Mercado: No erasures list

Saturday, October 29, 2011

THAT'S how the wife and I dub it. We jot down names of departed kith and kin for inclusion in All Souls’ Day mass. “No traveler returns…from this undiscovered country,” Hamlet muttered. No erasures possible here.

The years, however, dull name recall. We remember the gentle editor Cornelio Faigao. “Would you like to work as a reporter?” he asked us, then a restless student in his English literature class.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

But what was the name of the copy boy in the newsroom? He’d cheerfully rustle up files or coffee.

Then, there was Gerry Gil of F. Ramos St. He got his PhD from Stanford after leaving the SVD seminary. He wrote scintillating Manila Standard editorials, until death in mid-40s.

“We’re in the twilight of life,” we told Press Foundation of Asia officers. “Don’t say that,” publisher Eugenio Lopez Jr. gently remonstrated. “We’ve plenty of time.” Before the year ended, Geny was gone.

Life beyond a handful of ashes is the capstone for All Souls’ Day. “Death is not the extinguishing of life,” Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote. “It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.”

The feast underscores reaching beyond the grave. “It is a good and wholesome thought to pray for the dead,” the ancient Book of Macabees teaches. In year 998, Benedictine abbot Odilo of Cluny picked Nov. 2 for this remembrance. This practice spread to other countries, including the Philippines.

“We dressed as witches,” gushed our granddaughters Kristin, 8, and Kathie, 5. They’d just come in from Friday’s Halloween parade at Cebu International School.

“All Hallows Eve” marked the Celtic new year. Irish immigrants brought those spooky costumes to the US in 1848. Halloween last year, the wife and I trudged after our granddaughters Alexia, 9, and Tai, 5. “Trick or treat,” they’d chortle after ringing doorbells at homes in their California county.

“Here, our grandson Adrian, 14, will bring flowers and light candles at family graves,” the wife mused. “Those graves will include ours, sooner rather than later.”

The celebrations differ. But the essentials remain. “We give them back to you O Lord, who first gave them to us,” an ancient prayer says. “Yet, as you do not lose in giving, so we have not lost them by their return…Death is only a horizon. And a horizon is the limit of our sight.

“We thank you for the deep sense of mystery that lies beyond our mortal dust…Lift us up, that we may see further, as one by one, you gather scattered families, from the strife and weariness of time to the peace of eternity.”

All Souls liturgy spotlights this reality. ”For unto your faithful, O Lord, life is changed, not taken away,” says the Eucharist’s preface. The same theme resonates wherever the “Divine Office” is prayed.

Our children belong to the post-Vatican II generation. They never heard the “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) chanted at requiem services of our long-vanished youth.

News desks are swamped with humdrum reports: traffic jams, jostling crowds, crammed cemeteries, etc. “Is that all there’s to this?” an editor wearily asked.

No, it is not. The central reality remains of life beyond a handful of ashes.

”We Filipinos use the idiom itaga mo sa bato to assert our utmost confidence, Pastor Lino Pantoja writes. Such were Job’s exact words: “Oh, that my words were engraved in rock forever.”

They’re words of Job’s primitive theology of the Resurrection: “I know that my Redeemer lives. And in the end, He will stand forth upon the earth. And after my skin shall have been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

(juanlmercado@gmail.com)