When New Years Are Gone

BIMBO CABIDOG 

Like the leaves in an old calendar, memory fades with the passage of time. There are events that happened not so long ago that cannot be revisited anymore. They have faded beyond retrieval by consciousness. They are sealed in the chamber of the forgotten, buried in oblivion forever.

Frequently I ask: of the many New Years in my life, what struck most? It struck me that I can’t cite any. As soon as they are gone, they are forgotten. Besides the kids I have been with, even the one New Year that is as recent as last year is already a blur.

Is it because everyone has almost always been the same? Every coming year is supposed to usher something new, but ends up eventually more of the old. Nothing much leap out of the usual, nor bound into something far different. There are only the hours that lumber towards the dead of the night, erupt in brief riotous ecstasy, and fizzles by the break of dawn. The fireworks are anticlimactically humdrum, simply because they are expected.

Why New Years are not best remembered is obvious. What they commonly usher are predictably the continuation of the same: time-and-motion affairs of yesterday that promise no major change. They are anticipated not to spring up stunning surprises. Even the exploded victims of firecrackers have become commonplace. The new is nothing but the repetitive occurrences of the trite, the injured who never learn, the decapitated and plainly shocked that reception with gory clinical hardware awaits at hospitals.

Much has been made of the millennium crossover in 2000, like the celestial display of a bursting supernova. Here was the time divide that billions of folks of different climes strove to attach unprecedented meaning. I imagined thousands of years of human social history being cut off like a chamber of a shooting rocket ship and lost in the swirling ranges of space.

But now, it can be looked on hindsight as a passage not much different from Sunday turning into Monday week after week after week. When the passing year turns into another day what is not seen, but actually remains, is the eternal present, phenomena in a flux, the constant coming and going in the ever living I Am.

What is the future to be elated or worry about? Scrape off the barnacles of the past that clings to the mind and nothing worries anymore, because it is they that the mind projects into what is perceived coming. It is yesterday placed ahead in a state that doesn’t actually exist, that is, the future. Man sees fearful ghosts of a non-existent future from the lens of history. And to see ghosts is to believe in ghosts.

The so much fuss about New Year is indeed the apparition of tomorrow in the sights of yesterday. For tomorrow does not show as tomorrow. It shows as experience anticipated to be reborn. It has no reality of its own. It only lives in dreams foregone. It can only be real when it has become the present.

I have resolved to make the difference now. No New Year’s resolutions, instead New Year reflections. No presumption of the shape the future takes, constructed from actually the vanished realities of the past. I greet the new day of the year, like opening another door and just absorbing and learning what it augurs.

Imagine time being abolished by a new charter of being human. There are no more hours, days and years. There are only changes, the coming and going of events or occurrences – physical and spiritual, change in continuum, matter becoming and vanishing.

People no longer mark living by year, old or new. There is no beginning or end, only transitions and cycles. In all these, consciousness has found eternity. Identity is no longer a function of history in slices of time encapsulated by what the human eye merely wants to see.

Life will be released from the arbitrary sequence of chronology and interpretation as the limited mind of man conceives.  People no longer go down to writhe in the graveyard of the dead past. They rise up to the joy of living in the here and now, the appreciation of constant change. No one marks how long each one has lived or been with something.

When no eyes watch any longer the turning of the hands on the clock, human life revolving around the time divides will be a thing of the past, locked forever in the catacombs of the forgotten. By then, the physical, psychological and psychic benefits will be tremendous. Pressure and stress will bid goodbye. Man will no longer be a slave of schedules. Deadlines will cease to nag.

The ancient tormenting of the clock as it ticks will lapse into silence. No one will ever become a nervous wreck, because of a fast approaching date. The great masses will not blow horns, drag cans on the streets, and light pyrotechnics to create one powerful blast. They simply don’t know anymore when to do so. New Years are never again observed for all times.

In the beginning was the word, and the word became man

BIMBO CABIDOG

If you don’t understand, it must be a mystery. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, wrote John the Evangelist. What language was the word? The people couldn’t get it. This was because they thought by what the tongue speaks. And such thought could not comprehend mystery.

The word came to the world and lived among humans. It was the light, and the light was the life of men. Through it, everything was made that was made. Without it, nothing came to be. Speech didn’t decipher it. Man was mystified, even when the verbo had already become flesh and blood.

The birth was not determined with the accuracy of science. There was no calendar those days. But over the past two thousand years, billions of mortals knew for sure: the God-man was born. And that birth, they would celebrate in the 25th of the last month of the year. Many, of course, did not agree. They argued it was a different month and date.

If you believe in Jesus Christ you must believe in Christmas? Hmm, not so. But a large portion of humanity has staked their lives and reputation for the belief. Trillions of dollars are spent every year throughout the globe in affirmation of the fact that He was born to a human mother on December 25. Billions of people attest as if they were there.

Only a handful of mortals though, awake in the cold of the evening, were supposed to have witnessed it. Religion has a fragile case of the human-incarnate God. Even the writers of the four bestsellers were not telling from first-hand account. And who could be sure the child was He?

The point is that no one needed to be sure. No one needed concrete evidence. It is enough to be told. You either believe or do not. But it is a belief that is perfect. It is a trust that abides even through uncertainty in the shadow of death. What is this that man suddenly has?

Being born is at the outset seemed illogical for a God. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, does not go through that. For a human to give birth to God is absurd. But absurd is not impossible. God is not limited by reasoning. He has everything in his hold. He has everything in his fold.

