My father was dying.  It was a fact that I refused to acknowledge for months. Cancer steadily ate up his lungs for years. Thanks to cigarettes: it made us suffer for years and made us orphans eventually. Hours before I received a call that indeed my father would come home in a coffin, I prayed for the impossible: that I would be given the chance to hug and tell him how grateful I was for all he has done for all of us; to tell him, I love him. It was never granted.


     Of all my siblings, with the exception of my brother Jojo, I guess I was the one who stayed by my father's side the longest. I was his apprentice for years. It was from him that I learned that helping other people makes us better persons. But, in all those years I never uttered a word of gratitude or of love. 'I love you, dad' was corny. Everything was presumed, understood, tacit, if not taken for granted. Once I told my best friend in college, Jerome, that one of my greatest regrets was that I was not able to hug my father when he was yet alive. He said: 'You're right. But you can still hug him through other people.  Go and tell them your stories so that both children and parents could hug each other and say, 'I love you...' before it's too late.' Vita brevis: life is short. It was a costly lesson to learn that 'presumption hurts our loved ones the most.

     I've heard this story twice already but it still amazed me every time. Ahhhh, so I promised to find and verify its source and retell it. And please, help me figure out the real value of this story ;)

     A solid explosion literally rocked us. Black mushroom like
smoke went into the air. A grenade just went off. It was like in the movie, I thought. But when a man, approximately 70 meters away from us, came out from the gate walking with his two legs trembling, and his fists clenching I knew then that it was real and fatal. He raised his both hands to the chest and then fell face down. That was traumatic. The scene and the sound would flash in my mind every time I saw a camouflage uniform or a military tank.

     Have you met people whose gloomy auras are contagious? They are habitually depressed and perpetually complaining about anything. I called them casts of "Back to the Future."  The famous poem Desiderata advised us to avoid this kind of people; "...they are vexatious to the spirit."  When you are with them, you become angry and depressed too. They zapped your energy.

     One story that really challenged our imagination when we were in the seminary was the story of the two monks. After, we heard the story, many of us wanted to encounter such a situation and would choose what the first monk did. Everybody loved the first monk. Why? Here how the story goes:

     

     Now, our whole being could not stand being divided or dissected. It struggles to make us whole again. It struggles to be reconciled with itself.  We may deny a sexual desire for a certain person, for instance. But since our 'education', or our custom brand it as something 'improper', we push them down to the subconscious and we either tell ourselves, it's dirty or improper, and therefore, you should not want it. BUT, our spirit knows, you badly desire it. What happened is an internal complication which results in several neuroses.


     Now, our internal doctor will attempt to fix it. So, it will look for a way to reconcile our fragmented self. That's where our dream comes in and does what it was designed for. It will show us the reality, but it will attempt to prevent us from waking up. See? Our dream was designed to keep us sleeping while showing us things we don't want to accept.


     Let's say, you dreamed of killing someone. That someone has no face, or the identity of that person shifts from your friend to your enemy or a person you don't really care. Why is this so? Your dream wants you to accept the fact that you are angry, but it attempts to hide real identity of that person lest your feeling of anger would surge up and eventually wake you up. So, you understand now why you're choking to death a friend or insignificant person in your dream. It's your job, when you wake up to trace who would be that person that you intend to kill ( which could be yourself too ). Your dream wants you to accept that feeling. No, I am not saying that you need to really kill that person in real life. On the contrary, what our dream tells us is that it's okey to get angry and you don't need to deny that. It wants you to own that anger and do something positive about it.


     Just as dream is a gift from God, so is anger. Jesus got angry. Gandhi got angry, so did the saints and our parents. God placed it there to protect us from injustice. To get angry at the injustice is not a sin, it is even a duty. So, next time you would feel angry, accept the fact that you're angry, and then choose a Christian response to it.