By Archbishop Socrates B. Villegas
August 31, 2011
Do you still care to remember Jaime Cardinal Sin? He passed away only six years ago. How time flies! How fast we forget! He would have been eighty three years old today. I wonder if people still remember. As for me, how can I forget? I will always remember and I still miss him.
Cardinal Sin had something to say about almost everything happening to the Church and Philippine society. He did not have to go to Luneta to be heard. Even if he whispered to the wall, society somehow caught his opinion, media was swift to publish and gossipers were quick to exaggerate.
I lived with him as his secretary for eighteen years. I lived with him longer than I lived with my own parents. He taught me. He guided me. He allowed me to care for him. I knew he cared for me as much as he cared for the millions who belonged to his flock. He knew the meaning of living a dangerous life. He knew the meaning of being ready to die to protect his beloved.
What would Cardinal Sin tell us about what is going on the country now? What would Cardinal Sin do about the situation of the Church and government now? Only Cardinal Sin can answer for Cardinal Sin and only Cardinal Sin can answer like Cardinal Sin.
As I remember him and as I knew him, I offer these conjectures of a nostalgic former secretary.
I close my eyes and imagine him in the car on our way to an engagement. I imagine him say: The real battle about the reproductive health bill is not with the legislature where the debates are ongoing and where the voting will be done. The real person to wrestle with is not the President who has sadly called the bill a priority bill. The real battle is in the minds and hearts of our youth. The youth are being misled by wrong teachings. The youth are like parched dry sponge. In their thirst, they absorb all and retain them regardless of the purity of source. I pity our youth. The Church cannot impose its right and authority in this highly pluralistic society. It must be willing to join the arena of public opinion, use new methods and approaches and even jejemon vocabulary to make the message of God convincing. It is not the duty of churchmen to lobby in government offices. Our duty is to teach Christ and only Christ. Our duty is to form people’s minds and prick consciences and let those formed consciences speak up in the plaza of public opinion. This is lay empowerment. This is youth empowerment. This is the church of the people not the church of bishops.
There is a problem deeper than the anti life and anti family bills in the legislature. The blasphemous art exhibits point to a deeper and more alarming issue. The irreverent calumny thrown at religious leaders are symptoms of deeper problems. It is due to the wrong understanding of freedom and the misplaced primacy that is laid on conscience.
After EDSA 1986, we all discovered a fresh breeze of freedom in the air. Lost liberties were restored and the freedom to express was held in high esteem. Freedom is indeed a noble human right and a sublime aspiration but it not unlimited. Freedom since EDSA 1986 has been abused, terribly abused. Freedom is not absolute. The limit of freedom is love. The exercise of freedom must make us more loving. If the use of freedom violates the freedom of another, it is licentiousness; it fails to love. That freedom is lewd and obscene.
There is no absolute freedom. Freedom has limits. Its limit is truth. When freedom violates or assails truth, it can no longer be called freedom. It is debauchery and brute arrogance.
Freedom must respect the law. Freedom without respect for law is anarchy. Laws do not restrict freedom. Laws help us to live in order. When life is orderly, freedom is also safeguarded.
Our countrymen who declare themselves Catholics because they attend Catholic liturgies but disregard the commandments of God and the precepts of the Church are gravely in error. To be a Catholic, it is not enough to pray the Catholic prayers. To say you are a Catholic, you must also live as a Catholic. It is not enough to act according to conscience. Before listening to that conscience, we must first insure that the conscience is sensitive to the laws of God. Conscience is not the ultimate tribunal. The Truth that God has taught us is the highest tribunal. That Truth is in the bible. That Truth is handed to us in the teachings of the Church.
How I miss Cardinal Sin! He taught me to cherish freedom but he also warned me not to raise it to a value more than it deserves. Freedom is one of the great gifts of God to men but the greatest gift is love. Use your freedom to be more loving because “the greatest is love”. Aim for the greatest. Freedom must recognize unchanging truths. Freedom must not enchain truth. Truth is the mother of freedom and it is the height of ingratitude to enslave your mother, isn’t it?