All about the birth was out of the usual and normal. If man was to conceive it, he would have chosen a different course. He would have chosen an entry that heralded greatness, as society always does. For a king to be born in ordinary circumstances was not ordinary. But He was not just king.

He was the word that began all, when there was not even a mere concept of heraldry or royalty yet. He was the depth from which surged the fountain of life. He was the mystery reality, the soul and living essence of the truth. And because He was so, the faithful needed no proof to believe. 

For ages, humanity was lost. For a very long time, it crawled on earth weighed down by a heavy burden. Existence was a huge physical load that it carried to the end that was the grave. It was destined to be swallowed by the curse of mortality from generation to generation.

All the pride and glory of conquests dust claimed whenever the hour came, for the fate of mankind was to succumb to physical corruption. The body could only be redeemed by being wrapped in the light and lifted. It needed rebirth through the word. It needed the birth of the God-man.

A couple of millenniums since, more than half of humanity still doesn’t agree that has already happened. But billions know Jesus Christ, and pray to Him. They celebrate the supposed day of His birth, and glorify the child in swaddling clothes on the manger where a bright lone star shone.

Whether you agree or disagree that Christ is God, it is not his being born man alone that counts. It is the story of the redemption of mankind from the mortal fate. And it is the faith in the story that will redeem man by making him God. The birth of the God-man made man God.

You couldn’t prove it simply by scientific research where you can only find litters of fossil finds from an evolutionary past pointing to Homo sapiens. Christmas is not the link that establishes the leap to a different species. It is the connection of faith to a higher destiny.

Death of a Patriot, Birth of a Nation

BIMBO CABIDOG

All for the day! The doctor sighed. There is still time to write farewell. There is still time to paint in verse the chill of a fiery dawn.

There seem to be many things to think of. But the mind just wants itself empty. Thoughts flitted like intergalactic spaceships, fast as light. As minutes fled, they couldn’t be held in the dark cell.

Which one should he capture in the fleeing moments? Confusion swirled. Panic scratched the crystal calm. Tomorrow is terrible. Who will control it? Who will gain from it?

More than a century hence, everything will be grasped from hindsight. The question of outcome will be answered by history. Death would be a birth when time has shaped a people’s fate.

Conceived in Noli Me Tangere, change would no longer be prevented by authority. The force of the KKK was going to be the midwife of a society pregnant with it.

In the meantime, hope must yet fade into the night of his solitary retreat to pen last goodbye. No power had power on this any longer. As a nation aches for birth, folly was forcing also the oppressor’s demise.

Tomorrow, one flitting life will go – a twinkle in the inky vastness of the cosmos. A patriot will fall, but a nation will rise. The throes of death will be but the pangs of birth.

The doctor had a vocation not only to heal the sick, but to excise a social tumor and reinvigorate a race. He shall knock out the colonial viruses and knock in national identity, El Filibusterismo.

Patria Adorada was in ferment. A page in its narrative was turning. The course of events was speeding towards a cataclysmic finish of the order. Surgery by revolution was at hand.

Still in the womb of the old regime, change has taken a life of its own. The provinces were heaving, morphing into something new. But how he deflected it! He thought it was not ripe.

He avoided words. Instead of nation, he used fatherland. Instead of revolution, he chose reform. Though he helped impregnate the new, though he shared in its conception, he balked at its coming.

Dr. Jose Rizal was not prepared for two things: a land turning into war, and a people turning into nationhood. He excruciated at the crossroads. He wouldn’t be involved in the making of such history.

Had he accepted the uprising and even heeded the call to sit as head of the highest council, he would have rendezvoused with a different fate. Another die would have been cast.

But he preferred instead to give in to the fate minted by the oppressors. He separated himself from his countrymen now rising in an irreversible upheaval. His end however would fuel it.

Independence was whipping up unprecedented unity all over the islands. He opted to stay in the colonial grip hoping perhaps the night will vanish of its own. It did not let him see the new day.

Yet, the doctor was a paradox. Persisting on his path of reconciliation of an already irreconcilable contradiction, he yet became a guiding light of the people decided to overthrow the old order.

The ruling class strove to extinguish the flame of his historical engagement with the sentence of death by musketry. The act would instead ignite a revolutionary conflagration throughout the archipelago.

Death, intended to douse the fires of rebellion, turned out to be a gasoline. It stoked the collective anger that spread to the regions and engulfed the archipelago in a consuming fire.

For this, the doctor would still be the most extolled countryman. The people revered him even when he renounced being part of their rebellion. He became a national hero though he refused nation.

With him at the helm, the country’s course may have been piloted to more desirable outcomes. But by not being in a position anymore to marshal it, he avoided likewise risking his place by a big mistake.

Thus, his place in the founding of the Filipino was sealed. How history pivots on the stupidity of rulers. It was stupid to murder a subject who until the end would not have anything to do with toppling them.

In life, Dr. Jose Rizal pulled his countrymen away from uprising. His death pushed it vigorously like never before. Morir es descansar. To die is to rest. Demise rested the leading light’s firm detraction.

Paradox played tricks again. The doctor did not renounce allegiance to Spain. He denounced the idea of a revolution to separate from the Spanish masters. They discredited his position.

He was not for severance, much more going to war for it. He was for reengineering the colonial order into a new ruler-ruled relationship based on fair governance, justice, and few liberties.

The colonial powers-that-be itched on the musket's trigger to prove him wrong, and the revolutionists opposed to him right. His death gave birth to a nation.

Destiny denied him the taste of independence. It is sweet to live in one’s native land, sweeter to live here free. Nevertheless, death saved him from the nation’s failures and their sad outcomes.