
different colors in his drawings to help us distinguish one rule from the
other. And, best of all, he introduced the rhymes to us by personally reciting
them himself at first -- complete with hand and arm gestures, facial
expressions, and eye movements that only a “Father Peter Michael” could make. His method was so effective that, up to now,
more than four decades later, my classmates and I can still recite Father
Michael’s Latin grammar rhymes at the drop of a hat, and without much effort! We once spent almost an entire morning in our
Facebook chat room playfully exchanging with one another the Latin grammar
rhymes we still remembered from our days under Father Michael.
Our Latin classes under Father Michael also proved to be
particularly useful to me many years later when I had to study Italian to
prepare for my first diplomatic assignment in Italy. Although there are many
differences between Latin and Italian, the latter happens to be the closest
language to Latin among the so-called “Romance languages” (Spanish, French,
Portuguese and Romanian, all of which have their origins in Latin). Somehow, it was easier for me to get a handle
on Italian grammar because of its affinity to Latin.
Notwithstanding his efforts to make Latin easy and
fun-to-learn, Father Michael was by no means an easy teacher. While teaching, he would be walking around
our desks and asking questions at random.
Woe to the student who could not answer his questions correctly! If his answer exasperated Father Michael, such
a student could get a knock on the head from our Latin Professor’s knuckles – a knock that was neither too soft nor too
hard, but just enough to make the correct answer drop from one’s skull (in case
it just got stuck there) to the correct part of the brain underneath. Students
who were prone to daydreaming during Father Michael’s Latin classes would be
jolted out of their reveries; while those who were wide awake but knew they had
not studied well enough prayed hard that the bell would ring before those
dreaded knuckles had a chance to land on their heads.
Father Michael also kept track of our progress by means
of regular written quizzes and tests.
Those who did not score well in the quizzes would be required to see him
afterwards for special tutorials. He
would patiently explain why your answers were wrong, and tell you what answers
you should have given instead. If you still failed the quizzes and the tests
despite those tutorials, you would be required to spend your summer vacation
taking remedial lessons in Latin. And if
you still did not do well, you would be asked to repeat the course or, if you
also happened to fail in other subjects besides Latin, the seminary
administration itself would advise you to look for another school.
Aside from Latin, Father Michael also taught Greek,
German, Religion and American History in the other seminaries he was assigned
to before MHCS. That was how
wide-ranging his knowledge was. In addition, Father Michael was a writer who
chose to place his pen entirely at the service of God. While teaching Latin at
MHCS, he published a book entitled “Traveling Along the Gospel Trail,” a
collection of his gospel reflections.
The book did not interest me very much at that time since it was neither
a novel nor a collection of short stories.
But, years later, when I got interested in non-fiction writing, I came
across Father Michael’s old book again and I could not help admiring his simple
but elegant writing style. He went on to write more books, inspiring his
readers both by what he wrote and by how well he wrote them.
Yet, for all his erudition in Latin and Greek, Father
Michael was one of the simplest, humblest, and most ascetic men I have ever
known. If my memory serves me right, he
only had two sets of shirts and trousers, and one could tell that both sets
were regularly overused not only from how they looked but also from how they
smelled. As a religious priest, Father Michael could have asked for another set
or two. But he never did, at least not
during those two years when he was our Latin professor at MHCS. He was content with having only two. That was how simple he was. In fact, I even heard from some former
seminarians of Christ The King Seminary in Quezon City that when Father Michael
stayed there in his old age, he used to go around the common bathrooms of the
seminary to collect the seminarians’ leftover soap. He put together whatever he
managed to collect and used the combined leftover soap when taking a bath,
instead of asking for his own supply of bathroom soap. Indeed, Father Michael was a witness to the
truth that you can live with only the barest of possessions yet still have a
happy and fulfilled life.
The most eloquent manifestation of Father Michael’s
humility and simplicity was, of course, the activity he spent most of his time
on if he was not teaching Latin or writing his reflections: raising pigs and selling them to raise money
for charity. He was a swineherd by
choice, and a very hands-on one at that.
He maintained a piggery a few meters away from the seminary kitchen, and
he personally did all the work that was required -- from feeding the pigs to
bathing them to cleaning the pig pens with his own hands. He did not mind
getting himself dirtied in the process.
Of course, the running joke among seminarians at that time was that one
should never go to Father Michael’s room for the Latin tutorials or go to him
for confession if he had just finished tending his pigs, for it would be hard
for one’s nose to tell, at that point, the difference between the swineherd and
the swine. Father Michael must have been aware of that running joke
somehow. But, I do not think he ever
minded it. Other people’s good opinion,
like all other earthly treasures, seemed to be the least of his concerns. He always came across to me as a man who
wished to store up not treasures on earth but treasures in heaven, “where
neither moths nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal”
(Mt. 6:20).
We live in a world that often places more value on
“having” rather than on “being.” We live
in a world where a man’s worth is often measured by how much money and
possessions he has accumulated, how much power he has acquired, how many honors
he has reaped, and how high he has climbed on the ever-slippery pole of worldly
success. And, as the Christian existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel once
correctly observed, “being and having in our society teaches us how to take
possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting
go. For there is neither freedom nor
real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.”
Father Peter Michael was a living lesson in the art of
letting go. We were fortunate to have lived with him at one point in our young
lives, to have seen up close that letting go is indeed the key to living a
happy and fulfilled life. Father Michael
lived until the ripe old age of a hundred and four. We may not be able to live as long as he
did. But our own lives could be happier
and more fulfilled if we ourselves learned the art of letting go.