June

How did June make an entrance? We had decided to end May with a visit to a shrine of Mary, the Mother of God, about an hour’s drive away south of the island.

As far as I remember, the wife and I had attended the Flores de Mayo, to Catholics the month’s main draw, only twice, in a church that gives on the sea.

We did not see the usual scene, little girls acting as angels accompanying the letters of the words, AVE MARIA, as they were carried one after the other towards Mary’s statue near the altar.

Instead, the congregation at once filed towards the statue to put their flowers in a large vase before it. As though to make amends for our piddling observance of the Flores, we thought of going on a pilgrimage to the shrine, which we welcomed for two reasons.

First, we had heard that the shrine’s caretaker, an old priest and friend, had returned after a long absence, and a visit to the place would give us a chance to catch up with each other.

Second, a couple invited us for lunch in their house, after we had done with attending the Holy Mass at the shrine, to celebrate the fiesta of St. Isidore, the patron saint of their barangay, and, of course, we knew that in the country a barangay fiesta always meant a meal of champions.

Everything happened as expected — the Holy Mass, the meeting with the priest afterwards, and our conversation, long enough to let our sugar level fall, and for our noisy stomachs to make room for the generosity of our hosts, which required that during the eating we should surpass the world record for ingestion.

May ended on that note, more or less. Because we realized that we still had two days to spare, during which the wife and I travelled to a city on a neighboring island, the wife’s hometown, to attend the wake of her eighty-seven-year-old uncle who died not two days before. But we had to take the next noontime fast craft for home, because, at any moment, our daughter might give birth, her pregnancy having gone to full term.

How life’s seasons never leave our sights — the cycle of birth and death and the consolations and burdens of daily living.

The Gospels tell us of how Jesus dealt with this cycle. For instance, Luke narrates that at one time Jesus was travelling to a city called Naim, and near the gate of the city he met the funeral procession of a youth who had died, the only son of a widow.

“When the Lord saw her,” Luke writes, “he was moved with pity for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’” He approached and touched the coffin and said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” And, according to Luke, the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

This simply tells me that the Risen Lord walks our streets and meets us where we are, and in fact travels with us, and that we can feel the power of his compassion, whether directly or through other people.

The widow of Naim did not as yet see Jesus as God, but as someone with a great concern for her grief, which was deep enough to call for the exercise of his divine power.

We mostly just stayed home on June the first, which seemed ordinary enough as to all but escape notice. Egged on by an occasional thunderstorm, we had hoped that the rainy season would begin in earnest. But the heat had remained the same, and had continued to deal such a torpor as would deaden thought and memory.

Still, I recall a poem by Thomas Merton about the incident that Luke writes about, entitled, “The Widow of Naim,” and find it to the purpose as I reflect on the human journey, now halfway through the year. In a stanza, the disciples of Christ, who walked with him, addressed the menfolk who accompanied the dead youth:

“Why do you walk in funerals, you men of Naim,
Why go you down to graves, with eyes like winters,
And your cold faces clean as cliffs?
See how we come, our brows are full of sun,
Our smiles are fairer than the wheat and hay,
Our eyes are saner than the sea.
Lay down your burden at our four-roads’ crossing,
And learn a wonder from the Christ, our Traveller.”