Nine

In the same twenty-four hours:
You and I, flying over rooftops and trees
Landing on two distant doorsteps.
You, white house picket fence stethoscope you
Stand with a sparrow well-groomed.
I, ending the journey alone
In a red-brick window sill
Peering inside.
I have broken a few bones
Over our journey of four years
And my wings need are in need
Of resetting, and a man
Is inside the red-brick house:
He is a little jealous, and opens the window
To keep me close, so I can't fly away again.
He puts the bones back in place
And if I could weep I would
Through the white sharp icepick pain. That moment
Protracted over days weeks months years,
Ending when you say the words
And I do not hear them
Because I am listening believing to the red brick man
Who tells me sweetly that I am worth
More than many sparrows.

Faith for all defects supplying

Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque
Sit et benedictio:
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen.

Have a good Good Friday!

Tao rin pala!

The happiest times of my whole week are when we get together in the SSWC and sit down (or kneel down or lean against the wall or whatever) and practice our TRP song. Time just flies by and before you know it, it's seven o'clock and you have to go home. But those two hours are glorious. I love singing now as much as I did when I was this small:


(I know I don't look much like her. But I do know that little kid in the sailor dress could rock Basia's "Time and Tide" like there was no tomorrow.)

And I'm always happiest when singing. Which is why, when I discovered I had a laryngeal nodule in November 2008, I was devastated. The doctors--now my teachers--were cautious. I convinced myself that I could still recover, that it could spontaneously regress. Well, it didn't. And what followed was a year that was like being in a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end. It wasn't merely the vanity of having a talent taken away from you, but the sharp sting of having to find another way to express yourself, and to know that things that had once been easy are now impossible.

My speech therapist said that an operation was out of the question, because to wound my vocal cords to take out the nodule would be harming my voice even more. So I despaired. Goodbye, dreams of live performances! Good-bye, Tahilan Christmas carolling and singing in the June 26 choir. Good-bye, performing for birthdays, and good-bye, singing to Sondheimian musicals in the shower ("We DO NOT beloooooong to-GE-ther...."). But then, in late 2009, we broached the idea of an operation with my long-suffering ENT doctor, and he agreed and set-up an appointment for the last week of 2009. (This webpage has a cool video on the kind of operation performed on me; it's called a micro-direct laryngoscopy with micro-flap mass excision).

And after not speaking for three weeks... there it was. I woke up the day after my doctor told me it was okay to speak, and I started singing songs from Jason Robert Brown's "Songs for a New World," and there it was. I remember bouncing into Dane's bedroom in Tahilan to wake her up for mass, so happy and ecstatic that I could sing again. Sometimes God giveth, and He taketh away--then He giveth it back!

And this is why, dear TRP, I'm giving you my all this year. Last year I was morose and couldn't even be bothered to memorize the piece, and I took offence at the well-meaning advice of this classmate of mine when she'd give me pointers on how to sing (My ego was swimming in a soup of indignation: You're teaching me how to sing? How dare you?), and mostly it was a terrible experience. But now, this year, I can actually sing, and I'll never take that for granted again. Maybe one day I'll join a choir again--who knows?--but for now, I just want to say, get ready for us, college of Medicine, 'cause you ain't seen nothing yet.

Through a glass darkly

Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum.

There are things that, even when you bring them to prayer, you can't understand. The only solution is to bow your head and say, fiat voluntas tua. But Most Esteemed Lord Father, when I finally see you face to face, I will spend a long time asking you questions about these things I do not understand--the weakness of my nature, the funny nature of "coincidence," the vicissitudes of my own heart. I shall cease to wonder why--for Christ will explain each separate anguish in the schoolroom of the sky.
And I want to ask you lots of questions about why we hurt the people we care for the most.

You--not my esteemed Lord Father, but another person--probably don't even remember this incident. Or maybe you do, but because you're just so nice, you've chosen to forget it in a way that I'd find hard to do. But I read something today that reminded me about it quite forcefully--it felt like a blow to the stomach. I will apologize to you, probably over Christmas, because despite my ham-handed way of dealing with you and my all-around b*tchiness, I do count you as a great friend, one of the best, and I promise to never do that again. And I will keep doing nice things for you so that, one day, you can look back on that incident (because I didn't mean what I said, honest...), and not feel even a pang of resentment. So that one day, you'll forgive this stupid misanthropic idiot who always says the first thing she thinks and has "no filter" (words you used to refer to someone else, 2009). So that, one day I can be even half the friend you have been to me.

