Why Do I Love?

Why do I love God?
He fills my barn with blessings. I have his favor.
His promises are beyond my dreams.
His plans have already been laid out before me.
So as if on automatic pilot, my heart beats for him.
But what if there are no more blessings in sight?
I’m afraid of how my heart will respond.
Will I still stick to Him?
Will I still live for Him?
Will I still be in gratitude?
Can I say praises?
How faithful are those who, even in the midst of barrenness and drought,
choose to believe the beauty, mercy, and generosity of God.

Why do I love God?
Is it because I am poor and He is rich?
Is it because He owns the heavens and the earth and all the riches therein?
Is it because I am eternally in need and only He could fulfill?
To reduce God to a bellboy is the most troubling of my fears.
I don’t want a selfish kind of love.
I desire not to center my affections on all the advantages.
I want to love God for who He is, with or without all the heavenly benefits.
Not that He is unable to bless me.
He, in fact is, willing to.
To know what’s in it for me is the natural manifestation of my human tendencies,
but I say enough of me.
It’s about to time to grow in faith and focus on what He voluntarily did for me at the Cross many thousands of years ago.
Which, in every essence, is good enough reason to love Him.

Pure love.
That’s what He deserves.

The end of the story

(Note: This also appears in the new online literary journal, The New Dentists.)

A school program required my mother, an assistant principal in a private college in Manila, to bring a baby picture of herself. She didn’t spend much time deciding which to bring; she only has one. It is studio-shot and kept at the back page of her wedding album, occupying the whole space with an 8x10” size. I don’t say it is in black and white, which is the usual description I use for vintage photographs. It is more of gray and brown, the photo color palette of the ‘60s, which radiates with more poignancy than nostalgia. I have seen it several times as a kid and a few times as an adult, and I can’t remember if I ever questioned why she only has one baby picture and none with her parents.

I know the story of my mother. From the time I was learning to write ABC up to the time I am writing for a living, I have always picked from here and there various tidbits of my mother’s history. Mama is an only child, and the people I call aunt and uncles are in fact her half-siblings. I don’t know how I came to know this or who told me this fragment of truth about the family. This, after all, is not the kind of thing that is easily explained to kids and so is usually left unsaid for the younger family members to discover in the course of time. My family is different, and I grew up taking this story as part of the normalcy of life. As if it happened in every family.

In my thought, I tried a few times alienating my mother from her half-siblings. See her as a different individual from them, some stranger, some outsider. I failed, I have to say, because in the same thought, every reason said my mother was inseparable from them. Although she didn’t share with them the same father, she shared with them the same mother, the same childhood, the same house, and the same domestic turmoil. In the same thought, my mother was tied to them, who was pulled back as fast as she was pulled away.

To some degree, my mother is generous sharing with me and my sister her story. So most of what I know came from her own mouth, and the rest I observed from her relationship with her mother and siblings. There was one thing, however, that she didn’t bluntly tell us, but which I knew of instinctively: She didn’t meet her father. Although my mother knew his name and some familial details, the entirety of his person was unknown to her. I knew of this because I didn’t have a grandfather, which meant I had no old man to call Lolo, a bespectacled, gray-haired, pampering grandfather who, to this day, I wish having. To my mother, this meant a part of her was lost.

Mama’s parents had a short-lived romance. While I wish I knew how exactly it ended, my mother sure had wished it didn’t end. Her father left even before she was born, at a time when she was insulated and oblivious to the rest of the world, and so when my mother said she looked like her father, I didn’t know where she got the idea. The fact that she shared many semblances with my grandmother didn’t support her theory. Maybe she was trying to build linkages to her father, to find him in her, and to personify his existence in her own. And perhaps, she justified parts of her being as something she inherited from her father when she couldn’t find explanations elsewhere.

What does it mean growing without a father? I should know, having to spend most of my childhood years with my father working abroad. But in many ways, I couldn’t and would probably never understand the void in Mama’s heart because she and I were in different boats. I knew my father was somewhere and was coming back; Mama knew her father was somewhere but was not ever coming back. I had glimpses of my father; Mama had none. I knew what a father’s love meant; Mama did not. I was secure; she was not. This made a huge difference. But I never was completely aware of this until recently, when Mama met her aunt, one of the few living siblings of her father and her only link to him.

