Lovey Dovey Moment with the Vicar of Dibley

This top British sitcom is memorable to me as part of our modular classes on spirituality. The main actress, Anglican vicar Geraldine Granger is described by Wiki as:

“a “babe with a bob cut and a magnificent bosom”. She is a bonne vivante and a large, liberal woman who enjoys nothing more than a good laugh, much to the consternation of David Horton. Despite her fun-loving and sometimes outrageous behaviour, she is deeply caring and does her best to help those in her parish in any way she can. She is well aware of her obesity but seems to take a relatively laid-back attitude towards it. A self-confessed chocoholic, she often will go on a diet only to break it within minutes by eating one of the innumerable chocolate bars that she has hidden throughout her house (even in hollowed-out Bibles).”

Enjoy another hilarious YT clip of the sitcom here:

My Silent Madness

With my bike, i was out alone last night in a churchyard that is becoming my mall of silence. You can make me sit and face an empty wall and give a reading on Gibran while everyone in the house snores audibly. Such a tryst is more than consuming a half-gallon of Selecta ube ice cream to me. (I often think of food indulgence these days as a rebellion against the human spirit’s craving to be simple and sacrificing in small, many ways.)

But nothing beats going out into the wild expanse of Nature, peering through my minute eyes into its uncontainable vastness, being awed endlessly by its seemingly eternal presence. The past 2 weeks had been alternate nights of clear, star-dotted and cloud-shrouded skies, as the moon gradually without maneuvering other physical beings around her, revealed its full grandeur. Last night, i was one witness, wondering over its seemingly late showdown from the horizon. The security guard likewise wondered when at 9PM, the moon emerged with its melon-hued fullness from the veil of clouds like a 6AM sunrise. We are in for longer nights and shorter days plus the cool breeze i can only savor in silence.

I walked to and fro on the concrete ground, craned my neck upward to wonder with the stars and the festival of celestial lights crowned by the lunar light. Priceless! Incomparable to any man-made entertainment!

But even the simple thought of joining their silent festivity could shock a consciousness hardened by noise. The human mind tends to think, imagine, plan, worry, or chatter endlessly so that submission to the silence of the moon and the stars is no eating of a Red Ribbon choco moca crunch. It takes some efforts and intention – from foregoing TV time to saying no to a child’s after dinner cajole to play. Just around 200 meters outside the churchyard is a bustling street. I have to be conscious of the difference between a city street and a silent churchyard because each demands two different kinds of consciousness: the city – at least an awakened sense of control and mindful activities (hindi pwedeng patanga-tanga sa kalsada); silent churchyards, or any ground of silence – of carefree, no wristwatch wondering.

In silence, time is less segmented into minutes, hours or days characteristic of city life because Silence is the Great Uniter of past, present, and future. It’s where i’m going in the ultimate sense of the word. And so you are. Never too bad to get to know it in the fullness of the moon and the glow of the stars. Tonight, i might go out again, moonless or otherwise, pedal from a city-consciousness to Nature-mindfulness, leaving behind a sleeping mother-and-child, believing that the silence that charges my being effuses and blesses everyone around me in return. Tonight, i will empty my mind again, leaving up to Silence to fill it. And i can tug some into the space because Nature is always community-minded.

A Love Triangle

While the typhoon wind was raging last Saturday, I was re-reading Hagar – one of the most dramatic stories in the  book of Genesis, and one that’s truly universal in its portrayal of the complexity of human desires. Hagar was Abram’s Egyptian maidservant. When Abram’s wife Sarai in her advanced age could no longer bear a son for him, it was Sarai herself who told Abram to sleep with Hagar. Round as the Halloween moon, Hagar got pregnant as Abram’s wife. In a very fickle-minded manner, the news of Hagar’s pregnancy angered Sarai and soon despised and mistreated her. Hagar fled into the desert, found by the Lord’s angel, announcing to her a child she would name Ishmael will be born soon, telling her to go back to Sarai’s household and submit to her.

