In Praise of Mothers

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ*


An old woman once sent a rather strange letter of invitation to her children. It said, “Please know that, through this letter, I am giving you the permission to skip my wake, be absent from my funeral, and forget all about me after I’m buried. But I’m organizing a party with my old friends two weeks from now, and it’s one party I don’t want you to miss. Please be there… by all means.”

Two weeks later, all her children went to the venue she indicated in her letter of invitation. It was an old chapel that had seen better days. Seated together inside the chapel were their mother and six of her old friends. There was an open coffin in front of the altar and a microphone stand a few steps away. Upon seeing them, their mother stood up, walked to the microphone stand and said: “I have no idea when I’m going to be lying there inside that coffin. It could be tonight, a month later, maybe a year or two from now…. So, instead of waiting for the time when I’m already dead and I will not able to hear a word you say, please allow me NOW the privilege of hearing what you would be saying about me when I’m gone.” After she finished speaking, all her friends stood up, carried her in their arms, and placed her gently inside the coffin. There, with her old eyes closed, she began to wait for her children to speak.

One of the saddest practices that most people around the world blindly follow is to reserve the good words they want to say about the people they love until the day of their funeral. Eulogies are usually said when the person who would most appreciate hearing them is already dead. Wouldn’t our eulogies perhaps be more worthwhile if we delivered them while their subjects were still alive and able to hear what we would be saying about them?

Mother’s Day would be a good occasion to do precisely that. We could think of many ways of delivering a “eulogy” for our living mothers without unintentionally giving them the morbid feeling that there’s probably something we know about the state of their health which they don’t know, or that we’re expecting them to be gone anytime soon.

The word “eulogy,” after all, comes from the Greek word “eulogia” which simply means “praise,” “good or fine language,” period – not “praise for the dead,” not “good or fine language for someone lying six feet underground.” So, a eulogy can be delivered anytime – on Mother’s Day, on our mother’s birthday, and on any day for that matter. And it does not have to come in the form of a painstakingly crafted speech. A handwritten note accompanying a token, a brief call from overseas, a good word about her while you’re having lunch or dinner together would suffice. Most mothers are so easy to please. They don’t need expensive gifts and words laced with poetic similes and metaphors.

But, of course, nothing equals a eulogy that is delivered, not with words but with one’s actions. In fact, one’s spoken eulogy will sound painfully dishonest if it is not supported by the way one treats one’s mother in real life.

This Mother’s Day, I am reminded of the way my Mamang treated her own mother, my Lola Irene, while she was still alive. My Mamang’s life was, so to speak, a “living eulogy” for her mother. My grandmother (who worked as a schoolteacher all her life) was widowed at the very young age of thirty-seven. My Mamang was only ten years old at that time, and she had five siblings that included a boy (their youngest, my Uncle Eddie) who was only a year and three months old. Early on, my Mamang and her only sister, my Auntie Silda, did their best to assist my Lola in every way they could. In fact, after they finished their studies and started working, they gave their full salaries straight to my Lola so she could use the funds for their younger siblings’ education. They did this even while they themselves were already starting their own families. What was even more touching was that their husbands willingly allowed them to do so and even threw in their own support. The only time my Mamang and Auntie Silda were finally able to keep their salaries for themselves and their families was when their younger siblings finished their own education. But even afterwards, they continued to support their younger siblings whenever they could, and vice versa, for that was the way my Lola Irene taught her children to love one another.

My Lola Irene lived with us from the time we were born to the time she passed on. She helped my Mamang in bringing us up; and she was the person my Mamang always turned to for advise, for strength, for comfort. My Mamang always treated my Lola with unconditional love, with great respect and with filial obedience. They had occasional disagreements, of course; but at the end of the day, my Mamang’s love for her own mother always had the final word.

My Lola died at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. She quietly passed away one morning, after going through her twilight years, warmed by the assurance of her children’s love.

This Mother’s Day, as I think of my Mamang and all the mothers I know, I see their faces reflected on the face of the mother in the story we began with. And I realize how important it is indeed to seize every opportunity to eulogize our mothers, with our words and with our deeds, while they are still around and can still hear what we are going to say.
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*Copyright © 2023 Emmanuel R. Fernandez

Writing and Diplomacy

 by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

There is something about diplomacy that strongly attracts writers and people who, although they do not consider themselves writers, nevertheless love the act of putting down their ideas on paper.

