Tag: Ateneo

SA PAGLAPAG ’91

Talumpati ni Onofre R. Pagsanghan sa Pagtatapos
sa Pamantasang Ateneo de Manila, ika-23 ng Marso, 1991

Pinagpipitaganang Padre Joaquin Bernas, S.J.,
Kagalang-galang na mga Namumuno at Namamahala sa Pamantasang Ateneo de Manila
Mga Kapwa-Guro, Mga Kapwa-Magulang, Mga Kaibigan
Minamahal kong Mangagsisipagtapos,

Ang bilis talaga ng takbo ng relo. Ang bilis talaga ng inog ng mundo.

Paranq kahapon lamang, sa Dulaang Sibol, sa dulang “Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio,” si Cholo Mallillin ang aming patpating Serapio. At ngayo’y naririto, patpatin pa rin, pero magtatapos na sa hapong ito, lalapag na sa mundo.

Parang kahapon lamang, si Happy Tan, hanggang balikat ko lamang, sa klaseng 1-A aking tinuturuan, dulang “Julius Caesar” sinisiran

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Happy Tan, iyo pa bang natatandaan? At ngayo’y naririto, malinggit pa rin, pero magtatapos na sa hapong ita, lalapag na sa mundo.

Parang kahapon lamang, ako’y gurong baguhang tatanga-tanga, doon sa mga quonset huts sa Padre Faura. Ang pangulo sa klase kong pinakauna ay si Antonio Lopa. Naririto ngayon siya, kasama ang anak niya, ang balediktoryan ninyong si Rhea Lopa.

Paranq kahapon lamanq si Padre Bulatao, S.J., guro ko. Parang kahapon lamang sina Henry Totanes, James Simpas, Bob Guevarra — mga istudyante ko. At ngayon, kaming lahat ay nangaririto, tatlong salin ng mga magkakapwa-guro sa Ateneo.

Parang kahapon lamang, kami ng Misis ko ay nagliligawan. Ngayon naririto, apo na ang inaabangan. Para bagang sandaling tumalikod lang ako; pagharap kong muli sa salamin heto, ubanin na’t kalbo.

Ang bilis talaga ng takbo ng relo. Ang bilis talaga ng inog ng mundo.

At ito ang unang kaisipang imumungkahi kong balik-aralan, bago lumisang tuluyan. Pagdulog sa bukas na gripo ng buhay, matutong itikom ang mga kamay at bugso ng tubig-buhay ay sapuhing tunay. Huwag aksayahin, huwag sayangin. Bawat sandall, namnamin, mahalagahin. Pagka’t panaho’t pagkakataong waldasin, paano pang pababalikin? Sabi nga ng isang batang makata sa klase kong 1-A, sa buhay raw ay “No rewind, no replay.” Kung kaya’t “Live life, while you may.”

Ang ikalawang kaisipang imumungkahi kong balik-tanawan sa inyong paglisan, kay Fr. Dan McNamara ko natutunan. Faculty retreat master namin siya, noong mga limang taon na. “All is gift,” wika niya.

Sa dapit-hapong ito’y sandaling magbalik-gunita, isa-lsahin, himay- mayin ang Kanyang mga pagpapala. Sa pagbabalik-diwa, mamamangha, na lahat nga naman sa buhay ko at sa buhay mo ay biyaya. Pati na yaong mga nangyaring lihis sa ating mga hiniling, sa pagbabalik-tanaw, higit palang magaling. Talaga nga namang tunay, ang Kanyang Kabutiha’y naging kasabay sa bawat araw ng ating buhay. Lalo na marahil, tayong mga Atenista, na dinagsaan Niya ng grasya, paano tayong makapagpapasalamat sa Kanya?

At ito ang ikatlo’t huling kaisipang imumungkahi kong ating pagmunimunihan. Gamitin nating timbulan isang maikling sulating aking natagpuan minsan sa aming faculty bulletin board sa mataas na paaralan.

“On a street, I saw a small girl cold and shivering in a tattered dress with little hope of a decent meal. I became angry and said to God, ‘Why did You permit this? Why do horrible things happen to innocent people? Why don’t You do something about it?

For a while God said nothing. But that night, He replied quite suddenly, ‘I certainly did something about it. I made you.”

