The madness of April’s Fools

David was my eldest daughter’s very dear friend, and after a fashion, her significant other. He was a techie in his mid-30s, conservative in taste and limited of fears; he was fiercely independent and passionately entrepreneurial. For entertainment and investment, he tested an experimental plane. Last week, technical difficulties sent him plunging into mother Earth.

Karol Wojtyla, an 84-year old Pole whose imprint is indelibly carved into the soul of the Roman Catholic Church, breathed his last as thousands in St. Peter’s Square mournfully prayed for his well being. Popularly revered across Christendom, and quietly reviled in a few quarters within his own communion, Pope John Paul II’s enigma will cast an extended shadow on the Vatican long after his amiable demeanor fades from the environs of the Sistine Chapel. This spring day along the Tiber, a prominent voice in the last 26 years is stilled.

My retired Methodist minister father just turned 93 at a nursing home in Honolulu. After renal failure late last year, he entered and remains in the domain of the twilight zone. My youngest sister took a couple of months off from her job to nurse Dad. After she returned to her hospital work, Dad wandered around their Ewa Beach neighborhood in the middle of the night. Perhaps, he was looking for my Mom who at 85 suffers from the debilitating effect of Alzheimer’s disease. She putters around the confines of her own Aala world at a residential home for the elderly, oblivious to the requirements of the moment.

My sixth grade Social Studies class covered ancient Greece and Rome this past quarter. We watched snippets of the movie The Gladiator where the son of the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius enters the Forum in Rome. Images of the splendor of the Basilicas, the Senators notwithstanding, stood on the shoulders of servants and slaves. The gore in the Coliseum was common fare to hide imperial viciousness and appease the voracious appetite of the citizens for violence. Pax Romana was a wild chariot ride along Hadrian’s highway and a bumpy cart ride through the Elysian fields.

We watched Anthony Quinn portray Zorba the Greek. Zorba admonished his bookish and meek British employer in the island of Crete that to really live life one must live it in madness. In the closing scene, after the tragic deaths of a young widow and a desecration of a Madame’s memory, and the failure of an economic drive to revive an old mine, the cautious Briton finally ask Zorba to teach him how to dance.

The Pinoy’s Tinikling is a dance performed in the season of harvest, the completion of a crop cycle. Based on an old Malay observation, birds were seen to fly through swaying bamboo poles even in the fierce winds. They then promoted a lifestyle of graciously dancing in the midst of the chaos of life. Malays around the world have shown versatility in weathering the social storms of life by gingerly stepping lightly but decidedly between the slapping bamboos of human existence.

Ancient India developed four âshramas, or “stages of life.” The first is that of the student, the adventuring learner. Next comes the established householder, followed by the creatively wild, liberated but detached non-village resident dweller. Finally, one turns into a walking dead, a wandering sage. Each stage is approached as a lifetime with its own rites of completions and passages into the next stage. Life is lived playfully sober, and/or somberly playful.

Completions of life is never easy, more so when it comes suddenly and in the prime of life. The loss of David is surely my daughter’s deep grief. Pope John Paul’s demise entails grief among the massive faithful but accompanied for sure by a loud sigh of relief from pain for the admired pontiff.

The late Reverend Father Gary Bradley, SJ, burdened by diabetes, collapsed at the altar of Saipan’s Kristo Rai Catholic Church just after invoking the triune blessings. Close friends conceded that he could not have chosen a better way to go. In his conversations, he was known to decry the fact that in Saipan, we barely care for someone’s life until s/he dies, in which case, “we are lavish in our praises and exorbitant in our novena feasts.” Father Gary’s flair for the dramatic was in this life, not later.

As David’s life flashed before his eyes, it is conceivable that he would have declared of his life: “Wow! What a ride it was!!!” Sans Zorba’s madness, we are but simpletons waiting for a ride that will not come. The theological acuity of Father Bradley, Pope John Paul and my Dad would have made them lucid about one thing—each individual’s life is one, unique, unrepeatable gift in human history, of which there has not been anything like it before, and there will never be another one like it ever again. Life’s choice is clear: Let it pass by while longing for something else elsewhere, a better one later, or be the Lord of the Dance in the here and now. In the latter lies the madness of April’s fools.

The pharaohs of Egypt prepared for the afterlife, and the tomb of Qin Shi Hungdi included provisions for needs beyond the burial grounds. These are now archaeologists‚ artifacts. The Mayas worried about the otherworld. Castañeda’s Don Juan dabbles in mescaline-induced states of the otherworld in the midst of this world. Egyptian Coptics ceded to medieval Christianity what would become Dante’s vision of Heaven and Hell. The cosmology of Medieval and Evangelical Christianity resides in this realm. A pity. So much life is wasted in the waiting room!

There is a notion of eternity that is not about perpetuity in time, but about the quality of spatial existence. The living and the completion of one’s life in the here and now is irretrievably consigned into the annals of history. It can not be changed or altered. At completion, that permanence is final. Living theologians refer to this as the Eternal Now. In this vein, I celebrate David’s life, make peace with my Dad and Mom’s, remember Father Gary’s, and commemorate the wild ride of the Pontiff’s mitered reign in the seat of Peter. The Fools of April abide with you.

Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.