He taught me: Follow your conscience when it speaks but make sure the ears of that conscience are ever attuned to God. When a deaf conscience speaks, ignore that voice. That is the voice of error. Knowing what is right and what is wrong is not inborn. Conscience must be formed and molded unto Christ. The duty of conscience is to listen to its God so that it may be credible when it speaks.
The legacy of Cardinal Sin is freedom. Let us understand freedom in depth. The love of Cardinal Sin was the youth and children. He taught them well. I will honor him by loving those he loved and living as he lived and believing in what he stood for.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Forgetting
It's been nearly a year.
It isn't funny how I find myself here. Now. After nearly a year. A year!
It makes me sad thinking how much I've lost and how far I've gone and how nothing's been written. Am I no longer a writer?
It's a valid question. I have barely written anything of myself and my ideas, my adventures and mishaps. Whatever I've written is, essentially, nothing. Air. Spit. Sand. Ghost. And, I have had so much to write about and wanted so much to write about them. But when it came down to it, to words and coherence and logic, all energies went flying out the window and I died. Each and every time I died. I was content to be ghost, to be sand and spit and air. I flew this way and that and I had a crazy fun time and I was nothing.
It's fun being nothing. Having been spent and lost and forgotten. Thriving in others. Fungus. Shallow. Flighty. And sad.
I guess, at the end of the day, I still want to come home even if I've forgotten how.
It isn't funny how I find myself here. Now. After nearly a year. A year!
It makes me sad thinking how much I've lost and how far I've gone and how nothing's been written. Am I no longer a writer?
It's a valid question. I have barely written anything of myself and my ideas, my adventures and mishaps. Whatever I've written is, essentially, nothing. Air. Spit. Sand. Ghost. And, I have had so much to write about and wanted so much to write about them. But when it came down to it, to words and coherence and logic, all energies went flying out the window and I died. Each and every time I died. I was content to be ghost, to be sand and spit and air. I flew this way and that and I had a crazy fun time and I was nothing.
It's fun being nothing. Having been spent and lost and forgotten. Thriving in others. Fungus. Shallow. Flighty. And sad.
I guess, at the end of the day, I still want to come home even if I've forgotten how.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Chapter 11
"Time goes on, and your life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with the sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories.
Nothing will be the same, ever...But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.
It was September, and time to leave the little house that had begun to seem like home...
It is hard to give up the being together with someone...
Somewhere, for (Tatay), I thought suddenly, it would be summer still, summer always."
-Lois Lowry, A Summer To Die
Nothing will be the same, ever...But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.
It was September, and time to leave the little house that had begun to seem like home...
It is hard to give up the being together with someone...
Somewhere, for (Tatay), I thought suddenly, it would be summer still, summer always."
-Lois Lowry, A Summer To Die
Saturday, January 23, 2010
2010 Resolutions
Twenty three days is not too late to come up with resolutions for the new year.
I have always been wary of resolutions, knowing that they have every risk of never being met, but I have always found them quite irresistable still. And so, every year, I always come up with a list. Sometimes lengthy, sometimes brief, but always seemingly unattainable.
This year, has proven to be no different. After twenty-three days of dragging my feet, here is my list.
1. I am resolved not to buy another pair of earrings for the entire year. Those silly shiny dangly things have been my ruin, and I now have a collection to rival Imelda Marcos's shoe closet.
2. I am resolved to build up my savings anew, which through no fault of its own, has grown steadily leaner the past year.
3. I am resolved to write a children's storybook, as promised to my wide-eyed, simple-minded, all-believing students. It is never a good idea to make promises to children. No matter how silly or impossible, they will believe it to be true and demand that you deliver.
4. I am resolved to learn something new. What it is, I have yet to decide...
5. I am resolved to travel out of my comfort zone...which is not really a very good resolution seeing how unspecific it is, but I commit to it anyway.
