by Frank Savadera, SJ
Miles away from us, my friend Judith sends her regular e-mail. For the past two years, she has been writing about how life is in America. Quite often, she would tell us about the exciting places, the new people and communities that she comes in close contact with. Unusual is the fact that she never sent any of her photographs. Instead, her lengthy paragraphs, detail the new goings-on in her life – her pains and her simple joys, her greater appreciation for family, her growing regard for prayer, for friends and even for the minutest things. Her mails are usually the mushy type, approximating the content of ‘forwarded’ messages that we would rather immediately delete from our inboxes. Yet, something about these messages often leaves a lump in my throat, rendering my body momentarily numbed and my mind seemingly wandering away from my usual and mundane preoccupations. You see, Judith is not a mere tourist nor a Filipina trying her luck in New York. At the start of the advent season this year, she just had to break the news: the doctors had been very kind yet honest to inform that her cancer had spread. Emotions initially gripped me as I read through the text which informed how the mail I was reading may well be her last. I was stunned yet consciously perplexed. Some hundred miles away from me, a woman, a friend lies helpless, perhaps even in pain, contemplating what and how life had been, given her now fragile existence. Have you ever thought of yourself, at the twilight of your years, sitting in one corner of a room, rocking your chair and asking yourself -- what may well be for my friend Judith, a far from a mere academic inquiry -- the very real and most dreadful existential questions: “How do I make sense out of the things happening around me? What is my life truly about? What is there for me to hope for?”
Firstly, I ask these questions out of the experience of occasionally being stunned and numbed by certain phenomena and goings on in my life, by the true-to-life-shocking situations just as that of Judith’s. Since the possibilities of experience are numerous and varied, then from life, I can almost always expect more perplexing, more puzzling questions that may accompany every instance that come my way.
Needless to say, the events that transpire outside of me, are never detached from who I am. Thus to make full sense of events, much like that of the sufferings of a friend, means for me a breaking free from my unattached, isolated existence to a cognition of the 'other' that ever impinges itself on my oftentimes impervious system of constructs. Life, therefore, must endeavor change. I must continually open myself up to a world that promises to reveal new ways of looking at and absorbing things. Life is to fashion myself as an actor, that is, more than a mere spectator, and involved in a drama of existence that establishes for myself a basic commitment to processes of and goings on in the world. And … what is there for us to eventually hope for? Praying for Judith, likewise led me to a biblical story of a widow, a Jewish woman who carried my friend’s same peculiar name. Scriptures talk about this wealthy and beautiful woman who lived life in lonely mourning for her dead husband. We learned that in her precarious emotional state, the biblical Judith so trusted a far greater force that allowed her to take on the challenge to engender a spirit of confidence amongst her downtrodden people. She exposed herself to the enemy line, charmed her oppressors and in her weakness and lack, ensured victory for her nation.
Life, I continue to discover arouses in us such a sense of hope, such a sense of victory that comes even amidst our many limitations --- a consequence of our acknowledgement of the far greater being, the God who makes even our living and hoping possible. Thus, with the same words that inspired the biblical Judith to seek life amidst our utter lack and limitations, we continue to submit ourselves to the act of living by praying: “O God, my God, hear me …. It is you who are the author of all events and of what precedes and follows them. The present also and the future you have planned. Whatever you devise comes into being; the things you decide on come forward and say, “Here we are! All your ways are in readiness and your judgement is made with foreknowledge.” (adopted from Judith 9:5-6) To the greater Being that allows us to hope and live, we come forward and say: “Here we are, Lord. We take life as you had given us ... and as you may decide ... to take that same life away.” I’ll be seeing you, Judith.
