Gibran and his 7 self-reprimands

Seven Reprimands

by Gibran

I reprimanded my soul seven times!

The first time: when I attempted to exalt myself by exploiting the weak.

The second time: when I feigned a limp before those were crippled.

The third time: when given a choice, I elected the easy rather than the difficult.

The fourth time: when I made a mistake, I consoled myself with the mistakes of others.

The fifth time: when I was docile because of fear and then claimed to be strong in patience.

The sixth time: when I held my garments upraised to avoid the mud of Life.

The seventh time: when I stood in hymnal to God and considered the singing a virtue.

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The Best of Kahlil Gibran. Book Palace: New Delhi, p.71. Gibran wrote in two languages: Arabic for Lebanon, Syria and the Arabic world; English for the West. Gibran’s mother was the daughter of a Maronite priest. The Maronite Church uses Syriac, or Aramaic, in its liturgy, the same language spoken by Christ. While his feet “were stumbling on the stones of Nazareth, he decided to write his book Jesus the Son of Man.” On the Church becoming feudal during his time and bishops and priests used their position to advance and enrich friends and relatives, he wrote 2 famous stories: “Kahlil the Heretic” (a novice tries to convince the monks to distribute all their possessions and to go preach among the poor)  and “John the Madman.”

“Life is not only merriment; Life is desire and determination.” K. Gibran

The fierce landscape, the “cedars of God,” the mountains of Lebanon that Gibran grew up with, the Wadi Qadisha that has a “mighty force that compels the mind to dwell upon the words we have for eternity.”

Maguindanao Massacre: God Is Watching

God is watching…

• how they planned it
• how they orchestrated human and other resources
• how the 64 victims feared for their lives before their last breaths; died very violent deaths
• how people become prisoners of FEAR
• how money and power are used to instill those FEARS
• how the pursuit of JUSTICE is carried out

In His time, He will act accordingly: this is my greatest hope. In history, there were no Hitlers or PolPots or Stalins who were not humbled from their seat of powers, condemned by their own savagery. In His time and not sooner the Truth will bring those murderers into their own self-condemnation and die lonely deaths, leaving their wealth and prestige rotting like carcasses, totally now abhorred and abandoned into absolute forgetfulness. Not worth a human memory at all. Only for the sake of a story of how the bloody defilement of the Garden of Eden, the Eastern side of the story itself was altered by not covering their scrotums. In the absence of repentance, shame is also lost. In God’s time – the flaming sword of God’s justice will overturn their sense of absolute control into a dog’s dung they would regurgitate from their bellies and out of their troubled minds and consciences. In His time BECAUSE HE IS WATCHING…over this land in violent disarray.

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.

Spelling God, spelling what i believe…

Let me play in one mental game. Think or recall one person you believe is a  non-believer. Think. Recall. Need more time? If you recall one atheist you came across with and cannonball him to fill in the blank simply because he is on the other side of the border of faith, then let me punch in this wager: your backup reasoning is essentially wobbly. Why? Your atheist acquaintance may not necessarily believe in a being with a capital letter, you know, like Superman or Dragon Warrior. But ask him again, probe his public thoughts and it doesn’t take a Hubble space telescope to detect his magnified, enthroned, centralized being – Reason, No-God, Humanism, Facts, or Evolution.

“But wait,” you may tack on, “why capitalize those when even the God of believers only has a small “g” in the atheism circle, and still comes out seemingly persuasive to enjoin others to another believing bandwagon?” Find out from here.

Trivial as this may sound, I sometimes think it’s one of those legacies often unquestioned because it’s as commonplace as our house doorknob: spelling God.

Capitalizing God, capitalizing other gods

Capitalization implies importance, emphasis, centrality, primacy, identity, or even hierarchy of values. We capitalize our names to emphasize our existence, to highlight our identity. Those who do so otherwise like the poet e.e.cummings get the same existential attention I assume.

