Memory and class reunions

These past few days in that exotic island called Bohol, some kind of fever is gripping everyone. The reason is because they are organizing a so-called general reunion of Boholanos from all over the world, or Tigum Bol-anon sa Tibuok Kalibutan (TBTK).

Being a Boholano myself (we call ourselves 'sano', short for 'paisano''or fellow countryman, for we consider our island as some kind of independent republic), I was flooded with frantic invitations by texts, emails, etc., from classmates, friends and relatives.

I had to gently and patiently beg off, a mortal sin I think, because my schedule just would not let me. A joke has it that in heaven St. Peter hastily ties up the Boholanos during the fiestas since they would escape to Bohol on those days. That's how 'bad' this thing is with us.

Of course, I go to these fiestas and reunions in my heart. It's something that is part of our human nature, or our being inherently a social being, which always feels the need to be with others, especially friends and relatives.

No man is an island, no matter how much of a loner one is. He will always need someone else, if not physically then morally or spiritually. We somehow feel incomplete if in our heart we find no one else except ourselves.

We are always in need of God and of others.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: "The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of nature." (1879)

While this social nature of ours can be expressed in many ways, I would like to give special mention to class reunions, especially when held really far from the time the classmates were together.

These are reunions full of memories, good memories always even if particular events in the past were not exactly nice. Time and life have a way of softening whatever negative things took place before. We always have a chance to learn, to purify, to rectify, etc.

They remind us that we are creatures of memories and intentions. Our sociability is never confined to the physical. It becomes more meaningful and more intense when expressed in our memories, in our intentions and in our other moral and spiritual faculties.

These reunions connect us to our years of childhood and youth, when we were still quite raw and green, quite thoughtless and senseless. And yet now we are convinced that in spite of those conditions some significant things were developing and shaping up imperceptibly.

I have no doubt that all my classmates, however we were, even if we caused some pain, were actually blessings and God's precious gifts to each other.

We might have laughed a lot, or fought and cried, but I have no doubt we were helping each other in some mysterious ways when we were making those awkward first steps toward growth and development.

I believe that mistakes, gaffes, failures are excellent teachers. They wake us up to certain realities we surely would ignore if these mistakes did not happen. If they managed to teach us humility, then the road to a good transformation was laid open.

I believe we learned more from those mistakes than from the good deed we made. The latter often led us to vanity and pride that were sweet and intoxicating in the beginning but were terribly poisonous later on. Life can spring very surprising lessons.

I believe reunions highlight the fact that life is a continuity. An invisible hand is directing it. The so-called disruptions and mutations in our experiences do not destroy this continuity. They can always be made use of, one way or another.

There is God, and he is never passive in his providence. Now I seem to see how God played with us to lead us to some measure of sensibility and rationality, and later hopefully, to faith and charity.

God can write straight with crooked lines. He certainly made use of our childishness and all our other forms of foolishness and weakness to make something useful to us. I just hope we did not give him a really hard time.

Of course, the process continues. The room for improvement is the largest room in any house of life we build. It never gets finished. I have reminded my classmates of this, to warn them also of the ever-present danger of complacency.

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