Roses of the Little Flower

"Inspired by the countless pretty buds near the altar, waiting to be distributed to the people, The Little Flower's Day, September 30, 1931"

Those white and crimson roses, shy, demure,
And sweetly nestling on the silver tray!
What are they, fairy saint, so soft, so pure?
Eternal blooms of God's eternal day
You plucked from Mary's garden? Or are they
Red kisses playful cherubs stole from you
And smiling strewed upon our earth? Oh, say!
When time to light your star-lamps' varied hue,
Did your hands tremble, and upon us drop...a few?

These are your roses, Little Flower, blooms
That may mean many things, but they to me
Are petals of yourself, that on the tombs
Of marbled hearts are gently falling free,
So, crumbling, these may loose that soul to be
A seeker of the heights upon whose air
Are spilt your fragrant sighs of purity.

And how I wish I were some angel fair,
O Little Flower, gazing on your beauty there!

― Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, A.B. 1935

Manila, 30 September 1931

Sainte Thérèse de L'Enfant Jesus by Edgar Maxence. 1931.
Oil on canvas. Royal College of Saint Alban, Valladolid, Spain.

(Image source)

Riding the Whirlwind

THERE WAS a time not very long ago, when we used to refer to outbreaks of violence in the Far East as "incidents." It is significant that we no longer do so. We have come to realize that these "incidents" are not isolated local disturbances but ominous manifestations of a vast general upheaval, a social revolution that in varying stages and under diverse forms is taking place in every country in Asia. To understand this revolution — and we must understand it, or, sphinx-like, it may destroy us all — it is necessary to grasp something of the nature of Asian society itself.
          Now, the basic fact about Asian society is not merely that it is agrarian, but that it is agrarian in a very special sense. Unlike agrarian societies in other parts of the world, Asian society depends for its very existence on the preservation of a delicate and difficult balance between land and population, between man and nature. This is because Asia is characterized by very high concentrations of rice-eating population on a limited supply of land suitable to rice culture.
          The traditional Asian solution to this problem has been the prodigal expenditure of human labor, the cheapest and most readily available form of power in the circumstances, on highly intensive agriculture, or what is known as "garden farming." This simple economic fact has had far-reaching social and political implications. On the one hand the demands of intensive agriculture, of the desperate back-breaking struggle for a bare subsistence, have given the masses of Asia neither the time nor the ability to participate in government, much less to rule themselves. On the other hand the precarious balance between land and population has demanded a strong, highly centralized omnicompetent state to protect it from the forces, whether natural or human, which continually threaten to upset it. Only such a state could have undertaken the extensive public works necessary to control the water supply while warding off marauding tribes and maintaining in operation the work-cycle of the laboring masses.
          Hence the development at the cultural centers of Asia — in China, Japan, Cambodia and Java — of highly centralized bureaucratic empires run by a small specialized class of scholar-officials whose business it was to govern, just as the business of the masses was to labor and to obey. Such was the traditional structure of Asian society: a pyramidial structure of which the Chinese empire offers the most perfect and most ancient example. At the base of the pyramid was the peasantry, its energies fully engaged in the primitive cultivation of land, with little or no time for anything else; above the peasantry was the land-owning gentry; from the land-owning gentry came the scholar-officials who administered the empire; and at the summit of all was the emperor, whose divine function it was to preserve the equilibrium between land and population, man and nature, heaven and earth.
          It was a stable society, all the more stable as it developed a religious-philosophical system, Confucianism, which emphasized balance, harmony, the maintenance of the status quo, reverence for authority, conservatism. It was stable but not static. The equilibrium was sometimes disturbed, the harmony broken. Natural calamities — floods, droughts, locusts — destroyed crops. Bad emperors, greedy landlords, grasping officials took more than their share of what the land produced. Then the masses suffered, starved, died. Hungry farmers turned outlaws; barbarians poured in through the unguarded frontier, burning and looting; the sacred work-cycle stopped; there was no one to adjust the earthly calendar with the heavenly — and there was chaos.

          But for this, too, the system made provision. Formulated in China, the device for restoring equilibrium to a disturbed society was adopted in varying measures throughout the Far East. When such disasters occurred, the ruler was said to lose the mandate of heaven. Rebellion was then permissible, and the successful rebel by the very fact of his success, received the mandate and founded a new dynasty. Thus, although dynasty succeeded dynasty, the system survived. It survived for almost four millenia until the coming of Western man, who brought, not merely a new dynasty, nor even a new empire, but revolution.

