KEEP ON POURING

My dearest everyone,

Keep on pouring, Pip, you’re doing just fine. Words are never too much when they are meant to be shared. This is a Shakespearean quote: “Keep on pouring, I will endure…”

Sabi nga nung nanalo ng Best Picture Award sa Oscars, “In Los Angeles, people don’t touch each other anymore.  They have to ‘crash’ in order to have contact.”

This is true everywhere.  We go on our separate lives and lose contact with our roots, with the rest of the clan, with our basic values, even.  Sad, sad…

And you’re not experiencing a “mid-life crisis,” Pip.  There is No crisis. That is only a commercial expression for “psychotherapy books.” There is only mid-life, and it is a beautiful phase.  What is happening is a shifting of gears, that’s all.

Believe me, I have passed that way already

The formative years — elementary on to high school were the years of discipline, rigid instructions, the memorizing of values that ought to guide us for the rest of our lives.  Then, college — when we began to flex our muscles; hitch our dreams on the brightest and highest of stars, tested adventures and our skills and daring.  Then, marriage and family — or, the pursuit of a career — and the busy-busy conduct of our lives began. We were on a 24/7 binge to get everything the mercantile world could offer by way of necessity, and then, of luxury…and then…we reach a plateau — after having achieved and accomplished all these, we crave for more..not knowing what for or why…ayan na…the craving, the yearning, is for the SPIRIT.

That’s the shifting of gears.  This time, the journey is the journey within…Back to the fundamentals in order to focus our lives with the only purpose of our human existence, and that is…what we learned in grade school catechism: “To love God with our whole heart, our whole mind and our whole strength…and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Yun lang, ang purpose ng human life.  See, how simple it all is.  Sabi ko nga, only evil complicates.

So, sooner than later, it is good to accept that at a certain stage of our lives — when the anxiety, the loneliness, the questions, the doubts, the sorrows,pains, restlessness, all pour in — we are actually being guided towards the focus we have forgotten.  And I repeat that: “To love God with our whole heart, with our whole mind, and with our whole strength..and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Imagine how far we have searched for the good/better life, the “American dream?”  The cars in our garages, the best house in the block, a swimming pool perhaps, and whatever ephemeral appurtenances we think we need in order to think that these will give us contentment and happiness.

Whenever you turn the page of your calendar, or write down the date on your checkbook or on your office memos or letters.. think about how we got to this day and this year.  Sometime 2,006 years ago, a God-man lived and walked this earth and his death became the single most dramatic historic event of humankind that time itself had to be measured by his birth — BC, meaning before Christ’s Birth, and AD, the Anno Domini, or the year of our Lord which we continue to live in to this day…There is no other marker of Time other than this.

And Jesus continues to live and walk our streets, passing by our homes, waving if we care to listen to His Sermon on the Mount or by the seashore…You all can visualize this…so, don’t just watch Him pass by…come and follow.

Pip had Him in a dream…and as he writes about it, also and already in his waking hours…Each of us can have Him whenever we look for Him. He is no further than your breath…Say His name, He would like that.  Say it often; He would like that even more.

More, for the next time, and much love to all…

Charlie