Mama always wanted to meet her father, but she had long ago given up finding him. The last time she attempted was in the ‘70s, when she stayed with another aunt, hoping that she could lead Mama to her father. She never did, which was logical because Mama’s father already had another family. Mama soon left, but failed to banish the deep-seated longing that hounded her every time she witnessed father-and-daughter reunions. She wanted to have a reunion of her own so much so that after knowing a friend has recently found her absentee father, Mama immediately looked up in the yellow pages and, with boldness natural to her, tried to contact the first person with her father’s surname.

What she found was her father’s cousin, who in turn led Mama to his sister, a woman in her 70s who had memory difficulties and enjoyed talking about the recent past but not the distant past that could probably include Mama’s father. She just told Mama, flatly, that her brother died many years ago. Mama’s half-sister, the youngest of her late father’s three children and whom she phoned by her aunt’s suggestion, said it was in fact in 2003. Depression, her sister said. He died of depression two years after her mother’s demise.

The irony was that in 2003, Mama had lingering thoughts about her father and had strong desires to look for him, but she postponed every plan for fear of being the proverbial illegitimate child destroying a family’s peaceful existence. Mama has always been like that. Self-sacrificial. She’d rather suffer than see people special to her hurting. And, even without personally knowing him, these included her father.

I suppose I expected to see Mama cry when she told us of her father’s death. Or at least close to crying. Mama, after all, easily gets very emotional. This time, however, she never did. She was strong as ever. And after, I think, three nights of talking about it, it never formed part of any of our family’s discussions again. It slipped away. Like a sickeningly poor-plotted movie.

Mama has probably gotten over it quicker than I expected. Had she perhaps foreseen that this was how it would end? That when she was dialing to contact relatives of her father, she had actually felt he was long dead? That after all those years, she had in fact grown hopeless? I don’t know. I could never bring myself to ask her, thinking it was beside the point. But I never could actually believe that she has forgotten him entirely. Because although she is trying to make things appear easy, it could be that Mama still silently longs to see her father, who, she was later told by her mother, looked for her when she was about nine, but knows that it is now entirely impossible, because real-life stories’ endings are always unalterable.

Stubborn but awesome love

I don’t, and probably will never, understand why God loves and pursues me. It is kind of puzzling. I’ve wronged and failed Him over and over. I’ve questioned and doubted Him a lot of times. And each time I thought of the gravity of my sins, I feared God would not think twice to express His wrath and eternally abandon me. But countless times, especially when I was desperate down the pit, He’s proven His interest in me. And like a man rescuing a tattered doll from a manhole, he eagerly pulled me back, rinsed off the dirt and smell from the sordid pit, put the lost pieces together, and embraced me like I was new.

I can’t understand this kind of love, for I am not deserving of it. Why does He take pleasure in loving a mess like me? What is so special about me that He doesn’t want to let me go? I sinned; He forgave. I turned my back on Him; He took my hand again. I went away; He ran towards me to welcome me home. I rebelled; He accepted me still. I had no idea of heaven; He said He wanted me to be there to spend eternity with Him.

God, His persistence, His faithfulness, and the nature of His love are all beyond my understanding. And He will always astound me, for I am not capable of that great love and will never be able to equal it. His is wider than the heavens, deeper than the seas, bigger than me, and enough reason to die for me.

As it seems, my comprehension has human limitations to grasp this kind of love, but I am forever grateful and will respond to it in the way that is pleasing to Him.

The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.

Psalm 103: 8-15

An epiphany at a time of a writer's block

Having an expansive knowledge of the language, in and of itself, cannot define a good writer. Messages should be sent across. Not cheap messages, but messages that rouse, influence, and move people to transformations in thoughts, actions, and perspectives. If a writer is able to penetrate his reader’s mind and challenge the plateauness of a thinking, he goes beyond the threshold of talent. And for him to do that, he has to exhaust his whole being, squeeze out fragments of intellect, risk his vulnerability, and expose his humanity.

Unexpected

Just as the chorale begun the hymn, the church’s wooden doors propped open, revealing the silhouette of the bride. Her whole frame, covered with white cloth, radiated with the afternoon sunshine. She was as beautiful as any bride could be. And her dopey eyes glowed as if to say she was happy. Getting her cue from the hymn, she started to walk down the aisle, getting past the misty-eyed spectators, going to the direction of her blubbering but equally happy groom. She was finally getting married.

