Soul Highway

You know you're old(er) when...

They say age is nothing but a number. When I transitioned into 30, I didn’t go into panic attack. I only had to constantly ward off questions about marriage and kids and such. The so-called pressure builds up when most of your friends had walked down the aisle in pretty gowns. I don’t know about American culture but in the Philippines, when a woman is still single at 30 things begin to turn suspect. It is as if her marrying value begins to depreciate, thus doomed to be a spinster for life. I have to admit I overshot my goal. When I got out of college I told myself I’d get married at 25. Well, 25 came and went. Looking back, I’m not even sure if I was ready to become a wife at 25. I was too busy chasing stories, beating deadlines, climbing mountains and worrying about other people.

Besides birthdays, life presents little reminders of how old we’ve become. I was filling out a form for a state ID a few months back and I had to stop and calculate my age. These past few days, I got another jolt – my batchmates in college are organizing a reunion. Apparently it’s been 10 years since we last saw each other. The get-together is set for next month, in time for the university’s Founders Day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there to catch up with the goings-on in their lives. I wish I could be there though. I heard quite a number are already married. I looked up the Friendster profiles of some and just as I expected, kids are already in the picture. Talk about time zipping past.

I grabbed an old photo my batch has posted online and I’m still having trouble remembering some names. I know we’ve spread out to different places after surviving college and I wonder what paths, career-wise, others had chosen to take. I’m proud to say I have good memories of college. I met some of the most interesting people while trying to pass Algebra and Physics, and did both smart and stupid things. I wrapped up four years of hard work passed out at an airport runway dressed in Sunday clothes.

To my batchmates, I hope you have fun, guys! Looking forward to pictures from the reunion!

The husband said it was easy to spot me on the picture, going by forehead sizes. That jerk. :-) But the third person from the left is me, circa 1997.

Small consolation

If you are Catholic, like I am, and had been following the shameful sex scandals that have been hounding the Roman Catholic church for decades, then one of yesterday’s top stories should have caught your eye. After more than five years of negotiations with victims of clergy abuse, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has agreed to settle the case for $660 million, followed by a quick mea culpa. Apparently, the settlement does not call for the archdiocese to make a public apology. While the deal required the release of the priests’ confidential personnel files, the bigger question is what does the church intend to do with these erring priests? The church, after all, has the propensity to sweep things under the rug when it comes to wayward clergymen and yet has no qualms demanding the highest standard of morality among its flock. Talk about hypocrisy.

In the Philippines, where more than 80 percent of the 89 million population are Catholic, alleged sexual improprieties involving priests have been brought out in the open for years and years. They’ve been written about and cases had been filed. To the disgrace of the church, all it has been doing is offer promises of investigation but failing to take action. Allow me to correct that. They have acted – by “re-educating” the priests who pounce on altar boys (as if a two-week spiritual retreat is the cure to not being able to keep their pants zipped up) and eventually re-assigning them to other parishes. What I find nauseating is the church’s assumption that its followers are too forgiving. What I find disappointing, at least in the parishes I’ve been part of, is the Catholics’ seeming lack of interest in demanding moral accountability from the men who are supposed to guide us to salvation. It is as if denouncing these shameful acts will forfeit our chances of going to heaven.

By the way, the Vatican has also recently announced that Christian denominations outside the Catholic church are not full churches of Jesus Christ because they do not recognize the pope. Oh gee, I didn’t know we have the exclusive rights to declare which ones are real churches. I must have missed that when I went to all those cathecism classes.