Thursday, December 27, 2007 Tantingco: Mater Boni state of mind By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
"WE FEW, we happy few, we band of brothers/ for he today that sheds his blood with me/ shall be my brother," a quotation from Shakespeare's Henry V about comrades in arms, may very well apply to seminarians or, more particularly, to ex-seminarians-those few men whose common experience (they spent high school in the seminary) and common fate (they didn't make it to priesthood) unites them in a strangely intense bond which only they understand.
Here in Pampanga, when we talk of ex-seminarians, it can only be the ex-seminarians of Mother of Good Counsel Seminary, located at the back of Everybody's Café, although in my time, the more popular landmark was Highway Restaurant.
This is actually its third address, after Guagua and Apalit, where it was known by its Latin name, Mater Boni Consilii Seminary (Mater Boni for short).
Today, it is both a minor and major seminary, offering both Philosophy and Theology courses - both requirements for priesthood.
In my time, Mater Boni was just high school, which is why for most of us, it was the happiest time-all too short-a rite of passage before life turned more serious with the transition to any of the major seminaries in Manila (San Jose, San Carlos or UST).
Although "many are called, few are chosen," I don't think ex-seminarians ever feel inferior to those who make it all the way to ordination, or ever consider themselves unworthy.
Vocation is truly a mystery, and God's choices are even more mysterious. I had a co-seminarian who washed his face in a toilet bowl, thinking it was the sink he made.
There was another seminarian who caught his fart with his hand and released it on our face while we slept at siesta. He became a priest.
And then there was a boy who prayed the longest and knelt the longest after Communion -- he didn't make it.
Who knows what stuff priests are made of? Or what criteria God uses in choosing His priests?
How old were these boys when they answered God's call? Eleven? Twelve? Did they really know what they were getting into?
The saddest and scariest day of my life was when my parents deposited me at the lobby of Mater Boni so that I could start my high school in the seminary.
Even today, as an adult, I still feel strangely, inexplicably sad around 6 p.m., every single day, wherever I am, but I think I know: that was the hour I waved good-bye to my parents-and my childhood-exactly 36 years ago in the seminary lobby.
But those from whom a lot is taken away, a lot is also given. Priests grow old alone, suppress their sexual urges, pick maggots from patients bedsores, get assigned to middle-of-nowhere. I have never met an unhappy priest, yet.
Crazy or stupid, but never unhappy. They're not telling us, but I think priests have found the real happiness that we laymen spend all our lives looking for.
Ex-seminarians like me had a glimpse of it once, lost it, and now only dream of it.
This is probably why we live our secular lives like we are still seminarians, praying our morning and evening prayers, asking philosophical questions during parties and being the "salt of the earth" in our companies and communities.
And which is also why many of us get mistaken for priests a mistake that flatters instead of insults us high school memories in the seminary are unlike any other high school memories.
They are more intense and more enduring because we were forced to grow up together inside a walled compound, experiencing together everything, from first wet dream to first fistfight, from natural calamities like floods to manmade disasters like martial law.
The seminary was where we found and then suppressed first love, intimate friendship and other psychosexual stirrings, but it was also there where we stared the oldest, most authoritarian institution in the face the Roman Catholic Church and learned that history's top revolutionary was none other than Christ himself.
As a result, nothing anymore scared us, not the government, not the military (which is why ex-seminarians are often found in leftist movements).
When I think of the seminary, I remember most the beadle's bell, which dictated how we'd spend every single hour of the day.
But the ubiquitous bell, like the voice of God himself, is probably what has taught me some of life's most valuable lessons, like seizing every moment, making the most of it, wasting nothing.
I also remember the food, served to us in unbelievably small portions, which we augmented by regulating food intake with five mouthfuls of rice per mouthful of viand.
Today I still eat this way-one of many old habits acquired from the seminary.
Another is the habit of reading, which probably accounts for much of what I eventually became in life.
It's amazing that I don't remember what I had for dinner last night but I remember still quite vividly Apung Godang's fried meatballs and torta, last taken some 30 years ago.
I can still see seminarians queuing at the refectory to have their large tin trays refilled with rice.
Because food was never enough, we had to store smuggled stuff inside our cabinets, which we protected from ants by setting up water in tin cans under the cabinet's legs.
Of course the ants always outwitted us by climbing up the wall and across the small clotheslines we had made behind our cabinets to hang our briefs on after showers.
Who knows what else adolescent boys with raging hormones were capable of keeping in those locked cabinets?
I remember receiving the sacred host during communion, spitting it out and then setting it up for perpetual adoration in a makeshift altar inside my cabinet.
I also remember quite a number of seminarians being expelled for stealing from other seminarians cabinets-a terribly high price to pay for teen mischief.
I am sure there will be thousands of stories like these waiting to be told at the MGCS Grand Alumni Homecoming this Saturday, December 29.
I hope there will be many ex-seminarians who will show up, because there are very few of us left-we were few to begin with (an average freshman class had 20 students, sophomore 15, junior 10 and senior seven).
But, as I said, we are a "happy few" and we are a "band of brothers" who still hug and holler and horse around whenever our paths cross, like the world never turned.
It's amazing how even monsignors and white-haired company executives become again the pimply boys that they used to be, once they step into the time-warp that is Mater Boni.
Some of us have sent our own sons to Mater Boni, thinking they'd get the same education and training (MGCS is the best high school in Pampanga, hands down), and hoping that through them, we can vicariously re-live our lost seminary days.
Or, as God often works in mysterious ways, they'd probably make it and become the priests we almost were.
