The book is a collection of essays designed by the author to present an autobiographical sketch of his development as a person. The conceptual underpinning of the book as project is that the rich, varied life experiences of the author, as seen through the prism of his philosophical reflections, present an interesting narrative that readers would find appealing because they are at once both personal and universal. The author starts by declaring that he is an activist, and he sees reality from that perspective. He goes on to trace what he considers his roots in terms of actual early life experiences and ideological journey, giving the reader an initial sense of who the author is. The first transition informs the reader about the author's relocation to Indonesia. This is followed by an individualized narrative about his family members that lets the reader peek into the author's operating concepts both as partner to his wife and parent to his children. This is followed by stories about persons that influenced his growth as a person, again giving the reader a sense of the author's core values. The second transition is about his relocation to the United States that entailed personal sacrifices from both the author and his wife. The next grouping of essays deals with the author's philosophical reflections on what he considers important life-altering topics. The book ends with two essays that deal with sickness and death and how coping with these has profoundly shaped his view of life.
A Life That Matters
Autobiographical Essays of a Filipino ActivistBy Rey AbayaAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Rey Abaya
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-4031-4Contents
Chapter 1. The Activist Perspective.....................................3Chapter 2. Soulmate.....................................................9Chapter 3. Poster Boy...................................................23Chapter 4. Why I Wanted to Become a Catholic Priest.....................29Chapter 5. Tagaytay and Social Work.....................................35Chapter 6. Why I Wrote This Piece.......................................43Chapter 7. Badges of Honor..............................................47Chapter 8. A Long Shot..................................................55Chapter 9. Lifemate.....................................................63Chapter 10. The First Born..............................................67Chapter 11. Popot.......................................................73Chapter 12. Sleeper.....................................................79Chapter 13. Cherished Mentor............................................89Chapter 14. The Man I Admired Most......................................95Chapter 15. George Godinez..............................................99Chapter 16. My Special Gift.............................................103Chapter 17. Candles in the Dark.........................................109Chapter 18. Relocation Inconveniences...................................117Chapter 19. Exciting Things To Do After Retirement......................123Chapter 20. A Business Breakthrough.....................................127Chapter 21. Religion and The Vending Machine............................133Chapter 22. Jesus' Crucifixion and His Humanity.........................137Chapter 23. The Myth of Sisyphus........................................141Chapter 24. Nosebleed...................................................143Chapter 25. Angels of God...............................................149Chapter 26. Living With a Terminally Ill Wife...........................157Chapter 27. Hitting the Bottom of the Barrel............................163
Chapter One
The Activist Perspective
Last night I spent three hours phone banking for the gubernatorial candidacy of Phil Angelides. At the time I am writing this, Phil is running against the sitting governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a celebrity cinema action star . As I write this, it is now less than thirty days before the November 7, 2006 election, but Phil is still trailing badly in the polls. I think he is the much better candidate of the two, but many of his supporters have already given up on him. Last night, there were only two of us phone banking at the union office. The other phone banker was Gabe, a temporary political representative hired by our union. Even with the discouraging polls, I have not given up on Phil's candidacy so I volunteer to phone bank on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when I am not feeling too tired from my regular work.
It is during times like last night that I truly feel spiritually replenished because that kind of work really tests my resolve to keep on fighting despite overwhelming odds. The temptation to just give up and go home like the rest of humanity can become so overwhelming and emotionally debilitating that staying on despite what I feel can only make me feel stronger spiritually. I keep reminding myself that the world needs people like me to persevere in this difficult and thankless work because I really make a difference. Perseverance moves mountains. I keep reminding myself that in 2000, President Bush squeaked by Al Gore by a mere 500 or so votes, and what a difference it had made on the lives of many Americans. The difference in this contest might be 50 people like me who have not yet thrown in the towel.
It is not easy to call other people's phones and intrude on them during their leisure time to talk about the election and about how important it is for them. Less than twelve percent actually pick up to answer their phones. Among the live ones whom I might catch actually picking up their phone, about a fourth will give me a nasty piece of their mind. I often feel like an unwelcome intruder stealing a few minutes of their rest period. I understand that people are protective of their private lives. They are usually outraged that I dare to bother them after their hard day's work. Thus rebuked, I just swallow my pride and try to be pleasant and understanding. Once in a while, I get a welcome bonus in the form of an admiring compliment or a grateful acknowledgment of my volunteer effort. Even in the midst of their self-absorption, one or two people understand what I am doing. That makes my day.
I ride an emotional roller coaster during the three hours of phone banking, going through a range of emotions, from discouragement and despair to satisfaction and exhilaration. There is no financial compensation, and I expect none, but there is definitely a reward: my spiritual growth. I feel a certain maturing after every phone banking session. The heartaches and the letdowns serve as spiritual supplements for the true believer in activism. They strengthen the soul of the activist in a more significant way than if he had gone to church and attended services there. The phone banking halls and the precinct-walking streets are the arenas where the activist's character is forged. One learns self-discipline with every insult he takes without rancor, sporting an almost Spartan disregard for his own ego.
