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, 5

The title of this piece could have been a rather presumptuous one: sex and seminarians--or what is sex for seminarians, them who are supposed to be figurative and religious eunuchs in the name of some value that is called for in another abstraction we call, tentatively, eternity or the promise of one. 

It is a difficult topic, indeed, and this piece may blaspheme.

Or may offend those still in the vowed life.

Those who left in a huff or were traumatized by the experience of the vowed life or its image or its semblance whether true or not might find this amusing.

Or for some, a vindication.

For me, it is a continuation of a long tale of joy and sorrow, of life and its absence, and of reflection and prayer on religion and its demands, and on faith and its challenges even as one, an ex-seminarian like me--or more technically, an ex-religious because I had a taste of what canon law's power had with my temporary vows that I tried to keep for two years until it expired--revisit the oddities of seminary life in those times that Marcos' New Society was in full swing, and at a time when everything was on experimental basis including finding out what was the best technique to make people kowtow to the dictates of power holders including their dictates on what is good on the big screen. 

Late towards the 70's, Imelda Marcos the daughter had come from Princeton and brought with her ideas about 'experimental cinema' that bordered on the sensuous. 

This gave birth to the national experiments on film and filmmaking and their tortured road to dictatorial truth that bordered on dishing out sex and more sex to potential saboteurs of the blessings of that society that had by this time morphed into a monster of a perpetrator of human rights violations, with untold atrocities of war and the equally atrocious practices of the military that either believed in "praise the Lord" or invoked the powers of anting-anting as was the case of the Tadtad and other despicable vigilantes and fundamentalist groups. 

The experimental films really experimented in appealing to the baser instincts of men--and perhaps, perhaps, women. 

How some seminarians in those times gone entangled with the images on billboards in Cubao and everywhere is one subject matter of this essay, and it will relate to how sex, as it is, has remained a closed topic in seminaries. 

Perhaps we need a thousand more years before seminaries in the Philippines will have the courage to open to the revelations with a revelation of the sex talks of Dr. Margie Holmes on ABS-CBN's morning show's "Magandang Umaga," a show that reminds you, indeed, right after the morning ritual of greeting the Maker of Life, that we have an obligation to be earthy, to love the body, and not to flagellate it the way they do at the cloisters as in that tortured cleric in "The Da Vinci Code".

Sex and seminarians are issues that seem like confessional matters. 

In that confession box that antedated any psychoanalytic and Freudian pretensions at something close to psychological and psychiatric healing--read: mental rejuvenation--there is that tradition of secrecy which no priest or cleric or anyone that resembles them is morally allowed to reveal to anyone, except in that triad: one, the priest who gives the absolution in the name of God; two, the God who listens to the confession; and three, the penitent and sinner, this last one the believer who (still) believes in the sacrament of confession as practiced in the Catholic Church. 

This confession is different from the formulaic one that each church-goer is wont to recite mindlessly, with much rote memorization on days of obligation, the big days of Mass-going such as Sunday and the holy days. 

Sometimes, it all bogs down to which side of the bed the priest woke up when the public formula for confession is called forth, in which case, when he is inspired by some spirit, he could initiate the recital of the public confession even during ordinary days, to the consternation of seminarians as a matter of course because this meant a longer Mass that they have to go through ritualistically everyday of their lives in the seminary. Invariably, they would respond to the Mass like parrots, with sleep still in their lips as well as in their minds. 

To begin to look at the connections between sex and seminarians, we can go back to a sophomoric deconstruction of some of the key terms, an approach that could be familiar to seminarians when they begin their initiation into philosophical thinking by starting off with the definition of terms that they use when they argue, presumably. 

Assuming, of course, that in first year of college, straight from the juvenile kind of secondary education that the Philippine Department of Education permits, with a lobotomized high school graduate that can not speak English nor Tagalog properly even if these two languages are the very reasons for the kind of systemic idiocy and total ignorance that have afflicted in whole-scale way the educational system of the country, our seminarian is ready to brush elbows with philosophy instructors.

The philosophy instructors, some of them trying hard, are wont to parade their knowledge of philosophical analysis that they got from memorizing what the priests have taught them from yellowed and yellowing notes that they have been using for decades.   

So let us begin with the idea of seminary, a curious term for me, and which, in light of the fad of inculturation or enculturation in the Church in the 70s and in the 80s when the great Filipino guys from Louvain and some other royal and pontifical institutions of Europe and America came back to show off their white knowledge and tell us that some truths have evolved--and again!--from the West, and that we need to sit down and absorb these truths and live them. 