Time for God

"Whoever treads the path of prayer must first struggle to be faithful. It is not as important to carry out a beautiful and satisfying prayer, rich in ideas and deep in sentiments, as it is to pray faithfully and perseveringly. In other words, one must not focus on the quality but on the fidelity of the prayer. Quality will be the fruit of fidelity. A moment of arid, impoverished, distracted, and relatively brief prayer that is done faithfully, every day, is more meritorious and will be more fruitful than long, ardent prayers, done erratically and only when the circumstances are "right." The first battle to be won in the prayer life--after that of seriously committing ourselves to it--is to be faithful to it at all costs, following the rhythm that we have established for ourselves. It is not an easy thing to win."

--Jack Philip

Because it's easy to forget that prayer isn't just for nuns or priests. Because it's easy to forget that Our Lord told us ALL to pray. Because it's hard, but of paramount importance, to make this prayer an everyday thing, not only when we "feel like it."

Because it's easy to treat prayer as an exercise, when it's actually a gift.

Thank you, most esteemed Lord Father (as Suor Maria Celeste called Galileo Galilei), for the reminder!

Galileo's Daughter

I've just finished Dava Sobel's book, Galileo's aughter.


The book is just so much better than I ever expected--now it's my favorite nonfiction book, in a tie with St Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul. I want my own copy. I just stumbled upon this one when Carmela, one of my friends who used to stay in Manila a few years ago but who got reassigned to Cebu, was in our center for a day, during Pentecost. She wanted me to pass the book on to Tina, who had lent her the book a long time ago, but I saw the cover and the summary and couldn't put it down. I'm usually not very interested in Italian history, and even less interested in the dealings of "great men" like Galileo. But the moment that I read that the daughter in question was a nun in a convent--was in fact a "Poor Clare" after the spirit of St. Francis and the rule of St. Clare--I guess I started to think that there was so much more to a man like him than I thought. 

In my head Galileo was this man who thumbed his nose at the Church (though I admit that the Inquisition at the time had made a very great mistake); the book made me realize that this wasn't what happened at all.  

Galileo was a faithful Catholic his whole life--before, during, and after his trial. Descriptions of pilgrimages he made to Loreto for the sake of his health, showing his great devotion to Our Lady, made me smile; seeing how he had to ask to be allowed to wander out for Mass during Easter in Florence, while he was still under house arrest, made me shake my head in shame. The mundane details revealed by his daughter's letters to him--the collars he sent to be starched and the citrus fruits he sent to be candied, and the presents and trinkets he sent along to his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste--made me fall in love with the story even more; it almost feels like someone made this all up, as though the story is too rich and beautiful to be true.  

In the end I know more about Galileo's brilliance than I ever wanted to know--the man seemed to run on curiosity, and seemed to want to study every possible subject under the sun (except comets), and he made valuable contributions to so many new sciences--but what sticks with me the most is the impression I have of him as a sweet, loving Father, at least to Suor Maria Celeste; the other daughter is obscured by the lack of any surviving letters or references about her. He might have been an intellectual giant, but like all men he was immersed in the details of daily living--the plants in the garden, his own bodily illnesses, the search for a partridge to send to his daughter for the sake of a sick nun, the expenses of his oldest son.  

I think of old, blind Galileo in those last few years at Arcetri, working and talking to his new companion Vincenzio Viviani and perhaps to Evangelista Torricelli, all the while missing his eldest daughter with a constancy like the pumping of blood, like heartbeats. I don't think I would have been far off the mark. But it's sweeter to think of him as he was, when he was still allowed to wander outside the house and to walk the short distance between his house at Arcetri and the convent of San Mateo, where his daughter sat waiting for a visit while mending an apron or tending to the sick.  

Requiescant in pace!