‘The Peace of Wild Things’

One of the profound greetings I received for the New Year was the poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, who is known as the prophet of rural America. Based in his Kentucky farm, Wendell, 74, is a well-known conservationist, poet, novelist, essayist, professor, lecturer, philosopher, Christian writer, farmer and defender of agrarian values and small-scale farming.

Feel and listen to the poem’s soothing message. You can’t go wrong with this.

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

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Healing priest does so ‘many miracles like in the Bible’

Philippine Daily Inquirer/FEATURE/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

Filed Under: Mysteries, Diseases, Personalities, Belief (Faith), Good news

MANILA, Philippines -- He could not believe his healing power. He wanted to run away from it.

A Canadian woman declared dead eight hours earlier, her organs ready to be harvested and donated, suddenly opened her eyes after Filipino priest Fr. Fernando Suarez prayed over her.

Suarez, who was then a seminarian, was stunned. “Let me out of here,” was all he could say, ready to flee.

He was supposed to go and see the woman earlier but he was not able to make it in time. When he arrived at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in Canada, it seemed too late. But Suarez went to see her anyway and, surrounded by doctors whom he requested to be present, he prayed over the woman.

The miracle happened.

The woman is now well, Suarez says, and has resumed her normal life.

That case, which happened almost nine years ago, is probably the most stunning of all, but Suarez continues to amaze, baffle and bring hope and joy through his ministry that has seen the healing of countless sick and infirm in many parts of the world, including the Philippines.

“It is not me,” he says casually. He is convinced that he is just a channel for God’s healing power.

The soft-spoken Suarez, a 2007 TOYM (The Outstanding Young Men) awardee for religious service, projects an ordinariness that is both pleasant and endearing. His boyish looks do not easily reveal “what God has wrought” through him. He does not have an electrifying aura nor does he shriek and shout to slay evil elements like some Bible-thumping televangelists do. Suarez goes about it gently, in his own soothing way, touching, praying over people, pleading for healing. And because he wants everything centered in the Eucharist, he always begins with a Holy Mass.

Like in the Bible

Miraculous healing continues to happen. People who have been assisting him for some time have witnessed the impossible.

Businessman Greg Monteclaro of Couples for Christ-Gawad Kalinga has seen it all. “Except the raising of the dead,” he says. “But the deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk -- all that is told in the Bible -- I have seen it happen.”

In Bulacan, Monteclaro narrates, there was this young boy who was born with practically no bones. “He was soft -- like jellyfish. I was holding him in my arms when Father Suarez prayed over him. I myself felt the bones grow inside the boy’s body and suddenly there he was --walking.”

How does one explain that?

“My own problem here is that I have seen so many miracles, it has become so common to me,” Monteclaro says.

Not that he is complaining.

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Back-to-Christmas movement

If I were from another religion or another planet and I knew the Christmas story and how Christianity began I would be very shocked to see Christmas being celebrated with excessiveness, mindlessness, stressfulness. I would ask: how has Christmas come to this? This was not how it all began.

Simplicity has been supplanted by excess. It seems the Christ in Christmas has been x-ed. Xmas. X for excess. Xmall, Xmess. Oh, we say, but we know Christmas is alive, one just has to wade through the X-cess to find the true essence. But why must this be so?

Toxic toys, double-dead meat, smuggled goods, horrendous traffic, Christmas blues, piles of garbage, overcrowded shopping malls, desperate gift-givers, overeating, excess cholesterol and sugar, clogged airports and bus terminals, the culture of gift and cash solicitation (messengers, garbage collectors, strangers, barangay personnel leaving you envelopes into which you must put in money), and so forth and so on.

These are some of the negatives of the Christmas season that needn’t be there. How is it that Christmas is the time when the gap between the rich and the poor becomes wider than wide, with the latter feeling the pain of being on the other side of the railroad tracks? The lonely get lonelier, the hungry feel hungrier, the outcast feel like castaways indeed.

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If the land could weep and sing

Well, what can I say. Weeping has turned into rejoicing. Day is breaking all over the land. Joy comes in the morning. If there should be weeping, the weeping should let flow tears of joy.

For the farmers of Sumilao who marched 1,700 km. for two months from Bukidnon to Manila under scorching heat and driving rain are finally seeing a glimmer of hope. That the disputed 144 hectares would be theirs once again, wrenched at last from corporate hands after years of weeping and gnashing of teeth on the part of the farmer-awardees.