That was the height of Martial Law and you could see the connection between the capacity of the human mind to kowtow to the police power of a dictatorship, the fear of the institutional church, and the fear of clerics who are not expected to be cowards. 

Well, some clerics and frailes and priests and nuns and seminarians were brave, and truly so, and they were exceptional. 

But many of them ended up either in the stockade; some in solitary confinement; some ended up dead, waylaid wherever death took over their mortal bodies; some disappeared voluntarily and not so; and some went on a hiding spree by joining the revolution and lived among the people. 

The brave men of God are excused from these tall tales of seminary life. 

So let us go on to the confession thing.

One point in the traitorous history of the Philippine Republic, one simpleton of a woman who heard her brother talking about the Katipunan's plan to wage a revolution to fight for the independence of the sorrowing land and people summoned her strength, decided she had more duty to the fraile, and confessed to him, and told him about all what she knew from what she heard and probably saw of the preparations and the clandestine operations going on. 

There, the Katipunan was found out, its leaders rounded up, and Jose Rizal, then not-so-convinced of the plausibility of the revolution because he had the luxury of everything that Bonifacio and the other elite Katipuneros had including that son-of-a-mother Emilio Aguinaldo whose roots were from the Ilocos, was implicated. 

Seminary, says the dictionary, has roots in the semen, the seed. 

Originally, the plot where the seeds are allowed to grow is called the seminary, and since it was a lot, it was originally for both men and women, when seminary came be understood as the specialized institution where their trainers, whoever they are, trained them, presumably separately, for missionary and religious purposes. 

But we understand the power of the patriarchy. 

In that power, language is theirs as well, the language of power, and the power of language. 

Put in the politics in those power and language combo a la an expensive MacDonald dinner, and you rule the world, the way the Church has ruled the world for all times, in the spirit of triumphalism as being invoked by priests and seminarians and their cabal of courtiers when they have nothing good to say to refute a powerful attack on the kind of masquerade they do to save and serve the poor and the oppressed and give joy to the downtrodden. 

Back to those times, when Experimental Cinema of the Philippines and the Manila International Film Festival came in to condition the minds of the male machos of the Philippine Republic now transformed into a New Society, the conditioning one from the heat of the loins, from the challenges of the exuberant testicles, and from the revolutionary powers of testosterone going nowhere and everywhere. 

The seminarians from The Hill were not yet from The Hill in those times. 

They were somewhere else, in a posh enclave of the rich, their seminary tucked in two-story mansions overlooking vast fields of land awaiting the temptations of money and wealth and the rich who could afford to flaunt their riches. 

An aside here: the seminary was sandwiched in between houses, and one house had a beautiful teenager who would love to swim in her pool when the seminarians would be home from some pontifical university in Manila's heartland.

The seminarians were testosterone rich, mind you. 

They would feast on any flesh they could feast on--or at least many of them whose windows looked out into that swimming pool tucked in between the seminary building serving as a dormitory and her own sprawling lawn. 

The seminary had jalousies for windows, with those screens that welcome both air and sun and clear vision, especially vision when you try harder so you could see all what you wish to see including those that are the figment of the imagination. 

And among seminarians, the act of trying harder is a second skin, more like a habit, and certainly, with lots of practice, not something difficult to do. The trying hard was more of a mission and a goal to accomplish every afternoon when the rite of temptation would begin. 

That went on for some time until one day, the rector, in a bombastic sermon, more like thunder and lightning combined that reminded you of the wrath of the Dear God, talked about the evils of looking out the window, and looking at young girls taking a bath, and feasting on some young ladies' skin. 

That was a whole lot of a blah-blah, and the seminarians were all afraid that hell would break loose.

The seminarians looked at their hands: there was no stigmata, not yet, that cross-like blood oozing wound that would remind you of the sufferings of Christ who loved wine and laughter and party when people had a reason to do so, like the way He did with the miracle thing at Cana on that joyous wedding day when His mother was in panic mode and but rebuked on the dot by the famous Son, and the Holy Thursday breaking of the bread. 

The seminarians touched their eyes: no warts yet, not yet. Not even those boils that would result from so much exposure to the carnal views or to fleshly imaginations, the boils reminding them of their eternal damnation for looking out the window for so long, as if aesthetics and its allusions to religious ecstasy were--are--one and the same. 