In the first place, diplomacy is a career that involves a lot of writing.  A career diplomat’s working day typically consists of writing notes verbales, aides memoires, briefing papers, talking points, reports, demarches and a host of other forms of diplomatic correspondence.  Even if he rises to a position where his staff will be doing the actual writing of the drafts for him, he will still have to vet, edit and sometimes rewrite the drafts altogether before signing them or endorsing them to his senior officers. For this reason, a career diplomat who does not somehow enjoy writing will find it hard to derive satisfaction from his job.

Secondly, the annual FSO (Foreign Service Officer) Examinations, which any aspiring career diplomat must pass before he can be qualified for appointment by the President as a Foreign Service Officer, require a solid writing skill.  The centrepiece of the rigorous, five-part FSO Exams is the Written Test where aspirants are asked to answer (in essay form) some of the most abstruse questions one can imagine.  Some aspirants make the mistake of thinking that they must rack their brains for the “correct” answers to the questions if they want to pass the exams.  Yet, the truth is:  there is really no single “correct” answer to most of the questions.  What the examiners ultimately want to test is an examinee’s ability to present his answer or position in a clear, organized and persuasive manner.  The ability to write well is, without a doubt, one of the keys to passing the FSO Examinations.

Diplomacy, therefore, not only attracts those who somehow love the act of writing.  In general, it also admits (through its main screening mechanism, the FSO Exams) only those who can, in fact, write well.

The third reason that makes writers gravitate towards diplomacy is the priceless opportunity it offers in terms of “materials” one can later write about.  The challenges and joys that come with living in a new country, learning a new language, adapting to a new culture, making new friends in various parts of the world; representing our country before kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers; advancing our national interests and assisting our countrymen in need of help in a foreign land, constitute a vast treasure trove of materials for eventual essays, poems, short stories and even novels.  No wonder, some of the most interesting men/women of letters in history also worked, at one time or another, as diplomats (Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Niccolo Machiavelli, Baldassare Castiglione, Paul Claudel, Alexis Leger, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Carlos Fuentes, Czeslaw Milosz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, George F. Kennan; and our very own Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez and Armando D. Manalo, to name a few).

But that’s not to say that being a writer and a diplomat at the same time is easy.  Diplomacy is a very demanding job.  It consumes enormous amounts of one’s time and attention.  Writer-diplomats have to be determined and disciplined enough to “make time” (instead of just “finding time”) for their writing if they want to produce anything during their diplomatic career.  This often entails literally sacrificing their weekends and holidays, and the hours they could have spent watching a movie on Netflix or strolling in the park with their spouses at the end of a tiring day.  Writer-diplomats have to doggedly create time for their writing within the sparse interstices of their diplomatic life.

Even then, because of the demands of their diplomatic career, they can only write a little of the many things on their heads which they wish to put down on paper.  While still in the service, they have to patiently carry around with them an invisible suitcase filled with “songs unsung” (to borrow the title of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore).

Many of those “songs” will have to wait until they finally retire.

 

Queries for the Man on the Cross

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

We often think of “God’s will” as something which He wants us to do, something which He wants us to accomplish. But, sometimes, “God’s will” comes in the form of something we can’t do anything about, something we simply have to endure – in patience, and in faith.

In some sense, the “will of God” which comes in the form of having to do or to accomplish something is “easier” on our shoulders because it still gives us a room for choice. Somehow, we still have the freedom to decide whether to say yes or to say no, to accomplish “God’s will” or to reject it. A young woman who feels that God is calling her to the religious life can still say no. And God will respect her choice. He will not suddenly send a thunderbolt from the sky in order to strike her dead on account of her rejection. The same could be said of a man who feels that God wants him to resign from his toxic but high-paying job and find work that will allow him to have more time for his family. That man still has the latitude to say yes or to say no. In both examples, their choices will eventually have consequences. But these are consequences, NOT punishments from God. The things God wants us to do or to accomplish always redound, in the end, to our own good. If we choose not to do them, then we deprive ourselves of the good that would have been ours if we only said yes. That’s a consequence we must be ready for as a result of our own choices.

But the “will of God” that comes in the form of something to be endured is different. We can’t say no to it. We just have to carry it like a cross thrust upon our helpless shoulders.

