No End, for now

NO, THE world – as we know it – will not end with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Notwithstanding lightning striking the cross atop the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica the day His Holiness resigned.

Notwithstanding the coincidental cosmic events of an asteroid on a fly-by rather too proximate to planet Earth, of a meteor exploding over Russia hurting hundreds of people.

As the world did not end on December 21, 2012 with the end of the Mayan calendar, so the world will not end with the renuntiatio of the German Shepherd of the Lord’s Flock.

As the world did not end when Benedict IX resigned in 1045. So colourful is this Benedict who played some game of musical chair with the throne of Peter – reigning as Pope for three non-consecutive terms, and resigning three separate times. Aye, if multiple papal resignations did not end the world, so with this single one.

As the world did not end with the resignation of Celestine V in 1294, after only five months as Pontifex Maximus. Celestine V it was that solemnly decreed papal resignation to be permissible. And set himself up as example, invoking: "The desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquility of his former life." The pre-Celestine Pietro Angelerio was a monk and a hermit.

Find parallelism there with the scholarly Ratzinger wishing to return to studies, to contemplation, to his books in a cloister behind St. Peter’s.

Celestine V may have indeed served as Benedict’s template.

Before the relics of Celestine V in July 2010, Benedict XVI prayed thus: “So it was Saint Celestine V. He knew how to act according to his conscience, in obedience to God, and therefore without fear and with great courage. Even in difficult moments, as the ones from his brief pontificate, he never feared losing his dignity, knowing that it was full of truth."

As the world did not end when Gregory XII resigned in 1415 to put an end to the Western Schism arising from three claimants to the Seat of Peter: the Roman Pope Gregory XII, the Avignon Antipope Benedict XIII and the Pisan Antipope John XXIII.

Three popes! And the world did not end. So it shall survive the resignation of one!

The antipopes were not considered in the long line of Peter’s successors, hence, we have the Good Pope John XXIII who convened Vatican II in October 1962, over 500 years removed from his antipapal namesake.

So will the world end with the next pope, as believed to be embodied in the “Prophecy of the Popes” attributed to St. Malachy?

In the 1139 prediction of the Irish archbishop canonized in 1190, there would be 112 popes before the Day of Judgment. Benedict XVI is supposedly the 111^th occupant of the papal throne. 

St. Malachy’s prophecy concluded with the cryptic warning: ‘In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit…Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations: and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the terrible judge will judge his people, The End.”

So what to do?

I remember one time in my infima year in the seminary, we were asked by one of our formators what we would do if the world ended in five minutes.

Most of us answered we would rush to the chapel, go down on our knees and pray most fervently for the salvation of our souls.

One said he would continue what he was doing. His last five minutes would make no difference in his lifetime of 14 years anyway. And it was all up to God to keep him or damn him.

Yeah, why should we be bothered by the end of days when what should concern us is how we live our days.

"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Thus, Matthew 24:36.

Believe. Live.

    

Leaving the golden years

GETTING TO 50 was the pits.

The body enters the Age of Pain – the blood pressure shoots up, the head spins, the fingers stiffen, the knee joints creak, the back aches and it takes longer and harder to get out of bed – irreversibly rushing into an Era of Don’ts, when all the sweetness, the salt and the spice of life become a forbidden lot.

As though these were not enough a painful infliction, there is yet the most insufferable of all – the quenching of the fire that once ran amuck in one’s loins.

Sans Pfizer’s petrifier, sex at 50 starts becoming mostly a matter of gender, least of lust.

Here though, that biblical passage of the willing spirit, readily giving in to weak flesh assumes a different dimension, if not a higher meaning. Far from, aye, the very opposite of what it has been interpreted to convey – of the frailties of the human body rampaging over any sanctified wish, benevolent intention, noble goal.

Here, it is the grace of spirit that trumps and triumphs over weak, worldly flesh.

Something of an epiphany when I turned 50: with the ebbing of bodily strength,  the keenness in matters of the spirit – not necessarily translating to religious revival – suddenly inhered in me.

My daily walk at the village green, transformed from an exhausting physical exercise to an ecstatic spiritual experience, indeed become a joyous occasion for worship.  

The rays of the early morning sun, the canopy of trees, the singing birds perched on their branches, the fluttering butterflies among the wild flowers, all living testaments to the goodness of my God. And for these and all other blessings, I thank you, Lord.     

