Touching love: Thoughts and Stories

Touching Love Thoughts and Stories

Patrick Vance S. Nogoy, SJ

PHILIPPINES

TOUCHING LOVE: Thoughs and Stories Copyright Š 2015 by Patrick Vance S. Nogoy, SJ Published and distributed by Paulines Publishing House Daughters of St. Paul 2650 F. B. Harrison Street 1300 Pasay City, Philippines E-mail: edpph@paulines.ph Website: www.paulines.ph Cover design and inside illustrations: Ja Cabato Layout design: Mark Inton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

1st Printing 2015 ISBN 978-971-590-797-2

at the service of the Gospel and culture

Foreword “Amor ipse intellectus est!” [Love understanding.] — William of St. Thierry

is

mode

of

T

ouch is a way to “feel” a certain truth, question, or idea.

These essays have been written from the struggle in trying to “feel” the ideas, truths, or questions about love posed by students whom I have known and guided, colleagues, and friends. These nuggets of thinking are not solutions, treating love as a problem.

Rather, love is seen from concrete events as a greater whole — a kind of mystery. Some of these essays have been conceived in ordinary occasions of listening to love stories — real and unfolding narratives of those who even dared to pose those questions.

Letting oneself be touched by a particular love story already betrays wisdom. It is in the womb of these incidents (which I call gifts) where all the essays, over the years, have been forged. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once penned that, the questions already contained traces of the answer. Through such questions, I was moved to seek out what love could mean.

Touch also implies an attempt to “grasp” something or someone for knowledge. These attempts formed a search, an honest seeking out, demanding much self-emptying. I was forced to bracket my own prejudice and knowledge about love. It was easy and comfortable to treat these questions as opportunities for sappy quotes, tweets, or status. Giving in to those temptations would have reduced love to intellectual gymnastics or motherhood statements. Questions led to thoughts. These disparate thoughts were begotten, nurtured, and brought together into a coherent whole by experience. Wisdom, as Heidegger wrote, bestows itself 5

Foreword

on the way. Touching, therefore, means a continuous attempt: I, the seeker, am always on the way. Thoughts and stories here are simple patches of the greater image of love, a reality that always escapes one’s grasp.

Perhaps, there is no better way to touch love than to love. Loving is a mode of understanding. Thinking and narrating demand loving. Listening to and pondering on real love stories brought me back to my own attempts at loving. They even provoked me to question my own way of loving. It has been an experience of difficult wisdom, since much of what was revealed to me about who I am was tough to accept. In my attempts to touch it, love, in one way or another, has touched me. These essays are, in greater part, a documentation of those difficult experiences of wisdom — wisdom bestowed by others. I have to make the choice to subject myself to thinking and, in thinking, to loving. Philosophy, if we take it to mean a search for wisdom, unmasks itself as a journey of incarnated love stories.

The questions appeared as the face of Love. The beauty coming from the rich presence of another, if only lovingly listened to, is the portal to experience love itself. In listening to others, beginning with their questions, I have been led to a path, which seems new but is already old. Wisdom is already there at the beginning. She never forsakes those who seek her: “Wisdom is brilliant, she never fades. By those who love her, she is readily seen, by those who seek her, she is readily found. [Wis. 6: 12] These essays are mere crumbs of wisdom, hoping that the readers who will taste them will open the eyes and ears of their hearts to begin or continue their own journey.

May the journey unfold as touching love.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

5

The Beloved Creature

9

When I Say I Love You

19

The Manifestation of Love

23

Love at First Sight

31

The Game of Love

43

Measuring Love

51

Love and Time

57

Love’s Possibility and Promise

69

Love Unfolding

75

Love and Suffering

85

Love and Freedom: Making Choices and Taking Chances

93

Love and Time II: Forgiving and Forgetting

107

Love and Beauty: Meaning, Death, and Faulty Stars

115

The Limits of Love: A Three Part Theme

123

Afterword: Encountering the Divine Lover

137

Words of Gratitude

140

7

The Beloved Creature

A

t the heart of St. Thomas’ thinking of creation is the relationship between Creator and creature. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper puts it, “Thomas’s doctrine of truth can be grasped in its proper and profoundest meaning only if we bring into play this notion of creation.”1 This relationship already begets an important implication: the game is over before it even began. The creature finds itself already situated before freedom and unfreedom — a state that presupposes being. To be a creature is to be already determined, to be always late, and to be deposed.

To be a creature is a painful reality to accept, especially for the modern man who advocates autonomy, originality, and control.

And here perhaps the heart of the struggle lies: From the very beginning, I am already dependent on an Other.

1. Josef Pieper, The Negative Element in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, 3.

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Touching Love

But what does it really mean to be a creature? This is the wonder that St. Thomas explores in his reflection of creation.