All of us have had to endure that kind of “God’s will” at one point or another in our lives: a freak motorcycle accident that kills a young son who held so much promise; a serious sickness that has paralysed us or left us with only a few months more to live; a child who continues to rebel against us even if we cannot think of a reason why there should be so much hatred in his or her heart for us; a huge earthquake that claims the lives of thousands of people, including one or two who had been a part of our personal journey; a war that continues to destroy the lives of helpless civilians, including those of innocent children; a pandemic that has turned our world upside down…

Of course, we ought to desist from ascribing all things such as these to “God’s will” every time. If you’ve never really taken good care of your health and you have been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for the last twenty years, the doctor’s pronouncement that you have lung cancer and that you only have a few months to live is not “God’s will.” If you’ve been warned against taking a boat ride on a particular day because there’s a huge storm coming, but you still insist on taking that ride, then you can’t ascribe to “God’s will” the accident that may befall you as a result.

But there are tragedies that strike us for which we never had any responsibility; there are trials that violently shake the ground of our lives towards the occurrence of which we never really contributed anything. And, in the face of such trials and tragedies, we cannot help repeating the same old question that has been asked by countless others over the centuries: How can an all-good, all-loving and all-powerful God allow evil things to happen in our lives? How can such an all-good and all-powerful God afford to see us undergo so much pain and endure so much suffering yet still claim that He loves us?

There is a field of philosophy called “theodicy” that has been trying to answer that question for a long, long time. But the philosophical explanations that theodicy has so far come up with can satisfy our hunger for answers only up to a certain point. At the end of the day, after all of theodicy’s stratospheric attempts to pacify our minds, we will all find ourselves asking the same question we began with.

And it’s the same question that must have been on the minds of everyone who witnessed our Lord’s crucifixion: if this man hanging on the cross is indeed “God’s Son” as he claims to be, why doesn’t God do anything to save him? If he is indeed “God’s Son,” why does God His Father allow him to suffer and die in such a brutal, humiliating way? And if he is “God’s Son,” why can’t he himself do something about his own suffering? Matthew’s gospel narrates that those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Mt 27: 39)

Well, Jesus did not come down from the cross. And neither did His Father do anything to save him from his human suffering. From one point of view, it may look as though God did not answer the queries they asked – the queries that WE, all of us, continue to ask to this day.

But, maybe it only looks that way because we have mistaken His “silence” for a lack of an answer. Maybe the answer was right there, in the very silence of God, in the very “powerlessness” of both the Father and His dying Son. Jesus Christ did not come to take away our suffering and our pain. He came to endure them himself. And by enduring them, he demonstrated that pain and suffering (which will always be a fixture of our human condition) are part of a Mystery we cannot fully understand but which we can all choose to embrace, to be fully a part of – in faith: a Mystery the ultimate unravelling of which commences with the joy and glory of Easter.

*Copyright © 2023 Emmanuel R. Fernandez

On Happiness

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

The best thing about happiness is that you can give it to yourself anytime.  You don’t need somebody else to give it to you. You don’t even need to have anything in order to be happy.  That’s because happiness is ultimately a choice.  You can choose to be happy anytime, anywhere -- whatever your circumstances may be.  You may be in the middle of the most miserable circumstances, but you can still choose to be happy.  No one and nothing can stop you from choosing to be happy if you really want to.

In fact, we can go beyond saying that you don’t need someone else to make you happy.  We can go so far as to say that it would be a big mistake to ask or expect anyone to make you happy.  You may have a very beautiful, talented and intelligent wife who loves and cares for you as though you were the most important person in the world.  But if you still choose to be unhappy in spite of all that, you will be unhappy.

In the same manner, no matter how much you shower your young children or your old parents with all the gifts that are within your power to give, if they still opt to be unhappy in the end, you can do nothing about that.

No one has the power (nor the obligation) to make you happy except yourself; just as you do not have the power (nor the obligation) to make anyone else happy, no matter how much you love him or her.  That power (and that obligation) belongs to the person who wants to be happy.  To think otherwise is to put oneself in a position that will inevitably lead to many disappointments.

It would likewise be a big mistake to think that finally having the things you want will make you happy.  The possession of beautiful and expensive things is by no means the key (much less, the prerequisite) to happiness.  

