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 

 

The Prefect of Discipline and Other Things

I see the walled life in full remembrance from near and far. 

I have been blessed in many ways in having taken part in the nurturing of the questing minds of young men--and young women--who tried to answer the call of God or--God forbid!--a fantasy of a call that looked and sounded so real to many of them, with the exuberance of their youth lived in the most interesting times in the life of a cursed land and in the history of a people famished for what is just and right and fair. 

The Prefect responding to my blog entry on my long comment of another blogger's comment--so this is where the winding roads of thought begin, with no end in sight, I am certain--moved me to blog some more about my experiences as a teacher in at least four seminaries and in as many Catholic schools that had the semblance of medieval educational institutions in Europe, with each of these institutions having some kind of relentlessly resurrecting and incarnating 'The Prefect' with their perfections and their illusions of having some. 

The first seminary is one at Loyola Heights, and for want of a better term, we call it 'the ministers of the sick and the dying'. 

Oh, there you go: the prefects came in all shapes and colors, in all holiness and hollowness, in ideological commitment and zealotry for a cause grander than their bloated sense of self, that sense of self-importance in many ways misplaced, the feeling always not in the proper places.

The prefects made the rounds--you remember Gulag here or Auschwitz or Dachau or Gulag, suit yourself--and like policemen who have no sense of privacy except when their private needs are at the forefront, these guardians of morals and discipline and facetious acting have themselves as the models, er, the exemplars, for a more medieval effect: The Examplars. 

Yes, the exemplars, who have their own temples, and these temples have to be visited during the holy hours, and you have to kowtow to the key holders of these temples or else you are left out in the cold and in the dark. Think of clique in shallow sociology and in that Weberian analysis of what constitutes CYA--covering of your ass--in religious institutions: it is that destructive capacity to give your vow to the hungry for recognition and power. 

I have seen them all, round and rotund, the boastful and the idiots, and those who can cite the Holy Book to prove their point, complete with the chapter and the verse of a holy writer's text, minus the page number. 

It is not that there were no saviors in the seminaries I had the chance to teach, among others, seminar courses in ethical theory, linguistic philosophy, political philosophy, semiotics, and the like--courses that fell on my lap on the presumption that I know their titles and their descriptions. Ha!

I remember in another seminary in Quezon City--I taught in three in that city at various times, short years of adjunct appointment in two because their respective rectors, the bosses of the prefects, did not like my face, much less what I was teaching the seminarians: that the Philippine Catholic Church, in a hermeneutical and political sense, is outright a purveyor of unbridled capitalism. 

I remember that in the first seminary that I went to to test my (in)abilities to explain my theory---grand and pretentious at that--of what I called 'truth and meaning manufacturing incorporated', I was subjected to a kind of a Holy Inquisition, except that this was the Philippines, and Brothers Karamazov had nothing to do with our lives in these islands, but there I was, in front of a rector, in front of a prefect, in front of an academic dean--all big shots in that business of educating priests we call 'the seminary', a curious word, I would say, with its allusions to something that has to do with the abundance of testosterone, and the proof of that abundance, the semen--The Semen.

I had them grill me--the three inquisitors cross-examined me--about why I was teaching the seminarians that The Church was socially irresponsible with its false practices of economic empowerment for people and for societies. Of course, in my readings, I xeroxed a proof: the entrenchment of The Church in big businesses, with lots of investment holdings tracked by those people who were in the know. 

Even from afar, I have something nice to say about prefects as I have something awful to write as well. 

In one all-male college I went to teach to put food on my young children's table--a table known for the constant disappearance of hotdogs and vegetables, the first because the children liked them, the second because they simply abhorred them and had to throw them away so quickly everywhere that your eyes could not reach and which act gave you the impression that your children were like your Ilokano ancestors who knew no other food except leaves from trees and from summering farms--I had this prefect--The Prefect--whose duty each six o'clock in the afternoon was to ring the campus bell and to go around and find out if everyone rose to the occasion to pray the angelus. 

And my students, in that all-male college, had their girlfriends in mind while reciting the announcing by Gabriel of the blessing of the Lord to the Virgin, and that blessing had something to do with her getting the crack of giving birth to God's Son.

All those concepts need unravelling now, and I will come back to take another look at them.

I am writing this to thank The Prefect for keeping me on my toes with memory especially now that the fingers cannot type the keyboards without the prescription glasses. 