The activist is a very spiritual man but in a much different way than the usual religious person. He believes that the spiritual nature of man is shaped not through constant prayer but through constant action. Actions speak louder than words or prayers because in the realm of reality, words are cheap, and actions are much more difficult to do. Actions prove to the people around us the values that we profess to believe in. Most of us do not really confront the veracity of what we publicly say we believe in until we have to do something in line with those beliefs at some personal cost to us.
What we do from Monday to Saturday is the essence of our spirituality, not what we profess on Sunday in community. Sunday is the culmination of our "holy" week when we bring to our community the vessels that we are-empty, half-full, or full-to offer to the deity we profess to believe in. If we do not do anything good from Monday to Saturday, there seems to be no point for us to attend the celebration on Sunday because we come as empty vessels without anything to bring as sacrifice. There is no faith to celebrate because our faith is hollow; the values we profess to believe in have not been validated by actions in the real world.
This is not to say that phone banking and precinct walking are necessary for salvation. These are just some activities that activists can do. What I want to say is that activism is necessary for salvation. We cannot go through life without actively practicing the values we say we believe in and expect to be saved. There are a myriad of things that we can do to make the world a better place, to help build a heaven on this earth. Everyone must help if everyone expects to be saved.
The opportunity for us to help solve some problem in the real world will always present itself. I call this God's gift. It manifests itself constantly. We only have to be open to its revelation. These opportunities are all around us, waiting to be exploited by us. That is why I call them gifts. We are doubly blessed when we use them. We feel the exhilaration of participating in God's creative energy in transforming this world into a better one; the energy of the immanent God flows through us. It also brings us nearer to our self-understanding of what we are destined to be, what the Buddhists call " an enlightened one". If one is a Christian, Jesus had already shown him the way through the values he taught him through the New Testament. These values are simple and unmistakably clear. The rituals must not be mistaken for the values, such that we love the rituals and throw out the values, missing the essential because of attention to form.
Although I have had experience of the contemplative life when I entered the novitiate in my teenage years to spend a year mostly in silence doing work and silent meditation, I feel I am not really cut out for the contemplative life. I see myself as a man of action, constantly experimenting with real things to effect real results. My activist life in a way is a prayer in itself, a constant reaffirmation of the things I believe in.
For me, combing my hair is the key moment of every day because it is judgment time; I face myself without shame and regret, assuring myself that I have kept my integrity intact, despite what other people may think of me. That, for me, is the only real value. Everything else is chaff.
Chapter Two
Soulmate
I knew Mario from our kindergarten days. He was this buck-teethed, nerdy-looking, slightly built boy who was the perfect fit for the role of Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. At our young age when small boys regard physical achievements very highly, he definitely looked unimpressive to me. Although we were classmates, we were not close friends then.
Despite his physical limitations, young Mario liked to join the usual rough games of active small boys, like fencing with bamboo swords and engaging in mock land battles using rubber slingshots as firearms and folded paper as bullets. What he lacked in physical prowess he made up for in smartness. He would, with the slyness of Loki, make sure that some older, and therefore bigger, ally always protected him, acting as his personal bodyguard. His usual protector was Tito, a classmate who was a year older than both of us and bigger than everybody else in the class.
Wielding influence over a few of our peers was easy for Mario, as his parents were powerful people in our small town. His mother, a judge in a neighboring town, was the eldest child of the wealthiest landowner in our town. His father was a foreman in the local public highways office, an influential man with legions of construction workers reporting to him, just a notch below the district engineer in rank.
Mario and I belonged to the two elite clans of our small town, the de Veyra and Villegas clans.
In my case, although my mother and her older sister were ordinary elementary school teachers, they were regarded highly by the town. Their older brother was the academic superintendent of the school district, managing all the public schools of some fifty towns in the area. Their father, my grandfather who died during the Second World War, was mayor of our town for two terms just before the Second World War; he was also the titular head of the second-largest clan in the town, the Villegas clan. My father was not from our town, originating from a distant area in the northern part of the Philippines known as the Ilocos region. He came to our town just before the Second World War as a young geodetic engineer employed by the Philippine government and assigned to conduct surveys in our town. As a non-native professional working for the government, he had some stature in the community, and several young men of the town were working for him. Mario's clan, the de Veyra clan, was the largest and most influential in our town.
Mario and I were born a few years after the Second World War, in a town that still showed the scars of General MacArthur's grand campaign to retake the Philippines from the Japanese. Relentless bombing runs were a prelude to his historic landing on the beaches of our province Leyte. Our town Tanauan took the brunt of the air and sea shelling. Empty torpedo shells as well as unexploded bombs lay everywhere in our vicinity. War stories told by our parents were fresh and vivid. Douglas MacArthur was everyone's bigger-than-life hero for the promise he kept to liberate the Philippines; the Japanese were the hated bogeymen, cruel masters of a recent dark age. In our childhood, the wounds of war had not yet fully healed.