She was my cousin. My second-degree cousin, actually. Being one of the older kids in my generation, she was used to being called ate (big sister). The only irony is that she was an only child. But being so seemed to make her attracted to the idea of siblings and turn her into a generous and affable big sister to her cousins. It’s maybe because she was loved immensely and had so much love to give.

Though both her parents were working abroad, her paternal grandparents, with whom she stayed for many years, treated her like she was their own. So growing parentless never became a major issue or a gripping force for rebellion. She was well taken care of, after all, and had fast become the apple of the eye. She went to good schools, was dressed impeccably better than the rest of us, was provided with a wealth of privileges usually not available to ordinary kids, and had the early manifestations of elegance. She was pampered but not spoiled. She was the envy of little girls.

Every time her grandmother brought her to our house, I was glad in the way one would feel when meeting a real-life princess. We were relatively not pauper, but I felt small whenever she was around. She didn’t belong to our world, and neither did we to hers. But while there seemed to be an unseen abyss that separated us, she didn’t in any way illuminate our differences. She would play with us like any child would and talk to us in a calculated, refined manner. Without her realizing it, I was drawn to her by the reality of her existence and she became a paragon of childhood sophistication.

I have no clear recollection of the many afternoons my sister, my other cousin, and I spent with her. But there was one afternoon that stood out from my memory. It was when she, while gently twiddling my hair, commented I looked like the famous local actress of the 80’s. That was one of the few times I felt grandiosely beautiful as a kid. Even if it came from a child, a cousin who had an inclination to biased judgment, I believed it with no reservation. To a kid who was not so used to hearing comments as good as that from outsiders, it was worth much more than bags of candies, dolls, and colored pens. It was more than an innocent comment, for it laid the early foundations of my self-confidence. To this day, even if we’ve both aged and I can’t trace exactly where our similarities begin, I still believe I look like the actress. Not because I’ve grown to like the idea I am beautiful, but because my cousin said so.

When we transferred home, the occasional visits went down to zero. Her grandmother would still phone my mother, but news about my cousin was a rarity. There never was big news about her, in the first place. She lived in silence, in privacy. When we were kids, I remember she would talk only when necessary. Growing up as a teen, she, I believe, permanently tucked into her being a certain sense of aloofness I’d observed from her.

I also grew up to be a silent, private person. I never thought that news about me or us reached her, either. Steadily, we lost our connection. We were slipping away from both our worlds.

The possibility of us meeting again was only during special occasions, which amazingly had a way to patch severed paths together. When we met again, however, we were in our late teens and were soaked in self-consciousness, a strong enough force to stop us from going beyond the cordial hi’s and hello’s. Our eyes would meet and immediately look away as if something invisible in the other direction was more important than reuniting with a cousin. The awkwardness of the act was too much to launch another attempt to establish interest. And even though she was in the same room, her absence was more pronounced.

It is so amusing how time and distance could progressively turn people who got along very well as kids into total strangers as adults. I instinctively took it as a fact, an irrevocable error of past times. When you were kids, you would share even the tiniest bit of dreams, resolved that when it’s time for those dreams to take place, you would still be sticking together like nothing happened in between the years. In between the years, however, things happen not in the way you have foreseen, creating gaps, wide enough to keep you apart. And when one of the dreams finally comes, you are merely a shadow of the past. You are no longer there to share the happiness.

I didn’t know if getting married was part of my cousin’s dreams any more than I knew of her wanting me to be part of her wedding. And so when my mother broke the news I would be in the bridal entourage, I doubted. I asked my mother to repeat the news. I had just come from bed, so I was making sure I was hearing things right. “Who is getting married again?” She did mention the name, and as if to remind me of her existence, she added “Your cousin.”

If it’s another cousin with whom I practically grew up, I wouldn’t have been as surprised. But it was the cousin I lost a chance to intimately know who wanted me to take part in one of the most important events of her life. There had been a huge wall of unfamiliarity between us, and at this point, I was thinking whether it really existed or was only part of my imagination. Regardless, my cousin was choosing to be oblivious to it and seemed to remind me of the good old days, if only for a moment.

There were a few times I would like to think what we would have been had we had the chance to grow up more closely. Maybe we would tell each other stories, we would share secrets, we would be enjoying late-night talks, and we would be like sisters. And I could probably explain better why, for the first time since I attended a wedding, I shed tears when I saw her march toward her groom. Without feeling embarrassed, perhaps I could tell her it’s because I missed her.