Let’s humanize our habit of capitalizing G. There is at least a universal habit of capitalizing our real names. What’s the impulse behind? Naming and capitalizing the names carry an existential function – that of singling out a living or non-living being’s uniqueness. Names are important, their capitalized letters only to highlight how important those names are. No doubt, I can write my full name in small letters, a bit deviant an act against social standard. But if I can give a “capitalized treatment” to an ordinary cheap pen in a prose because I want my readers to have a unique mental image of such a writing instrument, then why give an “under-treatment” to the ideas arranger?

It could be equally argued that under-capitalizing names is no big deal, less torrential to alter a person’s inner or outer landscape. There were primitive practices or existing cultures less attentive to capital letters. But just as every stroke in a letter in all alphabets count within its cultural classroom, the universal practice of capitalizing names at least must be charged with meanings practical for humanity – uniqueness, centrality, primacy, identity, significance.

Such centrality, however, could only be stretched up to a certain limit like a rubber band. I may be unique. You may be unique. But both of us know we cannot be the center of all meanings of the universe no matter how ambitious our ego would sometimes dictate us. So what does humanity do? Where do I dig to find that Center? Like a hungry miner, I dig within and out and glance now and then at the shining gold of meaning I name God. The beautiful thing is I am not alone in digging, having glances, and naming God. I don’t think God really bothers to be given a name with a capital letter, and much more, alter with this name the very personality of God as the center of all meanings. We seem to agree as “fellow miners” naming is for the sake of human convenience, self-respect included. If I can write my father’s or mother’s name in capital letters in an angry missive not out of mindless habit but of self-respect as a son, perhaps, the human spirit has a weightier reason for doing so before its Source.

I don’t think God really bothers to be talked about all the time like sex scandals in barber shops or moral canteens. Again, it’s human convenience, respect for the human longing to behold God’s face included. I think what God wants is for me to see more of this luminosity that is ever transforming of the way I make myself and my self-centered desires to become the center of all meanings. Under what environment does the gold of God shine forth? I guess pretty much under those circumstances when I question the names I assign capital letters with – Pleasure, Power, Reason, Success, Prestige, Humanism (you can add more if you want). And here’s one more: Religious Security, which is inclusive not of VAT, but of all creatures who go to church to hide from God, yahooooo!

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Photo credit: ahisgett

“When I Met You” – Mother Teresa as an Atheist

Don’t get me wrong, mga kapatid. I remain on a reasonable level with atheists. Atheism is not necessarily the most disgusting thing in the whole universe. In fact, they’re even asking the most important faith-question on our behalf: where is your God? A neighbor revving up his motorbike for 5 minutes at 4:55AM could get more disgusting than argumentative atheists. Or a believer imprisoned by the mindset that domestic violence is normal. Atheism could even be the most desirable thing in the world. Take it from renowned Capuchin theologian and preacher Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa who skillfully wrote about the ‘atheism’ of Mother Teresa. Irreconcilable, right? It’s what I thought initially. It’s like KC (I’m not obsessed yet), lost in an island after a plane crash, telling Richard: “Are you God to help me? I don’t need you, to be honest.” Talk of differences that seem hard to reconcile but in the end, are the alchemist’s fuertes materiales. So is Mother Teresa and the atheist in her that made her a saint. Let me simplify atheism a bit based on Fr. Cantalamessa’s brilliance.

A-theism basically means no God, absence of God.

There are 2 kinds of atheists:

1. Active – those who willfullly reject God and even boast of their stance while trying to convince others to join the team

2. Passive – those who feel rejected by God; living painfully the absence and silence of God and everything seems to have no meaning

Now listen to these words from the Saint of the Gutters and judge which of the 2 categories she belongs:

“There is so much contradiction in my soul, such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a suffering continual – yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. … Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.“

Now, would you really believe that KC and Richard could not be meant for each other both in reel and real scenes when even atheism and Mother Teresa are both honorary members of The Distant God Club?

Happy Valentines – believers and non-believers!

Bluep, this post is for you.

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Photo credit: brokenarttattoo