Creatura eventually brings the Creator and the relationship into the inquiry. An exposition of the hidden key, the relation of Creator and creature in Thomasian thinking, reveals three key implications of creaturehood that this essay attempts to describe: giftedness, meaning, and desire. The essay punctuates the discussion of the presented implications in the idea of charity. It concludes in the reason of love.

The Effect of Giftedness “…It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God. For whatever is found in anything by participation must be caused in it by that to which it belongs essentially…Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation…

Therefore it must be that all things…are caused by one First being, Who possesses being most perfectly.”

[ST, 44, art. I]

St. Thomas, in the above quote, defines creation in the context of production of being of things. And this ability to create, to produce the being of all things [ST, 45, art. 6] is only proper to a Creator. To be a creature is to be without such power. Rather, to be a creature is to participate — to receive being from the Creator.

The reception of being through participation echoes Norris Clarke’s metaphysical exposition in explaining the principle of causality. Clarke states that every being, which does not have within itself sufficient reason for its existence must have it with another, requiring an efficient cause.2 As a creature, I do not have the power to cause my existence and this deliberately puts me in the situation of dependency on the Creator. The immediate 2. Norris Clarke, Central Problems in Metaphysics, 73.

10

The Beloved Creature

implication of this is contingency. My existence can be seen as an accident, a probability — I may not exist. It is through the discretion of the Creator — his decision to give, instead of keep the plenitude of his existence — that I came to be. Although existence and creaturehood differ in meaning, they are the same in reality. Creation happened because the Creator chose to share what he possessed. To be is to be a being from God. This is a gift.

To be accorded a gift is an expression of being special. A lover does not gift his beloved if he does not see the beloved as someone special. In this light, creaturehood is a gift from a Creator who looks at the creature as someone special, as a beloved. Interestingly, in the above quote of St. Thomas, what the Creator is giving is not just any other possession, but that which he possesses most perfectly, namely being. This is a generous giving — a diffusion of the Good. To be a creature is to be elevated with the receiving of this generous giving of oneself. The relation of gifting bestows goodness in creaturehood.

A closer look at Thomas’ thinking reveals that the Creator does not only gift the creature with existence but also uniqueness.

Being is that which is — esse-essence, essence-primary-matter, substance-accident — a composition. The which or what connotes particularity. To be a creature is to exist particularly in time and space. I have a unique history. Creation is diversification not duplication, not a narcissistic production of little gods. Identity is born out of separation. To be a creature is to be this creature. I can only be me.

The implication of uniqueness is equality. Comparing myself to others is a futile activity. We are both rich in our uniqueness, and at the same time poor in our dependence on the Creator.

There is equality in diversity. We are all good.

Reflecting on the relation of Creator and creature has uncovered the reality of giftedness, which is a major implication 11

Touching Love

of Thomas’ reflection on creation. Giftedness arising from the dependence of creature on the Creator for its being, considers creature as special not only in existence but also in its particularity.

There is an inherent goodness in creaturehood.

The Reality of Meaning “God is the first exemplar cause of all things…Now it is manifest that things made by nature receive determinate forms. This determination of forms must be reduced to the divine wisdom as its first principle, for divine wisdom devised the order of the universe...”

[ST, 44, art. 3]

Inherent goodness through the generosity of the Creator does not only define a creature. The above quote from St. Thomas also equates creaturehood with intelligibility. St. Thomas explains how creation has reason. There is order in the vast system of diverse participating beings. There is direction. There is sense. “God as first exemplar” not only points to the sources of ideas but, most importantly, reveals the reality of a divine plan. The implication of this is the reality of truth.

Truth easily manifests itself in our bodies. Given our composition, it is a wonder that our body parts and senses operate in magnificent unity and sense. To be a creature is to be fashioned intelligibly. St. Thomas affirms this in his argument about the trace of the Trinity in creation. He states, “For every creature subsists in its own being, and has a form, whereby it is determined to a species, and has relation to something else. Therefore as it is a created substance, it represents the cause and principle; and so in that manner it shows the Person of the Father…. According as it has a form and species, it represents the Word, as the form of a thing made by art is from the conception of the craftsman. According as it has relation of order, it represents the Holy Ghost…” [ST, 45, art. 7]

12

The Beloved Creature

The unity of composition already reflects reason. The implications of this are wholeness and complexity. Every creature is whole insofar as it is fashioned intelligibly, and every creature is complex — exceeding the grasp of knowledge. Every creature carries with it an ungraspable and rich meaning, which only the divine can illuminate. I am beyond grasping even by my own self.

Moreover, being fashioned intelligibly in the divine mind affirms the creature’s orientation to the Creator. The relation of Creator and creature is highlighted in the creature’s search for the fullness of meaning.

