The gift of reversals
At the airport, after queuing before a three-layered hurdle—check-in counter. terminal fee window, immigration—which for a while, for lack of an orderly procedure, seemed unclearable, the wife and I found ourselves chairs in the predeparture area and there we slumped, closing our eyes. I breathed out a prayer to Blessed Pedro Calungsod, to attend whose canonization in Rome four days hence we are setting off on the first leg of the journey, and—pleaded I with Blessed Pedro—may it be without danger or risk.
No sooner did I implore this than a woman’s voice came out of the public address system paging the wife. Which could mean only one thing, “Houston, we have a problem.” The wife approached the counter, her heart pounding (and I could feel it, because I too was concerned—if she were delayed, I too would be retarded. The plane was not about to wait for us, since I saw the mayor and at least one bishop among those travelling. )
In fact there was nothing to worry, not much—just that the wife had to be separated from me because the seat assigned to her in the plane had no meal tray table (perhaps a passenger on a previous flight, demented by poor cabin service, had twisted it off from the armrest).
Since my better half earned the attribute “better” from being constantly at my side, and true to this quality, she refused, and would rather not eat than stay out of my sight. Which profession of loyalty must have moved the management because it decided, after a moment of deliberation, to just keep us together and transfer us from economy to business class.
I thanked Blessed Pedro for this, definitely a sign of his favor, and his closeness to the Lord, and perhaps of his appreciation for our decision to join the pilgrimage to Rome. At the same time, the incident gave these words of Jesus a rather contemporaneous significance: “[W]hoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.” Mark writes that Jesus addressed this to the two brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who had asked him, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” Jesus’ answer was a restatement of a previous remark–“But many that are first will be last, and [the] last will be first.”
It could only be the Lord (and probably through the good offices of Blessed Pedro), who without our asking for it raised our passenger status from last to first, though as it turned out the decision of the airline management proved both flattering and humbling—despite the upgrade we were still served economy class food, and this made us each feel like a poor relation.
Nonetheless, what happened to Pedro seems a clear example of Jesus’ first-last, last-first policy. Pedro was just an assistant of the Jesuit priest Diego Luis de Sanvitores. While both of them died a martyr’s death in Tumon, Guam, in 1672, only the Jesuit priest’s beatification was sought as early as a year after his death. The young Pedro was all but forgotten. His equally heroic death for the sake of the faith came to the fore only centuries later when the long stalled process of Sanvitores’ beatification was revived and completed in 1985.
As matters stand, Sanvitores remains a blessed while the eighteen-year-old Pedro, his humble, long unremembered factotum, who carried the altar stone on his back and led the half-blind priest around with a rope tied around his body, will be canonized on October 21, 2012. Not that it matters to Diego Luis de Sanvitores, who now sees God face to face, or for that matter to God, to whom a thousand years is no more than a single day.
