A lingering Lenten memory of an unlikely hero

HE was Albert Einstein’s namesake. Admittedly, I thought he was no less a hero than the genius whose name he bore. But to anybody who was somebody in my hometown Albert was a nobody. I would have been deeply honored had he been someone I knew. But when I did meet him it was too late. He was already in a coffin, waiting to be buried.

            It all started when I came home to the rectory from two Sunday Masses and two sick calls. I just wanted to take a nap and forget the world for a while. But I heard some gentle knocking on my door. I wanted to say, “Please leave me alone for a while. I have to get some rest.” But I found myself dragging my feet to the door. It was then that I saw this lady who behaved rather strangely.

            She left her slippers at the bottom of the rectory stairs. I realized it was a gesture of courtesy. Simple barrio courtesy. “It’s just about Albert, Padre,” she said. “Please allow us to bury him today. We couldn’t afford to have him embalmed for the nine-day wake (as is the local custom). Neighbors contributed pieces of wood and slab for his coffin. Please, Padre. We only have two hundred pesos. May we have a Mass for him, please?”

            “Of course,” I said. Actually I just wanted to get back to my siesta. “Bring him at two o’ clock this afternoon.” Then she haltingly started to tell a story that woke me up the rest of the day.

            Albert was her fourteen-year-old nephew from Barangay San Mateo. He was the eldest of five children. His father, a rice farmer, didn’t come up with much in this year’s harvest. And while his mother also does other jobs, such as washing laundry and selling vegetables, the family income was not enough. So he did what he thought best. He stopped schooling and got himself a job in a local bakery. He ended up mostly by the firewood-fed oven. It was tough and the heat could sometimes be unbearable. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t complain. He was glad he could work and help the family. But his body was not superman’s. Recently he ran a fever and felt weak. He asked to be excused. But his employer threatened to dismiss him if he missed work, especially that it was two or three days before the month’s end. Albert naturally didn’t want to lose his job and decided to go on working. He made it to payday. He brought all his money home and having given it to his mother, said: “Now I just want to rest and sleep…”

            Albert never woke up again.

            As I presided over his funeral I was both angry and depressed. “How could any human being threaten someone not even qualified yet to work to fire him just because he was sick?” But other deeper questions were raging in my mind. How could a young man with such obvious love for his family, a young man with such promise fall into a fate as cruel as Albert’s? How could his parents be powerless to even consider seeking for justice? I searched the faces of Albert’s mother and father. I saw in them anything but protest. Both have now accepted Albert’s fate as inevitable. Both now eyed me with profound gratitude for refusing their two hundred pesos but nonetheless giving Albert a sung funeral Mass. “It’s the least I could do, Albert,” I said under my breath. “What I did is nothing compared to what you did.” Never have I felt more depressed over a funeral of someone I was not related to.

            But I found myself continuing my homily. “Albert expresses, oh yes, Albert continues the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. And we are all witnesses to this. The world, let alone his country, has no idea that he did. But we do. God does. And it’s all that matters. Albert has made it clearer to us what the sacrifice we celebrate during Lent is all about. May his sacrifice bear fruit in a better life for his family the way the sacrifice of Jesus brought us a sharing in the life of God.”

            I glanced at the faces of Albert’s brothers and sisters. They appeared calm and taking my words in. But one thing bothered me. Their eyes also seemed to say to me: “Father, we know Lent. When do we know Easter?”

The laity and Christ’s priestly office

IN the Pinoy culture the priest is a privileged person. Although in urban settings the generally media-hyped anti-clericalism of supposedly more educated Filipinos is more flaunted than not, in rural areas the priest usually occupies a special place and receives a similarly special treatment in family or group gatherings. It seems to me that there are two sources that could explain this behavior. One, Pinoy Catholics have been brought up by their families (parents and grandparents mostly) to regard their priests with an attitude of reverence by reason of the priest’s perceived close association through ordination with Jesus Christ (if you were brought up by someone like my mother or grandmother the priest was another Christ). Two, the practice is simply a reflection of the Filipino’s deep religiosity which may or may not reflect an equally deep Christian spirituality (but this is frankly an altogether different matter).