Not so long ago, I stumbled upon two pictures on the internet that powerfully showed me how true that statement is. One was a picture of five little children pretending to take a “selfie” of themselves using, not a mobile phone, but the sole of a rubber slipper.  From the picture, one could tell that the kids were not rich.  Three of them were barefooted.  The humble house in the background had a fence made of rusty G.I. sheets. Obviously, their parents could not afford to buy any of them a mobile phone – not even a cheap, second-hand one.  They had to make-believe that the rubber slipper was a mobile phone. But their young faces glowed with immense happiness – one that made you yourself happy just by looking at it.

The other picture was that of a little girl sitting inside a small pail filled with water.  Again, from the picture, one could tell that she did not come from a rich family.  The pail looked old and rather dirty.  But on the little girl’s face shone a ray of joy that many of us would gladly exchange our precious possessions for, if it were only possible to make such a barter.

Those children were happy not because they possessed beautiful and expensive things but because they had chosen to be happy with whatever it was that they had.  In contrast, many children of rich families are perpetually unhappy in spite of the fact that they have the latest models of the most expensive mobile phone brands, and they have huge swimming pools right in front of their living rooms!

Indeed, happiness does not come from getting what you like, but from liking what you get -- even if what you get is not exactly what you wanted originally.  It’s the attitude you choose to adopt vis-à-vis your current circumstances that makes all the difference.

But, at this point, one can ask:  can I choose to be happy even if I have just lost my job, or someone has just broken my heart into many little pieces, or someone I love has just died?  Of course, people will probably think you have gone crazy if you choose to be happy in the middle of such circumstances.  And if you choose to be happy after you have just lost a “loved one,” the police will probably suspect that you had something to do with his or her death. But, humour aside, the answer to the question is yes – you can still choose to be happy even in the middle of such unhappy circumstances.  

At the height of Adolf Hitler’s madness, when he was sending people with the slightest Jewish blood to concentration camps and gas chambers, one of his prisoners was a man named Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who happened to have a Jewish ancestry.  Frankl survived the experience and later wrote a book about how he was able to endure the horrors of being a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps by finding a personal meaning in the unspeakable sufferings that he and his fellow prisoners had to go through.  He kept his sanity and his will to survive intact by choosing to find meaning in his sufferings. He then concluded that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”  [1]

If we find ourselves frequently (or worse, perennially) unhappy, it is probably because we have unconsciously chosen to be unhappy in any set of circumstances.  We have probably adopted an attitude of unhappiness towards life in general, without our knowing it. And there are many ways by which we could be unwittingly led to make such a choice.  

For instance, our cultural upbringing probably discouraged us from being “too happy” lest we would end up being very unhappy.  I recall that, in the town where I grew up, older people used to warn us, children, against laughing too much or smiling too frequently.  They told us that unhappiness is the jealous rival of happiness.  Once unhappiness sees us being “too happy,” it will make every effort to drive away our happiness and put itself in its place.  It took me a while to disabuse myself of this cultural belief.

Our distorted religious views could also make us adopt an overall attitude of unhappiness.  I used the adjective “distorted” for a reason:  more often than not, it is our erroneous interpretation of the doctrines of our religion that encourages us to be unhappy, and not the doctrines themselves.

As Christians, for example, we are taught to be sorry for our sins and do penance for them.  We are taught to make amends for the wrongs we have done.  But, we are not taught to spend the rest of our lives torturing ourselves for the sins we have committed, or destroying our lives in order to “pay” for our sins.  Rather, after having asked and received God’s forgiveness, we are taught to stand up, sin no more, and proclaim – by word and deed – the good news of God’s salvation.  As sinners, we are not taught to follow in Judas’ footsteps but Peter’s.  Judas could not bring himself to believe that God would forgive his sin, and he ended up taking his own life.  Peter, on the contrary, deeply regretted his own sin but allowed God to forgive him and make him whole again.  Yet, how many of us, to a certain extent, wrongly follow in Judas’ footsteps instead of Peter’s?

Incidentally, Christianity is ultimately a religion that brims with joy.  As Pope Francis points out in his apostolic exhortation, “Envangelii Gaudium”:  “The Joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew….  The Gospel, radiant with the glory of Christ’s cross, constantly invites us to rejoice.” [2]. Still, no amount of Gospel passages that invite us to rejoice will ever succeed in doing so unless we decide to believe and heed them.

