Submitted by Vox Bikol on
THE TITLE OF THIS COLUMN is from the poem of Chiara Lubich. The homily of the Jesuit Father Catalino Arevalo during President Corazon Aquino's funeral mass spoke of her selflessness, faith, and love for her family. I think great men and women lived their lives with a great sense of sacrifice, with a tenacity of purpose and a consistency of life that finds its source from an ardent love of God and neighbor. I would like to dedicate this poem to President Corazon Aquino who was not only an icon of democracy but a living witness of faith.
If on All Souls Day you go to the cemetery of Verano,
you see an endless line of tombs.
And toward evening, as night begins to pulse,
a tiny light is lit for each.
A common tomb gathers up a number without number of the dead
and for each of the dead a spark.
A number without number of these lights,
like a fragment of the Milky Way fallen to earth.
Days pass
and each day marks thousands of those who are no more.
There is a day set for each.
And the day will come for me, for you, for everyone.
One tiny light more beside others.
A day of tears and sorrow for those who were close,
then life returns to what it was before.
And next to the sound of weeping for you
the frenetic jazz from a bar;
a white bow on the front of a house;
the howl of siren from the ambulance, announcing danger,
and the pop of champagne proclaiming a wedding.
Old lamps leaning on worm-eaten gates,
rouged ladies, symbols of vanity.
Such is life.
But, though the stars have each a name,
few of the Verano lights speak to anyone.
They are dead! Dead...already nameless.
They are dead because they wanted to live.
They are dead because in life they did not die.
But indeed there are courageous ones who confronted death
and were ready in their nothingness to let the Lord live.
They live in eternal glory
and in the unperishing memory of mortals.
How may contemporaries were there of a Teresa of Avila,
a Francis, a Vincent!
But who remembers their names?
They passed away and no trace remains.
The saints are bolts of lightning
who lit up the nights of their times and those that followed,
because an empty lamps, they glowed with eternal Light.
They lost their lives for God
and swore never to desert him.
So he, the divine craftsman,
worked them, filed them, planed them, broke them down
with such harsh trials that leave a person almost spent:
alive only to sorrow, alive to love.
So that once purified in heart and soul and mind,
God gives the saints a heavenly task.
They work and work
but it is no longer they who work.
God works in them
and the world is converted.
Hearts drawn by the brightness so much longed for, dream of,
almost unconsciously, in multitudes follow the light,
and with the saints find the same God.
In them is the law that works a revolution
and from below upholds and creates a divine society,
humanity Christified.
The saints are not lights at Verano;
They are stars alight in heaven eternally.