It's not much, but a short list does not make it any easier than a long-winded one. In the end, it doesn't really matter how many one comes up with. Resolutions were never meant to be easy. They were meant to produce change, and change never goes over easy.
The question now is whether these resolutions would ever see themselves met. The challenge always lies in deciding if following them is better than leaving them for something else; something more apt for a situation you did not foresee, therefore making your resolutions exponentially more difficult to achieve, if not impossible altogether.
I have always been wary of resolutions, knowing that they have every risk of never being met, but I have always found them quite irresistable still. And so, every year, I always come up with a list. Sometimes lengthy, sometimes brief, but always seemingly unattainable.
This year, has proven to be no different. After twenty-three days of dragging my feet, here is my list.
1. I am resolved not to buy another pair of earrings for the entire year. Those silly shiny dangly things have been my ruin, and I now have a collection to rival Imelda Marcos's shoe closet.
2. I am resolved to build up my savings anew, which through no fault of its own, has grown steadily leaner the past year.
3. I am resolved to write a children's storybook, as promised to my wide-eyed, simple-minded, all-believing students. It is never a good idea to make promises to children. No matter how silly or impossible, they will believe it to be true and demand that you deliver.
4. I am resolved to learn something new. What it is, I have yet to decide...
5. I am resolved to travel out of my comfort zone...which is not really a very good resolution seeing how unspecific it is, but I commit to it anyway.
It's not much, but a short list does not make it any easier than a long-winded one. In the end, it doesn't really matter how many one comes up with. Resolutions were never meant to be easy. They were meant to produce change, and change never goes over easy.
The question now is whether these resolutions would ever see themselves met. The challenge always lies in deciding if following them is better than leaving them for something else; something more apt for a situation you did not foresee, therefore making your resolutions exponentially more difficult to achieve, if not impossible altogether.
Friday, January 15, 2010
A Summer To Die: An Open Letter to Lois Lowry
Dear Ms. Lowry,
You don't know me. I am a third-grade Language Arts teacher from halfway around the world. I am a fan of yours, though I’ve only read four of your books: The Giver, Gooney Bird and the Room Mother, Gathering Blue, and most recently (just last night, actually) A Summer To Die.
Allow me to digress a bit and provide you with a short background of myself before I get to why I am writing to you now.
A number of tragedies hit me and my family last year, my dad passing away and floods inundating our home being the most heart-wrenching ones. I lost all my books in that flood. My students, with whom I shared my survival story, since then have been sharing their books for me to read. One has lent me your Gathering Blue and A Summer To Die. And I loved, love, both dearly. A Summer To Die especially. It wasn’t until I as in the middle of reading it that I realized it reminded me of my father.
My father was my best friend. I can’t get to the details of our relationship here because it would simply take up too much time and space, but it was a lot like Meg’s relationship with Will Banks combined with her relationship to Molly. He was also sick. He was diagnosed with diabetes in his forties and lived with it for nearly thirty years. He would be seventy-three now, if he lived.
The past couple of years, my dad went in and out of hospitals as his organs started bailing out on him, which was a consequence of his having diabetes. He started dialysis last 2008, which terrified him greatly, then had his worst attack last April. He spent nearly a week in the ICU while we slept on the cold, hard floor of the hospital waiting area. When he recovered, he gave us firm orders not to put him through that again. It must have been a million times more excruciating for him that for us who were just stuck watching helplessly, agonizingly. We knew that the end would come soon.
It did only a month after.
I wasn’t even there when he was rushed to a small hospital nearby (no big, ultra hi-tech hospitals for him anymore), which I didn’t really dwell on at that time. It didn’t really bother me at all because there were too many other things to think about then. Now, I realize it must’ve been God’s way of working things out. See, weeks before that my mother told me she couldn’t just stand by and follow my dad’s wish of not getting the best medical treatment there was to save whatever frail life was left in him. My mother said that if my dad wanted to be left in peace, she would have to stay out of the hospital. But in the end, she didn’t. Which was how it should be. Just the two of them. My mom stayed by my dad’s side ‘til the end.