Sa dapit-hapon ding ito, maaring sa ating pagtahimik, may mga tanong ding naqhihimagsik. “Bakit, Panginoon, pinayagang buhay ni Lenny Villa ay malapastangan, sa ngalan pa naman ng pagkakapatiran? Bakit, Panginoon, sa Mabini, naglipanan mga street children na napipilitang magbenta ng katawan para lang makapaghapunan? Bakit binayaang gamitin ng bulldozer ang mga tahanan ng mga iskwater nang walang mapaglilipatan? Bakit pinababayaang sa pamahalaan, maghari-harian ang suhulan, lagayan, kurakutan? Bakit wala Kang ginagawa? Bakit nagwawalang-bahala? Bakit ‘di Ka magsalita?”

Sa dapit-hapong ding ito, sandaling tumahimik at pakinggan ang Diyos sa Kanyang marahang pag-imik, “Hindi Ako nagwawalang-bahala. Ako’y may ginawa. Ika’y Aking nilikha. Sa aking Ateneo, ika’y inaruga, talino mo’y hinasa, pinanday ang iyong dila, pananaw mo’y pinagala, diwa mo’y pinalaya, pinuno kita ng biyaya. Hinding-hindi Ako nagwalang-bahala. Ika’y Aking nilikha. Sa mga kakayahan mo, Ako’y nagpunla ng sanlibong himala. Anq mga ibinigay Ko sa iyong mga biyaya, ibinigay Ko para iyong ibigay sa iyong kapwa. Kinakatulong kita sa patuluyan Kong paglikha.”

Noong ika’y musmos pa, tinanganan ng iyong ina ang iyong kamay at winika niya, “Close, open. Close, open.”

Sa paglipad natin sa ating kabataan, close tayo nang close kadalasan. Sunggab nang sunggab sa pakikinabangan. May dahilan. Hungkag na sarili’y dapat munang sidlan. Ngunit sa ating paglapag sa kalakhan ng buhay, dapat ay open na ng open, bigay na ng bigay, hanggang sa unti-unti nating pagdulog sa hukay, unti-unti rin nating naibubukas ang ating mga bisig at kamay, at unti-unti tayong natutulad kay Hesus na sa Krus nakabayubay, bigay-todo, pati buhay.

Sa inyong pagtatapos, samakatuwid, tatlong pabaon ang aking alay. Tatlong paalalang sana’y isabuhay: Una, mahalagahin ang buhay. Ikalawa, magpasalamat nang tunay. lkatlo, mag-alay-buhay.

Kay bilis talaga ng takbo ng relo. Panahon nang magwakas ako sa tagoskaluluwang pasasalamat sa mga Heswita at sa Ateneo. Halos buong buhay ko ay Ateneo — mula pa noong 1941 nang ako’y nagbabagong-tao. Pasasalamat ko’y hindi lamang sa parangal ninyong ito, kundi, lalung-Ialo na sa pagkakahubog ninyo sa aking pagka-AKO, at sa pakikiputol ko sa pangarap Ignaciano na nakapukol sa kapwa at kay Kristo.

Pahimakas ko’y ang katitikan ng awit na ito:

Sa lilim ng 'sang langit, 'sang himig ang inawit.
Tumingala, nagtiwala sa iisang tala.
Salamat, kaibigan, sa talang pinagsaluhan,
At sa oras na ginintuan ng ngiti mo, kaibigan.

Remembering My First Jesuit

By Father James F. Donelan, S.J.

Fifty-two years ago, in the Spring of 1939, at the Jesuit retreat house in Inisfada, New York, I met a Jesuit for the first time. I had graduated from La Salle High School in January and had decided to be a Jesuit, but hadn’t a clue how to go about it. However, my Aunt Helen, a Dominican nun, had a Carmelite friend who had as her confessor a Jesuit, Father John Gilson. It was the Carmelite sister who arranged for me to visit Father Gilson at Inisfada to find how one goes about becoming a Jesuit.

This gives rise to an interesting question: If Father Gilson was my first Jesuit, then who influenced me to want to be a Jesuit? Most Jesuits attribute their vocation to contact with Jesuits. I had no such contact. In fact, through most of my boyhood years, up until around third year high school, I felt no strong calling to the priesthood. It wasn’t excluded, but neither was it preoccupying.

