A MONTH AGO, my mother, an active member of the Legion of Mary, confronted me. ?Is it true you told your daughters they don?t have to hear Mass on Sundays? That they can pray anywhere because God is everywhere??
I admitted nothing but told her, ?They?re adults. They can decide for themselves what path to follow.? Case closed. She didn?t pursue my argument, if you can call it that, but I imagined her thinking there goes 13 years of paid tuition to an all-girl Catholic school.
Two Saturdays ago, feeling my spirit flagging from weeks of meeting deadlines in school as the semester drew to a close, I asked my painting companion Toottee if I could join their evening fellowship and study of the Word.
?Come on over,? she texted back. ?We?d love to have you.? No questions asked.
When I told my husband Rolly of my intention, he said religion, faith, whatever you call it, is all about practice. I was better off accompanying him to the grocery because we had run out of toilet paper, bread and other supplies. He had also long stopped going to Mass, bored to tears by recycled homilies. Baptized and raised a Seventh-Day Adventist, he converted to Roman Catholicism through the egging of his first girlfriend. He has taken to going to the Baguio Cathedral?s adoration chapel when his soul is famished. He likes its intimacy and quiet, especially on weekdays. But never on Sunday.
On Sundays, he feeds the CDs of the Philippine Madrigals and the Ateneo Glee Club into the CD player, turns up the volume and for two hours the house reverberates with choral music fit for a pope?s funeral. After that, I replace the CDs with the secular voices of Lisa Ono, Astrud Gilberto, Jane Monheit, women I like to sing along with while doing house chores.
A year and a half ago, I joined a Sufi meditation group that meets twice a month, but lately our meetings have become irregular. What we do with nuns and friends is to meditate for half an hour, sometimes more, a way of aligning ourselves with the Force. Then we share our dreams and what they teach us.
Rolly also found this strange, dismissing dreams as just that?dreams, nothing more. When he sees me getting ready for our Sufi meeting, he?d say, ?Why don?t you just sit on the chair and meditate by yourself? Mas mura pa. You don?t have to take a taxi going there.?
No use arguing with him. So last Saturday I hit on a better reason. I told him: ?It?s partly research. I don?t have material for our First Draft homework. We work on themes now unlike before when it was more free-wheeling.? (First Draft, a group of 10 woman writers, meets six times a year for critiquing of their essays or works in progress over long merienda that stretches to dinner.)
So Rolly dropped me off at Toottee?s house in Happy Homes. I said to myself, if I must go to church, it would have to be in a place like this where there is a garden, a greenhouse, a main cottage that reminds me of the Hansel and Gretel story. The cottage is where Toottee and husband Oscar live, empty nesters like ourselves. From its kitchen wafts the scent of freshly baked bread, cookies or brownies.
Oscar explained how the study group, whose membership contracts to a low of nine and expands to 15, went about its Saturday meetings. It didn?t matter what type of Bible you bring. I looked at what the others had brought. The cover titles showed the Devotional Bible, the Fruit of the Spirit Bible, the Student Bible, The Way, etc. When we had all gathered around a long rectangular table in the greenhouse, Oscar clapped his hands and announced, ?Let the games begin!? It wasn?t ?Let us bow our heads and pray.?
Nine of us had an early dinner of taco salad, pancit palabok, coffee and water. Oscar led the discussion with this observation: ?Many do not see the relevance of faith in their lives. They can?t see what God wants them to be, not to do. They think it is enough to belong to a religion.?
I remembered my egghead friend Francisco who studies the Bible as plain literature, watching out for inconsistencies and quoting biblical scholars verbatim to disprove that the Virgin Birth, among other events, ever occurred. The late writer Dolores Stephens Feria told me once, ?Mary must have been raped by some shepherd.?
Small ?C?
Francisco concluded that the Bible was nothing more than a book of fairy tales, something like Edith Hamilton?s ?Greek Mythology.? I half agreed because by then I was already catholic with a small ?c.? Francisco said deeds, actions mattered more, not faith alone. Oh, gee, if I could only drag him from Makati where he lives to Happy Homes, Baguio, that Saturday evening would have been very, very interesting.
Oscar?s fervor impressed me. There must be some truth to what the nuns in my youth taught us about the gifts of the Holy Spirit because he was eloquent and convincing. ?Sole fide,? he quoted Martin Luther who hammered this Latin phrase on a door. ?Faith alone.? Paraphrasing verses from the books of Romans and Ephesians, he said if works alone counted, these would make a person boastful. Faith gave a reason for doing something right because the deed was done in thanksgiving and to glorify God.
As Baguio nights go, Saturday did not heat up. Before we partook of slices of double rum cake, Oscar ended with these words: ?The more you say, I can do it, I can do it, the more you won?t be able to. You must call on a power greater than yourself, an enabling power? Believe and he will bring it to you.?
Well, believing has brought me to First Draft, to Sufi, to the tiny core of believers in Happy Homes, to all the tinier miracles of every day like breakfasting with a grouch who breaks into a smile when he has finished tending to his pots of ferns and bromeliads, folding what initially seemed a big pile of laundry, connecting with two daughters who love mountain and sea. Now, Mommy, what has Sunday Mass got to do with all that?
