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| "...an overturned black car resting on a vaguely familiar grassland." |
Saturday mornings are usually extremely lazy days for me. I sleep in and have a late brunch if nobody cares to yank me out of bed. When I do wake up, the routine begins with a runthrough of all the messages and emails I received while I was away in dreamland. December 1, 2018 was to be no different, I thought, but I was direly mistaken. At three minutes before noon (Nepal Standard Time), I awoke to successive vibrations from my smartphone and was jolted out of bed by my own barrage of expletives over the messages and photos I received from my mother -- news of the accident she had met earlier that day, accompanied by five (5) shots of an overturned black car resting on a vaguely familiar grassland.
In one of her messages, mama mentioned that she and everyone with her were ‘still alive,’ which, to a child living abroad and away from his mother, would be the most alarming reason for a phone call. ‘Still alive’ just didn’t cut it for me; I had to know she was completely fine and it didn’t help that my room’s weak WiFi signal prevented me from making a successful call on my first attempt. I’ve always seen something like this coming. With the kind of schedule she has and the speeds at which her service vehicles are compelled to run so she can make it to her appointments on time, I knew this was bound to happen at some point and I have always dreaded it.
I breathed a great sigh of relief when she picked up sounding absolutely calm. No hint of pain whatsoever. She proceeded to tell me that she and the three other people in the car with her escaped with not a single scratch. She was already home after a work meeting which she attended following a physical examination by TaRSIER 117’s first responders. I was baffled by the idea that she could nonchalantly just get back to work a few hours after an experience like that. I would need two dramatic days to recuperate if it happened to me. But then an inner reminder said something along the line of ‘This is your mother. She will always be alright.’ Then I understood. Then I accepted and let go of doubt.
A couple of days later when I felt that any remaining undetected twisted nerves would have rested back in place, I asked mama what went through her mind while the car turned over with her inside it. I was half expecting an answer detailing the life-saving procedures she may have learned from military combat training, but instead got a very clear expression of faith. “It was like I was not myself at all. It felt like I was there just to go through it because it was happening to me. It was like a total giving up of myself to something that I didn’t have the time to reason what or who,” she said. “One doesn’t reason at all. One just goes through it with complete trust of what may become. There was nothing except total submission to a being that I didn’t think what or who. It’s never human or materially comprehensible. It’s Divine -- a super being beyond what I am capable of intellectually comprehending. I just gave myself up with complete trust. I didn’t think of being saved. I just trusted and nothing else.”
Her words conjured images from a film I saw several weeks ago called ‘Mister Lonely,’ which involves a scene where a nun who accidentally fell from an aircraft in flight professes complete trust in God and hits the ground alive and unscathed. To many, these words from my mother may be quite confounding. Very few people know Liza Quirog deeply as she is a very private person who is picky when it comes to the subject of faith and Spirit. But I know my mother and these words did not surprise me at all. You see, one of her most ubiquitous pieces of advice, always prominently featured when she makes an ‘aunty’ speech at a debut party of one cousin or another, is to pray. She does not name drop any deity, she just emphasises prayer as an effective daily tool in life. This, dear friends, I must say, is not lip service to please religious majority crowds or for lack of anything else to say. I know mama and she is a very prayerful person. Perhaps she does not hear mass regularly, spew out memorised Bible passages, recite the Rosary or even mutter the Lord’s Prayer, but in her own private space and time, she does pray.
I’ve always been wary of people who claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious,’ subtly turning my head ever so slightly to my right to secretly roll my eyeballs each time I hear it. It’s a very common phrase for disillusioned individuals and apostates who have left the organised religion they were raised in. It took a long time for me to realise that I was raised by one ‘spiritual but not religious’ woman who didn’t even make a verbal claim to the description. When I asked my mother how she called herself religion-wise, she said something to this effect: ‘Baptised Catholic, trying to practise the teachings of Christ and the Buddha while constantly seeking as a Theosophist.’ Even if she is not the typical church-going Filipino, she approaches all matters of Spirit with utmost reverence and it was perhaps not until this most recent brush with fate that she has proven to herself the strength of her own faith even if it does not come with a strict label.
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| as seen on the Bohol Tribune 09 December 2018 |
