I stayed up till after one and getting up this morning was hard. I woke up at 6:15 but didn't get out of bed till an hour later. I regret now wasting that time huddled under the covers while the furnace came on again and again to warm the winter-frigid air. Outside light snow was falling.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday in the Christian church calendar. When I was a child, semana santa, Holy Week, was the highlight of my year. My mother faithfully went to the almost daily church services that commemorated the last days of the Savior God. I wonder today if she didn't go out of habit. Her mother, my Lola Tinding, was a religious bulwark in both our family and the small community of La Paz where I grew up. It was inconceivable not to be active in the Iglesia Filipina Independiente with my grandmother's figure looming as large as Lady Liberty does today in American consciousness. Then again I might understand piety and devotion in a different way today.
Some years ago, a Benedictine friend at St. Meinrad Archabbey in Southern Indiana told me he thought Thomas Merton was too "pious." From his tone, piety was not such a good thing. It marked the convert, for instance, and was more emotion than understanding. Tobias was a birthright Catholic, born into one of the German Catholic families in Southern Indiana. His family lived just a few miles from the monastery. Being a Catholic monk, I gathered, was more than sentimentality. The monks at St. Meinrad were most of them educated in one of the country's many distinguished Catholic universities, sometimes with graduate studies abroad, at the Louvain or one of Rome's pontifical colleges. Monasteries were oases of learning during the so-called Dark Ages in Europe. Learning and devotion were twinned virtues.
By the time I left the Philippines for America, my Christian faith was in tatters. It wasn't so much chemistry and biology that I had studied in undergrad Pre-Med nor the life sciences in medical school as my own intellectual questioning of faith that experience did not support. I was well on my way to becoming a humanist. It was another 10 to 15 years before I could acknowledge even to myself that the God I believed in a child couldn't be. I concocted an image of God that was more consistent with my growing knowledge about not just Christianity but the other religions of humanity. In the end I gave up the idea of God as a personal force. There may be intelligence in the universe but it is not the personal god people called on when they didn't like what was happening to them in their lives.
Doffing belief and reliance on God accompanied my evolution into an adult. This is not the typical religious person's journey. Many stay within the fold all their lives. Some even leave it and return as death appears on the horizon and illness reminds them of their vulnerability. I can't see myself going back. The more I learn the more I am persuaded that the universe in which we live is far more mysterious than we can ever dream of comprehending. That sense of incomprehensible vastness is today at the center of my religious life but it more often manifests in such pursuits as writing and photography. Poetry and art are paths if not highways into the ineffable wonder of reality as we experience it.
Maybe I have simply exchanged one language for another in describing a deeply human characteristic that I sense as both within reach and forever just inches away, forever pursuing me as I pursue it. Maybe at the moment of death I shall see it merge with my consciousness but maybe not. We move on and don't see where we're going from where we stand today.
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