To not possess the truth in its entirety is the conviction of being a creature. To be a creature is to be restless in the search for the truth, not only for its proper place in the scheme of things but for its ideal self. To know oneself is to find the Creator, who is the source of the archetype from which I was fashioned. In the creature’s search for truth, he is actually seeking for his Creator.

Augustine’s conversion, in his Confessions, confirms the reality of an individual’s restless pursuit of meaning that joyously ended with his Creator. Augustine found himself when he found God. Thus, to be creature is to be a being in God — before I am, He knew me already (to paraphrase Jer 1:5).

There is meaning even to the littlest detail of creation. There is a proper place for each one in the grand scheme of things — kahulugan, in its very essence of things falling into their proper places. Truth is already present in the being and governance of the world. This implies that even if the subject runs away or chooses to drift, he cannot go beyond the scope and limitations of truth.

What he, in fact, is searching is already there in creation. Life is not only a gift, but more so, a sincerity because it has meaning.

There is a divine plan.

13

Love’s Possibility and Promise

I

t was a heavy Monday. A group of us who had gone to Thailand to attend a regional conference arrived in Manila via a delayed flight. We arrived exactly three hours before my first class of the day. Not having the benefit of sleep, I dragged myself to Fr. Nemy’s metaphysics class and eventually to the 11:30 AM Mass in the college chapel after. I felt like a zombie. All I wanted was to get things done and over with so I could sleep.

I was snoozing in the Mass. I was barely awake. Yet, I was jerked into consciousness after hearing Fr. O’Gorman’s stunning news about the dying Fr. Joey Fermin. Fr. Joey was the Headmaster of the Ateneo Grade School who suffered an unnamed variant of cirrhosis. He underwent liver transplant six months before.

Apparently, his body rejected what was supposedly a compatible liver. He died on that day, a good nine hours after that O’ Gorman mass. We were to bury him three days later.

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Touching Love

The news of his eventual demise struck me. Initial thoughts quickly surfaced, prominent of which were these questions: Was it better for the liver transplant not to have happened given the eventual result?

Was it better to have applied palliative care rather than the risk of a sensitive and expensive operation?

I realized I was counting. In this kind of situation, I felt the normalcy of counting. It was an injustice — a failure of hope for a better result given the generosity of heart and pure intention of the donor. I walked home, contemplating the feeling of regret. But it was very apparent that the more important questions were not about counting or cost-benefit. It was actually: to love or not?

It was about loving. Life can readily present various examples from the frequently overlooked mother’s care, to these kinds of appropriation of extravagant medical treatment for the person we love. Despite the struggles of daily living, the question of to love or not still persists. What I carried throughout the day after that Mass was the weight of love. There is a weight, a burden if you will, to loving. Loving takes a lot — in fact, it takes everything from emptying one’s pockets to one’s private space and eventually to one’s self. Yet despite its demands, it is almost impossible to not love. This adds more weight to regret or pity or anger — the fact that despite all these, I cannot not love.

I was sharing this heavy load of regret mixed with the impossibility of not loving with the fellow brother who made the liver donation. In the course of the conversation, I was struck by the incident that he narrated to me. When he visited and said his goodbyes to Fr. Joey, Fr. Joey responded with a thank you and a sorry. He was grateful for the scholastic’s generosity and he was sorry because his body rejected the donated liver. This incident led me to reflect on love’s possibility and promise.

70

Love’s Possibility and Promise

Love’s Possibility I began to ask in that particular situation, how it could happen.

How is it possible that despite the failure of hopes, despite being on the losing end, despite the impending casualty of death, gratitude and forgiveness reign? That incident of gratitude and forgiveness belongs to a plethora of other people who in the clutches of death manage to thank life and the people around them. I have been both a witness and a subject to this. I clearly remember when my maternal grandfather was dying, he thanked me and repeatedly told me how much he loved me. These occasions of final goodbyes — where the closest friends and families are intimately present to exchange farewells and see you soons — these are miracles. These are possibilities created out of love.

Love’s power lies precisely in its ability to create even the possibility. Two people, completely different and even of opposing traits, find themselves in each other’s arms because of the possibility of love. This creative power of possibility transcends even the imagination. Love knows no bounds, knows no constraints or limitations. Whatever is given, even the bleak and confusing situations of pain and death, it can transform into life. People who are simply there for their friends despite the lack of solution and direction in their experience of sorrow and suffering, lovers who get back together several times after petty fights or breakups, acceptance of death and realities of forgiveness and gratitude despite the failure of expectations are but a small sample of love’s creative possibilities. Sky is the limit! as the expression goes, but love even goes beyond the skies. Perhaps, love is itself the limit.

Life can go on despite suffering and death. Redemption can happen despite the gravest mistakes. Resurrection is a reality, which is the final answer and not death. Creation continues despite the destruction.

71