Finally, it is possible that the view of life which we have adopted inclines us towards unhappiness rather than happiness.  Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us possesses what the Germans call a “weltanschauung” – a certain view of life, a personal “philosophy” of life (if you will).  If  the personal “philosophy” we have adopted makes us see life as nothing but an endless parade of useless tasks, meaningless events, worthless persons and what not, it would very difficult for us to choose to be happy at the same time.

And yet, the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus convincingly asserts that even if life is indeed “absurd” as we believe it is, even if life is indeed bereft of any inherent meaning as we believe it is, we can still choose to be happy.  Like the Greek mythological figure, Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to spend his entire life pushing a huge rock up a hill, only to see the rock roll back down every time it neared the top, we can choose to adopt a very different attitude towards our “futile and meaningless existence.”  In his famous essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus imagines Sisyphus choosing to find meaning in his apparently futile and meaningless task.  He imagines Sisyphus going down the hill after the rock has rolled back down, and making up his mind that the there is meaning in what he is doing.  “If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow,” Camus then concludes, “it can also take place in joy….  The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” [3]

At the end of the day, the wonderful thing is that we do not have to remain prisoners of the faulty elements of our cultural upbringing, our misinterpretations of the teachings of our religion, or the pessimistic personal philosophies we have unconsciously adopted.  We can always break free from them; and the process of our liberation begins with our being aware of the existence of our attitudinal enslavements. 

We can choose to be happy anytime, anywhere, and in spite of anything.  Or we can choose not to.  It’s really all up to us.

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[1] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning  (Boston, Mass.:  Beacon Press, 1992 ), p. 75.

[2] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Holy See:  Vatican Press, 2013), pp. 3 & 6.

[3] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 109 & 111. 

On Growing Old

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

Those of us who sometimes find ourselves complaining of the inconveniences that come with growing old would do well to remember what the French entertainer, Maurice Chevalier, once said:  “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.”  The alternative to growing old is, of course, dying young.  If we don’t like to die young, then we should be ready to bear with the inevitable inconveniences that come with growing old.  We can’t have our cake and eat it too.

One thing good about growing old is that its manifestations come in gradual, almost predictable stages.  Can you imagine what a terrifying experience growing old would be if its manifestations appeared in sudden, unpredictable surges?  How would you feel if you slept one night with a full hair on your head and woke up the following morning with all your hair suddenly gone?  Can you imagine what a shock it would be if you took a nap one afternoon with a beautiful and youthful face, and woke up an hour later to see an old, heavily wrinkled face in the mirror?   Fortunately, nature is very kind when it comes to the manifestations of old age.  We generally lose our hair, our teeth, our youthful features in gradual, almost predictable stages.  Nature gently prepares us for our old age step by step.  Unless we have resolved to closely monitor every little manifestation of our own aging process, we will hardly notice the fact that we are indeed growing older every single day.

Not so long ago, I had several vicarious experiences of what it would be like if old age manifested itself in surge-like movements.  When I first started using YouTube, I enjoyed searching for the music videos of the 70s rock stars I used to idolize when I was still in high school.  Back then, I collected posters of such rock stars and secretly wished I had their long, uncombed hair; their young, devil-may-care looks…  I expected to see the same young, carefree rock stars in the music videos I searched for on YouTube.  Well, some of their old videos met my expectations.  But their latest ones were quite a shock!  Not a few of the videos featured old men with white hair and wrinkled faces; and it took a while for me to get used to the idea of old men beating their drums and making their electric guitars weep like wild teenagers.  The shock was, of course, a result of the fact that I had not been able to see how they looked during the years in between.  I did not witness the gradual transition.  All I saw was the sudden metamorphosis.

The shock would be the same if old age came to us all of a sudden, and not in the progressive, almost foreseeable way it comes to each of us now

Not everyone lasts long enough to reach old age.  For that reason alone, old age is indeed a gift – a gift we should be immensely grateful for because we happen to be among the lucky ones to whom it has been given.  But, it is also a gift for several other reasons. 

Old age is a gift because it is a time in our life when we can finally take a more relaxed attitude towards life in general.  Much of our young life had been spent doing things that we “needed” to do – getting an education, preparing ourselves for our future, obtaining a degree, finding a good job, working hard to provide for our family, building a house of our own, sending our children to school…  But, by the time we reach our sixties (and even if we have not officially retired yet), much of that should have been over and done with.  Finally, we can slow down and find time for the things we “want” to do:  to travel, to read all the books we’ve been wanting to read but simply had no time to, to play the guitar or the piano again after many years of having to put them aside in order to concentrate on our studies and our careers.  Old age is “me-time” in the truest of that phrase.  