It was mainly flying that attracted my interest. The first book I recall reading is Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. My heroes were World War I aces (René Fonck, Eddie Rickenbacker, the Red Baron). The magazine G-8 and his Battle Aces was my bible. The most unforgettable and earliest memory of my boyhood years is of my father coming over the hill from the train station, waving a newspaper and shouting “Lindy made it!” Lindy was Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic, May 1927. I was six years old.

But it wasn’t Lindy who fired up my imagination. He was an international hero. I wanted a hero of my own. And I found him. It was Speed Haslick. (I never found out where the name “Speed” came from. The old red Waco biplane Speed flew hardly merited the adjective “speedy”.) Speed’s home port was a small airfield called Holmes. If, 60 years ago, you were to walk down the street where we lived — 64th Street in Woodside — and headed north, you would, after about three miles, have come to an open field with a barn-like hangar, a dirt runway, a windsock and a red Waco biplane. Holmes Airport. How many happy Sunday afternoons I spent there over the years — sitting on the grass by the side of the runway watching Speed landing and taking off, flying passengers on $3 and $5 rides over Manhattan. Occasionally he would go off barnstorming, and Holmes became a lonely field. Today Holmes Airport is called La Guardia, and DC-9s and 727s blast into the skies from concrete runways where once Speed and his Waco lifted off the soft grass into the quiet miracle of flight.

Those years of grade school and early high school were ordinary, schoolboy years. I made model airplanes, read G-8 and His Battle Aces and, when I could, on Sunday afternoons, when no one seemed to care where I was, I went off to Holmes Airport, to watch Speed do his marvelous side slips. My best laid plans at this point in my life were quite simple: Finish high school, go to college for two years, enter the Army Air Corps, serve the required four years in the Air Corps, and then enter commercial aviation, which was just getting off the ground, literally.

But then in the third year of high school, I was assigned to write a report on a book called Come Rack, Come Rope, a fictional account of the life and death of Edmund Campion, an English Jesuit who was executed by Queen Elizabeth in the latter part of the 16th Century. That simple story changed my life. And Speed Haslick had to move over as another figure came on the stage. The contrast in the two men is startling: One, an Oxford don of the 16th Century, the other, a barnstorming airplane pilot of the 1930s.

Whatever it was — naïve romanticism or amazing grace, or both, whatever — I was strongly attracted to the Oxford don, Edmund Campion. Campion was one of Oxford University’s bright stars. When Queen Elizabeth came to Oxford, it was Campion who welcomed her with a Latin oration, in the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin where, centuries later, John Henry Newman would proclaim the Oxford Movement. Elizabeth replied also in Latin. And she told her aide, Lord Cecil, to keep an eye on this young man. If Campion had played his cards right, he could have been Archbishop of Canterbury.

He didn’t play them right. He threw the deck away. He left Oxford and England, went to Douai, France, where he came under the influence of a Jesuit. After ordination in Rome, he returned to England to minister to the persecuted Catholics. Celebrating Mass was punishable by death. He was finally captured, racked and tortured in the Tower of London near where the two princes had been murdered by Richard III; after that he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, near Marble Arch, London. There is a bronze plaque embedded in the pavement in front of Marble Arch which marks the place where Campion was martyred. I was nearly martyred there myself. In an unusual display of piety, I knelt to kiss the bronze plaque and was nearly run over by one of those uniquely English taxicabs, probably driven by a lineal descendant of Oliver Cromwell.

It is a pleasant irony to realize now that my contact with the Society of Jesus came through a Jesuit who lived 400 years ago. And you can see now that it was really Edmund Campion who brought me to Inisfada that day in the Spring of 1939, when I met Father Gilson. So it is really Edmund Campion who is my first Jesuit.

However, it seemed at the time I was chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Father Gilson directed me to a Father Bleicher at Fordham University, who politely explained to me that the Society had 200 applicants but only 40 places, and for obvious reasons, they preferred graduates of Jesuit schools whom they knew, to strangers from elsewhere. But he didn’t reject me completely. He asked me to come back a year later, in June 1940.

So during the rest of 1939 and the first six months of 1940, I continued my studies at Saint Francis College, a small college in Brooklyn. I also kept up my interest in flying. On Sunday afternoons, I would walk to Holmes Airport. Speed was still there doing his neat slide slips in his red Waco. A flying career was still a possibility. It was Plan B if I failed to get into the Society.

