You are Dust and to Dust you shall Return

I am not sure whether my brothers notice that the Mahogany leaves are turning brown and these leaves are falling on the ground. Brown leaves are scattered, covering almost the dry ground. Sometimes, a gentle wind pushes these brown leaves and they are crawling and crawling, depending on where the wind directs them,  creating a hush in the air. The sun is about to rise.  I notice that the streak of sunlight is orange as it reflected on the morning clouds. The orange clouds are in the same color with the orange leaves of Talisay which are hanging on branches and are about to fall on the ground.  Summer is here, I thought. And I am not so sure if my brothers feel the coming of  summer.

Perhaps, my brothers are sleeping still at this time. I happen to pass a room where I can hear the heavy snoring and the sound of the rotating  fan. It is already 6:12 AM. The bell supposedly will ring at 6 AM. I did not hear the bell rings. And no one bothers to wake up for 6:00 AM rising . Perhaps, my brothers were tired from defending their Pastoral Plan yesterday. It was a very heavy week for all of us here in Galilee Year (a Formation Year in Vianney). Most of the nights were busy preparing,  planning, brainstorming,  writing, and arguing  our Pastoral Plan. The Pastoral Plan hopes to train us, future priest, in handling parishes someday.  So, I do understand why my brothers do not bother to wake up. They need to claim the sleep which they were deprived of for days because of preparing the pastoral plan.

However, I bother to wake up. This is my routine in life. I just wake up earlier than the others. I would like to attribute it to my body clock which I usually  wake up, even without an alarm clock, earlier than the rising time. Perhaps, to let me see how beautiful mornings are. To let me know that the leaves are turning brown and they are falling on the ground. To let me see orange clouds with the  same color of Talisay leaves hanging on the branches and are about to fall on the ground. To let me recognize that summer is coming. And to let me realize another ending.

School year.

It seems it was just yesterday when I reentered the gate of the seminary (Vianney) after spending my life outside for four years.  It seems it was just yesterday  when I met my new brothers, my new batch, BUNGA. It seems it was just yesterday that we played basketball on lazy afternoons. It seems it was just yesterday when we became over-all champion during the Intramurals. It seems it was yesterday when we worked as chaplain-trainee in a hospital. It seems it was just yesterday when we spent for three days with Sendong Survivor families. It seems it was yesterday when we travelled  far to Yolanda affected areas in Visayas for our Rural Exposure. It seems it was yesterday when we let go of twenty red and white balloons during Valentine’s Day to remember the victims of typhoons. It seems it was yesterday when we gather outside the room of Isaiah and waste our time playing tong-its.  It seems it was just yesterday when Rhaby left the seminary for good.

It seems that there are many yesterdays which have passed so swiftly. Thanks to these falling brown leaves. They remind me to take notice  the almost  forgotten yesterdays cherishly spent as brothers.  I guess this is the gift of waking up earlier than the usual rise up here in the seminary. I am sensitive to how time pass so swiftly.  I hope I can tell my brothers who are sleeping still that the leaves of Mahogany are turning brown. And it means summer is coming, school year is ending. Days from now, we are leaving this place, we are  going back to our homes  and be assigned in summer parish exposure. We can look forward to another exposure, another memories with families and old friends.

Hope before my brothers go to their summer exposure, they may stop and notice these brown leaves falling on the ground. These falling leaves may tell something about the swiftness of time, the passing of season, the temporariness of life. It was symbolic that during our year end community pictorials, it happened after the Ash Wednesday Mass. An ash cross marked our foreheads are captured in our community photos. No matter how we look good with our smiles, the marked ash cross in our foreheads will remind us that those smiles are temporary and passing. No matter what we do, possess, achieve in this life, we could not escape the fact that “we are dust and to dust we shall  return.” Someday we become part of the ground covered with these brown leaves. Perhaps, two hundred  years from now,   no one ever remembers we have existed once in this space and time, unless we become poets, saints and a hero or a lousy leader recorded in history.

Is this what Emily, a character in Thortorn Wilder’s  play Our Town,  meant when she asked, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?” Have we really realized that we existed and we have limited time? Have we realized that our life is passing as fast as the tick of the second? Have we realized that someday worms will enjoy eating our rotten bodies and transform it into dust? Have we thought someday of becoming one with those brown leaves on the ground and the orange clouds will pass above us every time the sun rises? Since our existence is limited, have we spent it to the things that matters most, to the things that makes us really really really  happy?  Have we felt, even though all things will pass, this “something eternal” deep down things, this something permanent?

I am not so sure that my brothers have asked these existential questions. Perhaps, they do but in different circumstances. I wish I could knock on their doors and wake them up to share what I see. However,  I know they are not concerned about the leaves turning brown and falling on the ground. They might find it corny.

I only hope for them to read this blog. I will tag them. Maybe, at the middle of their exposure, they are able to visit their Facebook account. If in case they are able to read this blog, I just want to let them know that falling brown leaves are telling me that I need to thank them for a year of shared memories.  This is the least I can do to let them know that I take notice the time when they sleep soundly at morning when the leaves are turning brown and are falling on the ground. 

Goodbye

I am packing my things. I am going somewhere.  I pull out some photos of me with my students and I start to feel sentimental. My students gave these photos as their remembrance. One photo I longer gaze.  I was at the middle seated with my usual teacher smile, and my students were doing wacky pose, with their costumes in Iliad and Odyssey characters. I am beginning to feel sad. This would be the hardest leaving I have in my life. I am leaving teaching literature, reading amateur essays of students, entering not so ventilated classrooms, and computing grades during the weary hours of midnight.  I am going somewhere which I think greater than being a teacher in a state university.

