Seminary Memoirs, 6

You got into the seminary in the late 70s in the middle of your trying hard to work for a degree in biology--of all things, holy cow!--under a government scholarship. 

Those years were the years of science and technology and with much money coming from some foreign loans, the Philippine government, awash with the public service announcement victory of the greatness of the New Society, had so much pesos to spare so that those who think they would be good in science and mathematics and technology could be given the opportunity to study under the government's intensified science and technology program that gave out those scholarships to every Tomas and Federico and Hilarion. 

You had the illusion you could become a biologist somewhere in Mars.

You thought you were doing good when this serendipitous event came in to distract you from your Martian illusion of settlement in that far, far away planet light years away, and you began to sing the song of Melchisedech: Tu est sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem, secumdum ordinem Melchisedech.

Other things stood in the way of your presumed scientific ambition--and you found yourself visiting The Center. 

And you kept the Melchisedech song in your heart all the days of your teenage life: You are are priest forever in the order of Melchisedech.  

Okey, let us call that The Center: no ifs, no buts, no claims, and no counterclaims. Just The Center to mean also The Seminary.  

By then, it seemed that was the fad: a center that forms and transforms and informs young people into becoming religious leaders and prophets and priests. 

The center thing hid the medievalism in the seminary thing--and it was more English than Italian or Spanish or Belgian or something else. 

You went through the motions: exams, exams, exams. 

You were asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person.

Of course, of course: you would put some cross on the house, some cross on the tree, and some cross on the person. 

Three crosses in a lifetime led you to kingdom come. 

You made it, with your crosses, and you began to plot your life as a future priest--or an ex-future priest.

You were asked: would you become a priest or a brother? The English of the one asking sounded like one from one of those The Godfather films. 

What the heck? 

What izdadiferenz bitwin a prizt en a bradar?

No can, you tell yourself. 

No can plain bradar. Priest ok. You repeated: priest, priest. You could have said again: secundum ordinem Melchisedech. But you did not have yet any pretensions to Latin in those days except those rote memorized pidgin your chattering neighbor of a sintudando cantora would say: uremusbobiskum etkum espirituu. 

As a priest, you would get the best sit in town, and if you were assigned in the Ilocos, people would call you 'Apo', the same form of address they use when they talk to The Dictator. 

In your small town mindset, only three people are worth that appellation, that form of address: the mayor, the priest, and The Dictator, the last one only addressed from afar except when he comes with the missus and the missus delivers a diskurso about the dreams of her husband The Great Apo but she is slashed with an imuko, the wounds of courage and dramatic concentration in those porcelana arms.

The Dictator would come to her rescue, on stage, like a knight in a shining armor, in the full view of the adoring public, and the missus would be rushed to a hospital somewhere, and The Dictator would not allow any plastic surgery because that would demolish the courage--on stage--of the missus.

So your choice: priest. 

You move to the royal and pontifical university, with the saints on rooftops, forlorn and lonely and sad and sexless in their frozen look, their concrete bodies stiff like mummies but their soutane billowing in the imagined wind of Europe or the Philippines, as these saints are the imported ones, presumably all of them having to do with human knowledge, that, because of the grace of God, this human knowledge would become species aeternitatis. 

You went through the motions: philosophy here and there, with the great Ariston Estrada for your introduction to Western thought. Western knowledge as opposed to the knowledge of your own people's knowledge. No apologies here. You were going to serve the Church, and the Church is rooted in the West, and the Church is imbued with Western knowledge. This logic is simple--and it is for the simpleton, but it did not bother you. You probably were a species aeternitatis of the simpleton.  

You grappled with definitions, with the conceptual roots of the ideas of the Western world that would dominate so many parts of the world.

And the the years of the bomba films came.

These films started first as a challenge--and response--to the ennui brought about by New Society and its illusions.

The first symptom was the males of the Republic of the Philippines were all getting agitated with the same idiocy of "Aawitan Kita" and "Student Canteen" and all those rahrahrah religious shows on one TV station nobody ever watches. 

