First Day of Work

Firsts are very important things, so today I write about my first day of work.

... Well, there's nothing much to write about, actually. I came to the office on time, I spent some time settling into my new role as an employee of an organization (and as a taxpaying citizen of Philippine society), I met with my superiors, and I read and I read and I read.

Maybe firsts don't always have to be a bang. Or maybe it isn't the bang that makes a first; it's just the fact that it is one.

One thing I realized, though... has nothing to do with the work I did. I realized that in the corporate world, if one does not have even the tiniest sense of one's own person, then it is very easy to be small. I do something that perhaps a million other people around the world do: I struggle with financial terms, I get lost in the complexity of words and numbers, I pretend that it's all perfectly manageable, although a tiny voice inside me is yelling the panic warning. How am I different from that million people out there? Has 21 years of life made me the same?

The answer to that would probably be yes if I myself stopped believing that I am different, if I stopped holding on to my dreams and passions. Being big or small is a trick of the mind, and it is only one mind that can perform it: my own. What I want, what I believe in, what I know I can do-- these are things that make me my own person. A sense of ownership of identity is what makes me big, that is to say, that is what helps me be different because it is what makes me different. Losing my sense of self would be losing to my place in this world.

The Death of the Pope

Pope John Paul II died at 9:37 PM on Saturday, 02 April 2005 [3:37 AM, 03 April 2005, Manila time].

I'm not really sure what that means for me. I'm sure to millions of people, especially to young people like myself, the pope's death means mourning of the type they have never done before, a kind of mourning that is reserved especially for a pope. And there is only one pope, and the pope has been pope for more than 26 years. How many of those people 26 years and below (I probably should add at least five years to that age bracket, since those people weren't old enough to have memories of their of the last pope's death)... How many of them are going through the same search for meaning about the pope's death?

Then again, it might just be me. My sister, a mere three years older than I, teared up as we were watching re-runs of the death announcement on BBC. Perhaps I took the pope for granted? The news was there; I encountered a good number of his encyclicals in my theology classes; he came to Manila twice, though the one I remember was in January 1995, when I was ten years old; I've been to Rome and St. Peter's and the Vatican Museums. But I think none of that did anything to make him a real, living, breathing human figure. To me, Pope John Paul II belonged to the pages of a textbook, right beside the pages that said something about dead historical figures. He was a portrait on the wall. He was a remote character. I didn't see him the way I saw other big people of our times, like Bush or Kofi Annan. They were moving in time; he was frozen in time.

That perhaps is the cause of ambiguity. Perhaps I am coming to terms with the death of a person I didn't really see as living. The public image of the pope has two dimensions: first, as a pope, a title in the Church and all the meaning that goes with it, second, as a human person who fills that title. A blessing given by a pope certainly is special, but the same as any blessing given by any other pope, say Pope John Paul I. But if we put a more personal dimension to it, that it was a Pope John Paul II blessing, that certainly is a unique blessing and the only one of its kind. The knowledge that John Paul II will no longer be there to give his blessings in the future is a cause for sadness. I think the personal dimension is the one I haven't come to realize. His passing, to me, is part of the cycle of church leadership, and not the passing of a pope who has made so many changes while in that leadership.

And perhaps our sadness, sorrow, and mourning belong only to who people are, not what they were called.