Christ the King, Christ the Beggar

‘

I intend to reflect more theologically on Vincent van Gogh’s life except that my approach this time is more liturgical than speculative, prayerful rather than a mental exercise.

I am not ashamed to pray online and to speak the name, the greatest name of all – JESUS! The uber-intellectuals among us and the so-called paragons of secular and successful living who don’t need God can label me anything they want – subjective, irrational, charismatic, narrow-minded, fanatic. It essentially doesn’t matter to me because it’s one thing that cannot be taken away from me – my faith in Jesus no matter how imperfect.

When i declare part of my faith publicly, i know i’m not announcing a faith that doesn’t shiver before the storms of life, or grapple in the dark. I am simply declaring to whom i try to center my life with in both joy and trembling for falling short all the time yet moving on with Him. Essentially, it’s what it is and i’m keeping on even virtually. It makes me wonder how many out there in the blogosphere feel like doing the same but hampered by the fear of being labeled, turning them into an oddball no longer “in” within a culture that is growing more secular each day? Or constricted by the mindset that writing prayers or theological explorations and its vocabularies are reserved for a certain category of people in the church only?

Would you like to pray with me? I begin here:

“God waits like a beggar who stands motionless and silent before someone who will perhaps give him a piece of bread. Time is that waiting. Time is God’s waiting for our love…By waiting humbly we are made similar to God.”

Simone Weil

Jesus, the King of waiting
van Gogh waited for his talent to flourish and bless humanity with,
may i know and welcome Your waiting love in those whose talents are undeveloped or undermined by others…

i breathe thrice here…

Jesus, the Champion of waiting,
van Gogh waited for that real self-love to unfold and keep him sane,
may i know and welcome Your waiting love in those who have special need of attention and acceptance…

i breathe thrice here…

Jesus, Hero among “beggars,”
van Gogh begged for love in his lifetime,
may i know and welcome Your begging love in the deprived, the abused, those who live on the edges of society, those who crawl in the night of despair…

i breathe thrice again…

Jesus, the Greatest Listener,
Don MacLean wrote of van Gogh:
“They would not listen, they’re not listening still,”
may i know and welcome Your waiting love by listening more than by judging others…

i breathe thrice here…

Jesus, the God who “failed” on the Cross,
van Gogh lived and died with rejections and failures all his short life,
may i know and welcome Your patient, waiting love from among those classified by society’s standards as the dregs, the failures, the non-passers, the mindless, the weirdos, the oddballs…

i breathe thrice here…

JESUS – whose Kingdom is one of patient, waiting love,
renew my mind, renew my whole being,
according to Yours. AMEN.

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Photo credit: cosmic kid99

Tagay – Kanta Gikan Kan Zandro

Mag-Sinurigao anay ako mga mambabasa. Ini kanta na lami pamation, gikan sa Surigaonon singer/composer, taga-Cantilan bagan anhi kon waya ako masajop, si Zandro Urbiztondo. Dili lamang ini kon para sa mga palabayong; para isab sa mga dugay mabayong. Na hala, andama na an imo speaker, ajaw pagtodahi kay basin makatugaw kaw sa mga nangatuyog kay magkaduyom an inom, o kaha sa mga nagduka-duka sa imo palibot. Bikja Surigaonon!

Tagay

Uno man na kalisod sabton an at kinabuhi
Uno man na an kalipay mo-agi ra man kadali
Jaon pay tagkinahanglan na waya pa mo-abot
Jaon pay mga tinguha na waya pa makab-ot

Koros uno:

Ugsa pirmi an tagay, permanente bayong
Ugsa pirmi yay angay, kay di na man masabot
Ugsa pirmi an tagay, kay dili na ma-angot
Magkabuntag molutay, permanente bayong

Kahamok na pangutana, na kalisod tubagon
Kahamok na mga suba, na malisod langojon
Tig-a sa pagkakuman, di magdugay ma-utod
Sugton sa pagka-kuman, buyagan da sa sunod

Utro koros uno:

Karajaw na na trabaho, ya gihapon makontento
Inday unoy taghanap dako na man unta an sweldo
Jaoy kuyang, jaoy kuyang, jaoy kuyang, jaoy kuyang

Koros dos:

Ugsa pirmi an tagay, permanente bayong
Ugsa pirmi mag-away, kay di na masabot
Ugsa pirmi an tagay, kay dili na ma-angot
Bahala na mangamatay.. Permanente bayong…bayong…

I-klik an nabayong na Spiderman kon gusto kaw mamati…

On Manny Pacquiao: A Gratitude Prayer

Thank you Father, for the greatness You allowed in Manny Pacquiao – the greatness of success and the humility to handle it. Amen.

Learning Guitars, Listening to the Greats

What music genre relaxes you? Mine is classic folk songs, even if Dan Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band guitar score is one i can only imitate imperfectly. I’ve watched Fogelberg’s solo on Youtube and the rendition is a soulspeak with his husky voice, the string’s simple and distinct variation, and the seriousness of remembrance and dedication of the song for a dad long gone. I am settled with my limits. But listening to folk music artists is an elevating experience, un-settling in a way on how the synergy of human voice, instruments, the many truths captured by words, turns me discourteous: they’re damn good! As if Beauty had pitched a tent like Jacob pitching one anywhere he went, the built one one adores with a sense of sanctifying distance, and if done fanatically brokers the adorer to carve a desert bull out of it.