The males of the republic wanted skin, wet skin, real skin. 

The males of the republic wanted some action, something akin to an active imagination with vast plausibilities for visual orgy and exploration into the cognitive of that which is repressed politically and erotically somewhere, in the human body as well as in the human spirit. 

The males of the republic wanted some dramatic and titillating excitements that would celebrate and inaugurate--or inaugurate the celebration--of the post CPP-NPA movement dominated by cadres who were now either in jail or looming large in another social state called The Boondocks.  

The artiste for a daughter of The Dictatorship came home and brought with her views on the redemptive capabilities of films, and the eros in the visual could be a principle for a renewed vigor on the male and sexualized notion of the patriarchal republic that was coming in parallel with the patriarchal church. Feminism had yet to sink in, what with The Revolution still in full swing, The Revolution that challenged the very fabric of The New Society. 

With the Manila International Film Festival came the experiments of the Experimental Cinema of The New Society. 

These events gave you two reasons to not ignore the possibilities of the flesh on screen, or the screen with the flesh. 

Never mind that the blood spurting was not made of sterner stuff. 

Never mind that the pulse throbbing and the excited heart that throbbed of delight and pleasure--of plain and simple dolce, that sweetness you could hardly ever imagine in the seminaries on a perpetual retreat, as a matter of tactic, from The Body and from The Flesh--did not meet head on another heart that throbbed of delight and pleasure a la Kama Sutra or its better version.

Oh, the billboards told all that could be told: white skin, white masks, brown skin, brown masks and all the colors in between. The imagination is terra firma--and it is not incognita: it a known known, if only you cared to know, not, never, a known unknown--or an unknown known. 

So one day, from the royal and pontifical university somewhere in Manila's heartland, some seminarians--The Clique--decided to call it quits with the Spaniards who were teaching them the metaphysics of beauty and truth minus the human flesh. Metaphysics, at least at that time, was devoid of matter, of body, of flesh. 

Them who fell in love with the billboards on Act Theatre on EDSA--the avenue of the saints--corner Aurora Boulevard decided to declare their youthful freedom and enjoyed that freedom to the hilt.

So they went--and enjoyed galore those lip-locking ceremonies with those ceremonies always often graduating into the sanctum of doors locking and linens thrown away and giggling going out the window and all the insinuations of what happened in those locked rooms. 

One priest happened to pass by that same route, on Aurora Boulevard, before that light rail transit line would destroy the blight of the urban metropolis and announce another metropolitan descent into another level of blight.

He saw all those seminarians coming out from the cinema house that had those skin flicks--ok, call them bomba--and saw their satiated smiles, their joy of remembering what happened on the big screen, and their contented laughter that originated from their bellies now dreaming of fire and passion, or the fire of passion, or the passion of fire. Or all of the preceding. 

The priest mentally listed the names of those he could recognize. From that herd, he chose one to cross-examine and interrogate, and would persuade to make a total confession, details and all. 

Which the priest did right away, about lunch time, when all seminarians from the royal and pontifical university had all come home to take their lunch, take their nap, and do the gardens, play in the grounds, or do other things to their fancy. These are some of the hours not exactly regimented in the sense that you could either choose to play in the ground or to play around until the bell was rung for them to take a quick bath, get dressed, recite the vespers, study their Latin and Greek and Hebrew and Italian and Spanish and English (but never their own mother languages), meditate about the glory and love of God in the prayer room, take the evening meal, go for a short break of laugher and watch some boob tube television show of another date with shallow and empty Philippine pop culture, study the Western philosophical ideas to the delight of the prefects roaming around and most of the time like sniffing dogs, pray the compline, and go through the ritual of lights out when only the mind has light, and dream of the pleasures of the body as a defense to this almost annihilistic way of living The Life that was also, somehow, a kind of The Lie. 

That one seminarian marked for the interrogation sang--and sang acappella: he admitted, he told all the names, and he said he was sorry and he asked for forgiveness.

On that day was the announcement of what happened, minus the names.

