dia in su il fantasma

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
Ecclesiastes 1:2 (NIV)

I only knew her for a few minutes.

Yet her life speaks so much about how meaningless and unfair the world is...

I can still remember how I carried her beaten and bloodied body to the vet and buried the husk that once hosted her life in a shallow grave in our front yard.

I didn't even got the chance to know her name...

She was so young and yet so thin...so hungry...hungry enough to risk being mauled by our dog Hershey who thought her presence was an invasion of our house...

Our lunch cut short with the sound of agonized howling and the sight of her at the mercy of Hershey’s jaws. It took a splash of cold water for Hershey to release her from her death grip...

A punctured lung. A broken spleen. Ravaged intestines. The sight of her limping in a pool of blood.

Three bloody syringes to the heart ends her misery, her life and all its meaninglessness.

A glass eye. A still body. A contented frown.

What could be more tragic than dying young, hungry, painfully and unloved in the arms of strangers?

The mystery of life and death in barely sixty minutes of anguish and tears.

Frederick Buechner on love and gender orientation

I've been wanting to post this here for a while now, but it just seems that there are a lot of things to do, and better topics to blog about.

Nevertheless, I decided to re-post this piece from Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized, in his entry on the word --Homosexual he writes:

One of the many ways that we are attracted to each other is sexually. We want to touch and be touched. We want to give and receive pleasure with our bodies. We want to know each other in our full nakedness, which is to say in our full humanness, and in the moment of passion to become one with each other. Whether it is our own gender or the other that we are chiefly attracted to seems a secondary matter. There is a female element in every male just as there is a male element in every female, and most people if they're honest will acknowledge having been at one time or another attracted to both.

growing old | growing cold

After so many years I am scolded by my parents two times in the span of a week.

Funny thing about it is that its mostly about the most mundane things that I have done or have forgotten to do.

I am almost in my 30s, I am aging and have become even more aware of the immanence of my mortality.

I am aging but not growing.

I am suddenly realizing that the prospect of death isn’t so bad as opposed to the prospect of living dead in a life that’s filled with remorse and ‘what ifs.’

I cannot think straight anymore.

I am consumed with this unquenchable thirst for this one thing that’s so near and yet so far away –of this one person whom I must love from a distance, whose heart cannot be mine.

I hate myself and I want to die, because it is in dying that I hope to find solace that perhaps my passing would clear out the grime that I have tainted on the lives of the people whom I claimed to have cared for and loved.

Life as it seems now is somewhat pointless and that trying to make sense out of it inevitably leads to the collapse of my sanity.

So for now I wait and see and hopefully accept what life has in store...

bane

Love is this bane messed up sense of strong affection and attachment to the one that I cannot be with, for so many reasons that I cannot fathom.

I hate myself for being honest with what I feel.

I hate myself for clinging onto a ghost of a good thing.

As Sinatra once sang in his satirical take on the subject, we spoil good things by saying those three stupid words: “I love you.”

If only saying it is as simple as expressing gratitude to a wonderful meal, a lovely day or a favour rendered.

No reality is crueler than our imaginations because this entails an experience felt by a person for another person. Therefore it involves caring for or identifying with the object of your affection.

It is not convenient. It entails memories both good and bad. It takes us out of our comfort zones, it brings us fuller to our humanity than we can ever imagine. It incites desires. It fuels passion. It releases the devil in our emotions and the goodness in our beings. It stings as death. Its breath brings life. It confers choices. It bears consequences. It gives joy. It inflicts pain.

If only words are as simple as life…

easier said than done

Earlier today I was walking along the streets of Cubao when I passed along this, theater-turned-church-turned-miracle-center-of-sorts by a famous televangelist. As I passed I was met by a couple of teenagers who handed me a gospel track and promised me salvation. "Para sa kaligtasan sir!" (‘for your salvation sir’), and what followed was something shameful for my part I mumbled: "salvation, is easier said than done."