Although as young kids we grew up in the same small town, our houses a stone's throw from each other, Mario and I were not particularly close. We were classmates in kindergarten, grade four, and again in grade five, but those were the only times we were in the same class before high school. After grade six, Mario went away to enter the Catholic seminary in a neighboring town while I enrolled at the local high school, a private Catholic school.
Our paths crossed again a year later, in our sophomore year, when we enrolled in the same seminary in the country's capital city Manila, along with my then closest friend Eugene. Apparently, the same recruiters that convinced Eugene and me to try seminary life had also persuaded Mario to transfer from his seminary to the same one Eugene and I had chosen. Mario came as a regular second year student while Eugene and I were accepted as special students who had to take two years of Latin in one year.
In the seminary, four of us who came from the same place were classmates in the same class; we became inseparable companions. Ninong, who came from a neighboring town, joined our group of Mario, Eugene, and myself. We spoke the same Waray dialect, and having similar common experiences, we created our own smaller subculture amidst the more dominant groups of Cebuanos, Tagalogs, and Ilokanos. As a minority group that the larger groups casually dismissed and marginalized, we felt we needed to band together to survive. In the few times when we were forced by circumstances to mix with a major group in the seminary, our small group chose to blend in with the Tagalogs as we felt more comfortable with them.
During summer vacations, seminarians like us tended to stick together all the time in our hometowns. Seminary authorities specifically instructed us before summer vacation not to mix with girls, even our sisters' friends, to avoid getting involved with the opposite sex. We had to avoid girls like the plague. Celibacy was an issue that overshadowed everything in our life. At the start of vacation, we had to present ourselves to the town's parish priest to be accounted for. At the end of vacation, the parish priest had to accomplish a checklist about our behavior during vacation that we had to turn in to the seminary authorities upon return. We usually ended up spending summer vacation totally in the company of other seminarians, isolated from the rest of the community. We felt like outcasts, unable to relate to anybody except people like ourselves, like members of a chosen but untouchable caste. By force of circumstances then, other seminarians from our hometown became our closest friends. We shared the same hopes, the same visions, the same stories, even the same anxieties.
Free-spirited Eugene was the first to leave the seminary, after third year high school, probably feeling stifled by the rigorous regimen of seminary life. Athletic-minded Ninong followed, leaving after fourth year high school, succumbing to the lure of the pretty girls in his neighborhood. Serious and determined but feeling more and more isolated, Mario and I stuck it out together. Although we had other friends in the seminary during the regular school year, it was pretty much just Mario and I during summer break after Eugene's and Ninong's departures. We came to dread summer because it meant being in a smaller, lonelier social world.
We tried to buoy up our spirits through endless dialogues of the mind. Our conversations were never stale nonetheless. We somehow managed to stay focused and excited. We discussed many interesting topics, never veering away into topics about the opposite sex, although it was always tantalizingly just beneath the surface. That subject was taboo, and we obediently adhered to that rule. We talked of other things, and that was how we managed to survive, by intellectualizing almost everything within our purview. For the greater part of our waking lives, we learned to live in our minds, through our minds. Notwithstanding our artificially sanitized world, we nevertheless lived vibrant and exciting lives in our active minds, in the unending discussions that we looked forward to, day in and day out. Discourse became our specialty. We became brothers in the mind, soul mates, where one could finish the other's sentence and be almost always correct. It was quite comforting to know that there was another mind in this world that could understand and explain one's deepest thoughts in much the same way he could.
As we waged what loomed as a long, fourteen-year struggle to survive and ultimately become a priest, we fought our fiercest battles together in the limited confines of the seminary. Life that could have been boring became actually exciting as we embarked on our own crusade.
The period was the later part of the 1960s, the years after Vatican Council II when so many things were exciting, and everything seemed to be in flux within the Catholic Church. We were part of a big class of forty-four seminarians in a seminary of some two hundred seminarians, and we regarded our class as a crusading army. Much like the warrior generals of the past that we had read about, we savored leading the attacks on the increasingly meaningless structures and strictures of the institution we were in. The battles, always exciting, were not always self-satisfying. There were many instances when close friends betrayed us. We did not always win.
It was during this period when Mario and I learned that we could trust each other unconditionally. We vindicated all the days we had spent together discussing, probing, and exploring. Many times, it was just the two of us left to wage battle for our ideas. We were Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha battling the windmills of our hopes and dreams. Not once did he abandon me, and I always returned the favor.
As personalities, Mario and I were worlds apart. I was brash, speaking my mind with little tact and reservation. He was more calculating. I was all heart. He was more mental. I was fiery. He was cool. I riled and antagonized adversaries, appearing to be extremely combative. He intimidated them with the power of his words. I took pains to simplify complex things. He spoke to confuse and rattle. I spoke directly, without mincing words. He spoke with a sophistication that was deliberately cultivated to generate deference.
I did not survive the long trek to the priesthood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Life That Mattersby Rey Abaya Copyright © 2009 by Rey Abaya. Excerpted by permission.
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