As far back as Malabon oldtimers can remember--that's 1926 for the short-lived Malabon Normal School and 1936 for the grade school that eventually grew to become the premier private high school in our town (now a city, ugh!)--St. James Academy always meant the Maryknoll Sisters. The whole town, not just the school, fell in love with the gentle, soft-spoken, mainly white American nuns.
But in 1980, in response to Pope John Paul II's call for Catholic religious orders to follow the strictures of Vatican II, the Maryknoll Sisters gave up the schools they owned and/or administered and moved into direct apostolic work in poor and deprived communities all over the world. Management of St. James Academy, as determined by the Archdiocese of Manila, was transferred to the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena.
We were heartbroken--the students of St. James Academy who had known only the guiding hands and caring hearts of the Maryknoll Sisters. "The Main Event," a homecoming of all alumni in the school grounds, was our goodbye to the sisters. I was asked to write the epilogue for the homecoming's souvenir program.
But for the life of me, at that critical moment when I should have come up with a masterpiece everybody would remember, I somehow couldn't find the words. I am not proud of this obviously labored goodbye to the nuns who had shaped the writer that I am. Even Joseph Conrad must have turned in his grave again for my nth use of his words (that I love dearly). But here it is, anyway. Done.
_____________________
It is inevitable, and it happens all the time: leaving.
One day, we too will decide to leave the lifestyle, the mood, our space of the moment. And it will be another passage to the future.
Who knows what that future will be? Perhaps, for those leaving us, growth, experience, the testing of inner strengths, the searching for inner resources. Surely, the unknown--possibilities which are ever expanding as they touch the currents of social structures and mine the depths of the human psyche.
But what of us, the ones they leave behind? Events are arbitrary signposts. Rarely are they definitive touchstones for recording the growth of the human personality. We love marking times and lives with the dates of events and occurrences, but we often forget that an event is only a physical response to an inner vision, and is never measured by time.
When finally we remember "the year the Maryknoll Sisters left St. James ...," we shall not stop there. We shall move on to questions of true essence. Was it the year we began scouring underneath the rubble of tangibles piled up in a lifetime of achievement for the bedrock of intangibles? Was it the year we sized up our own personal system and, finding it sadly inadequate, started on a feverish search for a lost sense of self? Or was it the year we found out the inexhaustible limits of human growth?
There is, says Joseph Conrad, a solidarity that knits, that "binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." Leaving is not death, it is rebirth. To be left behind is not to be abandoned; it is to be confronted with the true conditions of living:
as impassioned witnesses to the courage of the Maryknoll vision,
whatever form of courage our lives may demand;
as committed individuals, without emotional crutches,
independent and integral ...
whatever form of courage our lives may demand;
as committed individuals, without emotional crutches,
independent and integral ...
--NBT
__________________________________________
Saturday, 19 April 1980, Malabon, Metro Manila