Look, it's Armani

He’s an ukay-ukay regular customer. My dad. My mother describes him as addict, but I’d like to veer away from her description to give my dad some respect, although I’m tempted most of the time to use the same word or another that is more lacerating and irreverent than that. He’s obsessed. That I believe is more accurate. And less vindictive.

It didn’t happen progressively. There was no defining moment, a turning point whatsoever. He acted just like that without at least giving us warnings or getting bigger closets to squeeze in all his stuff. I mean, he got so many they could almost displace my mother’s. Sometimes he would bring home a pair of jeans or a shirt. Sometimes a pair of shoes. Other times a belt. We couldn’t tell exactly what and when he would buy next. It all depends on the price and the new arrivals.

And boy, how he turned into an expert. While I can hardly guess how much a dress is, my dad knows definitely. He can even compare prices. Having gone to many stores, he knows that Ukay-Ukay A sells more cheaply than Ukay-Ukay B, but that its fitting room is not in good shape as B’s. There were even times his breaking news was not about the latest political blunders, but the newly opened ukay-ukay store in such and such street, or the on-going sale in such and such store.

“I spotted a pair of jeans, but I would wait for the sale. Its price would have dropped by then,” he would say of the sale, which usually is still a week to go.

“Who said it’s still there by then?” I would be tempted to say, but always decide not to. After all, he has waited for ukay-wide sales several times already and never been disappointed after finding whatever clothing he wanted still hanging invitingly.

My dad is frugal. He’s the type who doesn’t want to spend excessively even if he has the money to spare. He turns off the light when no one’s in the room. If he can tolerate the heat, he’d rather fan himself than turn on the electric fan. He eats leftovers, even those that have been in the freezer for more than three days. He sometimes eats them without reheating, leaving the microwave oven, which he still keeps in the box, completely useless. Shopping at ukay-ukay stores, therefore, is not much of a surprise. After all, they are a place where he could buy stuff usually worth thousands of pesos for a fraction of the amount.

What interests me, though, is not his ability to scour the whole of an ukay-ukay store for a piece worth a high school student’s allowance. My dad has impressively sophisticated taste. Sosyal, if I may say. A pair of jeans should be an Armani, the slacks Louis Vuitton, the shoes Salvatore Ferragamo. And there are other names he digs for, which I can’t remember, let alone spell.

For a good record, 8 out of his 10 purchases are branded. In fact, he buys anything signature, even those that are outdated they look like costumes for movies. I know they are called vintage. And in the fashion world, the word vintage is attached to gloriously glamorous, elegant, and exotic images. But these vintage clothes, some at least, don’t look flattering on my dad. He thinks otherwise, though.

“Are you sure you want to wear that?” I would ask, trying to define what year and season the piece was from. What, 70’s? 80’s?

I know that my dad has taken no special interest in vintage clothing. I know it for a fact. He doesn’t care what decade the piece was from, but he cares about the label on which the fashion god’s name is sewn. And I have come to realize that that’s the major consideration he has when buying a piece from an ukay-ukay store. Who cares if there is an obvious hole on the left leg of the jeans? Who cares if the shirt’s big on him? Who cares if he looks like he’s stuck in the 80’s? Who cares, really?

“Why, this is Armani,” he would say, fronting the mirror with the piece on, then slightly turning around to get a full view of his back. He would repeat probably more than three times it’s Armani or another whose-who name and justify why it was a good buy to, in my opinion, convince himself more than us.

“Look, it’s Armani. It is genuine.”

I get it. To my dad, sporting a signature clothing is sometimes more important than being connected to the rest of the fashion world. And it seems a single name outweighs the purpose of dressing. I would like to take it all from the viewpoint of an understanding daughter, but it kind of bothers me that he seems to overlook why humans dress in the first place. I almost regularly tell my dad no one in the streets would dare ask him who he is wearing and that people wouldn’t mind if it’s not Armani. He wouldn’t budge, and I take that as a hint that he’s not to abandon yet his usual trips to ukay-ukay stores.

Now he regularly receives text alerts from a certain ukay-ukay store. He read to us the message one day, an info-text of an upcoming sale. I can’t believe ukay-ukay stores have advertisements of that sort, but then again, this is the text era. My dad would reply with a simple “Thanks,” devoid of any excitement and anticipation. But in my mind, I see him smiling, looking round the store in search of an Armani. Or Ferragamo. Or Louis Vuitton. Or what-have-you’s.

