Choices

By Virginia J. Pasalo

IT is almost 2:00 a.m. and I am still going through the books to be given away. Books that influenced my life, books given by friends, books I have not read, books I have outgrown. Why should I be giving books I have outgrown, should I just throw them away?

I sit and read again, trying to find what made me read them, and why I kept them for so long. I remember I gave a two and a half-inch compilation of Shakespeare’s poems to Antonio Hombrebueno, several years ago, after keeping the book with me for years. I wonder if he finally composed a verse?

I see my life rolling back to the library of St. Louis Girls High School, reading detective stories and the Bible. Yes, the Bible, from which I learned to ask questions and never got answers from the Belgian nuns. Questions that made the nuns assign my classmate and me to clean the dreaded place in the Baguio Cathedral where skeletons were literally kept in the walls, not closets.

Despite the questions and the doubts about the origins of the religion my parents embraced and where all nine of us were baptized, I nurtured a desire to be among the Pink Sisters. I would walk from Happy Glen Loop to the convent before the gate opened, and joined their relatives in the pews to hear their angelic voices at 4:00 a.m., through the bars that separated them from the rest of the world, and imagined what it was like to live in contemplation. As soon as the convent closed, I would sit under the cypress tree near the entrance and read the Bible.

On my last year in college, a student leader from the University of the Philippines invited me to attend the Southern Baptist Church. Before I could take control of my wits, I was already baptized. I was a practicing Baptist for a year, until all the questions I used to ask the nuns surfaced in my consciousness once again.

That was when I started to be in the company of friends with different religious beliefs where friendships can last only with the degree of tolerance you can bear with each other. Surprisingly, some friendships lasted, religion became secondary to the dynamics of personal relationships. While the encounters may have been random, the time, energy and resources spent in making a relationship flourish is clearly a matter of choice.

In a library, you are surrounded with different books carrying different thoughts, but what you eventually pick out is the one that takes your curiosity and creative insight. The world is a big library of people, of various origins, representing a multitude of thoughts and ideals, and the person you select to read, is dictated by chemistry as much as it is driven by need and curiosity.

A more complex process is involved in the choice of spiritual paths because it guides our existence and our relationship beyond ourselves and beyond the people we love. It locates us in a specific space in the context of what is known and the unknown, bridging gaps in the comprehension and valuing of deeper connections with other forms of life, visible and invisible, the plain and the magical, and those that can only be grasped by faith and intuition. By fate, or by accident.

 

Accident

Magic!

intense encounters

of spilled juices

random collisions

of aimless mortals

imposing shadows

in the silence of darkness

a quick step of fate

a cold splash.

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