My dad’s passing was a cheerful event for me, or so it seemed at that time. He was such a cheerful soul that literally moments after his death, I was left laughing with unexplained joy.
I did not grieve, for a long time. When I finally started to four months later in September, a super typhoon came and dumped the heaviest rainfall our country’s seen in decades. The ensuing floods swept away everything: our home, our car, all our belongings, our memories, everything. It was like a Divine Hand telling us to move on, don’t waste time holding on and grieving over a happy soul.
Now, we’ve all started over. We’ve left behind our old house with all the memories of my dad. Of course, we haven’t forgotten still. I just remember the happy times.
Reading your book, it touched my heart. Though starkly different in many ways, our stories have eerily similar circumstances, including the important fact that my dad died in May (which is summer in our country) and that we left our home, too (or rather, the flood drove us away), one September day like the Chalmers. I also felt a strong connection with Meg. Our attitudes and behavior are remarkably the same (yes, even at my present age) and interests, too. I was a good student with an eye for art. And I have always felt somewhat unpretty and slightly out of place wherever I go.
Ms. Lowry, of your four books that I read, A Summer To Die is not my favorite but it has struck me the deepest and will not be easy to forget. I will probably never read it again, but such are great books, I think, that are difficult to read (for one reason or another) and must only ever be read once. I wanted to write to you to share this all with you, though I’m not entirely sure now why. If it offers any enlightenment or consolation, another great book I’ve read but which I cannot read again is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. Have you read it? I read it a long time ago. The main character, Jose Arcadio Buendia, reminds me very much of my father.
You don't know me. I am a third-grade Language Arts teacher from halfway around the world. I am a fan of yours, though I’ve only read four of your books: The Giver, Gooney Bird and the Room Mother, Gathering Blue, and most recently (just last night, actually) A Summer To Die.
Allow me to digress a bit and provide you with a short background of myself before I get to why I am writing to you now.
A number of tragedies hit me and my family last year, my dad passing away and floods inundating our home being the most heart-wrenching ones. I lost all my books in that flood. My students, with whom I shared my survival story, since then have been sharing their books for me to read. One has lent me your Gathering Blue and A Summer To Die. And I loved, love, both dearly. A Summer To Die especially. It wasn’t until I as in the middle of reading it that I realized it reminded me of my father.
My father was my best friend. I can’t get to the details of our relationship here because it would simply take up too much time and space, but it was a lot like Meg’s relationship with Will Banks combined with her relationship to Molly. He was also sick. He was diagnosed with diabetes in his forties and lived with it for nearly thirty years. He would be seventy-three now, if he lived.
The past couple of years, my dad went in and out of hospitals as his organs started bailing out on him, which was a consequence of his having diabetes. He started dialysis last 2008, which terrified him greatly, then had his worst attack last April. He spent nearly a week in the ICU while we slept on the cold, hard floor of the hospital waiting area. When he recovered, he gave us firm orders not to put him through that again. It must have been a million times more excruciating for him that for us who were just stuck watching helplessly, agonizingly. We knew that the end would come soon.
It did only a month after.
I wasn’t even there when he was rushed to a small hospital nearby (no big, ultra hi-tech hospitals for him anymore), which I didn’t really dwell on at that time. It didn’t really bother me at all because there were too many other things to think about then. Now, I realize it must’ve been God’s way of working things out. See, weeks before that my mother told me she couldn’t just stand by and follow my dad’s wish of not getting the best medical treatment there was to save whatever frail life was left in him. My mother said that if my dad wanted to be left in peace, she would have to stay out of the hospital. But in the end, she didn’t. Which was how it should be. Just the two of them. My mom stayed by my dad’s side ‘til the end.
My dad’s passing was a cheerful event for me, or so it seemed at that time. He was such a cheerful soul that literally moments after his death, I was left laughing with unexplained joy.