          For the spiritual baggage of Europeans who came to make their fortunes in Asia contained material of a highly explosive nature. In the first place, new ideas: Christianity, with its emphasis on the human person, his rights and freedoms, valid even against the state; Western science, with its concept of a universe governed not by capricious gods but by determinable laws, laws which man can formulate and even to some extent utilize; popular government, based on the revolutionary notion that rulers are actually responsible to the ruled. In the second place, new tools: new and better and faster ways of doing things, the highly developed techniques of Western industry; medicine, making possible epidemic control; mass production, mines, factories.

          All this built up to a terrific impact which unhinged the age-old cycle of Asian history and rocked the very foundation of Asian society.

          In Southeast Asia, colonial regions established by the European powers replaced the native ruling class, changed the economy from one of subsistence to one of export, developed an industrial proletariat of landless laborers, an intellectual proletariat of colonial subordinates, and by stimulating mass migrations created minority problems.

          In China, the peak of the Western impact coincided with dynastic decline. It hastened the fall of the Manchu dynasty but prevented the rise of another. The harmony between man and nature was lost, for no one had the mandate of heaven; while warlords, westernized messiahs and ephemeral republics sought in vain for a mandate from the people.

          The ancient equilibrium was similarly upset in Japan. The penniless samurai class brought off the most gigantic judo trick in history by riding with the Western impact which brought down the Tokugawa power, capturing that power for themselves, and then by frantic westernization building up more and more power, until they were mighty enough to burn against the West.

          And what is the net result of this terrific impact of the Western world on Asian society? Something akin to an atomic explosion. Dark unpredictable forces, knocked out of their ancient orbits in the inert mass of Asia, have set off a chain reaction which is detonating all about us today; or, to lay aside metaphor, a vast social revolution, a process of rapid and violent change in the very structure of society, has developed and will continue to run its chaotic course until some new principle of equilibrium, some fresh social synthesis replaces that by which Asia has lived for centuries.