And the rector, in accented English learned from a missionary school somewhere, said: I will have those windows closed.

And it was so.

In the afternoon, as soon as the seminarians came home from the pontifical university, they found their jalousies nailed. That was the beginning of airless and sunless days that would continue in the coming days.  

What about the erotic--known in those days as 'bomba'--films? 

And sex and seminarians? 

That will come in next.  

 

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, 3

A blogger hiding, for security reasons, behind the clerical cloak of 'Bukidnon', commented on my previous blog entry, Seminary Memoirs. Was that Bukidnon in reference to the Trappist monastery there, with its share of monks that sing of the love of the Lord in the early morning hours as in the late evening compline? But the Trappists are in Guimaras. Well, the Benedictines are in Malaybalay, with their coffee and cacao and their good conscience for getting away from the Mendiola crowd of San Beda, ha.  

He tells me of the tales he knew and has kept for long. I told him earlier we could mount a seminary reunion of our own by flooding the young seminarians with the lessons of heeding the call of God or an assumed call from someone else. 

He told me we could mount a coup of knowledge that no one has ever known before. 

And if that other blogger,  hanseman--also known as Ka Loren can join us--I am sure this is going to be the grandest of all the coups since the nailing of the theses by Luther the monk on some church heavy door somewhere in time in Medieval Europe when absolving the sins of others were the preserve of those who received power from the Most Powerful. 

Of course, another motor that drove both of us--and I pray there is going to be a third one in this unholy trinity of hindsight and insight into what seminary history has to offer us--into this frenzy of recollection of those terrors and miracles we were--are--heir to, was the reunion of 'X-men' of  a group of missionaries we call, for want of an appropriate term, the Promethean Healers. 

I have heard of reunions like this one, but I had always been suspicious of what all reunions of former classmates are for, except to calculate who were able to make it big time and therefore, include them in the long list of future benefactors, and do another list of those who simply did not make it because that was not meant to be: to make it in life  a la the yuppies of Makati, them who now live Starbucks-ized lives, American caffeine and consciousness in their bodies.  

Pray tell, I always remind my suspicious self: what would reunions give except to make one feel lesser than the other when one comes with the Lexus from the missus, while one comes with the brumbrumbrum of yellowed tricycles that go to the walled enclaves of seminaries that look out to the best site for retreat from the world, with the chirping insects for company in the dark when thoughts get to be dark too? 

Think of poverty as a virtue but I tell you I never learned this in the seminary, not in the everydayness that I had to contend with it, with the the kind of blighted lives that we live because of it whereas those with the vows seem not to know what it is. 

We people of lesser faith negotiate with our own poverty, and we knew its evil face. We even fought it before joining the seminary, at least many of us. In my case, after letting go of my rotten and infantile priestly ambitions of becoming a permanent prefect one day, I had to to deal with it, and I have to keep on with this dealing with poverty that has been twin to us, lesser mortals that we are. I remember one priest saying--as in a curse--that those who will not heed the call of God to priestly life will not lead good, financially well-off life. That was a presumption straight from Wall Street, okey, okey, Ayala Avenue and the Philippine Stock Exchange, when what counts is how much is your worth in any currency that matters in the world.   

But back to the fictitious group calling for the reunion, the Promethean Healers, those who do not understand the viciousness of Western medicine that is being imported by them as a model for healing those who are sick. 

We understand, of course, the name Prometheus.

He was that bound guy, that great guy who finally found his calling in life and that was to steal the fire from the gods, and which he did, this act of stealing fire--The Fire--from the gods.

The script calls for his being caught, and, indeed,  he was caught.

And he was was punished.

And the punishment was this: the gods tied him to a caucasus--ok, ok, this means a huge, white big, monstrous rock (remember the English word 'caucasian' to mean 'white'?) Ah, the rusty knowledge of  kindergarten Latin comes to the rescue sometimes, even if I hated to the max my Latin maestro--a Spaniard with a penchant for San Miguel beer--who made me analyze so many chapters of  Saint Matthew's Vulgate Edition (meaning, darn, the classical Latin that to me looked like barbed wires strewn on Mendiola so you could stage your war against the sitting president) because my seatmate, now a priest somewhere in Australia, could not understand my handwriting and he was copying my answer to an exam, and that guy talked to me and I answered back and in my answering back, the priest-teacher of Latin we called 'Balut'--he smelled those hot boiled balut eggs they vended in the late afternoons by P. Noval in my hot Manila--caught me opening my mouth. 

