The age of forgiving
Smoking is an awful and dangerous vice. The Maker understands this. There is no good reason for him to accent every twist and turn in his life by lighting up. And yet, he cannot help himself. Thus, even while his exhibit was ongoing at the Art Center, he could not help stealing away from time to time into the smoking lounge next door.
The smoking lounge is a dark, smallish, improperly ventilated and windowless room. The hard-core regulars occupy the tables at the interior. They literally conduct business here using their cellphones apparently to fix and facilitate appointments and sell things. It is a marketplace. And if one were to imagine what hell on earth might look like, this one makes for a good candidate. Imagine the darkness at the interior in the back of the room. Imagine the smoke curling and billowing all over before finally funneling into the small smoke digester at the corner. And then imagine this man in the darkness railing against the Catholic church to a small audience gathered about him.
The Maker sits always at the fringe. Fringe here is the table nearest the door where the Maker could watch out through the glass for important guests or friends who might be coming into his show of art touching on the religious theme. In which case, he would hurriedly kill his cigarette into the ash tray and draw one last sip from his coffee before meeting them.
But there are periods when he can sit long enough to finish the entire stick of cigarette. At those instances, he could hear the conversations behind him and sense what transpires. The man in the dark recesses is a barangay captain. He proudly announces his latest feat, how he single-handedly talked down a bishop’s plan to make a parish out of his barangay. “Why should the people spend to make for themselves a parish? The Catholics are amassing wealth all the time,” and so on. Then he goes into a long narrative about the parish priest owning property including a resort and how he got all these only after he became the parish priest. And of course, he followed all these with a detailed description of how poor his constituents were. One of those gathered asked if the barangay captain was Catholic. He gave him a strange retort: “If he (the parish priest) is the priest, I might as well not be Catholic. I don’t go to church anymore since it only becomes another incentive for sin.”
He said all these in a voice loud enough for the Maker to wonder if the politician was addressing all these at him. The Bisayans call this padungog. It was entirely possible. He obviously felt passionate about his thoughts on the matter. And the Maker knew there is always an audience, a market, if you will, for this discourse. And one might easily understand why. It is all over the Internet.
But while Catholic-bashing is so much in style now, the Maker himself wonders if there is any institution out there, religious or political or otherwise, that is exempt of moral transgressions in history. He knows enough history to know all are guilty. Institutions derive from the human mould. They are inescapably at the mercy of human limitations. In this age of information where every sin inevitably finds its five minutes of fame in media and the web, nothing remains hidden for too long. And if one were forced to come up with a descriptive summation in the form of a sentence, it would have to be the declarative: All are guilty!
Innocence has become exactly what it is, a myth; at best, a momentary state reserved for little children. And the Catholic church like all other churches and governments in the planet is not an innocent little child. And so the danger that we will all think everything is, therefore evil and there should be nothing out there we can still believe in, no room for faith. But the consequence of all these is the damning thought we have also lost all room in the planet for goodness. And then, what should walk into the room but a male Caucasian in his mid-70s being led into the room by his teenage, doe-eyed, Filipina lover? They pursue their sweet romance in the table next to the Maker’s. He has no recourse but to look upwards to the heavens only to realize he can see only the dark ceiling billowing smoke. If heaven or even sky is still up there. He can only imagine it. He can only believe.
He whispers in his mind a short prayer. He prayed for grace above all else. Grace which comes before and after forgiving. Grace, even before love. For to love anything at all in this burnt-out little cinder of a planet, one must first be blessed with the grace to forgive, forgive in the sense not equal to excuse, but forgive nevertheless. Forgive in the sense of forgiving others as the necessary requirement to forgiving one’s self. For it is so much easier to forgive others than to forgive one’s self, as it should be for good people, as it has been written. He prayed by his faith, he would ultimately be judged by this very same measure. And then he thanked his God for the remnant of a little smile still left in his face.