          Our present problem, then, is to find the new synthesis whereby the antithesis of revolution can be resolved. What are the terms of this new problem? It is still basically an economic one, the age-old Asian riddle of how to strike a balance between population and resources, how to harmonize man and nature. But new complicating factors make it vastly more difficult than it ever was to Master K'ung or the architects of the Tokugawa system. Improved medical and public health facilities by Western methods continually increase the rate of population growth and hence the pressure on the land. As a result, industrialization has already become a vital necessity among people who are as yet incapable of it. The plantation economies left by receding colonial empires provide another paradox: that of whole regions unable to produce enough food for themselves because they are geared to the production of an export crop which they can no longer sell.
          All this adds up for the Asian masses to just one simple and stark conclusion: less and less work, less and less food, more and more people. We have mentioned that the classic Asian remedy for this was to overthrow the government, for it was precisely the business of government in traditional Asian society to maintain the balance between man and nature. But not the peoples of Asia, influenced by Western ideas, are seeking not merely to replace governments but to control them. These governments, on the other hand, composed as they are of the native aristocracies, landowners, compradores, former employees of the colonial civil service, are not exactly willing to be controlled. Thus the withdrawal of the European powers has left a power vacuum, to fill which a bitter struggle is in progress in almost every country of Asia.
          But even more important than this power vacuum is the spiritual vacuum created by the Western impact. Western ideas have acted not merely as explosives but as solvents. They have undermined the traditional beliefs and philosophies of Asia but have not succeeded in proposing any view of life or scale of values acceptable to the majority of Asians. In place of the old faiths, they have substituted merely doubts. This is not to be wondered at since the liberal West, because of its rejection of Christianity, is itself without a faith of its own. Indeed, it no longer has even a consistent rational basis for the rights and freedoms which it professes to defend and teach. With unconscious but suicidal contradiction, it calls upon Asia to accept the inviolability of the human person, the sovereignty of inherent in the people, the sanctity of treaties, the rule of law, and at the same time casts doubts or heaps derision on the Christian faith and the rational philosophy without which these principles cease to be valid or even intelligible. That is why you cannot blame Asian liberals who have learned liberalism from a dechristianized and doubting Europe for refusing to die in defense of liberalisn. Why should they, indeed? Men die for a faith; they will not die for a doubt.
          A whirlwind is sweeping over Asia; but the heart of it, like the center of a typhoon, is a vacuum: a power vacuum and a spiritual vacuum. Whoever fills this vacuum rides the whirlwind and becomes master of Asia. And there you have communist strategy in Asia in a nutshell. To ride the whirlwind; to fill the power vacuum with its leadership, the spiritual vacuum with its militant faith, and having thus placed itself at the center of Asia's social revolution, to harness it to its own ends.
          Let us note carefully wherein our analysis differs from that of communist propaganda. Communists claim the credit for starting the revolution in Asian society. But the facts are against them. Rizal and Sun Yat-sen raised the standard of that revolution years before communism was born. The communists merely took advantage of a movement they did not begin. Again, they claim that the objectives of Asia's revolution are communist. They are not. These objectives are essentially those of the free world: a fair deal for the workingman and the peasant, popular control of government, peace and order in a free society. What the communists have done is to maneuver the free world, and especially the Western powers, into seeming to be against these objectives in Asia while setting themselves up as their defenders.
          And yet the whole irony of the present situation is that so many people take the communists at their own valuation, and propose to fight them on their own grounds. There is nothing the communists would like better. They have striven mightily to identify themselves with the masses of Asia because they know that the masses in movement are irresistible. You cannot stop a social revolution. You may as well try to block a whirlwind.
          Yet that is precisely what certain conservative governments in Asia are trying to do today. They are opposing measures of social reform, relying on brute force to preserve existing arrangements, on the grounds that all such measures of reform are communists-inspired and any concession made to the masses is a step nearer to communist domination. They fail to see that by acting thus they are playing right into communist hands. They are proving the communist thesis that all non-communist governments are by that very fact governments against the people. They are convincing the masses, as not even the communists can convince them, that the only hope for social justice lies in class warfare under communist leadership. They are helping communism in the most efficacious manner possible to fill the power vacuum in Asia.
          There is only one way to fight the communists, and that is to beat them at their own game. We must go to the masses, as the communists have gone to the masses, and show them, by work and not by words alone, that their hope does not lie with Soviet Russia or Soviet China but with us. It is useless, besides being unjust to try to stop social change in Asia. That is not the issue. The issue is who is to control that change? Who is to direct it? Who is to ride the whirlwind? The communists or the men who are for freedom?
          That is the essential problem: a problem of control, a problem of leadership. If we cannot produce leaders as intelligent, as devoted, as selfless, as heroic as communism has been able to produce in Asia, we shall fail.
          In order to produce this sort of leadership, liberalism does not suffice. Nothing could be less forceful than the kind of liberalism that is sometimes referred to as a "third force" in Asian affairs. For what does it consist in? It is a set, not so much of principles as of working hypotheses, of provisional conclusions; a tissue of "ifs" and "buts," a "climate of opinion"; not a positive philosophy but a temper of mind, what is called the "rationalist" temper, skeptical, cynical, in mortal fear of the absolute, impatient of discipline, never quite making up its mind; quick to perceive the flaw in everything, slow to perceive the worth of anything, seldom acting with decision, half paralyzed with doubt even while it acts; a feeble force, this, which not only tires easily but, like the ne'er-do-well of the story, is born tired.
          And what is this adversary it has to grapple with? What is communism? It is a faith. A climate of opinion is powerless against a faith. You must have a faith to fight a faith, and to conquer a faith you must have a stronger and truer faith. Liberalism then, is not enough. We must have some other rock on which to stand, some other well from which men may draw not doubts but living water; not just hypotheses but the truth.
          It is the personal conviction of the present writer that Catholicism is that rock and the source of that living water: that if liberalism is bankrupt today, it is because it has rejected the ancient faith by which it lived. And it is more than personal conviction, it is a tradition in the missionary order to which he belongs that the Catholic Faith is not a Western thing but a human thing, and all the more human because it is divine in origin; that it belongs fully as much to Asia as to Europe; and that properly presented it can be the answer, indeed is the only answer to the deepest aspirations of Asian man.

— Fr. Horacio de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.