I did not grieve, for a long time. When I finally started to four months later in September, a super typhoon came and dumped the heaviest rainfall our country’s seen in decades. The ensuing floods swept away everything: our home, our car, all our belongings, our memories, everything. It was like a Divine Hand telling us to move on, don’t waste time holding on and grieving over a happy soul.
Now, we’ve all started over. We’ve left behind our old house with all the memories of my dad. Of course, we haven’t forgotten still. I just remember the happy times.
Reading your book, it touched my heart. Though starkly different in many ways, our stories have eerily similar circumstances, including the important fact that my dad died in May (which is summer in our country) and that we left our home, too (or rather, the flood drove us away), one September day like the Chalmers. I also felt a strong connection with Meg. Our attitudes and behavior are remarkably the same (yes, even at my present age) and interests, too. I was a good student with an eye for art. And I have always felt somewhat unpretty and slightly out of place wherever I go.
Ms. Lowry, of your four books that I read, A Summer To Die is not my favorite but it has struck me the deepest and will not be easy to forget. I will probably never read it again, but such are great books, I think, that are difficult to read (for one reason or another) and must only ever be read once. I wanted to write to you to share this all with you, though I’m not entirely sure now why. If it offers any enlightenment or consolation, another great book I’ve read but which I cannot read again is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. Have you read it? I read it a long time ago. The main character, Jose Arcadio Buendia, reminds me very much of my father.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Joy!
Because I am HAPPY. And this song makes me HAPPY. It makes me want to JUMP!
This video is so HAPPY. It makes me HAPPY. I am HAPPY. Welcome 2010!
This video is so HAPPY. It makes me HAPPY. I am HAPPY. Welcome 2010!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
12.29.2009
Where is my heart? Where has it gone?
I had gone and lost my heart. It slowly dried up til nothing was left but ashes, and the wind went and blew it all away.
The past few months have been hard. So many things happened after my father's passing. I fell in love, and out of love, worked through an epidemic, survived a flood, left home and almost every trace of my 27 year long mortality behind. Harder, still, that I had to endure it all without time enough to even blink. And so I didn't.
I stared unblinkingly, like seeing it all through someone else's eyes, I didn't really have any real idea of what was happening. It was much like a bad drama on t.v. where the lead just gets slammed with one tragedy after another. It all seemed so unreal.
I broke my heart. And before I could glue myself back up, it broke again. And again. And again. I can't recognize it anymore.
Where is my heart?
The holidays have proven much more difficult this year. It felt like a newspaper. Dry, gray, and flat.
Where is my heart?
The year nears its close. Thank God for that. 2009 has been the most heart-wrenching year I've ever lived through. Though it wasn't without its good, and such good there was like I've never seen, but so was the bad...the universe can't help itself.
Where is my heart?
I never thought I was so strong. Am I? I lost my heart in all this. I could not hold on long enough.
Where is my heart?
I had gone and lost my heart. It slowly dried up til nothing was left but ashes, and the wind went and blew it all away.
The past few months have been hard. So many things happened after my father's passing. I fell in love, and out of love, worked through an epidemic, survived a flood, left home and almost every trace of my 27 year long mortality behind. Harder, still, that I had to endure it all without time enough to even blink. And so I didn't.
I stared unblinkingly, like seeing it all through someone else's eyes, I didn't really have any real idea of what was happening. It was much like a bad drama on t.v. where the lead just gets slammed with one tragedy after another. It all seemed so unreal.
I broke my heart. And before I could glue myself back up, it broke again. And again. And again. I can't recognize it anymore.
Where is my heart?
The holidays have proven much more difficult this year. It felt like a newspaper. Dry, gray, and flat.
Where is my heart?
The year nears its close. Thank God for that. 2009 has been the most heart-wrenching year I've ever lived through. Though it wasn't without its good, and such good there was like I've never seen, but so was the bad...the universe can't help itself.
Where is my heart?
I never thought I was so strong. Am I? I lost my heart in all this. I could not hold on long enough.
Where is my heart?
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