Last Sunday, the 31st of January, I had enough time to accompany my dad and return to San Beda to celebrate the feast of the Most Holy Child Jesus of Prague (Sto. Nino de Praga) by attending the procession and attending mass with a few of my Benedictine mentors.
And how it felt really good to go back to my roots.
I spent the whole afternoon talking to a lot of people I had been with more than eight years ago. Of course, there were a few friends from the minor seminary who were there, and we had a little chat before the procession and before I left the place. But of course, there was nothing more surprising than finding a lot of people who were with me in the past and were still there in school. There were my teachers, both those who decided to retire once the grade school and high school was removed in the Manila campus, and those who stayed with SBC even though it transferred to its Rizal campus. I also found some of my old classmates, as well as "Mang Roger," the balut vendor of antiquity, who was still there after more than 25 years of selling balut both inside and outside the campus.
As I strolled along the halls and corridors of the school, I found memories flashing back "in the early days of our boyhood." There were those times of going out of campus to play Counterstrike (and not being seen by the semi-panoptic grade school coordinators), the quad assemblies where we are required to pray the daily novenas and the rosary during October, the petty cases of cheating, fighting, and that-which-I-cannot-name-in-this-blog, our different clubs in grade school, and, most of all, the experience of the Benedictine way of life centered in "Ora et Labora."
However, I was faced with a different look of San Beda. Besides the new St. Placid Sports Complex (which previously was the GS/HS basketball court, where boys in uniforms like us would go for a few basketball games before going home), there is the presence of those that you will see once in a while during our times - young women. Before, the only girls that come in the Sto. Nino feast are those that are a)family members of students, faculty, and alumni, b)the women faculty themselves, c)some friends from the nearby colleges - Holy Spirit and La Conscolacion, d)some "guests" from our sister school St. Scholastica's College, and e)girlfriends of Bedans. Furthermore, the campus is littered with young boys (like us) in gala uniforms, as participants of processions, both from grade school and high school, and one way to distinguish them from those in the college is precisely that gala uniform (because the college during our time do not have uniforms and are only required to wear any red shirt). Now, a different scene was presented to me. College Bedans now have the Hogwarts-style uniform, and there were no more grade school and high school in gala uniforms. A loss of the original Bedan spirit, as I have thought, together with the need of this institution to move and be known.
In a way, I did have a different picture of the Sto. Nino feast. My dad said that there was not much of an excitement, since the active grade school and high school boys (and their respective Family Councils) were quite absent, and they are those that make the feast a livelier one. As a grade school alumnus, I somehow agree to that, that most of the fun was lost because of the loss of what we were before. However, I also think that this different scene opens up new horizons and new possibilities for the San Beda community, and I am still happy and hopeful for my alma mater, that it may continually grow as they cope up with the different realities around them.
Overall, I really felt glad that I was able to go back, because I was reminded of how special am I was nursed by three different religious orders: first, the Benedictines who had a profound respect for Divine, worldly beauty and discipline, the diocesan priests and their orientation towards local community-building (which I would hopefully belong to in the future), and finally, the Jesuits with their education and Ignatian spirituality. It reminded me of the way I think right now, the way I live my vocation and choose it among all possible alternatives. And I think that there is one common denominator, a common lesson that I was taught, and that is passion. It is the drive to orient oneself totally towards the Other, to go beyond myself and my own comfort zones and challenge myself to new possibilities that open up. It is the drive to work hard, not for oneself, but for the other, in the name of love and compassion. Finally, it is to learn to go on with life and never be let down by the circumstances that one was in.
And ofcourse, there come the little important things. The Benedictines taught me the true value of PRAYER and WORK, the right way of singing (or, in my case, praying) the psalms, and right liturgy. The diocesans taught us the value of rigor and critical obedience, and, in part, the Jesuits, where most of life learning took place within and outside the walls of our interdiocesan seminary, and even down from the proverbial hill, taught me in seeing God in and above all things and continually discerning God's will for me (together with all the doses of existential phenomenological philosophy my mentors taught me). All of these under placing passion at the core of one's life.
With everything that was part of me, all I could say is ut in omnibus, glorificetur Deus, that in all things God may be glorified. And as a Bedan, Guadalupe seminarian, and, most of all, a Josefino and Atenean, all I could do to thank God is to give back, to be of service to the Church he continually nourishes.
