Special glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you—
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses,
but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

-Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry, 40-41.

A Day with Opus Dei

I always thought this was a rather fair article, though I add hastily that Opus Dei is NOT a religious order.

No albino monks here, folks.

A Day with Opus Dei - TIME magazine

No, actually, on a second reading, I really kind of like it. I love how everything is so open, because nothing in Opus Dei is secret. And how there was such an emphasis on how Opus Dei members try their very hardest to practice what they preach.

Home.

Around my mother's house there is a lot of verbena. It's the first thing you smell when you roll in and step out of a vehicle, and open the gate. The smell is so pure and so wonderful and it rises up to meet you when you ring the doorbell to announce your presence, when you open the gate and move to open the white front door.

Our house is by no means beautiful. It's a lot of good intentions ruined by a lot of bad architecture, and a phobia of painting the walls anything but white and the roof anything but blue. But I'll always love coming home.

When I turn right and open the first door, my mom is inside, and she's always waiting for me with a hug and a smile, and no matter what happened during the week, no matter how tired I am or no matter how much I have left to do, she's always happy to see me, and I'm always happy to see her.

Monday yet again

If I could live in a book, I would probably live in Anne of Green Gables/Avonlea/the Island. I've been rereading and rewatching Anne this weekend, following the harrowing experience of my second pharmacology exam. If I lived in that world there would be exams too, but there would also be green, expansive fields, cooperative animals in Patty's Place, and dresses. Rather that, than this dreary city existence with dirty rainy streets and flash floods and wet shoes and spotted white uniforms. And of course, if I lived in that world, I could exclaim (like I wanted to yesterday) "But it oughtn't to rain on a Sunday!" and I would have been met with a chorus of agreement.

I don't know what's wrong. In medicine it's called a prodrome--there are signs and symptoms of something wrong, but you don't know what it is. Oh well. I suppose I'll be able to tell pretty soon. Meanwhile, a barrage of exams--one to three every week, for mercy's sake--still await me.

To end with a lighthearted anecdote: I was on the same bus as a childhood love this morning. I don't think he noticed me--my bespectacled head was buried quite deeply into the disreputable copy of Anne of the Island that I bought from a booksale last Friday, with Ado's money--but I tried to hide all the same. If only all childhood loves could turn out like Gilbert and Anne! In this case I rather suspect I was the Charlie Sloane and he the Anne Shirley.

Fr. Ernie leaves the parish.

The parish priest leaves today. He has been here ten years and it seems that the entire parish is sad to see him go. I don't particularly share in their sadness--for in the priest I always detected some sort of bias against myself and those like me; he has steadily refused to ever allow a picture of St. Josemaria Escriva to be mounted in the church, saying "he has too few devotees here", while St. Peregrine and a lot of other great saints who didn't enjoy a very distinct following here were allowed spots.


This I add to this uneasiness I feel that while there have been many developments in the parish for the last ten years--new buildings and youth centers, and so forth--I don't think that there was every any love of doctrine or a genuine Eucharistic devotion fostered here. I don't intend to speak badly of the priest--only to say that I'm curious about the changes, and I'm optimisically hoping for a lot of them.


Still, I'm sorry to see him go if only for my mother, because she has worked under him for a few years now and is genuinely attached to him. She seems to think of him as one of her few confidants. I'll keep praying for him.

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!

Good Friday, and the Lord of the Rings

It's Good Friday and I'm alive. I'm still a bit irritated with myself when I remembered that I was supposed to be FASTING and ABSTAINING (one full meal and two smaller meals that do not amount to a single meal, plus zero meat), but by then I'd already eaten up all that was left of the Rice Krispies treats we made yesterday.

In other news: Mitzie said during this month's recollection that if you're bored, something's wrong with YOU--not your environment. There's so much work to be done and at the end of our days God's going to make us account for every single minute, and I hope he'll be pleased that I'm trying to really finish and appreciate LotR this summer. A lot of people don't know this but The Lord of the Rings is actually high up on most Catholic must-read booklists. It's beautifully written, totally innocent without being sugary, and--like The Chronicles of Narnia (what I mostly think of as its protestant counterpart)--acknowledges the faults and perfections and temptations of man while showing how very CLEAR is the distinction between good and evil. No moral relativism here.

I read LotR when I was little (it was my dad's present to me when I was... eleven? twelve?) long before I heard of any movie, but I couldn't match my father's enthusiasm. I understand why. It's very much a man's book, full of travel and manly fighting and gallantry and all that. I read it (though I'm not sure I finished The Return of the King), watched the first movie and just decided that (like Star Wars) it would be something I'd never appreciate.

I'm glad I've taken a second look. I just could not put The Fellowship of the Ring down. Out of mortification and penance I did try to read for just one hour a day, but then when I spent two days alone in my new condo unit in Manila I was just so lonely that I read while eating, washing the dishes and drying my hair just to drive away the loneliness. I ended up finishing it pronto. I'm in the middle of The Two Towers right now.

I feel like I've been left behind and am only catching up. Why did no one tell me it was so great? :D It's totally everything I could have asked for in a book. It's fundamentally Christian (Tolkien said it himself... "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. "), though of course it can be appreciated by those who aren't even remotely religious. There is none of our modern angst and, lo and behold, there is an actual plot. The multitude of names and the places is sometimes wearying but I think I can get used to that. And the characters! I'm positive I love Sam the best. He reminds me of John the Baptist who said repeatedly (of Jesus, as Sam might say of Frodo): He must increase and I must decrease. A more humble character I have never found.

Most surprisingly perhaps is that it's made me think a lot about the struggles of good and evil. It doesn't belong to old songs and history; it belongs to the present, to the here and now. I feel a renewed solidarity with the Church Militant.

Have a good penance-filled Good Friday, everyone, and a Happy Easter this Sunday.