Romancing Guitars

Backtrack a bit to the personal limit i alluded to. I’m not a guitar virtuoso, learned to play the instrument only in high school while shaving off the off-key edges of my voice. Statistics: it took me about 4 years in high school and another 4 years in college to hew off those edges and led small gatherings with some confidence. Guitar skills aside, the proliferation nowadays of home videoke would have hastened the process. Manny Pacqiuao would likely be happy to testify over this with his Magic Sing! But no, not during our time in the convent, not even a TV set despite the Dutch coffee and cigars. Thanks to this Dutch frugality, TV shows and movies are never my top sources of entertainment. It’s listening to music and playing some of those!

But guitars, yes a convent and church cannot afford not to have one. It’s crippling for a liturgy without its command for unison, rhythm and glee. If you grew up in the countryside, you can imagine what i mean: choir members glancing at each other first to gather hints when to open mouths for the big Am…oopps…Alleluia! Countless were the times when i sabotaged those choir bodies for the wrong chords, messed up introduction, playing the wrong song. Humiliation is always part of any learning. I kept strumming anyway through raised eyebrows and sabotage-pointing: in mananitas, haranas, Christmas carolling, house blessing, Holy Week processions, barrio fiestas, and burial ceremonies. It was learning past the living and the dead, sumptuous meals and Christmas coins, from Ang Mga Minatay (The Dead) to America’s Horse With No Name. The opportunities were there; i only need to scale off incrementally my fear of failure. In the stretch of my experience, no dead came alive again, laughing.

The Dutch Connection

Over a small bottle of Matador brandy, i played one of my faves: Vincent by Don McLean. Slowly, i was reminded of Darbs’ recent comment on my post My Silent Madness: “starry, starry night…” the very first line of the song. Then 3 days ago, i got an email in Dutch from a former Dutch mentor, a confidential one mistakenly sent to my inbox. Strange after not having heard from him for a long time.

Vincent is deep and dark, the message tragic and beautiful. It’s a song in poetic motion, bringing and beholding back the inner beauty and madness of this great Dutch artist we all know by the name of Vincent van Gogh. Now, there are 2 ways of talking: the poetry of the song, and that of van Gogh’s life. Briefly, let’s recap van Gogh’s talent and tragedies first with the aid of Tita Wiki:

• Died at the age of 37
• Fathered Expressionism with 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches
• Worked as an art dealer
• Fall in love with a landlady’s daughter: rejected
• Grandfather was a minister: failed the entrance exam to study theology; also failed in a 3-month course at a Protestant missionary school
• Became a missionary to a small village; brushed with church authorities and left
• Wanted to marry his widowed cousin: rejected
• Quarreled violently with his father, also with cousin-in-law
• Fall in love with an alcoholic prostitute; Vincent defied his father’s objection
• Fall in love with a neighbor’s daughter: opposed by both families
• Impregnated a young painting session model: Catholic priest forbade modelling for him
• Lived alone through the sale of his paintings with bread, coffee and tobacco
• “Teeth became loose and caused him much pain.”
• Diagnosed with gonorrhea
• Worked with great European artists of his time
• Cut off the lower part of his ear lobe after a fight with a fellow artist, gave it to a prostitute
• Suffered from hallucinations and delusions
• House was closed by police upon his townsfolk’s petition
• Confined to an asylum
• Depression went deeper and “walked into a field, and shot himself in the chest with a revolver
• His last words: “La tristesse durera toujours.” (the sadness will last forever)

There you go, peeps – the beauty and madness McLean tried to capture in his song:

Vincent

Starry
starry night
paint your palette blue and grey

look out on a summer’s day
with eyes that know the
darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills
sketch the trees and the daffodils

catch the breeze and the winter chills

in colors on the snowy linen land.
And now I understand what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
they did not know how

perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry
starry night
flaming flo’rs that brightly blaze

swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in
Vincent’s eyes of China blue.
Colors changing hue
morning fields of amber grain

weathered faces lined in pain
are soothed beneath the artist’s
loving hand.
And now I understand what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
perhaps they’ll listen now.

For they could not love you
but still your love was true

and when no hope was left in sight on that starry
starry night.
You took your life
as lovers often do;
But I could have told you
Vincent
this world was never
meant for one
as beautiful as you.

Starry
starry night
portraits hung in empty halls

frameless heads on nameless walls
with eyes
that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the stranger that you’ve met

the ragged men in ragged clothes

the silver thorn of bloddy rose
lie crushed and broken
on the virgin snow.
And now I think I know what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity

how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
they’re not
list’ning still
perhaps they never will.

Next time, i’ll try to explore some theological openings from such a colorful life. Meanwhile, i’m leaving you this quote from our man:

“…to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces that lead to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture.”

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.

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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…

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Photo credit: creative liverpool