Finessing faith

I’ve long wanted to do a review of Christopher Hitchens’ best-selling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and maybe even add a few nodding remarks on other anti-faith books that have gained good currency over the past decade. These would include The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, End of Faith by Sam Harris, and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett.

But that would be a tough go. I’d need much time for deep discernment, and pray to achieve the proper tone, diction, default mode, just so I avoid suspicion of being a lapsed agnostic.

Uhrrm, este... The hesitation might also have something to do with the circumstance of having two boys still in the process of acquiring college degrees in Catholic institutions. So an omnibus write-up, which could turn out glowing let alone amen-ic — on the supreme rationality of atheism — would have to be done with utmost care.

Ironically, what recently came my way was another title, as thoroughly engaging, albeit hymn-ing of the old redoubt. It is an excellent book, a local publication at that, dwelling on the obverse side of the view that theism and religion are eventually bound for the scrap heap of humanistic thought.

That this book happens to be authored by a good old friend might have something to do with its immediate prioritization for comment. But it certainly helps that this friend is a first-rate writer of both poetry and non-fiction prose, besides ever exercising an eye that twinkles over matters of ordinary time, inclusive of beauty and/of spirit.

I hadn’t realized that he’s very spiritual, or staunchly religious, although I now recall that he had a youthful stint in Ireland as a participant in Roman Catholic bonding rites of education.

Decades later, now comes the excellent read that is Ah, Wilderness: A Journey Through Sacred Time by Simeon Dumdum Jr., published by Ateneo de Manila University Press. It’s a collection of brief essays originally written as regular columns for Cebu Daily News by the poet “Jun” Dumdum, who also currently serves the public as a Regional Trial Court Judge. 

His own Introduction to the personal anthology of 147 pieces composing five sections — Advent; Christmas (And Ordinary Time); Lent; Easter; and Ordinary Time — prepares us for the unfolding gift of gentle introspection. Here’s an excerpt:

“Journey defines the world and life. Like a top the earth spins around the sun, and the loyal moon keeps circling the earth, setting off tides. The shuffle of night and day and the ebb and flow of the tides the pendulum mimics as it swings from left to right.

“Every time I get a chance to travel I bring a small notebook with me, intending to record my impressions as I move from place to place. But often the moving around would tire me, or else the experience would claim no less than my full attention, allowing me precious little time to stop and put my thoughts down in writing. But later I would catch my memory missing out on a number of details, and always those trips that did get recorded I would recall with a freshness next only to that of the actual experience itself.

“Every diary makes the events internal. The entries there speak less of the landscape than of the soul. Somehow the art of recording makes the river or field of flowers part of a spiritual scene. Observations that on the surface relate to the outside world ultimately speak about one’s relationship with one’s Creator.

“I move in a sacred world because God fills every space. Every journey — because in the end it is a return to God — is a journey through sacred time.”

The good reader should be able to divorce his own views from those of any writer, from the material’s core contents, in terms of subscribed ideas and predilections. More essential is to evaluate and appreciate the sheer quality of the writing.

This is the experience I happily find myself embracing while going through Dumdum’s cycles of essays, each one a fountain of engaging ruminations and insights. They are fey, wry, selfless, endowed with that smile of confidence in faith that need not become any bludgeoning tool for proselytizing.

Jun Dumdum does not need to render any pleading or manifestation of the authenticity of his spiritual resolve. He simply glories in it, in a quiet, self-effacing way, so that it is he, of the charming honesty of a devotee, we get to believe in.

Considerably, weaving in literary erudition contributes to these essays’ lustrous facets. Quotations, paraphrases, mentions and allusions are spun as fabled weft across his faith’s woof. They enmesh a delicate worldview in a continuum of a tapestry that documents the human as much as it celebrates the divine. 

The essay “End of Story” closes thus:

“If someone were to write our lives and were to observe us day-to-day, he would know the ending. And if he knew nothing but the ending, and were a good writer, he would reverse time’s arrow and from the ending weave our story back to the beginning. For, as Henry James said, ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’

“‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ asked the meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz in his paper given to the American Association for the Advancement of science in Washington on December 29, 1979. Does one’s cruelty to an old woman today set off an earthquake at the end of history? But already William Blake eloquently put it in his ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

“‘Kill not the moth nor butterfly,/ For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.’”

A legion of poets and writers is conscripted not exactly to shore up the rationales for these reflections, nor to provide chic decor, but as an army of sharp pins upon whose heads the angels of the author’s mind can dance with proper decorum.

Thus he calls in Hemingway, Frost, Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Shakespeare, Dante, Archibald MacLeish, T.S. Eliot (whose notion of the “objective correlative” is elegantly redefined), and a similarly motley crew of artists from Michelangelo to Chagall and Dali. 

The wilderness spoken of is not one of roots and trunks and vines of abandon, but the company of distractions that both poet and sinner have to elude, to realize their respective (or mirroring) inscapes.

In “Uncertain Weather,” the rhetoric turns infinite:

“Did I say that life is as brief as a lightning flash? Then we enter the realm of the meteorological, no, the spiritual, in whose almanac or atlas we find the directions towards our true home. As we journey towards it, we ourselves become signs, as much as the wind and the leaves. I remember Carlos Angeles’ poem, ‘Storm Warning.’ Here are the last lines. Pray tell if you find there an image of you and me, and if this is how we should see ourselves towards the end of time:

“‘... for a moment demandable and brief,/ Two interlocking leaves trace a calm route/ Landward, and the now uncertain weather.’”  

For marvelously finessing his very own treasury of devotion, Judge Jun obligates us to host a moveable treat of countless cups in his favorite coffeehouses with a view.

As he recounts in his essay “Isaiah,” cappuccino warms him as he wrestles with the challenge of writing up the daunting subject. It’s a stalemate, even as he shares a storehouse of what he admires in the prophet who reminds of the approach of Christmas.

Our friend the sage ends his caffeine rush thus:

“I looked at the cup, it had no coffee left. I drank from it all the light that it contained, café au light.”

Ah, wicked is this wilderness of delights, in an effervescent, stimulating sort of way, making it fun to reserve our last judgment. (Not of the singer but the song?) We dare not say it.