But there were will be some waiting to do even after President Arroyo authorized that the land that had been reclassified as agro-industrial, be reverted back to agricultural land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

With the backing of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines and civil society groups but minus the disruptive flag-waving of hard-core ideological elements, the farmers should be on their way back to their promised land.

Nine years ago, I wrote the column piece below. I fished it out from my files some days ago when I thought the Sumilao case would again turn awry, because for a while it looked that way. Anyway, here it is as a remembrance of things past and I hope I never have to rub it in again.

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The light of their life

This book convinces me that no mother—if it could be helped—should ever leave her family to work abroad for a long, long stretch of time. That is not the book’s expressed objective and neither is it trying to find economic solutions to stop the endless stream of mothers leaving for jobs far away from their homes. But solutions to the collateral damage are in the offing.

“Nawala ang Ilaw ng Tahanan: Case Studies of Families Left Behind by OFW Mothers” tells us what happens when the mother is away for long. The title alludes to mothers as light and translates as “the light of the home has gone”. That description of the state of affairs in the domestic front came from the left-behind families themselves. They know what it is like, they remember the day the light went out.

The little book is a compilation of case studies by psychotherapist and prolific book author Ma. Lourdes Arellano-Carandang, and psychologists Beatrix Aileen Sison and Christopher Carandang. Ten OFW families are featured, each of them with the individual profiles of fathers and children (and mothers in some cases), their feelings, world views, hopes and problems, as well as how they cope and find solutions.
Plus more solutions, but this is getting ahead of the review.

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Leaders for Health Program

“Stories of town mayors giving out medicines, from paracetamol to penicillin, are not unusual because these can get votes. On the other hand, municipal doctors complain about not having enough funds to buy common drugs and gasoline for the ambulance in emergencies. Community members largely stay on the sidelines, rarely participating in the arenas of local governance.”

This is the scenario that is common especially in far-flung places. This is the situation that the Leaders for Health Program (LHP) wants to address and change “by making health part of the governance process wherein there is transparency, efficiency and civic participation.”

Situations like the one that broke into the news recently, the one about the outbreak of parasite infection or capillariasis in Zamboanga del Norte. Reports said at least 70 had already died in the village of Moyo in Zamboanga del Norte leaving families orphaned. More than 300 villagers had been infected and suffered chronic diarrhea and dehydration.

The poor villagers had been eating river fish and shrimps that had the capillariasis worm because there was little else. And when struck by the disease, they could not afford the medicines. Worse, there was not enough medicine. No tests had been done so the mortality was simply attributed to chronic diarrhea. But what caused the diarrhea?

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An apology to Dr. Alfredo Bengzon

A supposed-to-be feel-good Sunday feature that I wrote (p. 1, Inquirer, Nov. 25) turned out to be feel-bad thing, not just for the persons and institutions concerned but also for me, the writer, as well.

I made a mistake—not deliberate, of course—and I am sorry.

The front page story was on the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health’s (ASMPH) bold move in medical education (“Ateneo graduates in 5 years MDs and MBAs”) which is something unprecedented. The story went well until the last portion where I wrote: “Bengzon, an Atenean who finished medicine at the University of the Philippines, recalls speaking at his alma mater and saying that UP had become a staging area for doctors ‘tailor-made to be exported abroad.’”

Dr. Bengzon, ASMPH dean, denies having said that that “UP had become a staging area for doctors ‘tailor-made to be exported abroad.’”

I must state here that it caused him pain and embarrassment especially. UP is, in fact, helping ASMPH by providing the needed faculty. The Ateneo, UP and La Salle University systems have, among themselves, a memorandum of agreement on sharing of faculty.

UP itself has, in fact, created a medical curriculum that exposes their graduates to health problems in poor communities and the systemic and structural problems in society that affect people’s health.

After Dr. Bengzon and I had gone over what transpired at the three-hour-or-so conversation/interview some months ago where he talked about ASMPH, I agree that I had misquoted him and taken his statements out of context.

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Tempest in Tanon

“The State shall protect and advance the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature. -Article II, Sec. 16 of the Philippine Constitution

I imagine the Lord of the Sea wading to shore wearing raiment of corals and sea grass and--flotsam surrendered by the sea. Thundering, roaring like the wind in a lost empty city, he seeks the despoilers of his ocean home and the home of gentle sea creatures that inhabit the earth and provide food for its inhabitants.

Where are they. He roars. Who are they, they who laid waste the ocean garden.

This scenario plays like a movie in my mind, it surges in my consciousness like the thoughts and images I had long ago while beholding, somewhere, the sea in its threatening beauty. And I imagine now the threatened Tanon Strait in the Visayan Sea as it waits to be visited by turbulence in the form of exploratory drilling for gas.