An Epistle of Love

To my future,

Now that I write this, your identity is still unknown to me. I don’t even know if I have already met you. I am utterly clueless, although I sometimes wish you were already part of my circle. Regardless, I am hoping to be surprised when I finally meet you. I hope you also will be. You will be a pleasant surprise, a gift actually. A beautiful gift. An answer to my prayers. To my tearful cries. To my longings.

I have been waiting for you. For years. Quite abnormally long years. But I am patient. I have to be. I want you to find me spotless. Pure. Reserved. Yes, I have reserved myself for you. I won’t say, however, that I have been entirely faithful, although faithfulness while waiting is questionable because there is no one to be faithful to in the first place. But there is, I think. You. I have to be faithful to you. This is my choice. To wait for you.

It is not an effortless thing, I have to say. Because I’ve been tested several times and failed quite a few times, too. I battled with self-doubts, with self-pity, and every so often I questioned if you would ever come to find me. God says you will. And I trust Him with the intensity that I hope you have, too. Let’s trust God. Even though you are there and I am here, with our individual anonymity and the unknown future separating us, I know in my heart that God will cause us to meet someday. It will be a sweet thing, like finally locking the ends of a priceless necklace, keeping it secure, its diamond pendant radiating with the streaks of sunlight. I can’t help my excitement. But in the meantime, let’s wait.

Please be patient. I am being patient, though it requires too much of my strength. We will meet when God decides we are finally ready. I don’t want to go against God’s plan, and I know you feel the same way, too. Let’s obey. We will both be pleased if we allow God to work between us and unravel the love story He has already authored for you and me.

Right now, I know the Lord is still preparing us. For our meeting. For our union. And for every lovely thing He has for us. Indeed, it is the reason for this singleness. I often wonder why I have been in this season longer than many of my friends had. Do you often wonder, too? The only answer I have is because He wants us to be a testimony not only to our friends but also to other people, strangers even, who may have unfavorable opinion about love and marriage. The world needs models who can credibly demonstrate the rewards of waiting, and even if we didn’t plan to take that role, we were chosen. I want to be used you know, and if my, our, waiting is designed to create more impact and make our story more powerful, then I have no questions about it. In fact, it makes my heart glad. Because I also know that there will be a beautiful ending. A very beautiful ending to our singleness and an equally beautiful start to our togetherness.

I have to admit, though, that using us, we, and our is somewhat new to me. I have always been alone and I have never considered anyone to be part of myself. It has always been I, me, and my. So this is how it feels. It feels great. It feels as if you were here, next to me, watching me write you a letter, looking over my shoulders, peeking at every word that I put, holding my hand once in a while. But I can’t see your face. Until I see you personally, your face would always be a blank, hazy image. It’s okay. I have the rest of my lifetime to lock my gaze on that face God created with me in mind.

I have always loved you. I told that to a friend long ago, riding the train, with nothing to talk about. She probably didn’t see that coming and so doubted my feelings. She told me that this may not be the case, that I may not actually love you, that I loved only the idea of loving you or the idea of you. I pondered for a moment and thought that she may actually be right. No, I said. I love him. I love him even without knowing him. I love him even without knowing who he may actually be. I love him.

I didn’t convince her I know. Because if it weren’t me, if it were another person professing her affections for her unknown beloved, I would have scoffed at her. For who would believe in the idea of loving someone you haven’t met? Who would actually love an imaginary person? But to me, you are not imaginary. You are as real as anyone I know. Only you are not here. You are not with me. Yet. But that doesn’t give me any reason not to love you now.

Love is not just a feeling. Because if it is, I may have long ago abandoned the idea of us and have chosen to cling to someone else. But I did not. I chose to stay. Because love is a choice. If I didn’t love you, I would not have chosen to wait for you.

I believe it doesn’t require physical evidence to trigger love. I don’t need to see you to love you. It just happened. An occurrence even I can’t explain. And I don’t need to find reasons for feeling this way because I believe love demands no reason. You just love.

This is how I am toward you. And I will continue to wait for you until God says it’s time. You are part of neither my past nor my present, but you certainly will be part of my future, and to me, that’s better than enough. I will meet you. Soon. In God’s time. And we will be happy.

Lovingly,

Your future