nonfiction

I'm writing this on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, something I may entirely have forgotten if it weren't for all those cruciform smudges on people's foreheads at the mall, where I had my lunch.

It got me to remembering my grade school days in the early 60s, at La Salle Green Hills, back when EDSA was Highway 54 and there was nothing on Ortigas Avenue but that green-pillared house, the school, and dusty vastnesses of scrubgrass and adobe in between.

Back then, a day like this would have been suffused with prayer and incense, and with as much ceremonious contrition as giggly boys could be made to muster. Back then, at about the same hour today that I was strolling past some food stalls and trying to choose between spicy chicken wings and beef on a bed of noodles, we would have been at Mass, poking out our trembling tongues for a wafer of a host, our bellies grumbling for more substantial fodder after a whole morning of fasting.

That host was the driest thing you ever tasted. It felt as large as a saucer -this was way before it became all right to snap it into halves or quarters-and it stuck to your palate like a stamp, and you sucked on it slowly until it came apart, bit by crumbly bit, mindful not to chew on it. That, said the priest, would bring Christ's holy blood gushing out from between the molecules of the masticated starch, to dribble out of the sides of your guilty mouth and onto your crisp white shirt. I saw no blood in all those years of post-Eucharistic swallowing, so I guess we all believed him.

This was a school and a time when, at flag ceremony, you could stroll between the rows of gangly pre-teeners and fatting kids and spot the likes of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Diosdado Macapagal Jr., and Roberto Manglapus-whose fathers were all after the same high chair in Malacañang-and, chubby and quietish, Stephen Mark Whisenhunt. We didn't mind them too much, because flag ceremony ended with more pleasant diversions than wondering about what you and your schoolmate would become in thirty years-such as the Twofus, aka Ronnie Henares and Jojit Paredes, belting out "From a Window" (you know: " Late yesterday night, I saw a light shine from a window." ) from behind the flagpole.

I remember that, and the La Salle fight song-which, I would discover years later much to my chagrin, had been lifted from Notre Dame's-but it wasn't the secular clarities of the place that stayed with me so much as the mysteries of our devotions: Tantum Ergo, Salve Regina, No mas amor que el tuyo , the faceless priest, the incense filling the hall with the smell of holiness, the roses for the Virgin Mary, the Glorious Mysteries, the maddeningly inescapable ubiquity of Sin, and opportunities therefore.

We all had little booklets in which we dutifully and truthfully ("God is Everywhere") catalogued our trespasses, mortal and venial-a "Bad word" here, an "evil thought" there-so much the easier for confessions. Looking back on forgone pleasures, I wish I could say that I mostly sinned against myself and with myself, but that came a little later. Those days we were happy enough to pee, and the most heinous social offense you could commit was to pee-or worse-in your pants, for which the nurse at the clinic thoughtfully kept a pair of Kairuz khaki shorts handy. Such was life in that privileged pocket of easy colonialism and hard religion.

And now, more than three decades later, those two a.m.'s when I realize that I'm staring at my beer and wondering, not too remorsefully, about how I could've made such a fine and glorious mess of my life, I think about those days when sinning was a Big Thing and yet it wasn't.

A few days ago, a friend asked me pointblank over lunch at the cafeteria: "Are you an atheist?" No, I said, but I also said-in the way many people of my generation might have-that I didn't necessarily believe in the bushy-bearded Roman Catholic God but in a God, a Great Someone or Something or Other.

And I told her that I was repelled by institutionalized religion and any kind of fanaticism that presumes to know what God thinks. That's right: I'll respect what other people believe in-Jehovah, Baal or Ashtar, for all I know-but I won't be told that theirs is The Only Way to Paradise, as if they owned the franchise and the TV rights, besides. I can't stand people who pray to God to help them with this prize or help them be Miss or Mr. That. I'd hate to think that God would be stupid or small-minded enough to evaluate basketball games and players and pick a side to win.

I think that the whole notion of having presumably celibate men lay down the dos and don'ts of sex is downright silly-and, when we talk of a whole population policy, criminally irresponsible. And I haven't gone to confession (or "reconciliation," as I think it's been repackaged) in something like eleven years, because I don't see why it has to take another man to get the sordid truth out of me; and besides, if I'd kept a list of everything and confessed to everything, I'd be in there for a week, reading from a chronicle of infamy the size of a phonebook. I don't know what God thinks of that, but I think He knows I'm sorry; I've told him so, many times.

And no, none of this virulent anti-Vaticanism means that I've been reborn, or "renewed," into a more convenient variety of Christianity. I don't even know that I can call myself a Christian (I can hear my mother groaning and praying for my salvation). What I do know is that religion has become a very different thing to me from what it was at La Salle Green Hills (don't snicker, Ateneans; you probably had it worse): priestless, non-sacramental, more private even than sex.

So why am I writing about it? Because I suspect that there are many of you out there who feel the same way I do. And I can suspect, too, what my devouter friends will say to all this: it was the brush with Marxism, it was Sartre, it was the marriage, it was the money, it was all those Playboy magazines, he never knew religion to begin with.

19 February 1994

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