Tina Quirino died some months ago of cancer. And a group of once-active Rudolf Steiner diehards got together for a Reading for the Dead. Tina’s best friend, Sujata Mukhi, hosted it in her lovely home in Greenhills.

 

I remembered Tina as a young girl with long, very curly hair and could hardly connect her with the pictures on hand of a bald and very sick girl. Marie Avenir facilitated the long reading from Steiner. It followed the spirit’s journey after death, visiting the gods in every planet.

 

A Steiner reading is always mercilessly abstruse, and I wouldn’t want to explain something I’ve always had to struggle with. So I just made a drawing of it—Tina bursting from her etheric body and traveling through the cosmos, again curly-haired and beautiful.

 

Here are some excerpts from Marie Avenir’s talk. Don’t try to understand Steiner in one blow. I promise you’ll fail. I was sitting beside Lory Paredes and wondered if she was understanding it more than I.

 

“Having undergone death and passed into the expanse of the universal, it is as though, in the physical world, we meet a man and perceive only his thoughts.

 

“In the weaving cosmic thoughts, there appears, as it were, a single cloud which is the record of his last earthly life. The record is inscribed into cosmic intelligence. For a few days he beholds his whole life in one great simultaneous tableau.

 

“The etheric body, as it frees itself, carries forth the living thoughts from man to the Angels, Archangels and Archai, who in their Divine Grace receive them.

 

“Knowledge of what really happens to a person between death and rebirth shows us that it is not eternal rest that a soul goes through after discarding the physical body. It is much more the meeting with the gods and those who have also passed on to the spiritual world, the preparation for the next lifetime…

 

“When the ethnic body is dissolved that is when the thoughts are breathed in by the Angels, Archangels and Archai, then after a few days man enters into that backward review.”

 

Stars, for example, “are tokens of another world, indications of a spiritual world beyond our ken…

 

“The sun is where there is space alone, there is nothing, there is a lacuna in space. And there dwell the Exousiai, the Dynamis the Kyriotetes. There they have their abode, sending their essence and power through all creation.”

 

So said Rudolf Steiner.

 

There are 33 more pages of that. But now you’re on your own.

 

Saints come marching in

 

Hallowe’en, eve of All Souls and All Saints Days, has been celebrated for centuries the world over as Scare Days. Its purpose? For one, “to mock death and lessen fear of it.”

 

Hallowe’en is also traditionally Trick-or-Treat Day worldwide. In the Philippines, at an earlier time, adults in the countryside went from hut to hut singing a traditional plegaria. They threaten to steal the chickens and piglets tied under the house if they are not given food. Today it’s kids in gated subdivisions who go around their neighborhood in masks and Hallowe’en costumes. They just say Trick or Treat and receive bags of candies and maybe toys from smiling homeowners. No sweat.

 

I recently read that a bishop suggested that on Hallowe’en young people should dress “like saints and martyrs.” Whatever did he mean by that? That they should “look saintly” (with halos and wings?) Or like martyrs who suffered some pretty gruesome tortures for their faith?

 

To my friend Belay and me a procession of martyrs could be scarier than any commercially concocted Hallowe’en event. The martyrs would have to be depicted as they appeared in their old statues. Our imaginations ran wild. What a spectacle!

 

Bartolome with a hatchet buried in his head. San Roque led by a dog on a leash (no poodles or Pomeranians, please). St. Agatha carrying her lopped-off breasts on a platter (since they looked like pan de sal she has since become the patron saint of panaderos).

 

St. Oceanus whose hands and feet were amputated could be represented by an amputee, ano fa? St. Damian the leper is easy to do: Draw a lot of peklat on his body. Apollonia, patron of dentists, clutches a pair of pliers and on her other hand carries a tray of false teeth.

 

A white-haired old woman with a pillow tied to her tummy should represent St. Elizabeth who bore St. John at the age of 90. St. John carrying his own decapitated head. A martyr’s widow walking with her long hair tied to a log. A cut-off tongue of another martyr standing erect on a saucer like a red cactus!

 

The parade is endless. I hope the bishop likes our suggestions.