Not that I was not happy in teaching literature. God knew I enjoyed this job. There was somehow a joy in me when I teach Robert Frost’s Stopping by the Woods in Snowy Evening. I sensed my students were attentively silent when I discussed the poem with them. I knew they were disturbed when I explored the line, “the darkest evening of the year.” Their eyes spoke of their own experience of “darkest evening.” They had not named it, but I knew they had experienced this “darkest evening” somewhere, somehow. I found joy, when I saw few of them trying to hold their tears. Perhaps, Robert Frost touched them.

Not that I was not happy teaching William Blake’s The Sick Rose. My students were in awed when I declared in class that there was something sexual in this poem.  “How come? Sir, the poem only says about a persona addressing a sick rose,” many reacted. Then I said, “As a literature student, you have to learn reading between the lines.” Again, they ardently read the poem. Eureka, someone got the sexual theme. I found joy in tickling their intelligences.

I did love introducing the character of Richard Cory created by Edward Arlington Robinson. They were bothered with the irony of his character. Why Richard Cory, gifted with everything in this world, would pull a trigger on his head one summer night? Can Richard Cory represent the people in this world who have everything in life yet could not find true happiness and meaning?

There was always an excitement in me to see my students preparing their costumes for their performance in Iliad and Odyssey. I usually asked my students to dramatize some scenes in Homer’s great epic. It was always good to tap the creativity of the students which I believe, most of them lack. Many of the group would choose to role play the scene when Paris has to choose which apples among the three goddesses to eat. In this scene, the character of Paris is teaching the modern man to give importance in making choices. I knew these characters written thousand years ago are somehow connected to the very ordinary lives of my students. Besides, it was good to see that these characters are brought to life in the classroom.  

However, I was leaving Robert Frost, William Blake, Edward Arlington Robinson and Homer because I was responding to a small still call.  I heard this call every time my students write their essay in the classroom. While waiting for them to submit their essay, in silence, I happened to stare at the window of our classroom located at the fifth floor of the building. I glimpsed of the vast on-going constructions in the city. I felt a wider realty, bigger than the classroom I was in. Because of that window, a voice was calling me to reconsider my first choice before I became a literature teacher. The voice was inviting me to look back to the life I left, to the place I considered my first home.

The seminary.

I am packing my things because I am going back to the seminary- that somewhere greater than teaching literature.

Before teaching, I was in the seminary for eight years. I went out because I feel a sense of longings. There was a desire to experience life outside the four walls of the seminary.  That time there was a desire to have job, to earn money and to buy things I want. There was a desire to be independent like the ordinary young adult. There was a longing to experience some sort of  “freedom.”

Moreover, I saw the emerging shadows of priesthood. Seeing these other realities, I was afraid to continue. First, I was afraid to grow old lonely. Priests are basically alone in their lives. I did ask myself if I can bear the nights not having someone to embrace. Second, priests were attack by scandals, and many faithful lost their trust on these men. I did ask myself if I am still willing to give myself to priesthood wherein people whose trust are fading. Third, the relevance of priesthood lost its luster. In this time where everything could be explained by science and technology, entering religious life is considered corny. It explains why there are convents and seminaries around the world being close because no one dares to enter. Priesthood is less attractive to young people today. I did ask myself the relevance of priesthood. With this emerging other realities of priesthood, I needed to discern deeply whether I am willing to pay the price. Hence, I decided to stop for a while and do some serious thinking.

 But God did not give up on calling me. I realized that I was so wrong on leaving the seminary four years ago.  Literature helped me realize this. Literature led me to reconsider priesthood as an option. I was like Paris, in Homer’s Iliad, who was enlightened on whose apples I was willing to eat from the goddesses. And I chose priesthood.  With faith, I was taking this road less traveled.

Furthermore, literature amplified my ear on the gentle, still and small voice of God. I learned, in literature, that life is full of ironies. In trying to claim my independence, being full of myself, I realized that I became empty. Richard Cory taught me that happiness is not about having everything in this world. There is more to life than possessing material things. I also learned that being alone does not mean being lonely. Real freedom does not mean doing what I want. It is in weakness that I become strong. These ironies, which I encountered in the stories in literature, were my epiphanies.  

Perhaps, the stories I discussed in classroom touched my very heart and led me to listen to the stirrings of my heart- the very true voice of my heart, the very voice of God. I did remember then Robert Frost who says, “ I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/ And miles before I go to sleep.” I do remember then my promises to God before. I have to go back and fulfill that promise to God, that promise when I was still an innocent young altar boy in our ordinary parish.  

Now, I am packing my things to fulfill my promise before.  Honest, I am experiencing some self doubt. I am not really certain about this packing. What if the call is just an illusion? What if this is another form of escape?  Fear grips me. However, the voice is inviting me to do a leap of faith. That is why this leaving is the hardest.  What I am certain about is that I heard a call to go beyond teaching literature and I will try to respond to that call. I am also assured that a voice is telling me, “ Do not be afraid, I am with you.” I know that voice come from that Someone who loves me truly, that Someone who woos me through the years, that Someone who invites me to forget myself and follow him. I am called by that Someone who died on the cross and asked me to do the same. It is in this dying I will find my eternal life, he assures me.

For now, I will be keeping these photos with me. These are good for my journey. These photos are my remembrance of a cherished life as literature teacher, which help me find my place in the greater scheme of things.

 I am writing this to say sorry to you, my students,  for not informing you about this goodbye. Now, you know where I am. Thanks for the memories. And remember one time I said in class, “there is more to life.”