Thursday, December 23, 2004

Revisiting Christmases past

Revisiting Christmases past


Updated 01:11am (Mla time) Dec 23, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 23, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THE GRIME-STREAKED beggar at the church door wouldn't budge. Misa de Gallo had just ended. If delayed, I'd miss that overbooked flight for Bangkok. As a "martial law refugee," I had Thailand as my United Nations duty station for 17 years. Kids were flying in from US schools to join us for Christmas.

Shifting his battered can, the beggar persisted. "Don't you remember me?" Seeing the blank look in my eyes, he murmured: "We were classmates in grade school. I am Candido..."

Memory scraped away the wrinkles, the dirt and in-between years. We had played “patintero” and other games of childhood. We built model airplanes and sailed toy boats. During vacations, we'd swim in nearby resorts.

Today? “Tiene cara de hambre” [You have the face of hunger], the orphan boy tells the Crucified in the film classic: "Marcelino, Pan Y Vino."

We barely managed snatches of conversation. Airline schedules are unyielding. Couldn't I have dropped, into his tin cup, more than what was hurriedly fished out of a shirt pocket? I asked as the immigration officer waved us on.

We were all invited to journey to Bethlehem, including those with numbered bank accounts, cigarette tax break bonanzas and illegal logging take. But like my beggared classmate, many wearily limp to "the City of David" with empty tin cans. Billionaires here lodge in "gated enclaves" while many lack frugal livelihoods. "There's no room in the inn."

Yet, "Christmas is the only time I know of when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely," Charles Dickens wrote in 1843. Like the reengineered Ebnezer Scrooge, they "think of people below them, not as another race of creatures bound on other journeys, but as fellow passengers to the grave."

I never saw my beggar-friend again. But he forms part of past Christmas images. As the years slip by, these mental snapshots remain. But revisiting them, one finds that a bittersweet tone now overlays the montage.

The images include the kindnesses of friends one now rarely sees. I rushed out to talk with a pediatrician, glimpsed midway through an Advent Mass. Dr. Mike Celdran lavished care on my now grown-up kids. I wanted him to meet my lawyer-daughter and her doctor husband, visiting for Christmas. But he had left.

"That season comes wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated / The bird of dawning singeth all night long," one reads in "Hamlet." The overseas Filipino workers too were singing carols like "Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit" at the SVD Fathers' Verbiti conference room on Christmas Day. Did they sing the old Spanish carols like "Nacio Nacios Pastores"? I don't remember now.

Verbiti is tucked close to Hadrian's wall in Rome. It was festooned with star lanterns, “belen,” even “lechon.” But corrosive loneliness contorted the faces of many in that room, separated from kith and kin, in "this "hallowed and gracious time." One glimpsed in the tears slipping past tightly closed eyes, the economic diaspora's costs. Hidden behind those hefty foreign exchange remittances are: pain, separation, alienation, trauma even. Tiene cara de hambre.

Christmas, the Filipino SVD fathers told their expat flock, is "Emmanuel-God with us" in the dark night, even of despair. "There are no more unvisited places in our lives."

Illnesses in absent family are shattering for expats. We trudged to the Crib in Gereja Theresia (St. Therese's Church), behind Jakarta's giant mall Sarina. Half a world away, alone in a Los Angeles ICU room, an economic diaspora statistic -- my younger brother -- lay dying.

In January, Jesse phoned. Life is fragile, he said. We don't know when we will see each other again. Let's meet in Cebu with our then 86-year-old mother.

He flew in from LA. Our only sister from Toronto arrived. And we joined in from Bangkok. We had a laughter-filled week. July, our mother went. "Please. No heroic measures," our sister-in-law soberly cautioned the cardiac team that rushed in. And by December, Jesse was gone, too.

The Child of Bethlehem enables us to see beyond the grave. "Death is not the extinguishing of life," the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote. "It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come."

"The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light," Isaiah writes. "Kings shall (stream) to the brightness of thy rising." From our third floor flat in Bangkok, we'd watch this Thai lady slip into the deserted courtyard of the Holy Redeemer Church. Draped in the Advent dawn's soft darkness, she'd pray before the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help -- until Misa de Gallo, introduced by Filipino workers, would start. Her silhouette brought Isaiah's lines to mind:

That silhouette, like the image of a Muntinlupa prisoner, forms part of our Christmases past. Clad in sweat-stained detainee togs, the prisoner wouldn't budge. If delayed, I'd miss a dinner appointment. Seeing the blank look in my eyes, he murmured: "Don't you remember me? We were playmates in Cebu. My name is Policarpio..."

There is, we're told, a geography of the heart. Like the Magi, we travel its byways, not merely from place to place, but from grace to grace. It is a search for what endures amid the transient. Without fail, we find it in those with cara de hambre.

"And they found the Child with Mary his mother," the story goes. Venite adoremus [Come, let us adore him].

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