Songs stir the soul even more – mournful strains as those of Schindler’s List invariably draw – along with a torrent of tears – images of the least of God’s children, in the Sudan, in Somalia, in Syria. Sharing – albeit spiritually – their sufferings, solidarity with them in their sorrows, is an enrichment to the soul.

So is it not written, “As ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”?

Weddings become more than mere organized events for fellowship and food but actual partaking, a communion, in the celebration of love. Ah, how they make me cry, even when it’s not my kids, nephews and nieces being wedded. Copious tears of joy, For All We Know and Sunrise, Sunset always bring.

The fullness of love before the altar renews, refreshes all that is reposited in my heart, seeking an expression of its own through sharing, most especially with the unloved.

So who was it who said: “The love in your heart was not put there to stay. Love isn’t love till you give it away”? As good a thought there on one’s birthday as on Valentine’s Day. 

As in weddings, moreso in funerals – tears. A sign of the cross, a tear or two for the loss, a short silent prayer for the repose of his/her soul at each encounter with a funeral procession. That I don’t even know the dead matters not. All that counts is a fellow human being having passed, and the hope that God judged him/her worthy of His kingdom.             

Commencing at 50, the sense of one’s mortality has taken greater intensity and frequency in me as I turned 51, 52, 53…onto this, the last year before my euphemized “dual citizenship.”

More than the legacy I shall Ieave behind – neither much nor great, in the first place – it is that which I shall take along that concerns me. That which I shall present before the mercy and compassion of my God. For His judgment, I shall most surely fail. So His forgiveness, I most humbly plead.

Getting to 50 is the pits, in ways and means of the world.

On another plane, aptly named is 50 as the Golden Age – in which to pass through the crucible of spirituality to earn a rightful passage to the Diamond Age where celebrated the purity of the soul.

With the grace of God, how I long to come to that dazzling threshold.       

Vote nut

THE INC vote is a certainty.

The Iglesia ni Cristo brethren vote as one. More from personal reading now – as I am no INC affiliate – than hermeneutics is that one church, one-vote dogma grounded on Romans 15:6: “That you may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In all things, not the least in choosing the people’s leaders, is God glorified. Alleluia! 
No certainty though – in winning, is the INC vote. In local contests, the block votes are no surefire for electoral success. A case in point is Oca Rodriguez’s victory in his congressional rematch in 1995 against the INC-backed Didi Domingo. 
And then, there was the incumbent INC-propped Mark Lapid finishing dead last in the 2007 gubernatorial polls against proclaimed winner Eddie Panlilio, and recount victor Lilia Pineda.
Elections being a matter of addition and multiplication makes the INC vote a plus-plus factor nonetheless. 
Thus, its being a much-coveted prize among all candidates.
The Catholic vote is an improbability. Not the nullity it was readily dismissed to be after the bishop-blasted Joseph Estrada handily won the presidency in 1998. 
“Vote for persons who morally, intellectually, and physically show themselves capable of inspiring the whole nation toward a hopeful future.” So reverberated the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines’ pastoral statement from pulpits throughout the land. 
The not-so-subtle inference of moral wrongs on the womanizer, gambler, drinker and uncolleged Estrada not so much fallen on deaf ears as glossed over by the sheen of the Erap persona on the silver screen.
But there is such a thing as “Catholic influence” – that which Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile raised at the time of the deliberations on the Reproductive Health Bill.
This is much pronounced at the parish levels, especially in the rural areas where the cura parocco exercises the highest moral ascendancy and thereby the greatest influence in community life.   
So who among the sarado Catolico would dare even to conceive a questioning thought against the very voice of God emanating from the pulpit? 
Roma locuta est, causa finite est. Rome has spoken, the case is closed. The definitive end to all arguments of the medieval era is not extinct as the Borgia pope but as much extant today as Benedict’s infallibility. 
To a considerable majority of the Catholics, that is. That which so-called freethinkers have long ridiculed and despised as the miserably blinded faithful and unthinking fanatics.
Think and rethink: The intelligent vote is a fallacy.   
Why do we vote for those whom we vote? 
Family. The candidate is mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, cousin to the nth degree of consanguinity dating to the discovery of the Philippines.
Friendship. The candidate is a childhood friend, barkada, friend of the wife, friend of a brother, friend of a cousin, friend of an uncle, friend of a friend, friend of a friend of a friend…
Favors. The candidate paid for the hospitalization of a family member, funeral expenses for a kin, school tuition of a child. Whence rises too the commodification of the vote, of the right of suffrage reduced to the transactional, to buy-and-sell, to trade or pawn.                  
Always visceral, very rarely cerebral. That’s the vote hereabouts. 
So we ask again: In the pursuit of our electoral exercises do we ever, as we should, to quote Baruch Spinoza, “… use in security all (our) endowments, mental and physical, and make free use of (our) reason”?
So we vote nut. So we are the nut. 