Now don’t get me wrong. I just reacted the way I have probably reacted for a couple of years now whenever I would be approached by people who wish to save me, which oftentimes mean: proselytize me. I’m still down with the whole idea that its something that is freely given by grace through faith –after all Scriptures testify that and I won’t contest that.

cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit, cras amet

Pain.
Such must be the language of love.
There was this line in this movie that I know that says:
“Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more? 1”
As much as I hate to admit it there is truth in that
But the problem lies in the idea of love itself.
Is love really about that of feeling that we are loved?
Or is it about the idea of getting way past the point of caring
whether we are loved or not?
Love hurts that much is obvious.
But what is life without pain anyway?
And what is love good for if it is only something we desire from the other?
It is indeed a perpetual struggle to want to be loved.
And yet to discover that the one we love would be happier, better off without us
Or even longing for love from another…
Perhaps to say: “I love you”
Really means: “You’re free as far as my desire for finding my personal completion in you is concerned…”
If that is the case...
...Then it is no wonder that “the Cross is the necessary contradiction of all we know in life. 2”

1. Celine (Julie Delpy), Before Sunrise (Columbia Pictures: 1995)
2. Robinson, David. Rappings (Grand Rapids: Tyndale 1971). P.47
   

Earth Day 2010: Love and life

Here's something that I wrote for Earth Day on the Greenpeace Philippines blog

22 April 2010: Earth Day
It is almost midnight.

Earth Day is only minutes away from being over. Another day, has passed and like in so many things that are subject to time, this day now becomes part of my memories and are now recorded as a chapter in my life.

I am more than glad that this remembrance of Earth Day was done with the celebration of the life of a dear person with whom I count myself fortunate to have as a friend .

Perhaps it is safe to say that in as far as speaking about Earth Day and the need to uphold the urgent struggle of safeguarding the environment, the celebration of Earth Day and the work for those in the environmental movement must always be reflected in the context of love for life –and I am not talking here about token sentimentally about Mother Nature, nor am I simply being a bleeding heart for the cute and cuddly animals, nor am I romanticizing my love for the outdoors –far from it!

While it is true that the aforementioned things are part of the things that bear weight in my decision to commit myself to my work with Greenpeace, a larger part of me recognizes the resolute urgency of taking action for the environment lies in the love that can be found in life that is shared in relationships –relationships that can be found in that of parents, grandparents, children, siblings, relatives friends, comrades, kindred spirits and lovers.

tristitia

I am on the brink.

I can tell especially now as I feel my body ache and my sanity and control tail spin beyond my capacity to maintain fortitude in the midst of overwhelming odds on things and things hoped for in a reality that is too blunt to candycoat the impossibility of my greatest expectations.

And those poison drinks that we use as placebo beverages to cover up the pain of our innermost longings.

I am alone in the midst of a crowd. I can hear them talk, laugh and talk more about themselves, their lives and their hopes and dreams.

But what about me?

Easter and the triumph of life over death

This morning I greeted Easter in a taxi cab.

There I watched the darkness of Black Saturday give way to the piercing light of the Easter dawn. Light beaming, shining brightly as the resurrection hope glistened in the quiet streets of Manila.

Easter was spent early at church with the remembrance of Christ’s death in the Eucharist and the commemoration of dedicating one’s self to the resurrected Christ in the waters of baptism. It is there that it climaxed with the deafening chorus of the Halleluiahs chorus from Handel’s Messiah.

Easter was remembered with a celebration of life that came with a whole day spent in the company of those that I love.

Easter is where love and life is both celebrated and given meaning with the miracle of Christ’s resurrection the triumph of life over death.

Nicky Perlas' Easter reflection

I met him personally, early last year during the formation meeting of the Network Opposed to the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (NO to BNPP). He was not your typical picture of an anti-nukes activist, he did not fit into any of the stereotypical look that activists whom I had met had.

On the height of the campaign against the proposed bill to revive the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant I’ve seen him in the protests, symposiums and congressional hearings where at one point he was even crudely confronted by Congressman Mark Cojuangco, the bills chief proponent and there I saw him gracefully disarm Cojuangco by not raising his voice nor did he give out any aggressive gesture towards Cojuangco.

Now he’s running for president, and albeit with the admirable passion of putting what he personally believes in into the fabric of mainstream Philippine politics. Only time will tell, if the general populance will share his vision.