Our Winged Self

In the place where I work part-time, I have learned another "r" to add to the three "r's" in the environmental cause: reuse, reduce, recycle AND refuse. 

From my inbox this morning came a message from a friend. We have been discussing, back and forth, in our emails the issue of guilt that women get saddled with and makes them capitulate to the pressure of others, whether it's family, friends, colleagues. She wrote that guilt has been used, by men especially, as a way of making women feel less worthy as wives, as mothers, than what they are. She ended her note with a cheerful "This season, let's make this our chant: take no sorrow, give no sorrow."

On the third hour of this morning, while going about cleaning my files, I found this old composition, dating, by my estimate, to sometime in '08 or '09, about the time I was enrolled in an introductory course in print-making.

In my middle age, prayer has morphed into something else. To my mother’s grief, I have stopped attending Catholic mass on Sundays and on holy days of obligation.

In childhood, Sister Gemma of the Cross, SPC, our music teacher and glee club conductor,  told us heartfelt singing has double the power of spoken prayer. That lesson stayed.

Through the years, as I watched the Bolshoi, Alice Reyes  (she dances “with libog” in the immortal words of Lino Brocka), Myra Beltran, Ligaya Amilbangsa, Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey troupe, actors like Adul de Leon (before cancer claimed her) and Emily Watson, who channeled cellist Jacqueline Du Pre in a biopic, passionate pianists Cecile Licad and Lang Lang, equally passionate violinists like Alexandru Tomescu, cellist-conductor Mtislav Rostropovich, my godson Diwa de Leon going into a trance as he plays his compositions, my seven-year-old niece Bianca drawing with deep concentration figures on scratch paper or playing a simplified version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—then and now, I am convinced that artists have that ineluctable  link to the Force.

In the past five years that I’ve been doing fine arts studies and taking private art lessons, I’ve also felt an eerie feeling come over me when I’m painting, working on a collage and, lately, a rubber-cut. Not only am I in the moment, any form of distraction is unwelcome—a chatty classmate, a buzzing cell phone, a chore that needs doing and nagging me at the back of my head.

When a piece is done, no matter how faulty, I go: “Gee, did I really do that?” I can never call these latest products of my hand “work.” The writing, the editing, yes, that’s work,  work I like doing and was trained to do to enable me to earn some pin money for the occasional Starbucks treat or rum Coke at a bar. 

Painting and other modes of visual art expression have become a form of prayer. The rare remuneration that comes out of it is, for want of a better phrase, accidental grace.

Here is the poet Khalil Gibran ( 1883-1930 ) on the subject of prayer:

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.

And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.

When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.

Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion. For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:

And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:

Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others

you shall not be heard.

It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

I cannot teach you how to pray in words. God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.

And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.

But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart,

And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence,

Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.

It is thy desire in us that desireth.

It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also.

We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all.