Christmas

Christmas is coming. It is a beautiful, peaceful time.

My first vivid memories of Christmas go back to the time when I was five years old.

My parents put the children to bed right after supper, so that Santa Claus would find us there ‑ good children ‑ and leave us all the gifts that we had prayed for. We were not allowed out of bed until our parents said it was alright to come down into the living room.

At about 4 a.m., in our winter nightwear, we came down the stairs into the sala. The room was dark. The only light came from the lamp posts outside the house, shining through the window. But in that half-light we could see the Christmas tree, glistening in the dark.

I will always remember that breathless moment, standing in the dark with my little sister, seeing the Christmas tree and the outline of the presents under it. It was ecstatic. The intense thrill of anticipation.

When our parents turned on the lights, we danced with joy, opening our presents. But the sweetest moment was that standing in the dark, holding the hand of my sister, looking at the Christmas tree when we really did not know what it looked like, seeing the outline of the presents, when we did not know what they were.

The next strong, that stands out in my memory was when I was a first year novice in the Society of Jesus. On Christmas Eve, close to midnight, lying in bed, I heard the Juniors’ choir, moving through the corridors, singing the Christmas carols. All male voices.

I felt that those Christmas carols, sung near midnight on Christmas Eve, were the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

In the Philippines, I became the director of the choir. We sang in the hospitals, in the wards. The patients wept. One poor old woman, who was living in pain, with cancer of the throat, motioned me to her bedside. I had to lean close to her, with my ear only inches from her mouth, because she could hardly talk.

She said: “Please ask God to take me, soon.” She was dying, but she was at peace.

The war broke over us on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1941. On that Christmas the bombs were falling during the Midnight Mass, Father Leo R. Cullum, S.J. gave a powerful sermon on: “Why have the Gentiles raged?. . . . . ”

After the Mass we were all lying on the floor, in the blackout, because the building was shaking from the bombs. The blackout was necessary, so that we would not give a target to the Japanese. Bill Rively, first tenor in our choir, lying there in the dark, said to the Jesuit next to him: “Boy! That sermon was a knock-out!”

The figure next to him said: “Thank you.” It was only then that Rively realized that the figure next to him was Father Cullum.

At Christmas in 1942 we sang in the Philippine General Hospital. One of the patients was Father Kennally, S.J., who had just been released from Fort Santiago. He wanted to bless us. But he was so battered and beaten that he could not raise his right arm. Finally he blessed us by holding his right wrist with his left hand, and moving the right hand in the sign of the cross.

The saddest Christmas of the war, for me, was 1944. We were in the prison camp at Los Baños. I was directing the choir at Midnight Mass. Joe Kavanagh, our finest tenor, was suffering from beri-beri. Half of his face was paralyzed. When he sang, only half of his face moved. All of us were suffering from hunger because we were getting only two ounces of rice in the morning, and two in the afternoon.

During the Christmas carols, the tenors cracked on the high notes. There is nothing so sad as a fine tenor cracking on a high note.

When I went to bed that night, for the first time, I admitted to myself that we might never get out of that camp. That we might die there. My thought was: “If we do get out, I will not care whether I am the Rector of the finest Jesuit school on the East Coast of the United States, or the last, lowest and least teacher in Tuguegarao, provided I have three things.”

This was my vision, when I was face to face with death. And do you know what those three things were?. . . . . . Breakfast, dinner and supper!

The first satellite telecast that I directed ‑ a program going out of the Philippines to Spain ‑ was one of our Aguinaldo Masses. Our people, flooding through the streets at four in the morning, with the Church bells ringing, on their way to Mass, are a wonder to all the world.

Even if our life is hard, Christmas somehow lifts us out of the hardship into a beautiful moment of peace. And even if we can not give rich gifts to each other, at least we can give ourselves — our time, our friendship, our love.

And that is the most beautiful gift of all!