What Happens To Nights Like This

What happens to nights like this

When words you've heard

become what they were meant to be

and you don't learn. You stay at home.

You let what will be,they don't own you -

you don't own them.

Feeling spent while all are filling.

Having much and many

all this silence, all this lonesome

all this darkness not built for me,

but made for me regardless

if outside is a breeze

you don't walk away from this.

Do nights go anywhere?

Do they run or walk somwhere?

They run like lava over everything

this wealth I'm not made for

in a room I've made austere

when sunlight hits the walls tomorrow

I will be all the same.



The Stranger Pope

I had high hopes when I learned that the pope was a Jesuit.

I'm not naive. I've read about the work of Jesuits for nazi Germany and all their crude misconduct throughout history. But that's what I was counting on - not a scheming agent of devious machinations, but a person who goes against the grain on his own principles. Put someone like that as Pope and you can expect a shakedown.

I was not only schooled by Jesuits, I was personally mentored by the former Jesuit Provincial (the highest Jesuit position in any country) in matters of social justice. Jesuits have founded many social action organizations including two of the largest labor unions in the country.  In the end, the Jesuit Provincial, who also had taught Ethics in the prestigious Philippine Military Academy, had a serious falling out with the women's organization he helped found because of its positions on abortion and the reproductive health bill.  I had a falling out eventually because although I took the cudgels of organizing the women loyal to him, I could not not support the bill.  Or so I would like to think. Possibly I'm difficult to work with in a structured environment where Jesuits can thrive with the military.  It's always been my challenge.

So I love this Pope because he has gone against many traditions. I suspect he is also torn on many more issues than already publicly confessed.  For instance, several Jesuits are gays. There are many whispers among the halls of the Ateneo University.  We who heard of them were torn between sympathy and cringing. So the Pope opening the conversation on this piece should have been helpful.

This Pope will surely change lives if he hadn't already. But not because he has his own opinions that differentiate him from many modern Catholics, but because he is dressed in a robe, he is talked about, seen in crowds, and he waves from a magnificent balcony dripping with symbol. One day he will pass away and we will feel empty for his loss. And his successor may prolong his legacy or overturn it, as popes are allowed. But 30 years from now we may have already disregarded his words, especially if no real change in the clergy hierarchy would have taken effect.

My point is, there are people more ordinary who have no clout but will be shaping our lives more than any person on TV.  They are called our neighbors. They elect the local community leader, the next president, and even has a hand in how traffic is managed in our neighborhoods.  Yet we hardly ask about their principles and values. We don't sit them down and dress down their wrong notions about women, gays, carpooling, or the electoral system.  And yet we can.  And even get some clout in the process.

The Pope soon comes to the Philippines. Already, streets are being paved more thoughtfully. People will be flocking to get a glimpse, it will be a nightmare for the government of a hugely Catholic country to ensure his safety.

I'm already learning two things from his hugeness and his smallness.  Every generation has a revolutionary, but this generation has many, although pity they have been adopted by corporations. There's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others. People who don't care whether you have community gardens only computers.  This Pope may be a different revolutionary. At least he spoke about inequality as the root of all evil. Nathan again, he has not started a program for equality in Vatican City.   His hugeness is becoming increasingly inappropriate to his message.   But then he is also inherently small, a small piece in the puzzle. He can't change the world alone. And so he must try to preserve the office which differentiates his not-so-extraordinary opinion from the common folk.

Elementally, the Pope is still an ordinary stranger outside your doors. How much of the Pope you let in is a reflection of the world you're trying to make; how much you let in of any stranger for that matter.

We curate chaos just as anybody else does. He may be one thing and so are you.

The God Wound

Today, the sound of howling winds too often heard in these parts tears through the glass windows sealed for comfort.  Incorrigible. The deaths of 10,000 or so in one island during the last supertyphoon of this magnitude are still fresh in the collective memory of those in the 7,000 islands of this country who were spared. The winds don't lash or buffet, they crush any sliver of faith that God will spare us from danger. At least for me.

