Help where I can find it
In times of conflict, especially personal conflict, I turn to prayer and remembered homilies. There have been many memorable homilies in my long life, and some of them have decidedly changed my outlook on life. Interestingly enough, many of these have been from Jesuits—those from Thomas Green are among the treasured ones.
During Leila de Lima’s imprisonment of nearly seven years, until the pandemic kept us all imprisoned at home, my husband and I had visited her whenever we could and became part of the Parokya ni Leila, a group who came and heard Sunday Mass with her in a little room next to the one where she worked and slept in isolation, in the custodial complex of the national police headquarters.
Mass was almost always concelebrated by her three spiritual advisers: Robert Reyes, a Jesuit-trained Franciscan, Flavie Villanueva, S.V.D. and Paring Bert Alejo, S.J. Sometimes all three spoke, and from them I heard some of the most inspiring homilies, always relevant and deeply moving. The three are, after all, known to walk the talk, constantly caring for the poor and for victims of injustices, helping them keep body and soul together. Their kind of activist spirituality has inspired and given me, and no doubt many others too, a chance to become myself part of their mission in my own modest way.
Spirituality
Parokya ni Leila was dissolved during the pandemic, but I didn’t starve spiritually, thanks to Jesuit-on-leave Tito Caluag; he became my companion as celebrant of a daily TV mass. His trademark short but meaty homilies sustained me.
When mass at church resumed, my husband and I joined a small community every Sunday morning at the Asian Institute of Management, near us. There we met one or two each time from the Parokya, and also old friends from other cause-oriented organizations and from school.
Again, the drawing power is Jesuit homilies from a rotation of celebrants from the order. Soon a teenage granddaughter of mine, Mona and my daughter, Gia, joined us.
My husband and I only had to attend one Mass there to get happily hooked. Each time, I felt I was learning something new. After all that exposure, I began living with the awareness of God’s presence in everything that happens, whether good or bad, and therefore was never fearful again.
Indeed, in old age, when we have detached ourselves from mundane responsibilities and struggles, and our children are all grown, spirituality is the way to go. That way we can look at things from a perspective that precludes despair. It still doesn’t come automatically to me, but with practice I should be able to get it.
God’s will
There was an initial panic; after all, I, we all, had come from a life largely worldly. I know that eventually I will be able to smile at conflict in the face, secure in the knowledge that whatever be the outcome, in spite of my best efforts, it will be good for me and everyone else in the long run. Any fat soul is supposed to know that. Alas, when the problem overwhelms, you are unable to get out of the way of God’s will quickly enough to save yourself.
Oh, how well do I know that. But in His boundless mercy, and in the nick of time, He gave me yet another nudge through a friend in a similar situation, one who was also saved from herself.
In a sort of post-homily commentary, she shared with me some spiritual advice on “solving” problems from the most unlikely source—layman author Henry Miller, known for “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn,” novels oddly “notorious for [their] candid sexuality.” But there it was, clear as day, indeed the only way to go. And it can’t get more spiritual than that:
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it and you only set up more resistance.”
I am certain now that if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing. To be able to put yourself in tune or rhythm with forces beyond, which are the truly operative ones, that is the task—and the solution, if we can speak of “solutions.”
I’m working on it. And may the forces beyond be with me.