Hon, HI

Sept 27/08

BUT THOSE WERE THE BEST OF OUR DAYS

(for Ka Loren and Brainteaser, whoever you are...)

     I never realized that some statements I wrote with the frenzy of fingers in a mad rush  to write a comment on the nostalgic piece of a former student on his remembered life in the walled world of the seminary would make sense for another blogger who responded with sensitivity to the comments that took on a life of their own away from—and autonomous of—yours truly the writer.  

     But the statements work their magic, some would say, and one Brainteaser, a blogger, says s/he likes the twists and the turns of the phrases that came from those fingers when one hour between breaks of lectures on the filmic possibilities of a people's revolution, I sat on my computer and catatonically wrote what came to mind, the small truth of the moment more important than anything else. And for a small-time, small-town writer on the lookout for the first affirmation early in the morning when blog opening is akin to early prayers for the early hours of the morning--those matins of birds that talk of dawns breaking in the summer sunshine--such a comment was a salve. It still is--and the kinship in language is forever sealed with all the Brainteasers of the world.     

     These days, the blogging world—the world we call virtual, cyber, and some other techie terms—opens up a world for us to explore and see and experience, a world of expansiveness, with the consciousness going way beyond the comfortable and convenient boundaries we have always known, much not unlike the comfortable and convenient logic we have always used to argue for the case of our comfortable and convenient existence that is as middle class as the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the Old and the New Testament combined, what with their luxury of abstraction about the coming of either the Son of God, or a prophet, or a mere messenger of the Good News.

     Or this new world—brave and brutal as it is—is not new at all, as we have always known that there are other worlds out there whose horizons we have yet to grasp and grapple.

     In the faraway lands that have claimed our everyday lives, this virtual world could signal emptiness. Or vacuity of the soul no one can ever understand as we keep trying to pursue some ways to fill up that world only to end up with some other vacuities that are both familiar and strange.

     The thing is: we create and recreate each day out of the nothingness of our empty lives—empty because we are everywhere and we are nowhere, and as such, our roots reside, tentatively and constantly, in that territory where there is that recognizable and palpable restlessness of our soul. This is, indeed, the cyberspace world, and memory takes up our cause, that memory that remembers or makes us remember the many things that we have left behind like the scent of  burned human skin and flesh one morning when salvaging—or summary execution in the early days of EDSA People Power when then President Corazon Aquino had all the power of the pulpit and the freedom constitution to reform the cancerous society we incidentally call the Philippines.

     Her daughter, then in her grade school twinkle-twinkle hairdo, came to cut the ceremonial ribbon that would pave the way for awakened seminarians to come and say, Here, here I am, Lord, I come to do your will, and before the altar would frustrate themselves and offer everything they have got including their nothingness and being ala Jean Paul Sartre. The seminary ritual is one of self-oblation as is the ritual of the cyberworld. It is a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump says so, and indeed, it really is, what with priests and their allies always on the lookout for the dregs so these priests could have a reason to exist and for those dirty and drunken dragons lurking in seminary closets so they could have a reason to redeem. Here—in the cyberworld and in the seminary--you get to meet anonymity including yourself.

     But it is one anonymity that sometimes hits you so darn hard you want to cry a river—or an ocean—depending on the severity of that sorrow that visits you while you state blankly on a screen that is so blank with emptiness and yet seducing you to keep going with the pointless attempt to clone your mind so that those who are like you might discover some of the sparks of being kindred in that sorrow all sorrowing people ought to know.

     And so, here is my comment to that blog entry of a former student who has remained faithful to the cause of social justice, to the struggle to make our life in the islands of the Philippines better: “But those were the best of our days, I suppose, when the beautiful were in the contradictions we saw, in the conflicted lives we lived, in the poems of radicalism we wrote, and when salvaging was common in the hills of that seminary (where the priests-to-be studied their Coppleston and Glen and Summa Theologica and metaphysics and the dread of living. But there is hope in Marcel as in the Marx you know before the Marxists would mangle him, including those from the Philippines who called themselves communists). The guns fired against the helpless would signal the crack of dawn, and would crack the dark silence of the hills.”

     That inaugurated a response that made me realize how words could be so charmingly powerful as to invite action and reflection from others.

     I thank Florentino Lorenzana and the fans of his blog—hanseman.wordpress.com—for this miraculous opportunity to take part in the making and remaking of the cyberworld.

 

Honolulu, HI/ September 26, 2008