Losing to win

“IS SUFFERING a defeat good for a political person? The run for office is a short run, and the loser is not likely to find comfort in talk about the long run. But can rejection at the polls be fairly presented as what condolence-bearers sardonically call ‘a character-building experience’?”

William Safire’s rumination in his The First Dissident subtitled The Book of Job in Today’s Politics led me to my very own with the political persons we’ve come to observe, if not to know, real up close and personal.

Much as I authored his proto-bio, I had no information if Oca Rodriguez ever thumbed through the Book of Job after his failed re-election bid in the 3^rd district congressional derby in 1992. Much of what I heard was that he retired to his farm in Maliwalu with his favourite books – Machiavelli’s and Sun Tzu’s tomes I would so presume to include – for consolation and comfort to take him through his Joban experience.

Renewed, reinvigorated from that humiliating loss, his character re-forged in the crucible of the Mount Pinatubo devastations, Oca retook his congressional post in 1995 and has not looked back at defeat since: re-electing in 1998 and 2001, winning the mayorship of the City of San Fernando in 2004, 2007 and 2010. And now poised to return to the House, but not if incumbent Dong Gonzales could help it.

Tarzan Lazatin lost in his very try for an elective post – mayor of Angeles City in 1980. Though not exactly a long shot in the 1^st district congressional contest in 1987 – he was the beatific Cory’s choice, after all – Tarzan managed to squeak through victory – by a plurality of less than a hundred votes against his closest rival, if now-selective memory still serves right.

Like Oca – it could very well be lord of the jungle in Telabastagan that served as template – Tarzan has tasted only triumph since: three-term congressman, three-term city mayor, back to Congress in 2010, seeking the city mayorship anew this 2013.

In contrast to the two, Rimpy Bondoc breezed through his very first election as 4^th district representative, in 1998. Veritably no sweat was his re-election in 2001 – unopposed.    

The ease with which Rimpy achieved his victories and the consequential arrogance of success, could have confluenced to his undoing. Thus, his sorry defeat in the gubernatorial race of 2004.

Losing an election early in political career is deemed constructive. As Safire says, “a therapeutic trouncing introduces a little real humility into candidates who must at least profess humility.”

That could well serve Rimpy the lesson he – it is generally thought – most needed to learn, moreso to earn, in his comeback bid in 2013.

And then, there’s Boking Morales.

Deemed the “sure winner” in the Mabalacat mayoralty contest of 1992 – what with a formidable war chest, the support of the contending Lakas-NUCD and LDP parties – he had Fidel Ramos on stage at his opening salvo and rival Ramon Mitra in his miting de avance, the INC bloc vote, not to mention his youthful appeal and on-stage bombast – Boking lost to the very unassuming, even self-effacing, Dr. Catalino Domingo.

Humbled at the polls, bourgeois Boking attuned, if not immersed, himself in the ethos of the rural poor who comprised a clear majority of the Mabalacat constituency. Handily winning in 1995, he has not vacated the mayor’s seat since. Notwithstanding his Comelec-decisioned defeat in 1998. Notwithstanding the mandated three-term limitation. And with a patsy for a rival, Boking is cocksure of getting re-elected anew this May.

What Safire called the “law of political return” applied well to Oca, Tarzan and Boking, all of them ingrained with the “comeback quality.”

“Defeat, if it does not destroy them, tempers leaders. After reaching deep within for internal resources, they can rightly claim to have grown as a result of what the voters have taught them. In the art of comeback, one lesson is not to insist that voters admit they were wrong last time, even if their choice of candidates turned out to be inept or corrupt in office. On the contrary, the putative comebacker should compliment the electorate on having been right in spotting his own shortcomings in policy or personality or presentation, which have been corrected – with no compromise of principle, of course. Last time losers should assert with pride that they have learned enough to become next time’s winners.” So Safire says.