But I also notice that the special treatment we give to priests in our culture is also extended, to a greater or lesser degree, to whoever is with him. Most priests are amused, for example, when even their sacristans receive a similar treatment especially when they are mistaken for priests (admittedly some dress and look more priestly than the real ones). At least I know a priest (newly appointed to a parish) who was long ignored by his hosts in a barangay he was visiting because they were busy chatting with the elderly sacristan who they thought was the priest. The real tragicomedy, however, is when lay persons forget that they are actually sharers in the priesthood of Jesus Christ because of their baptism, not because of any ordained minister they are related to or associated with.

In our faith culture this more exalted reality of sharing by all the baptized in the priestly office of Jesus is seldom appreciated even by the laity. But in truth, even the so-called official Church calls theirs (the laity’s) the ‘royal’ or the ‘kingly’ priesthood. The ordained priest has received the ministerial priesthood, so-called because, as taught by Vatican II and reinforced by PCP II, his priesthood is servant to the realization of the royal or common priesthood of all the baptized. Unlike a sacristan’s sharing in the special treatment of the priest, this sharing in Christ’s priestly office by the laity and all the baptized is a real and not an imagined experience.

Jesus himself shares with us a most important mission and identity, his priestly identity. (In the presbyter through ordination that becomes ministerial priesthood; in all the baptized, it is the royal or common priesthood). The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church asserts that to “those whom he [Christ] joins to his life and mission he also gives a share in his priestly office, to offer spiritual worship for the glory of the Father and the salvation of man” (LG 34). Here I sometimes marvel at the difference between a male and female lay person. A male lay person typically focuses on functions in the Church that have to do with leadership or with ministries that stress camaraderie and doing things. A female lay person, on the other hand, typically focuses on prayer and spiritual activities. Isn’t this highlighted by their more numerous attendance in the liturgy, prayer meetings, novenas, parish retreats and recollections. It is not by itself indicative of our women lay persons having a higher spirituality than their male counterparts but it certainly tells us how much male lay persons need to catch up on the cultivation of Christ’s priesthood that they share. Still, let us not miss the teaching of the Church: there is no distinction between male or female; both are called to share in Christ’s priestly office.

It goes without saying, then, that the laity’s sharing in the priestly office of Jesus Christ connects them most to the highest Power; hence, it should logically be their highest priority. But is this reflected in real life? Personally I experience  qualms out of what seems to me more lay immersions in secularism-relativism than in spirituality (prayer and worship) and, at the same time, positive indications of our laity’s spiritual coming-of-age as they receive more solid formation from the Church. But even that cannot substitute for the role of the Holy Spirit himself in the laity’s exercise of their priestly identity. In fact, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church says: “Hence, the laity, dedicated as they are to Christ and anointed by the Holy Spirit, are marvelously called and prepared so that even richer fruits of the Spirit may be produced in them” (ibid.).

I was struck one day by a blind girl named Fatima in a televised radio program I stumbled into. She had been made famous through her encounter with Fr. Jerry Orbos and is slowly becoming a well-loved persona because of her prayers for people who are complete strangers and who often report being positively helped by these same prayers and petitions she brings to God on their behalf.  Fatima, I believe, illustrates somewhat what it is to exercise the laity’s sharing in Jesus Christ’s priestly office. In this instance, though, she is not unique; all lay faithful can certainly do what she does, no matter that not all have the gift of powerful intercession. Still, she will even be happier if there were more and more people who pray like her for others, both in the liturgy and outside of it, especially for their benighted country that seemingly scuttles from one calamity to another (both natural and man-made ones), thus making truer their sharing in Christ’s priesthood than is generally felt. Lumen Gentium further explains: “For all their works, prayers and apostolic undertakings, family and married life, daily work, relaxations of mind and body, if they are accomplished in the Spirit—indeed even the hardships of life if patiently borne—all these become spiritual sacrifices  acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (LG 34)

            Considering where we are, our lay faithful have more than enough reasons to take their sharing in the Christ’s priestly mission very seriously. Or the conditions where we are will keep getting serious.