by Fr. Ranhilio Callanga Aquino

It is Advent once more and the countdown to Christmas has begun; in fact, for many, it began a long while back. Time was when people were excited about the approaching holidays. These days, I think more and more are nervous about Christmas—because it costs a lot now to celebrate the birthday of the Savior who lay in a manger! That is not only a sad comment on our times; it is a sadder comment yet on our faith, or its demise. They were happy times, I think, when our simple folk were roused by the pealing of bells and, parol in hand, made their way through the dark streets and pathways to the brightly lit church for the Misas de Aguinaldo. For all the glitter and dazzle that opulence can afford with which to adorn malls and supermarkets, I do not find too many signs of that joy that truly warmed the heart then. And there may not be too much need for that, considering how, in our thoughtlessness, we have warmed the world unhealthily!

In Advent, however, readings at Mass offer us vivid—many times frightening—images of the “end times”: the sun refusing to shed its rays, the moon going dim, the starts falling from the firmament and the earth convulsing violently! Rather than the promise of order, we are given portents of chaos and utter confusion. And of course, apocalyptic literature like this was put to potent use by preachers of old who piously believed that they could turn sinners from their erring ways back to righteousness by dire prognostications of the terrors that awaited the unrepentant. What is the order of things to come, or is it, as the images we are proffered suggest, a total collapse of order?

As regards disorder, we do not really have to await the end-times because we are quite capable of plenty of it. Not too recently, the Oversight Committee of the Lower House conducted a hearing—one of the endless hearings that give immense pleasure and media exposure to Their Honors, the members of the Congress—on the Hacienda Luisita. That of course is a hot topic because Noynoy Aquino is running for president and the informed as well as the misinformed (and the totally uninformed!) have chimed in on the Hacienda Luisita case. The congressmen and congresswomen were not to pass up this opportunity to deliver their quaint tirades for the public to applaud! Tony Ligon, a lawyer who appeared for Hacienda Luisita, was dressed down rather haughtily by a lawmaker for what was supposedly his “bad decorum” before the august body! I know Tony Ligon. He is not a stupid lawyer; in fact, he knows his law well, and knows how to say what he knows. He is one of my students at the Graduate School of Law of San Beda College—which already says much about his desire to learn as well as his mental aptitude (the same thing being inapplicable to many of those who were supposedly appalled by his “lack of decorum”). He was neither abrasive nor intemperate in his use of language—which cannot be said of many who ask questions at these often pointless and fruitless investigations. But he would not grovel at the feet of those he was sure knew less than he did, just because their table-shingles bore the honorific “Hon.”. And because he would not budge from explaining lucidly and with the meticulousness of a truly studious lawyer—even when the “inquisitors” made several pathetic attempts at leading questions—he was scolded for being haughty.

The other incident of disorder had to do with the grand affair of the MLQ University College of Law. In decades past, MLQ had a law school of which the nation was rightly proud. The likes of Ricardo Puno, Sr, the honoree of the affair, the legendary J.B.L. Reyes, Lorenzo Tañada and luminaries in the legal firmament once filled its lecture halls with their sonorous voices. At this affair, my father, Justice Hilarion Aquino, was one of the honorees, and my mother, who also studied at the same law school but graduated from the Lyceum of the Philippines, was with my father, as the invitation invited the honoree’s partner. Unfortunately, it seems that no provision was made for the honorees’ wives or partners to be seated. One of the organizers was totally at a loss about where to put my mother who eventually decided that the more prudent thing to do was just to go home.

Incidents like these perturb because we are beings of order. To exist is, for us, to put order in our lives and in our world. Social theorists call this nomization, “nomos”, being the Greek word for rule, order or law. Absolute disorder is unthinkable; it is not livable. And so what is it that is foretold when we are warned about wars, disasters, and terrible portents on earth and in the skies? The dread we have of the breakdown of order makes its way into the movies that are box-office hits! All pervasive, it seems, is this foreboding of disaster, the terrible prospect of the total destruction of our ordered world!

A prophesy about an apocalyptic end however is still Gospel—good news, in a philosophical sense because we all want closure, we strive after ends. Purpose is not only the mark of intelligent activity; it is also a demand of meaningful existence. To what end?—is always a legitimate question. Eternal return would be nightmarish and in this respect, we have much to learn from the writers of the Upanishads, perhaps the very earliest philosophers of the world. They thought of bondage in terms of samsara—the never-ending cycle of birth and re-birth and moksha as liberation from this meaningless prolongation of life. The allure of staying forever young that the wizards of cosmetic surgery hold out to us notwithstanding, nobody really wants endless wandering on the surface of earth. (Neither would we welcome the possibility of continuing our pointless peregrination on the moon or some more distant celestial body that should prove hospitable to us!) That is also the Buddhist message: nirvana is not some transference to a parallel universe. It is the cessation of all attachment to that which gives us comfort and ease, as well as torment and suffering in the world. From another perspective, a narrative has to end; a never-ending story is not a narrative. And it is only when the narrative ends that one can define its characters, for it is plot that defines character, what they do and what happens that allow us to say who they are.

The powerful imagery we get from Biblical writings about the end-times—as well as from the narratives of other ancient religions—suggest that there is an end, and therefore that we can strive for an end. It is in fact a message of salvation, not necessarily because a savior shall redeem us (although that is the core message of Christianity) but in the more fundamental sense that we are not condemned to the cycle of eternal return! Earth must shake, sun and moon must dim, and the powers of heaven must fall from their places because it is truly an end. But the stories do not end there. There is also imagery of the Son of Man returning in glory, surrounded by the ever-present figures of the apocalyptic genre—angels, summoning all, living and dead from the corners of the earth, and rendering judgment. It is the judgment that follows that says what this is all about: Those who attended to the needy are called “blessed of my Father’; those who remained stone-cold in the face of misery are dismissed as the “accursed”. Human encounter—the stuff of everyday life—assumes eschatological significance; the commiseration with others or our indifference towards them assumes the status of life’s absolutes. Judgment is the metaphor for that.

The relevant question then ceases to be “when”—just as it is really impertinent to ask “When shall I die?”—but “what has it been all about” which, of course, is a question of ends, a question of purpose and of meaning, and a question about the very last things, the eschaton!