Earlier this day, we found ourselves beset by a very bad typhoon.

It began as an almost ordinary, even insignificant, shower yesterday that culminated in lashing rains and ghastly winds at noon time. Throughout lunch, the conversations were subdued; the usual everyday din of animated conversation gave way to hushed and muffled ruminations about the weather. “A horrid disaster,” an older priest said, sighing heavily.

As we looked out, many of the verdant trees around us in this beautiful campus were being whipped about mercilessly by the incessant wind and rain. Surveying the sight before us from the door of our residence, many of trees along our tree-lined avenue were torn asunder; their ripped branches scattered on the road in clumps of chaotic mess as the unforgiving rain bore down harshly. I've no doubt that it will an arduous job clearing the debris in the next day or two.

As we stood there, someone, who had scrupulously monitored the progress of the typhoon, mentioned that we were in the eye of Typhoon Milenyo, the most violent we have experienced thus far this year on campus.

For some of us in Arrupe, this is our first experience of a typhoon, and we were frightened. But everyone is fine for the moment as there is a break in the weather. We are staying indoors for now; it would be foolish to head out for anything. It is good that classes have been cancelled.

As I write this, the city of Manila has declared a state of calamity in the metropolis in the wake of the typhoon.

While we sit here safe and sound, I can’t help but think about the many poor in slums dotted around this city. I think of the families I’d stayed with in flooded-ridden Baseco and Navotas, for whom these rains promise nothing but more pain and suffering as their makeshift houses in these slum areas have probably not been able to withstand the force of the typhoon well.

Please do keep them, the many poor, and the Philippines, in your prayers this evening.

photo by adrian danker, sj

Sitting at table last Friday, Savio, a brother scholastic from East Timor, and I discussed poetry. It began as we tried to explain to each other “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” which is the first line in the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Savio’s enthusiasm bubbled over as he shared about his lessons in poetry and the wonders it is doing for him—opening him to new vistas of human experience and continually shaping and re-shaping his very being.

His insights echo the experiences of so many of our young Jesuits doing their university studies at the Ateneo. For them, attending English class is where they inevitably encounter poetry for the first time. They find it difficult at first, grappling with the seeming abstraction and other-worldliness of poetic discourse. Yet, like all enduring relationships, their engagement with poetry moves from disinterest, sometimes, dislike, to an intimate befriending once poetry’s cadences and metaphors, its rhythms and rhymes hold them in its spell, introducing them to worlds of possibilities they had never dreamt of and encounters with feelings and thoughts they never realized are part of their very being. Today, some of them are budding poets, their spirits pregnant with all things poetic.

Listening to Savio reminded me too of something deep within our being: our yearning to dwell in the poetic.

We yearn to dwell in the poetic because our very being seeks transcendence, be it for wholeness a poet like Auden offers when he crafts out of death and tragedy a poem of confession and reconciliation, or for a redemption we remember we are made for each time we listen to Faure’s Requiem or Handel’s Messiah and are lifted to heavenly heights. As human persons, we desire to be inspired: the colours of a Chagall or a Van Gogh, if not also the heartfelt ache in Michelangelo’s Pieta, raise our sights beyond the smeared and the stained to the beautiful and the true. And in times of darkness, the poetic prophetically speaks of hope: the diary Anne Frank and the letters the Carmelite Edith Stein penned during the harrowing days of the Holocaust invite us to look beyond despair and death to human goodness and compassion.

In the everydayness of our lives, many of us gaze beyond our mere existence, beset as it often is by strife and struggle, to the unexplainable artistry and magnificence of Nature around us. When we do so, we seem to touch the Transcendent and life becomes bearable and meaningful again. A petite verdant sprig amidst the harshness of winter moves us with as much wonder for life as the magically incandescent twinkling of the stars draws us into an unutterable silence that strangely comforts.

In all these moments, our poetic sensibilities remind us of the Poet of Life, the Author of Beauty, Creator God.