Else, they stop running altogether. And stop losing forever.                         

              

Politics, as is

REALPOLITIK. The “realist’s determination to treat politics as they really are and not as the idealist would wish them to be.”

The buzzword in the Kissinger era in American diplomacy has long descended from its rarefied niche in foreign policy to the street level, to its very roots – politics as practised, as is, where is.

So, the Colombia cartels conceived in coca and cannabis and birthed narco-politics. Reigned supreme, ruled absolutely the drug lord here. The elected reduced to mere vassals doing the lord’s every bidding, disempowered to sheer figureheads, albeit, well, extremely well compensated.

There is more to the politics of vice other than that taken to perfection by Clayton Olalia in the Province of Pampanga, lived fully by the late Tiger Lagman in the City of San Fernando and Ric Zalamea in Angeles City, and relentlessly pursued now by Vicky Vega-Cabigting with Jay Sangil tenaciously clutching at her ankles.

As a matter of course, the politics of vice meanders to different channels.

Bingopolitics capitalizes on the penchant of the barrio folk for their much beloved game of chance. Nothing to lose for the folk here as the cards come free – from the politico, and everything to gain with prizes galore, from electric fans and gas stoves to refrigerators and flat-screen television sets – ever windfalls even to the Pelco-disserviced brown-outed masses.

Raffle-itics  is another very popular game now played in the pre-campaign hustings. All attendees are given designated numbers drawn against corresponding prizes, no more than the usual bingo fare.

Far, far superior – fearsomely graver, the moral minority is always wont to insist – to the two above is tambiolitics – after the tambiolo (the usually bottle-shaped rattan contraption) holding the bulitin (small balls numbered 1 to 37) used in drawing the winning combinations in the illegal numbers game.

Tambiolitics is but our euphemism for what suspended-priest-wanting-to-be-governor-again Eddie Panlilio derisively calls – in your face, Atching Baby – jueteng politics.

But how could you, Among? There’s no jueteng, there’s only STL (small town lottery) in Pampanga. Was that me, or did I just hear Senior Supt. R’Win Pagkalinawan’s strong protestation?       

The now-dispensation-seeking Panlilio himself introduced a brand of politics with his entry to the gubernatorial race in 2007 – clerico-politics.

The cry of clerico-fascism in the exclusive Catholic campuses in the ‘60s though did not resonate in the Panlilio administration at the Pampanga Capitol. It rather devolved into putativism vectored on his provincial administrator.

Religion as the people’s opiate going the way of Marx’s grave, the boob tube, the silver and digital screens took over as the addictive hallucinogens of the masses. With an even greater tama, er, high, er, intense effect. 

Whence rose, and now dominates, cinepolitics.

No matter the reel bida turning real villain once voted into office, moviestars make the very first of the people’s choices in any election they enter. Erap in Malacanang. In the Senate, there’s Jinggoy, Agimat and Leon Guerrero. In the House, Lani and Lucy, Mikey too. Ate Vi in Batangas. Jorge Estregan Ejercito in Laguna. A host of others in provincial boards and city councils, not the least of whom is the beautiful Marang Morales in Angeles City.

More in the ways than in the who now is butterflyitics. We all learned from the elementary grades of butterflies going after the nectar of fresh flowers. The wilting and the wilted hardly meriting the slightest flitting. So goes the political party-goer too. At a Senate hearing, the once famous Lt. Victor Corpuz had a rather impolite term for this: political prostitution. Pimpolitics then, anyone?

Trending now is tarpaulitics. The stock-in-trade, aye, the only way of the epal – the publicity-obsessed credit-grabber, in street lingo. It’s just something no one can escape from, given the scale and scope with which every politico – current, wannabe, has-been, and never-been – has impacted his image into our consciousness, polluted our thoughts, and cluttered our environment.    

I most certainly though would rather be pestered by epalitics than fall prey to ampatualitics.

Yeah, that brand of politics in Mindanao that votes with bullets rather than ballots, and memorializes mediamen in backhoe-dug and –filled-up, unmarked graves.

And they say it’s only politics?