If blogging or facebook had been a fad then, Hagar could have handily hang out online, her FB wall streaming with the sense of betrayal and isolation that Sarai had caused. What could have been her blog titles, intentionally anonymous for the despicable thought that Sarai from the other end, could google her anytime and once found, would craft comments (also anonymously) to further degrade her? Some possible titles:

• The Wife That Never Was
• Desert Rodent
• Hating S.
• Point of No Return
• Missing Abloy
• Laylay Na, Sablay Pa

Haha – you can come up with your own… Our time, our age of information of course, is a point of no return, and is pointless to return, to the time when the world beyond our yards were largely unknown or unheard of. What’s known is known so that denying factual knowledge is like puking food forcibly. The point for this hypothetical set-up is to highlight differences of our time and Hagar’s: ours is a time of increasing speed and space to vent out our thoughts and emotions, a time of growing human solidarity with our personal malaise. Isang note lang sa FB ng sama ng loob at may makiki-simpatiya na kaagad. Hagar’s time must be doubly depressing for its snobbishly hard and isolating landscape. Ikaw kaya mapadpad sa disyerto bitbit ang mo ang yong love triangle drama? Desert life is survival at its extreme.

But hey – i need not be quick to judge desert time especially from the lens of our ‘information time’. One – i haven’t lived in a physical desert. Two – I’m not Hebrew for whom deserts are ambivalent places of struggle with the “demons” as well as transfiguring landscape of dialogues with God. And third – silence and solitude (space and intention to be alone with God) is not the staple habit of our tendentiously noisy ‘information time’. I can only approximate what the desert time was for Hagar in silence and solitude and less through our antsy information time. Every good thing has its own pathology they say. Parang siomai lang sa bagoong alamang pag too much daw.

On the contrary, what was good about the boring indifference of desert time that Hagar encountered was the gift of picking up “hints and guesses” from the Lord’s angel. Sinong gustong makausap ang anghel ni God, taas ang kamay? The problem is even the image of a conversation with an angel appears too mountainous to absorb for our ‘information time’ mindset, even laughable from our literal, scientific, and practical conditioning. But the greater point is in the silence and solitude of Hagar, painful as it was, anything can happen – even an angel’s appearance. Or a burning bush. Or being blessed with courage enough for Hagar to decide to go back to Sarai and face the love triangle drama head-on. Surely, more dramas await Hagar at Abe’s house. At wala pa ring broadband sa kanyang pagbalik kaya wala ring blogging at fezbuk hehe.

————-

Photo credit: Lillylilla

Halloween Parties

We had our street Halloween soiree 2 nights ago with the bubbly kids in the  neighborhood. It was a blast of laughter and sharing of food enough for everyone: kids were showered moderately with Kopiko and other candies, adults with giveaways from one bachelor medrep. At the tune of “Nobody,” packed prizes were given to the top tomfooleries on the dance floor. Unknown to most of us, the kids had been dancing the moves of the Wonder Girls in their schools, thus dwarfing over our adults’ awkward mimicry of the sleek Korean twirlers. I got the laxative Senokot shirt as a giveaway in the adult category plus a pink-coated pen. I was happy. The rest of my time was spent chasing 1-year-10-month Hans slicing carelessly through the crowd, grabbing the microphone and mumble and sing to the delight of everyone, climbing on the parked mo-ped, swatting away the food on the table with his bare hands, snatching others’ pumpkin candy containers, and wiggling his small body to the dance music of the night – Nobody. He is bursting with too much energy enough to become a stressor in the house. But the way he shamelessly mumbled over the microphone speaks gloriously of how gregarious he is and chatty he could be opposite my pensive personality. We watched him with delight and shook our heads.

Ours is not a posh neighborhood, and nothing grand, nothing lavish, nothing pricey a prize glittered the gathering. It’s one of those common urban corners where the gossipmongers and the modest co-exist, at times in passive hostility, and in other times, in shared gaiety. Real enough, right? Halloween-like in some manners when I get to gambol with my “witchy” (and bitchy)  side by wearing masks while sharing our food and vivacity. Halloween-like in the way I romp with the “dry bones” of my alienation from God and others in a more communal way – singing, scaring each other, or playing with my shadowy self.

Halloween parties are quite a ritual where my lights and shadows are symbolically held and celebrated in fun, creative tension, where the gossipmonger and the modest in me hold hands as shameless as Hans holding and singing and mumbling undecipherable a stretch of – is it mere sound or language coherent enough from toddlers’ point of view? Clear or incoherent language, they don’t matter come Halloween party time. I am a mixture of both. Besides – who has mastered the language of the living, and who has mastered the language of the dead? I tend to oscillate only between these two ends of the bridge.