It would have been a good time to start a career in aviation, for this was aviation’s heroic age, 1925-1940. In Europe, Saint-Exupery and his Air France pilots opened air routes across the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, down the west coast of Africa, across the South Atlantic and up South America’s east coast. Unable in their primitive aircraft to top 20,000-foot mountains, they flew between them without radar. It is all told in Saint-Exupery’s classic book Wind, Sand and Stars. Here with his poetic language he captures the mystic exaltation of the first airline pilots as they faced death in the rigorous performance of their appointed rounds.

Among the heroes of this heroic age were Speed and his fellow barnstormers. Landing their antiquated Jennys in cow pastures and farm fields throughout the land, they taught America how to fly. They opened up the skies the way the cowboys and their covered wagons had opened up the West. They even looked like cowboys — lean, tanned, wrinkled around the eyes. They dressed the same: leather boots, whipcord trousers, leather jacket, leather helmet, goggles and, of course, the white scarf. And like all pioneers, they paid a high price to conquer mountains, cross deadly deserts and merciless seas. Seventy-five percent of the barnstorming pilots of that heroic age died in plane crashes. Looking back now at how those planes were made — fabric and glue and wire — the modern pilot stands aghast and in speechless admiration.

Then in June 1940 came two signs which seemed to indicate quite clearly what path I should take. The first sign was negative. The Society turned me down for the second time. And rightly so. For during the months I had worked at the World’s Fair my grades had slipped badly. I flunked the Latin course. I used to get home from the World’s Fair, where I was a guide, at around 3:00 a.m., rise at 6:00 a.m., serve Mass and go to school. Sleeping in the subways, after class I would head back out to Flushing and the World’s Fair.

The positive sign was that in 1940 Uncle Sam, preparing for World War II, offered flight training to college students who could fulfil the requirements. Standing in front of the school bulletin board and reading the announcement, I couldn’t believe it. It was a dream come true. I could learn to fly — free!

Thus, at the same time the Society shut its door on me, Uncle Sam held his wide open. No one could blame me if I felt God was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was not meant to be a Jesuit. It all could have ended here. Actually, God was merely writing straight in crooked lines.

For — and such is God’s grace — though I applied for the government flying program and had been rejected twice by the Society, I didn’t give up on the hope of being a Jesuit. But I knew I was running out of time and a decision had to be made. I set two goals for myself that year, June 1940-June 1941. I was determined to work for each goal as it it were only one, yet at the same time not let one interfere with the other.

The first goal was academic: To get good grades, especially in Latin. So I left Saint Francis College and entered sophomore year at Fordham. I would have gone earlier but I couldn’t afford it. But now I had the World’s Fair savings plus a working scholarship from Fordham. I gave full time to my studies, with no sleeping in the subway, and in the final Latin Province exam in May of 1941 I scored a 92. Thus my first goal was achieved.

The second goal was to win my pilot’s wings. I didn’t know yet how I would take to flying — if I had the aptitude to be a pilot. I was assigned at Floyd Bennet Naval Air Station for primary training near where John F. Kennedy airport stands today. After seven hours of instruction, I soloed, and after 35 I had my wings. The program began in June so I had three months of vacation to get my wings without interfering with my college classes. After that, during the school year, I would fly only early on Sunday mornings.

I’ll never forget those early sunrise flights. I would taxi out to one of Floyd Bennet’s six runways, and wait there till the red light in the tower turned green, signalling that visibility was now VFR. If the wind was from the west, my take off would pass over the salt flats and swamps where today we find the great runways of John F. Kennedy. The rising sun hitting the windows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers made it seem as if the city were all aflame.

It is hard to put into words the mystical joy of flight, being up there above the ceiling alone in a fantastic world where billowing cumulus clouds form all sorts of weird shapes — Bavarian castles, sailing ships, the faces of giants who look like Bernini’s water gods, and enormous, nuclear mushrooms. A silent world, so peaceful, and yet so dangerous.

Only two writers have been able to put into words the mystical exhilaration that comes from flight: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote the classic Wind, Sand and Stars — this book describes the heroic efforts and sacrifices made by the men who established the first airmail and passenger routes between Europe, Africa and America — and John Magee, a young American pilot whose sonnet, High Flight, captures, first, the physical rapture of flight:

“I have danced the sky on laughter-silvered wings, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of.”