But the seminarians knew. And some said, my, my, why did we not do it ourselves?

 

  

Seminary Memoirs, 4

Let me start these tales by coming up with a waiver: that I am not responsible for what I write here. I am merely reconstructing memory from a cartographic sketch of a Bildungsroman of a double embarrassment, one for the riches of the institutional Church and never, not mine but I am waiting to have a share soon, and another for not making it in the seminary as a priest. 

This idea about priesthood starts out with a child's game, in the mind as in the neighborhood when in moonlit nights in the provinces especially during the hight of the tropical heat, children could imagine to play all sorts of games from the sacred to the profane, from war to peace. 

When we would stage our wars--we did not understand the delineation, following the Summa Theologica of what was moral or its lack in the calling for a war with someone else or with some other people or communities--we simply staged it, with basically two actors: the Ilokanos against the Japanese soldiers who gleefully bayoneted Ilokano children and raped and bayoneted Ilokano women and children.

Or it could be the Ilokanos against the Americans who, even at Tirad Pass, did not forget their imperial ambitions at the expense of the more democratic view of the American people like Mark Twain who opposed it, and opposing it fully he was willing to put his life at stake to that opposition, arguing, among others, that America had no right to impose its notion of freedom and democracy upon a people who are trying to define these things for themselves given their own unique experiences and circumstances. 

A war, we would always shout, and there we go: one side were the Japanese, who would wear long sticks for bayonets, and the other side would be the Ilokanos, who would wear their courage outside their sleeves. 

We would hide in other peoples surroundings, sometimes shooing away the chickens that had already come home to roost for the evening, the chickens that would sadly dream of stew and papaya and our hunger and their last summer of life. 

In the quiet of the evening, we would rouse everyone from rest and sleep with our shrieking, and the war would go on until everyone dropped dead. Mapanen--let us go--would be a signal for us to go and run and hide and look out and look for the enemy on the prowl. Mapanen--ah, that beautiful word only nostalgia could recover how it was said. 

We would seek each other, kill each other. Once already killed by the enemy, you dropped dead. The tricky was, you killed first. Aggression was part of the moral of this war exercise.  

And it would be over, this business called annihilation--a good exercise in spirit-building andin strengthening human character because in my youth, I would need it. 

Part of that youth was spent In the seminary, in particular.

In the seminary was the tacit game of war, that game of annihilation when to annihilate is to get annihilated, or simply, you are annihilated. Either way, and it all boged down to how strong was your sense of self-worth, your sense of decency, and your sense of self-respect. 

In peacetime ('peacetime' is my father's favorite word, him who knew what war was and whose uniform of khaki in that one and only one photo he had with an uncle who went to war but had never tasted the spoils of that war, not a single cent for his duty to his country), we would stage other childhood games. In one rare occasion, it was a bishop saying mass for that city fiesta that was about to be held each February. 

I can't remember the name of the bishop and neither the priest in our place, but they were good people, and they were so far away. 

I remember that as a child, we would mock how they officiated the mass, with their backs on us. Vatical I--not Vatican II--was still in effect then, and the miracle would happen as soon as the priest turned his back on us.

We would interpret the ceremony of the turning of the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into His blood as--the ceremony of the Eucharist--as:

Priest: (fronting) Awan pay, awan pay, awan pay ("None yet, none yet, none yet.")

People: Apay ("Why?")

Priest: (turning his back, cape in full view, so royal and so pontifical) "Awanen, awanen, awanen ("No more, no more, no more.")

People: Tinapay? ("Bread?")

Priest: (facing the people) Daytoyen, daytoyen. ("Here it is, here it is.")

That would be for the turning of the bread into the body of Christ. The same ceremony, in verbatim fashion, would be followed when turning the wine--almost always, our father's or somebody else's father's basi--into the body of Christ. 

We would parrot this ceremony: we liked all the Ilokano blankets in their riot of colors on the clotheslines of the neighborhood draped on our small and lanky and tubercular bodies and narrow shoulders, and we looked good with them. There would be a religious procession from someone else's front gate to another playmate's backyard some yards and yards away. 