Social Order II|6

St. Louis, June 1952

Acrobats by Cesar Legaspi Torrente
Oil on masonite. 1955.

The Sabbath Is For Man

          Then John's disciples came to Jesus and said, "Why is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but you disciples do not?" Jesus replied, "Surely the bridegroom's attendants would never think of mourning as long as the bridegroom is still with them? But the time will come for the bridegroom to be taken away from them, and then they will fast."

Matthew 9:14-15

          In your search for genuine religious experience, a number of questions keep coming up, among them the following:

1.       It seems that certain new concepts of spirituality are being put           forward today which are different from the traditional concepts. To what extent, in what ways, are they different, and is the difference a difference for the better?
2.       One of the indications of this change is that long-established structure and safeguards of traditional spirituality are being given up. Why is this?
3.       It may be that these old structures and safeguards are being given up because they have been found to be obstacles to an authentic spiritual life. Have hey been found to be such only in theory, or by actual experience?
4.       It seems that the climate of our contemporary society is becoming more and more mundane, more and more secular, and that may be the reason why the guiding principles of the spiritual life are changing. If this is so, how do we, immersed as we are in this mundane society, respond to the challenge of the Gospel, the good news of salvation? How reach out to the sacred in a world ever more absorbed in the secular?

          These are large questions, and I must say at once that I have not even begun to reflect on them myself. But we can always begin, and now is as good a time as any to begin, and it is certainly an advantage if we begin together. For as our Lord says, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."
          It strikes me that in the Gospel of the Mass for today, our Lord is being asked something similar to our second question. We ask, "Why are long-established structures and safeguards of traditional spirituality being given up?" And the disciples of John the Baptist asked, more concretely, "Why is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?" We might add that even within our lifetime, the discipline of the Lenten fast has been radically revised. The general law requiring Catholics to fast every day except Sundays during Lent has been abrogated; and even the more indulgent legislation we enjoyed here in the Philippines of fasting only on the Fridays of Lent has been set aside. We now have to fast only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
          But if there is a similarity between our question and that of John's disciples, I do not think we can conclude from that that our Lord's answer would be the same. He was answering a concrete question concretely. More applicable to our case, perhaps, is another incident in our Lord's life when He answered a question with a general principle.
          He was walking through a corn field on a sabbath day, accompanied by His apostles as well as by His critics, the scribes and the Pharisees. His apostles, being hungry, plucked some of the ripe corn as they brushed past them, husked the grain by rubbing them between their hands, and ate the kernels. The scribes and the Pharisees were deeply shocked by this, for what were these ignorant fishermen doing? They were milling corn, that's what they were doing. They were doing servile work on the sabbath day when servile work was strictly forbidden. They cried out to Jesus to stop His followers from committing this flagrant violation of the law of Moses.
          What was Jesus' reply? It was that certain prescriptions of the law are not absolute but relative. They can be changed at need. When David the king was on a forced march, he did not scruple to give to his hungry men the sacred bread that had been offered to God. Why? Because "man was not made for the sabbath; the sabbath was made for man."

           Here, then, was a religious practice ― the keeping of the sabbath ― which was not absolute but relative. Can we say the same of our Christian religious practices, our devotions, our methods of prayer and penance, our forms of spirituality? I think we can. They, too, are made for man, not man for them. They are means, not ends. Our end, our finality as Christians, is to draw even closer to God in Christ. This final end is the absolute for us. Everything else we have or do must be relative to that absolute.

           Now, means can be more or less effective, more or less appropriate, according to circumstances of time and place, personality and environment, culture and society. They can therefore be adapted, revised, changed. And if we look back at the history of the Church, we see that our religious practices, our devotions, our methods of prayer and penance, our forms of spirituality have changed, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit reaching in the Church.

           And it is not only time or place that require these adaptations. The different abilities, obligations, occupations, states of life of Christians require them. Saint Francis de Sales, that down-to-earth director of souls, has something very sensible to say about that.

           Look at creation, he says. The Creator, in creating the plants, made each kind of plant different, and made them different kinds of fruit. So, too, with Christians, the Church's plantation. It is God's will that they bear fruit, each according to his or her particular quality, condition, and calling. The nobleman will practice religion differently from the workman, the ordinary citizens from the person in authority, the married woman from the widow or the spinster.