And then flight’s mystical exaltation:

“And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

Both Antoine de Saint-Exupery and John Magee died in World War II. Saint-Exupery was shot down over North Africa; Magee was shot down over Germany.

As the month of May 1941 drew to a close, I tried to establish for myself my priorities. What was it I really wanted most: a career in aviation or a career in the Society of Jesus? For most of the two years — from May of 1939 to May of 1941 — I was somewhat ambivalent. I suppose my attraction to either career was so strong that the loss of one would be softened by the gaining of the other.

But then a strange thing happened. I can only describe it as the grace of vocation. Gradually, my ambivalence was replaced by a clear, strong determination to be a Jesuit. It was not due to any falling off in my love for flying. I loved it — and still do. But not as a life’s work. Why? I would have to say very simply that it was the grace of vocation. God was calling me to serve Him in a special way. Or at least I thought He was. And if He was, I thought to myself, then the Society would accept me the third time. It not, then I would take to the skies.

On a day in mid-May 1941, I told my mother I was going for an interview by Father Bleicher who had shot me down twice. If it happened a third time, I would change my career choice to flying. At Fordham, I got a positive sign that God was finally seeing things my way. Father Bleicher was not there. He had been sent to the Philippines on an inspection trip. My interview was conducted by a kindly old Irish Jesuit who felt I deserved a chance for having tried three times. And so it was that on June 21, 1941 I entered the Jesuit novitiate of St. Andrew-on-Hudson, and began the first of the 50 years that would lead to this day.

In retrospect, one has to marvel at God’s ways, His crooked lines that conceal a hidden truth. In third year high school, He arranges for me to read a book, Come Rack, Come Rope, which introduces me to a man who, though 400 years dead, would become my model and inspiration. Little did I realize then, as I read Campion’s life, that one day I would live for three years in an Oxford college named Campion Hall, that Saint Mary the Virgin’s Church and Saint John College and the streets and fields where Campion walked would be part of my everyday life, that one day I would be like Campion — a Jesuit and an Oxford don.

And what of Speed Haslick? Whatever happened to him? I flew over to Holmes Airport shortly before entering the novitiate hoping to find Speed. But neither he nor his red Waco were there. It was six years before I returned to Long Island again, and by that time La Guardia had taken over and Holmes Airport had ceased to exist.

Years later, I met a pilot who knew Speed. He told me that when the call to arms was sounded, Speed put his Waco in the hangar and put on the uniform of an Army Air Corps pilot. And here he disappears in the mist of time and the smoke of battle. Most probably he is now with Saint-Exupery and John Magee in that Valhalla where heroes go.

Two months ago, I began my journey back to Manila with an early morning flight from La Guardia. Waiting for departure time and looking out from the observation deck I could, by intersecting the radials of various familiar landmarks, pinpoint where Holmes Airport had been. As I looked and remembered, the thunder of jet engines taking off was drowned out by the noise of a single Waco engine, and I could see Speed — leather jacket, helmet, goggles and scarf — striding out to this plane and mounting it like some medieval knight on his charger. And suddenly, the 50 years dropped away and I was a boy again, sitting on the grass along the runway, dreaming my dreams, hoping that one day I, too, would chase the shouting wind along and dance the sky on silvered wings. I would, but in ways I never dreamed of.

And since a homily is supposed to have a moral, what is the moral of all this? Perhaps Shakespeare says it best of all: “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them though we may.” Readiness is all — not resignation, not passivity, but an active trust in God and His everlasting love.

—————————————–

Father James F. Donelan, S.J. celebrated his Golden Jubilee as a Jesuit on July 25, 1991, attended by friends in a special Mass at the chapel of the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City. His sister, Catherine, also a member of a religious order, flew in from New York City to attend the occasion.

Father Donelan has spent practically all his Jesuit life in the Philippines. He is more of a Filipino, in many ways. On May 24, 1991, he was conferred the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa by the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.

The conferment citation reads: “Man of letters from Oxford University, professor, dean and president of the Ateneo de Manila, founder and professor of the Asian Institute of Management. You have not allowed your commitment to scholarship and administration blind you to the desperate conditions of the poor. As effective advocate for the thousands of street children in the Philippines, you are fund raiser, sponsor, caretaker and relentless lobbyist on their behalf.”

This publication of the homily he delivered on the celebration of his Golden Jubilee is sponsored by friends.

(Published in August 1991 in The Business Star, Manila, Philippines)