It helped that these religious dramas of infantile pretensions were staged when the elders were away or in deep slumber and youthful men and women were all elsewhere in the banana groves dreaming about the number of children that would come out of their loins. In moments like this one, we were left to our devices and no one bothered us as we never bothered the old people, as we never bothered the young lovers.

I grew up getting used to this cycle of childhood imagination when a television antennae was two long bamboo poles roped together, and the TV set was only for those who were well-off or for those who were Hawaiianos, our people who had come back from Hawai'i to live amongst us and happily and who nightly counted their dollars while we all endured the pugnacious smell of RCA--Rice and Corn Administration--rice courtesy of Marcos and his cohorts. 

Then one evening, the playmate who would always play bishop or priest or both depending on the circumstances and the religious occasions we would parody, got sick with flu. Someone suggested that I would take over--and lo and behold, I took the helm as priest and bishop rolled into one. 

I took my own dirty linen--my own blanket--draped it on my shoulder and shielded it from a fall from grace by tying two loose ends together and let the tie fall on my neck. Lo and behold, here, here, here is your priest and bishop of Romblon! Vatican was way below our standards, what with our opulence and pageantry. We were simply unparalleled. 

That was fun--and we always looked forwards to these primeval drama of soldiers killing and getting killed, and priests and bishops giving the blessing for each killing and each death. Think of violence being tutored on the young, while they are young. 

It helped that I had aunts and uncles and other relatives all over who were in the religious life. Their stories made me think about following up on a tradition, if we could call that as one.

And I had a grand aunt--my grandmother's elder sister--who had fervently prayed that one of his grandnieces and grandnephews would inherit her closeness to God. 

There you go: we tried, I tried. The 'we' there was that many of us tried. No luck. 

Few succeeded, only a handful. The rest of us successfully found our way out of the walled life, out of embarrassment for the pretension that we thought we heard a call, or out of desperation because of the recognition that simply, simply, we did not have the guts to live a vowed life and/ or a living lie like that. 

The idea of a living lie here is, of course, subject to interpretation. It bogs down to issues about how many times you say Ave Maria each day, in church or elsewhere, and when at home, you curse your housemaid. Or even if you talk to all the angels, both fallen and those still rising. 

The truth is: we were perhaps lying that we were called to live a lie--or to live a life like that.

A Solver Agcaoili

Hon, HI

Oct 10/08

Seminary Memoirs, 1

There are days that life in exile takes all the virtues in you and you just simply take everything in stride. 

Or at least, that is what you think is the better way to do especially when everything seems to go wrong, and all those things that you do right, or at least you believe they are right, do not seem to end up the way you have expected.

Somewhere back in time, I remember: that I was once a prefect of students and in the seminary where I learned to pray and pray harder and learned the rudiments of humility and learned the hard way the wages of self-promotion. 

One thing good with seminary life, if at all it ever comes to a point that the world will turn upside down and that theocracy will take the good part of our reason and allow the men and those pretending to be men of God to rule over our affairs and our lives, private and public, is that you learn to be grounded. 

The humus, the earth, the good earth, is your ground. You learn to have your feet firmly planted on that ground or else you go the way of them the nuts who think of salvation as recitation of the rosary hour after hour after hour.

Which is not the case, as the empirical life of priests and clerics and them who have gone into the X-route (those X-men and former men) would reveal: Those who have had the taste of freedom in seminary life despite the walls, despite everything walled, despite the walling of their desires, and the walling of everything that can be let loose are those people who gain wisdom to see life more fully in the round, life lived in fullness of vision and in the sweetness of surprises, life lived in fidelity to the promise for both joys and its antithesis. 

And these people get to become better people--and thus, better priests.

Those who have not done any wrongdoing will go the way of priesthood with a breeze, for certain, because they do not make troubles, they do not rock the boat, they do not challenge the status quo. And for priests who are eternally infantile with anything that has something to do with relationships, this is exactly what they want: no more troubles now.