And he said, aha, you will explain the evangelist for two days! 

Thy kingdom come is thy kingdom come especially when the only trustworthy companion you could have in moments like those were the Concordance and a not-so-handy Latin dictionary which you were not allowed to use during recitation. 

But back to Prometheus again. 

So he was tied to the white rock--and this alludes to Western medicine with its penchant for the surgical table in white and all those other white things in clinics of doctors pretending to be healing us.

So the vultures come in Act 2 of the story: while tied to the white rock, they would come in droves, eat all they can eat of him, but they wanted more and more of his internal organs (think of organ donations here, and the famous 'bopis'--that culinary wonder of chopped heart, chopped liver, and chopped entrails with black pepper to add flavor to a hodgepodge of uric acid-rich entrails they sell in 'carinderias' by the scoop. 

 

In the deep dark of the night, when the gods would be asleep and unknowing, the healing gods would come, repair the damage on Prometheus' liver and heart and other internal organs, and as soon as they mission was done, they would leave, leaving Prometheus remaining tied to the white rock. (Now think of medical procedures here, again and again, including surgery and other high tech abracadabra that justifies today's notion of medical centers, an abomination if I may be allowed to say, almost an immorality, when what we need in the Philippines is a system of preventive health care service, more aggressive that drug salesmen giving perks and pelf to doctors who are always on the prowl precisely for such perks and pelf: all-expenses trip to a medical conference abroad, commissions from drug sales, and incentives for prescribing a branded drug instead of a generic one or the competitor's.   

The term 'X-men' is a tongue-in-cheek reference not to issues of 'transgenderism', which is a human rights issue, and which I have no competence to talk about, but to that popular culture notion of X-men going a la cyborg and wreaking havoc to the classical definition of man, whether following Plato's valorization of the 'he' and relegating to the sacred and macho corner the 'she' or holding on to the Thomistic definition of the quiddity of man: that he is a full essence man, essentially. 

The last one, of course, would be rebuked by Marx and company when they talked about the new place, the Utopia where men will be equal and opportunities will be equitable. Include here Sarte and he would tell you, You are dreaming, you are dreaming. 

In seminaries where there is much lack for alternative critical thinking because the thinking that is approved is the one that comes from approved philosophical attitudes such as Thomism, Marx is communism and communism is Marx and any good communist can never be a good priest or seminarian or nun. The Marcos military behead communist priests, remember?And the Church cannot afford to have beheaded priests. Think of the Ortega brothers and the great martyr of Bakun. 

Anyways, this piece should start the tale that I promised the Bukidnon blogger who probably went to the reunion to do his field work, his participant observation of what gives in seminary reunions, an event I have a zero knowledge because I do not understand its logic, not yet. 

With my rudimentary knowledge of stylistics as my tool, I think I know this Bukidnon blogger. 

He turned in those essays decades ago when all the rest of them in his batch could not make heads or tails of an auxiliary verb in the English that was being pumped into the young minds of students from the provinces who were products of the aggressive recruitment tactic of that seminary we were a part of, yours truly as the first-ever lay formator, on an experimental basis, and instructor as well, and the Bukidnon man as a student imbued with the mission to colonize and evangelize the world. Young colonizer--er, evangelizer, here you come!

Of course, there were rebels in that group--in all other groups that I had the chance to instruct my own twisted version of truth, and they showed their rebellion to the hilt, until some of them could no longer stand the Gulagization of seminary life so they had no recourse but to either calculate their moves so that they would be kicked out to the ultimate joy of prefects whose ultimate duty is to see the seminarians they do not like kicked out and soon. Or their voluntary separation from the walled life, the walls almost like a Berlin, with no possibilities for tearing down. 

Such was the life--and such is reunion to me, and this gives me the reason to come back and write the tall tales of seminary life in the hills where the sun rises. O there, on its steeps and inclines where the grasses grow taller than those in the foothills, they salvage people and burn them so no one would recognize them. 

 

Seminary Memoirs, 2

The surprises of having been a teacher in seminaries are endless. 

In places where I have gone, chances are I would bump into someone who have had an attachment, however vague, in a seminary. 

In Southern California, while there trying make heads or tails with fate, one news hit me: that a former student in the seminary would soon assume the post of an assistant pastor or whatever is it that they called to someone next to the parish big shot. 

