By Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ
Homily shared to the Ateneo High School Community
July 30, 2009 Ateneo High School Covered Courts
Solemnity of St. Ignatius of Loyola
When I was in grade four, there was one time when my dad thought it a brilliant idea to cut my hair instead of bringing me to the barber. Back then, I already thought it was bad news. But what could I do? So dad cut my hair, bangs-style, as we called it back then. It was horrible. He combed all my hair down towards my forehead, and ran his scissors on a straight line from right to left. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I looked like I was a wearing an inverted black bowl on my head. I hated it. I went dreadfully to school and as soon as my best friends saw my hair, one of them named Raul who didn’t have front teeth walked up to me and said, “Bakit parang bunot ang buhok mo?” And all I could say was, “Gagu. Bungal.”
A month ago in Boston, when I passed a group of well-dressed high school students on my way to church, I overheard one of them say, “Dude, I don’t wanna be seen with you. You look like a tree, man.” It was obvious that they were going somewhere special, and this guy was dressed in a green top-coat and brown corduroy pants. He looked like a tree. And I felt like saying, “Your friend’s right…dude.” But they were very big boys so I just shut up and minded my own business.
Two weeks ago, when fellow Jesuits and I were walking up to the high school covered courts for the Ignatius Mass, I spotted three students seated on a bench near the ATM. And I overheard one guy sincerely tell his sad-looking friend, “Alam mo problema mo, pare, kapal ng mukha mo eh. Abusado ka eh.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. But the guy who was being told off by his friend certainly looked like he agreed with him anyhow.
I remember these stories and something at the back of my head says: “Arnel, remember those times when people were actually able to tell each other what they thought about one another? Especially the lowdown’s. Remember those times when your friends could actually tell you that your attitude sucked? Those times when you and your friends could actually tell a friend ‘Alam mo, style mo, bulok’?”
For some reason, when we grow older, we lose a lot of that. We lose that spontaneity. We lose that kind of friendliness that’s able to tell each other what annoys us about one another. All grown up, you get more and more scared of being honestly told who people think you really are. If we dared ask a friend: “Who do people say that I am?” the question will most likely fetch the lowdown about ourselves. And who would want to hear that? Let me hear praise. Let me hear compliments. Let me hear what a terrific guy I am. But a lowdown? When we grow older, we begin to live with an implicit rule: “I won’t tell you your lowdown’s, so that you won’t tell me mine.” That way, we live peacefully. “Peacefully”.
Or do we? Do we really?
Many a time in the parishes and seminaries all over the world, nobody stood up to a fellow priest who was playing favorites with seminarians or spent too much time with altar boys or young girls. Suddenly, sexual scandals rocked Christendom and led to the ruin not only of priests, not only of their victims, but also of innocent faithful people scandalized out of their wits, and walked out of the Catholic faith shaking their heads. Why? No one wanted to hear the lowdown about themselves, so they weren’t confronting anyone else’s.
Recently, in a well-known school in Manila, nobody had ever gone up to the parent of a kid who bullied his way around. The kid obviously believed he could do anything he wanted because of the power of family money and the force of his dad’s rage. One fine day, out of a sudden urge to show off his stupid wrestling skills, he put a smaller classmate in a headlock and never let go. Blood stopped flowing to the little guy’s brain. The guy wilted, and fainted, and his heart stopped beating, and he died. All because despite the alarm bells that rang around the bully and his family, nobody ever had the gumption to tell him or his parents who people said the kid was, and the kind of monster the kid was turning out to be.
God knows how many more years it will take us to tell people like the Arroyos and some stupid congressmen and senators, “God love you but you’ve made a fool of us enough. So get the hell out our lives.” Because nobody would tell them who they really are for us, we, as a country, are waist-deep in c-r-a-p.
Fellow Ateneans, brothers and sisters, we have to be able to ask the very same questions that our Lord asked Peter. “Who do you say that I am? Who do people say that I am?” In the experience of Ignatius of Loyola, in every moment, God works very hard at each of us so that we may have an ever-deepening self-knowledge. You know why? Because that is where God works His miracles—from within the deepest part of ourselves. Because that is where God works His healing—in the darkest parts of ourselves. Because that is where God dwells—within the deepest part of ourselves. One of the best ways to approach that deepest part is to dare ask the question: “Pare, who do you say that I am, really?” “Bespren, who do people say that I am? Yung totoo.” “Anak, magtapat ka nga sa akin, hindi ako magagalit, promise, kumusta ba ako sa iyo?”
Matanong ko nga kayo: among the hundreds and hundreds of friends you have on your Facebook “community”, is there at least one—one soul in there who knows you so well that you can dare ask, “Anong palagay mo sa akin? Ano ba talaga ang palagay ng ibang tao sa akin?” If no such person exists on your Facebook or in your life who can answer that question with brutal honesty, then I guess you’re just a face in a book. Because regardless of the wealth of friends we have on Facebook in terms of figures, we are actually only the poorer if none of them may tell us who we really are to them. And what you have is really only a virtual personality; a Facebook personality. Little do those friends know, suplado ka pala sa personal.
Knowing the self deeply is knowing how we affect one other—both in good ways and in bad. Oh it will hurt to be told the lowdown’s about ourselves, of course it will. And it will be bad news to many of us, of course it will. And it will even take some of us by surprise, sure it will. But realize this, if we are so perfect as we often take for granted that we are, then maybe we don’t need God. Maybe we don’t need healing. If you are so good that you don’t have any lowdown’s, then you must be the Messiah the world is waiting for! And Peter must have been wrong, because we have a Messiah back here, there are hundreds of us, Messiahs, in fact.
But thankfully there already is a God. There already is a Messiah, who himself was nailed to a cross despite his utter goodness. And if this Messiah-God dared ask who people think he was, how dare us say we are his followers when we never dare enough ask that question ourselves.
Ad majorem + Dei gloriam!
Photo courtesy of Sch. Weng Bava, SJ
