On the first Saturday of Lent, Vergel and I attended a recollection on an invitation from Fr. Tito Caluag, S.J. It had promised a different experience from the other like occasions I had known.

For one thing, the venue was a theater, a huge one, and in a place that would seem awkward for anything even faintly spiritual—Resorts World Manila, better known for its casino. There were restaurants and shops around, but these themselves hardly lift the setting appropriately.

In fact, when I told my friend Nida after our water-aerobics that morning where I was going for my recollection, she mildly warned, chuckling, “Well, there’ll be lots of distractions, I promise you.”

I hadn’t been to a recollection in years. The probable last was in the late ’90s yet, and it left such an impression on me it has lasted. It was conducted by the now departed Fr. Tom Green, a Jesuit, too, in my alma mater, St. Theresa’s, in Quezon City.

Vergel himself had never been to one, but that is definitely no reflection on his spirituality.

Moral upheaval

Amid the moral upheaval going on in the country and in the world, a recollection seemed to me just the right thing to do. An invisible, perfect hand, I feel, has begun rearranging things, and done it in a fashion so joltingly sensible it cannot but be an urgent call to spirituality.

I was up early for my water exercises, which usually pushes our lunch to about 1 p.m. We had planned a Hainanese chicken lunch at Tao Yuan, on the floor just below the recollection venue, with plenty of time to be seated by 3 o’clock as Father Tito had asked.

The program was to last four hours to accommodate some sharing. But the major time was to be taken by a full-length inspirational movie, “Ignacio de Loyola,” with the Ateneo choir and the ABS-CBN Orchestra conducted by Gerard Salonga doing the musical score live.

Father Tito welcomed the fair-sized audience and gave a short talk, putting in perspective the three periods in Ignacio de Loyola’s life, each period set in a place: first, Pamplona, where he is born to soldierly nobility; second, Montserrat, where he dedicates his life to the Virgin; and, finally, Manresa, where all his struggles climb to a chastening peak and he emerges victorious and spiritually transformed.

It is in that third state that he lives among the poorest of the poor, suffers imprisonment and trial under the Spanish Inquisition, and is finally vindicated, goes off to Paris for studies to prepare him better for his mission, and goes on to found the militant Jesuit order.

Mission in life

An awareness of our own mission in life has long been the center of most of Father Tito’s homilies. It was he who got me thinking of my own. Even a seemingly uneventful life at a late age has a special reason for being. Like everyone else, I have been at it, whether I was aware of it or not, in my daily struggle to be a good and decent person.

Whoever we are and in whatever situation or position we find ourselves, we, all of us, are called to a journey back to our innate goodness, back to our original state as true children of God. It’s all brought me back to my recollection with Father Green: I am writing my own gospel, I’m my own Mark, Matthew, Luke and John; I am myself bearing witness to the existence of Christ in my own life.

Reading the lives of saints, it becomes clear to me that the way to sainthood is full of trials. And yet if we really look at what God asks of each of us, it’s nothing short of what sainthood calls for. But, relax—most of us, unlike the saints, are not expected to attain it in one lifetime. Perhaps after a few reincarnations—if you believe in reincarnation as I do.

Contrite

On Monday I listened to the contrite Arturo Lascañas at the Senate hearing testifying to having been complicit in many murders, for money and for some mistaken cause, with Rodrigo Duterte when he was still mayor of Davao.

Lascañas, whatever his reasons, has taken a brave step; he says he has come forward to tell the truth and to reform so that he might come closer to God. He says he wants to clear his conscience publicly in hopes that the extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs may forever stop.

It’s an indication that he has begun to care for others, fearing neither death nor Duterte, only the Lord’s wrath. Courage and change of heart in a repentant man happen by God’s grace. But God also has much to purify in his newfound friend; it would be worth watching how God does merciful cleansing on him.

In any case, it’s best he heed the warning of St. Theresa of Avila who, in her frustration with God was heard to say, “No wonder you have so few friends!”

As we come closer to God, we discover not only our innate goodness but also everybody else’s. So it is only part of the natural process that we find ourselves commiserating with our fellow sufferers. This selfless love of our fellow human is the very path to sainthood that opened up to St. Ignatius, and perhaps, in God’s mysterious ways, to the self-confessed sinner seeking redemption, Arturo Lascañas.

May the Lenten season bring about an inner change, a conversion in each of us, one hopefully reflected in the world we physically inhabit. God only knows how much we need it.