How does one heal from a God wound?

A year has barely passed after Typhoon Haiyan, today we get Typhoon Ruby. At this time, although it has made landfall, the news we get is that our luck can be summed in the few lives snuffed this time. Barely a handful this time.  

But I sorely remember how 2 days after Haiyan hit, after we all prayed in our heart of hearts and our deepest faith to our God, that the damage caused by the typhoon was zero. Somehow, it magically disappeared. And this to my mind was how the nuns in my Catholic high school described one typhoon that magically split into weaker forces getting lost in a mountain range.  How it was a miracle, nothing is impossible with God.

Tomorrow, I will still be expected to work. I will be talking to a Palestinian who has never experienced a typhoon in his life.  I told him to expect floods and strong winds but he will be safe because he lives in a good hotel. We talked about Haiyan and I could see his empathy. I'm quite certain a person who has no nation and no passport, hassled for his strange travel documents, can empathize with helplessness.

In the few days I've with met him we've talked about the Quran, about Israel, and my views on the beauty of dark-skinned people. He has been amazed at learning about the literacy rate in the Philippines, which is one of the highest in the world, our achievements at gender equality, and our propensity to adopt the less fortunate as our own.  He asked me, "Is adoption something you do morally?"  I said, "It's more cultural. My aunt has adopted six, and I have an adopted brother." No one will be able to tell. My colleague chimed in, "I myself have an adopted sister."

With all the corruption that has plagued this country, and with all our rebellions against our captors and bad leaders, you would imagine our God is not the God of obedience or compliance. And surely you may understand why.  Last super typhoon, it was the first time we ever experienced a thing called a storm surge. It was a cross between hurricane and tsunami.  We thought we had complied enough with our safety standards and the rest will be up to a rather merciful God, in our view. But the sea outdid itself and swept inland with the huge ships at harbor.  

We eventually learned after 2 days that the reason we thought Haiyan miraculously dissipated was because it had wiped out most of the coast guard and the police force and locked in the whole town, both dead and alive. Instant news blackout.  It wasn't a miracle. It was the end of the world for at least 40 days.  For about 40 days the town ate mostly the feast-worthy dish it's known for, roasted pork.  Among the dead they feasted, there were barely any alternatives.  After 40 days, help reached them after hurdling rotting corpses, logs, concrete slabs, and parts of wooden homes.

Today, right now, we hear minimal casualties.  I wait. It's past midnight and I won't be able to sleep. And what do I pray for that seems doable or reasonable to our God?  Compliance hardly saves us in this nation that is hard to rule over. Whatever semblance of stability we try for ultimately gets challenged by powers of nature or powers-that-be. Does God honor our efforts to suffer one another? When we barter our personal space for the accommodation of another, does God not see how little we feel?

I only pray that as minister, I have something to say next Sunday to the congregation I serve, when all the numbers are in and we all feel once again that nagging doubt. That I tell them that the wound of disappointment is where the light enters, as Rumi said.  That a Muslim is who I turn to for inspiration at this time. That I open the wound to a different care.  That I am feeling small because I am. Because power does not lie in invincibility but in resilience, not in domination but in steadfastness.  That it is not certainty around which the order of God is built, not in control, but in adaptability like forgiveness and love that adapts to the loved without losing yourself.   

And in the core of doubt is the ability to accept the relativity of certainty as well as of failure, of loss, of change. To doubt God is the coward's way of doubting if certainty and control are the ways of the just. The best window to the eternal is the one where we find ourselves not as people comfortably looking out, but one outside which we are the stranger looking in, uncertain and hopeful. And sometimes the darker it is inside, the better we see ourselves reflected. Our reflection shows our deepest intention.  It takes courage to see God within ourselves.  And that may be the message for the living.  Perhaps only the dead can reside in certainty.