Old age is also a gift because it is an opportunity to celebrate what we have achieved in life, regardless of its degree of significance in other people’s eyes.  Even if others think we have not really achieved that much in our life according to their standards, there is always something we have done which deserves to be celebrated by us – something that we should feel proud of and happy about.  When I graduated from San Pablo Seminary in 1982, one of the best gifts I received was a card from one of my teachers, the late Ms. Agnes Bautista, the caption of which read:  “It is not how far you have reached that matters.  It is how many obstacles you had to overcome in order to get there.”  Indeed, it is not the size of the house we have built, the kind of car we drive around, or the names of the schools we were able to send our children to that matter.  It is the struggles we had to wage in order to achieve them that ultimately count.  Many of us had to overcome enormous obstacles in order to reach where we are now.  While we were out there struggling, there was not much time to stop and pat ourselves on the back for our own efforts.  Old age provides us with the long overdue opportunity to do precisely that:  to be grateful for what we were able to achieve, to celebrate not only our victories but also the battles we needed to wage in order to achieve them.

Old age is, moreover, a gift because it provides us with the opportunity to put a proper closure on our life – something which many of those who die all of a sudden will not have the privilege of doing.  Sudden death often leaves the deceased – as well as the bereaved – with plenty of “unfinished business.”  Growing old until one dies, on the other hand, gives us the time to finish our pending business before we depart from this life for good.  We are given the time to ask forgiveness from those we have wronged, to make amends, to try to repair what can still be repaired with regard to the things we might have broken, to rebuild the bridges we have burnt, to reconnect with the people we have alienated along our way.  

More importantly, old age provides us with the opportunity to reconnect and, perhaps, even make peace with our own past selves.  I read somewhere that each of us is, in a way, a house inhabited by several past “selves.”  Inside one room of that house lives the young boy we once were still struggling with his fears.  Inside another is the teenager we once were still grappling with his regrets.  Out in the garden, alone, is the disillusioned young man we once were still trying to get his faith in life back.  We are often unaware of the presence of these “co-inhabitants.”  But they are very much a part of us; nay, they are “us.”  Their unresolved issues, their unaddressed cares and concerns influence the decisions we make and the steps we take in our present journey, without our knowing it.

Old age gives us the time and the opportunity to reach out to the young boy we once were and assure him that there’s nothing more to fear, for the monsters and the demons he continues to be afraid of are now gone; to reach out to the teenager we once were and assure him that making mistakes is part of growing up and that his 60-year old self has actually become a much better person because of the lessons he learned from his mistakes; and to reach out to the disillusioned young man we once were and tell him the good news that, many years later, his 60-year old self has discovered that, in spite of everything, life is good – and it’s a great privilege merely to be alive.

Old age is, furthermore, a gift because it gives us the opportunity to give something back to life without expecting anything in return.  In our younger years, much of what we did was probably done with a view to receiving a corresponding reward: a promotion, a salary raise, a good professional reputation, the respect of our peers…  We needed those things then and, hence, many of our efforts were exerted in the hope of attaining them in return.  In old age, we can finally serve for the sake of serving, and give for the sake of giving – with no eye on what will come back to us as a result.  Old age is “me-time,” but it can also be, at the same time, the very opposite of “me-time” which is “others-time.” Those two “times” can comfortably sit together when one is old.

Finally, old age is a gift because it affords us the opportunity to prepare for our death according to what our own religious beliefs tell us.  As Catholics, we believe that part of the preparation we must undertake for our death is to approach it with a soul cleansed through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  Other religions have their own prescriptions for their followers as to what they must do to prepare for their own death.  Old age, fortunately, gives all of us the time and the opportunity to undertake those prescribed preparations for our inevitable leap into The Great Beyond.