In all four seminaries I have had the chance to take part in the (de)formation of seminarians, I have both been lucky and not lucky: some did not like me, some tolerated me, some liked me a lot, the last group for obvious reasons. The devil, truly, likes company, in much the same that misery does.

But our misery in these seminaries both as a former seminarian and then as a teacher was of the metaphysical kind, a la Albert Camus, with his idea of the metaphysical rebel who despaired before all that is logical and convenient and comfortable. I am pretty sure that many priests teaching philosophy in the seminaries do not like him, this Camus guy, and neither that other misbehaving existentialist guy Jean Paul Sartre who even wrote an intro to the Frantz Fanon oeuvre on the mischief of colonialism and its impact on the minds of the young, the people, and society at large. 

I was the opposite of everything good in the seminary, I suppose, because I thought Marxism that was also some sort of good news for the oppressed, I taught existentialism and all the other things that could render the faith of the believer shaky and unsure even on firm ground. Ha, Socrates, you did a lot of good afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted. 

But I was a prefect of students--well, it was called dean of students then--a lousy title, if I may be allowed to say so. My charge: the sophomores. Where are they now except that like me, they are nowhere in the hierarchy of power of the triumphant Church. 

I am not sure now how many of those under my watchful--and carefree--care ever made it to the seminary--this word 'seminary' does not give me good thoughts, I tell you!--and then eventually to ordination time. 

Now, now, I am not sure, unless somebody out there will please stand up and be counted and testify that, indeed, indeed, I was a good man, and that, I taught my students well when I was their, ahem, ahem, prefect, or dean of students, or whatever that you call these titles now to hide the fact that, indeed, indeed, you are the seminary's Dobberman or Pit Bull or German Shepherd without the dog food but with graces earned from the heavens for your salvation in the afterlife. 

O, I remember one who made it to priesthood but is now in New York or New Jersey, I do not know which now and which side of the bridge or river in those parts is he really from, except that he does transportation work for some Asian airlines and had to go to other places and climes to train people into becoming better servants of airline passengers whose egos are sometimes as big and ferocious and fiery as the bursting Mayon, with lava and ashes and mud and vlog, this last one I learned lately from some volcanologist in these parts when I was asked to translate into Ilokano what the hell was going on in these islands, my islands, of fire and wrath.

But that is beside the point now.

The point is that the seminary is a couldron.

There you are either gold, or something closer to one. 

And if you are not one, get out so quickly because there is no point testing your goldenness if all you have are the 'kalawang' for the karat. 

No way, Jose, they say in other other part of the Pacific where I resided once for a number of years: No way, Jose. 

No can, no can, they say down here in Honolulu. No can gold if you no gold, no ken, no ken, the Ilokano speaking pidgin would say, a language I have learned to love and which I have vowed to learn quickly so I would be able to claim my rightful place in these islands, my islands. 

The second point is that the seminary is a snake pit.

You do not want to be bitten by venomous snakes, get out. 

There are no sacred tourniquets for the snake-bitten soul. 

Either you live it through, the dubiously heavenly venom in your body so that when the time comes, you can bite others and transmit the venom, or you climb through the great walls, in many ways like China's, or sneak out through the main gate when the 'sikyo' is not looking.

Or, if you are smart enough, give bones to the real dogs each evening, the big bones of red meat. But before you hand the bones over to the canine enemies of thy kingdom come, salivate as much as you can as if you are Pavlov's dog awaiting conditioning, and when you have produced enough saliva, spit on the bones, spit on them so generously, and in the deep dark, give the bones to the dogs as if you are making a sacrificial offering. You do that night in and night out until one day, until one day, the canine enemy shall have become your best of the beast of a friend.

Then you can plot your escape.

And you can go out any time you want and sneak in before the first bells are rung early at five o'clock when the hills in the east are still dreaming of the early morning sun.

Ah, seminary tales are tales of wonder and surprise and terror and one day, one day, I will write about them all: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And the holy, the holier, and the never mind. 

Hon, HI

Sept 29/08