Yes, the poetic can move us to dwell in it and realize our being truly human, if we but let it. More mysteriously, the poetic in life opens our very being, lifting us beyond finitude to glimpse the Infinitely Divine, even in something as surprisingly simple as finding bread and wine on the table:

When snow falls against the window,
long sounds the evening bell…
for so many has the table
been prepared, the hour set in order.

From their wanderings, many
come on dark paths to this gateway.
The tree of grace is flowering in gold
out of the cool sap of the earth.

In stillness, wanderer, step in:
grief has worn the threshold into stone.
But see; in pure light, glowing
there on the table: bread and wine.

“Winter Evening”
Georg Trakl

When I studied Epistemology under Dr Antoinette Angeles a few years ago, we began with the topic, “wonder.” Spring-cleaning my cupboard last weekend, I came across this piece that I’d written for her then. It brought back memories of sitting in Epis class at 7.30am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pondering the meaning of meaning.

What is wonder but to be in that almost magical, and sometimes puzzling, child-like state of bewilderment and astonishment? To wonder is to be like a child who sees a butterfly for the first time, and goes chasing after it with glee. I am in wonder when the unfamiliar and the unexpected, if not also the unreflected, ordinariness of everyday life stops me in my tracks, forcing me to pause and ask those questions—the whys? whats? hows? whos? If I dwell on them long enough, an insight dawns and an epiphany unfolds. This is a moment when I utter 'a-ha, this is…!'

At six years, I dug a hole on the beach with my Dad. We dug it deep; I wanted to empty the sea and pour all its water into the hole. But the waves kept running away from me each time I ran after them. Why do the waves come and go, Daddy? Where does the water disappear to? The sea is so big you’ll never empty it, my son. Oh, I said, wondering thoughtfully as I gazed at the water’s continuous to-ing and fro-ing.

What is wonder but to experience that the magical 'a-has' of my childhood can be much better explained by Science, Logic, even Philosophy. My grandma once told me that rainbows are God’s bridges between heaven and earth. When you are good, God will help you climb up there and you can have all the ice-cream you want! Now, I know refraction makes rainbows. But each time I see a rainbow across the Marikina valley, its striking colours glistening over Antipolo, I don’t say, there’s refraction at work. Rather, as much as I've learnt about light rays and optics, I continue to marvel at this multi-colored sight: it enlivens me, as much as it teases me. And this is itself one of the many 'a-ha' moments I continue to have as an adult, even as I am enriched by all the education I’ve received. These are 'a-ha' moments because there is still so much more that remains beyond my grasp, so much that is beautifully mysterious in our world. Do we ever stop wondering?

What is wonder but to juggle those funny and exciting yet intriguing feelings of perplexity and fascination in such encounters, only to realize finally that though we can think of and ask the question that bedazzles or befuddles us, we will never have the complete answer to it. There will always be another question to that answer, and another question to this, and so on and so forth.

Like children, we continue to find our way through the maze of life, turning a familiar corner that we seem to have navigated before, only to see the vista of the maze before us in a whole new perspective that astonishes and enriches. This is wonder's gift: it opens us up to new possiblities and leads us to hope in spite of the anxieties that surface to drag us down as we meander through the journey of life.

We’re throwing pebbles across the water, my Dad and I. They skip: one, two, three. One, two three: what will you be, my son? A pilot, I replied, maybe a writer. No, a priest…. Looking back on the whys and hows I am here as a Jesuit scholastic, I find myself having answers to the questions the curious and concern ask me about my call. But these too challenge me to seek with greater desire the face of our mysterious and surprising God who calls me. Even as I’m gratefully overwhelmed by the many re-assuring instances of His goodness in my life, I find myself, now and again, wondering, Why me? I can find no answer but this experience: the wondrous love of the One who loves.

Finally, what is wonder but to fall asleep like a child, secure in the embrace of the Absolute Other that holds us all in the palm of his hand, only to arise with the new dawn to a day similar to yet different from days before or to come, and to discover that this day too bears the promise of being truly wonder-ful!"

photo by anne geddes