           Look here, Filotea, continues Saint Francis. (Filotea is the odd name he gives to the lady whom he addresses his treatise.) Look here, Filotea, old girl, would you think it appropriate for bishops to lead a solitary life like the Carthusians? For the father of a family to be no more concerned about increasing his income than a Capuchin? For a workingman to spend whole days and nights before the Blessed Sacrament, as contemplatives do? For a religious to be as deeply and unceasingly involved in activism, as a bishop, for instance, may have to be because of the needs of his flock? If we do not make an effort to adapt our devotional and spiritual life to our position and vocation in society, do we not make ourselves ridiculous?

           In the light of these considerations, let us take a look again at our second question. Why are long-established structures and safeguards of traditional spirituality being given up today? Well, as to the fact, are they being given up? I think we will have to say, yes, some of them are. But I think we also have to say that most of those being given up are external structures and safeguards. Well, then, why? As to that, may I suggest the following thoughts for your reflection.

          The structures and safeguards of our traditional spirituality were fashioned in, and for, a traditional society. Our traditional society here in the Philippines was very stable and very conservative. It was also a society in which Catholic Christianity was largely taken for granted. Taken for granted in the sense that most Filipinos were simply born, grew up, got married, raised children, and died in it; and so, hardly ever thought about it. One did not think about it; one simply practiced it; externally at least. Catholicism was not something we discovered, like a treasure hidden in a field. It was not something we defended from attack, like a beleaguered citadel. It was simply something that was always there and would always be there, like the weather. One does not fight the weather. One does not even question it. One simply makes the best of it.

          And that's what we did. We made the best of our Catholicism by conformism; by passively practicing the practices that identified us as Catholics, without ever asking why.

          But now, all that is changed. We no longer have a stable society; we have a society in the process of rapid change. We no longer have a conservative society; we have a society that looks upon conserving what is past as an exercise in futility. And many of us, if not most of us, no longer consider traditional Catholicism as weather, to be accepted and made the best of. They are now asking, what gives with this rainy weather? Can't something be done about it?

          What ho. In answer to our second question (which involves the first as well), let me propose, after the manner of the Irish who answer a question by asking another, three other questions for your reflection:

1.       Will the structures and safeguards of our traditional spirituality meet the needs and demands of our non-traditional society?

2.       If so, how?

3.       If not, what kind of structures and safeguards should take their place?

          As a framework for your reflection, you might take the "first principle and foundation" with which Saint Ignatius begins his Spiritual Exercises:

               Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by so doing save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth were created for man' sake, that they may assist him in the pursuit of the end for which he was created.

               Whence it follows that a man must make use of them in so far as they help him to his end, and withdraw from them in so far as they are an obstacle to that end.

                It behooves us, then, to develop in ourselves a detachment with respect to all creatures, to the extent that such detachment is permitted to our free choice and not forbidden; in such wise that we do not, as as in us lies, prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to shame, a long life to a short one, and so in all other things, desiring and choosing only what is most conducive to the end for which we are created.

The trend in Catholic spirituality today seems to be:

―toward a more personal faith,

―toward a faith directed to service.

A more personal faith:

More focused on Christ as person, both divine and human

Faith as a relationship of personal love

Hence, emphasis on personal prayer

And focus on the Sacrifice and the Eucharist

A more personal faith:

Faith not as a social institution but as personal conviction

A personal understanding of the Message, to be able to give a

       rational account of it

Faith marginalized in contemporary society;

Our task is to restore it to the center of the individual and the

       social conscience

This cannot be done by mere institutional or nominal

       Christians.

A faith fulfilled in service

This has always been so ― "faith without works is dead" ― but

       today more than ever

And faith specifically directed to integral human development

Which involves action for justice and participation in the

       transformation of the world.

A faith fulfilled in service

Which will not take us out of the world, but plunge us into it

Hence, internalization of formerly external safeguards

       to protect both purity of faith and purity of conscience

The cloister in the heart

Not "Que descansada vida"

But, "Caminante, no hay camino

Se hace camino al andar."

― Fr. Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.

Recollection of the Mother Butler Mission Guild

Manila, 5 March 1976

The Last Supper by Ang Kiukok. 1973.
Singapore Art Museum.