I am not saying, of course, that everything about growing old is good and beautiful.  I have no intention of sugar-coating old age.  Let’s face it:  old age is  something we all wish we would not have to go through without having to die young.  And the older we get, the more our minds are visited by questions about who will take care of us when we get sick, how we shall die, how long and how painful our dying will be, and so on and so forth.  We will all die someday; and no matter how hard we try to prepare for it -- the time, the place and the manner of our dying are ultimately beyond our control.  The thing to do is to cherish each new day of our life as a priceless gift, and to trust that He who knew what was the best time, the best place and the best way for us to be born into this world also knows what would be the best time, the best place, and the best way for us to leave it.

Thoughts on an Italian Summer Night

 by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

                It is 10: 37 PM, on the 30th of August 2005, the second to the last night of summer, and I am lying in my bed trying so hard to go to sleep.    But the harder I try, the more sleep eludes me.   I feel like a little boy who has already counted hundreds of sheep yet still feels wide awake despite his closed eyes. 

             It should not really surprise me why I cannot sleep tonight.  This particular working day didn’t go very well.  It was one of those rare days when you drove home from your office and wished you could just keep moving farther and farther away and finally escape from it all.  If the office were a boxing ring, today’s fight had been unusually cruel.   The blows I had to take were rather hard; and the punches I myself gave---intentionally and otherwise---only left a bitter taste in my mouth afterwards.   By mid-afternoon,  I found myself (so to speak) untying my boxing gloves in disgust.  I stood up from my swivel chair and took an aimless, solitary walk in the park a few meters away from where I worked.  Barely had I breathed the fresh air I craved when I realized I had to go back to the ring for another scheduled meeting.  And the ruthless games of power that had to be played across the meeting table made me wish I were elsewhere…  anywhere but there.

             It is 10: 56 PM, on the eve of summer’s last day.   I toss and turn in my bed, praying that sleep would finally embrace me.  Realizing how determined sleep is to make me a loser in its game of hide-and-seek, I rise up, switch on my bedside table lamp, and begin to read.  But my mind soon sees through the trick I am trying to play on it.   I put the book away, switch off the light and resume my hopeless quest for sleep. 

             It is 11:10 PM and I wonder:  What has gone to the heads of these young people?  Everyone else in the neighborhood is trying to get some sleep.  Yet all of a sudden---here they are, singing and laughing as though the day has just started.  Yes, I know, I know… These teenagers are in the neighborhood piazza where one can do what one wants---but not at this time in the evening, for goodness’ sake!  Could some “responsible citizen” please get up and remind these kids of older people’s right to rest for the morrow’s battles?   

            The “responsible citizen” doesn’t get up.  Having no choice but to bear with the youngsters’ unwelcome sound,  I open my eyes in the darkness of my room and try to make out the lyrics of their song.   It is an Italian song.   I can hardly understand its words.   But I soon realize it is a happy song, for after every line or two, someone bursts into laughter and is quickly joined by the others.   Another song is sung, then another, and yet another.   And, always, laughter pops up like a bottle of champagne in between the singing. 

            Wasn’t there a time---many, many years ago---when I myself was young; when, like these young people, all that my friends and I cared about was to play our guitars and sing, regardless of where or when---or how we sounded?   Wasn’t there a time when, like them, all that mattered to me was the here and now?   Not tomorrow.  Not even yesterday.   Wasn’t there a time when I couldn’t understand why older people should give so much importance to achieving success, attaining power, gaining fame and  accumulating wealth?   Their preoccupation with such matters looked ridiculous to me then.  Alas, here I am now breaking my heart and head over things I used to consider not worth the bother at all!   Something must have gone wrong somewhere along the way.   At some point, I must have started believing older people’s lies about the importance of making a name for oneself, of leaving one’s mark in the world, and of winning grown-ups’ wars at all costs. 

            It is almost midnight, on the 30th of August, in this Italian neighborhood thousands of miles away from that small town in the Philippines where I spent a good part of my youth.  I am still wide awake, even though the young people must have grown tired of singing and laughing and have probably gone home, for I no longer hear the sound of them.  I rise up from my bed and look out my window… and I soon realize, in spite of everything, what a beautiful summer night it is!  Si, che bella notte d'estate e davvero!

             In a few hours’ time, regardless of whether or not I can still manage to sleep, I shall have to drive back to that “boxing ring” I left in disgust several hours earlier.  But, though back in the ring, I shall no longer have a prizefighter’s heart.  For this penultimate night of summer has made me a lover of life once more.

 

Father Peter Michael, SVD: A Latinist in Swineherd's Clothing

 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.