The sea is a-boil. A slow, symphonic movement takes a sudden turn and climaxes with a roll of drums and a clash of cymbals. The sea quakes to a crescendo, then hurls itself against the wind. Here before you is a concerto at its most tempestuous peak. Water breaking into a million crystalline pieces. It is pure music and fury. Salt melts in your eyes. Suddenly you are no longer afraid.

A battle royale is set to unfold if Japan Petroleum Exploration Co. (Japex) starts exploring for oil on Tanon Strait without having hearkened to protesting communities, scientists and environmental advocates who are asking that exploration be put on hold while the sea itself is to be explored to find out how much of it will live and how much will die.

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Suicide has no heroes

The media frenzy, the blame game, the breast-beating, the outpouring of sympathy and the if-onlys that followed turned out to be more surreal than the suicide itself.

Everybody and everybody had something to say about 12-year-old Marianette Amper of Davao City, about her diary, her family’s poverty, her dreams and dashed hopes. And how she ended it all with a rope. So young and so despairing.

Someone’s got to take the blame--was the undying refrain, the knee-jerk reaction of many. And why not. Manette’s lot in life was indeed something for the yagit telenovelas and bleeding-heart movies that truly resonate with many Filipinos, both poor and not so poor.

But suicide, as psychotherapists would tell us, is not as simple as cause and effect or this equals that. Not everyone who goes through what Manette had gone through, not everyone whose life is more difficult that hers would want to end his or her life.

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Suicide and the blame game

The media frenzy, the blame game, the breast-beating, the outpouring of sympathy and the if-onlys that followed turned out to be more surreal than the suicide itself.

Everybody and everybody had something to say about 12-year-old Marianette Amper of Davao City, about her diary, her family’s poverty, her dreams and dashed hopes. And how she ended it all with a rope. So young and so despairing.

Someone’s got to take the blame--was the undying refrain, the knee-jerk reaction of many. And why not. Manette’s lot in life was indeed something for the yagit telenovelas and bleeding-heart movies that truly resonate with many Filipinos, both poor and not so poor.

But suicide, as psychotherapists would tell us, is not as simple as cause and effect or this equals that. Not everyone who goes through what Manette had gone through, not everyone whose life is more difficult that hers would want to end his or her life.

But why--is the question most people ask of the most unlikely suicides. While in the case of Manette, the most likely remark most people would say was, but why not. Or, but of course. She was poor, though not the poorest. But it is not as simple as that.

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Rock and refuge: NPC then

It was our rock and refuge. It was our sanctuary during the dying days of martial rule. That was the National Press Club for us in the early 1980s. Many of us were greenhorns in journalism then, upstart freelancers from the so-called mosquito press (okay, alternative, and sometimes underground--and underwater if you were the “Ichthys” type) who made bold forays into the mainstream media and were continually at odds with the Marcos military. Hunted, surveilled, “invited”, manacled and thrown into jail.

Standing tall by the banks of the Pasig River was the NPC which was founded and built by the generation of journalists before ours, a good number of whom bore the brunt of military fury when the reign of terror began in 1972. The founders did not build the NPC in the 1950s for the purpose that served us in the 1980s. It was supposed to be a club, a watering hole for the old boys who wanted to unwind after a day’s work at the editorial office or on the beat. Not long after, the culturati and the literati also made it their haunt.

Vicente Manasala’s mural on lawanit in the dining hall gave it ambience. The mural (gone and sold I don’t know where) withstood the smoke, grime and slime from overbearing journalists who thought the masterpiece was their birthright.

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‘Dies irae, dies illa’

I remember our Benedictine school days when Nov. 1 and 2 were marked as special liturgical days. As college boarders (synonymous with brats), we would listen to the nuns singing the Latin “Dies irae, dies illa” at Mass on All Souls’ Day even when English was already the liturgical language of the day.

It was very neo-monastic and I would picture the square-ish Gregorian notes swimming in space while I tried to keep my thoughts from wandering. The organ roared and the voices soared, shaking the rafters of the neo-Romanesque, Germanic chapel which, I must say, is the only one of its kind in this country.

Yes, Gregorian was part of our music appreciation class (part of our expansive Liberal Arts education!) and we were taught how to read those funny notes on four lines and sing them right with the mouth correctly shaped. There was no beat or time, just rhyme and round-ish strokes in the air from the conductor. One was supposed to go with the swelling and the receding of the waves, the ebb and the flow of the sound of the spirit.

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