I jumped for joy in the secrecy of my soul: one student, another student, had made it big, and all in the name of his one dear and loving God. I uttered a prayer for him and vowed to go and see him before work would swallow up all my time. I am not sure if I ever got that one fat chance to see him. Maybe not, maybe yes, I do not know. 

In Los Angeles, I would get a call one day while scratching out a life as a glorified director for training of one consulting firm that looked out to the Hollywood hillside, complete with the landmark that invariably announces what to expect in the land of myth and fantasy. 

And the call was from a seminarian, now a priest, in the first seminary where I taught the difference between a long a and a short a to people who just came from the provinces and who had to take remedial English or what passed for one in order to get by with rectorial wishes and seminary requirements that hey, the seminarians are going international, and thus, they are to speak an international language code named English in the way the English and American people and the fake Filipino academic speak it. 

I remember that I had religious sisters in my class--those veiled women who had vowed to follow the path of the Lord but since they did not have the college degree to make them get by with the highly competitive world of the nunnery or the sisterhood, they had to be sent back to college, and in that seminary where I taught.

The seminary offered the classics, as a matter of course, and the classics was Western philosophy with a token of a single coursework on oriental philosophy, and nothing, never, on something that could be called Philippine philosophy even if decades before Leo Mercado the SVD scholar had paved the way to what he called 'metalinguistic' analysis that led to his valorization of loob-buot-nakem, the core, he claimed, of 'Filipino' philosophy.

Never mind that his assumptions on the Ilokano 'nakem' were flatly mistaken; the thing is, through his academic pursuit, we had something to start with. 

Day in and day out I would give assignments, some kind of elementary exercises for pronunciation. One morning, I asked one sister to present to me her work, and sheepishly she said, No, no, sir, I do not have the assignment because we had the novena. 

That did me in--or her. 

I told her, in no uncertain terms, that that would not happen again, not in my class. 

Of course, I was marked from that time on, with my words traveling to her convent, and eventually reaching the ears of what passed for a dean whose graduate degree became the talk of the town, the dubiousness of that degree gotten from some obscure town somewhere out of somewhere the envy of some who did not have the required masters.

That was fun, this small-town mentality of barrio people who passed themselves off as instructors in a respectable seminary. What a life, those days! 

And from hindsight, I wish things were better. 

But so much of the gossips came from the seminarians themselves who seemed to know all things, everything, omnipotent and omnipresent as they were, and knowing too the details of saucy liaisons when lights were turned off, or when no one seemed to be looking including a cabal of seniors who had the courage to visit some beer houses and have their necks checkered with kiss marks that they would explain as mosquito bites. Perhaps the seminary mosquitos knew exactly where the best blood could be sucked? 

Words travelled that I came to America, finally, after calling it quits with the homeland. 

Some would rebuke me, mostly from seminarians who knew I was for something that was close to mendicancy: to keep teaching in the homeland until one could not teach any longer, with a pittance for salary while I watched the years go by. 

They said that I betrayed the cause--The Cause--and that is to keep on with the poverty that I have always known, like those people in the Acts of the Apostles. 

Of course, so few of them ever knew that in order for me to keep updated with my reading and book acquisition, I would ransack all the libraries I had an access to and photocopy them, or devour their contents as if there were no tomorrow, afraid that I would never got hold of these books again. My dream--a long-time dream, is to have all the books I want to read and I want to hold onto forever--and I could only do that if I had some extra cash to splurge during those book sales that came as infrequently as the summer rains. 

And then one day, I got a call from New Jersey or New York, I am not sure now. And then another from Phoenix, or somewhere in Arizona from a batch two years down my own batch.

And so the circle of knowing someone who knows someone else began in a spirit of adventure and exploration--and surprise of surprises.

On the internet, I would get to meet them some more: one was from Seattle--is still there, I guess so, that one poet I have known since he began to get enamored--seduced and tempted and enchanted--with the possibilities of words. 

Another one just popped up, and telling me he is still with The Cause--The Cause: of social justice and fairness, of economic development and community building, of doing good to the least of his brethren, of a committed work with 'cooperativism', one work I tried doing but had to give up for lack of patience, simply. 

I meet them more and more, and I realize: It was not a bad life, after all, this teaching in seminaries, this transaction with young minds who almost ways challenged me to look at life always--always--in a new light.

You get your psychic reward when you realize that your students are now better off than you are. That ought to be the law of nature, of evolution, and of teaching seminarians who know how to live life to the full. 

Hon, HI

Sept 29/08