Happy Halloween peeps…

—————–

Photo credit: creative liverpool

Chasing Silence

Thank you peeps for all the kinds words, wishes, and whispers of some prayers. Darbs, thank you again for allowing me to guest-post with my piece Flooded Altar. Thank you also to Barrio Siete for posting the Blog Prayer Brigade for 2010 President banner on the front page. Beyond the familiar metrics i use, and often tempted to use, I believe every kindness counts towards that which we anticipate – our movement towards a transformed world, the Kingdom of God in Biblical parlance. Every act of kindness eventually vanishes into silence, only to mingle with the Grand One especially if it is done with the prayerful conduit of the heart and hands. When it is offered back, bouncing into our very earthiness, it becomes purer, freer from our self-indulgence. The human ego bit by bit becomes a background before it is the main showmaster we can call the Mother-Father of compassion. Such is my vision, and i suspect is the very ache of every human heart regardless of whether one is a Buddhist, a Christian, or an atheist.

I need not outline my itinerary into solitude and silence. Ultimately, each of us has to find our own rhythm when we can be alone with God, away from the external noise in order to listen to the more internal ones – a doorway into silence. All i can say is it can be done within a busy day, more necessarily within a busy day.

In between i squeeze in facebooking for the first time. Indeed, a superb invention for social networking when i got to meet old friends especially. Millions couldn’t be wrong for its utility, not to mention that games serve as virtual glue to harness it; real time-killers.Facebook is a highway of faster and shorter thought processes and snapshots of experiences. Even a period on a facebook wall has a space in the highway of self-expression. Much more for vivid images. The highway is actually clogged up most of the time. The proximity of travellers to each is unquestionable. Just when you step up the clutch to share a figment of thought, in a matter of seconds, one or two or more travellers have sped up past you with or without notice. Facebookers are seemingly at home with this proximity and speed but not without some wariness on matters to share publicly. What’s the upshot? Communities grounded on the shared vision mainly of self-sharing and organizational promotion to some extent. What are the downshots especially within a sphere called prayer life? For the meantime, i will leave it up to you to figure out. I’m simply keeping those to myself for now.

Facebooking aside, there were some surprises smacking me on the face. Reading Nietszche on solitude is one. Exchanging emails on church matters with one woman solitary is another. And the third one, it’s more silent – a growing solidarity in spirit with those who are suffering.

Solitude and silence is never a bad idea afterall, peeps. It’s worth a chase and a cut from our hurried skeds and clogged up space. It seems like the very blood of the silent stars who live past our lifetimes, how about that!

I’ll keep drinking and chase where the well is…

Happy Sunday peeps!

Photo credit: Noel Zia Lee

English has never been easy…

For Miel and Totomel :

Abandoning Blogging

I am abandoning this blog for some sustained time:

• Work-related depression and its main buddy anxiety is knocking at my doorstep. Unreal as it is like Don Quixote’s windmills mistaken for giants, it’s worth some wrestling with it in solitude and silence.

• Time for some emotional housekeeping which can only be done in secret.

• Turn my attention to some urgent things.

• Spend some time on small, practical ways of extending relief to victims of Typhoon Ondoy.

Sustained and focused time for solitude and silence, I’m finding out, is actually a great ride on Mystery. No fees, no miscellaneous charges. You only need to be vulnerable before it, let your guards and facades down. And yes, it’s possible for any busybody, family man and woman, and layperson. Desire is the main passport – no ifs, no buts, and time will follow.

See you then after 1 month…

The Pandesal Seller

I am inspired to write this musing after reading Brother Jun-G’s entry Negosyong Pandesal. To make sense of this post, I encourage you to read first Negosyong Pandesal:

i sense a simple man,
who got used since childhood
with his almost empty hands,
open those while the rest were asleep.
it was economic – the pandesal-selling,
but breaking the dawn with his voice
is analogous to the Psalmist’s desire “to awake the dawn,”
so that pandesal-selling became an opening up
of the spirit to the approaching light.

the discipline of waking up early,
the doggedness to sell,
in other words – the nascent, growing singlemindedness,
the focus on purpose with those globular pandesal,
i assume this is where being singlehearted begins,
and it is a long journey from the mind to the heart,
counting all the detours and the crossroads.

it really makes me wonder,
why the only thing he seems to need to do
is to come back into full circle with pandesal?
i suspect it is less the desire for profit
than the remembrance of those dawn moments,
hard-wired in his brain,
when his spirit braved the dark alleys,
while silently soaring against the darkness of poverty,
or apathy,
or a little more convenience from an extended sleep.

The pandesal, to me becomes sacramental,
nudging him mysteriously to open up
to his light within,
and the sun’s,
and God’s,
while filling up those empty spaces of one’s stomach.
Eucharistic, i assume, in his “pandesal way”.
no wonder the conversation ended,
only to begin,
in the more open,
more silent,
Greater Eucharist.