Outside

I have sensitive eyes. I mean I cringe at the sight of blood or gore. I also hate hospitals. So you can just imagine my eyes the first time I saw lepers in my life. When a jeepney collided with another car right in front of my vehicle, it fell upon me to bring the injured to the nearest hospital, which at that point was the Tala Leprosarium in Novaliches. It was already dark when I got there and even the darkness could not cover the blood and broken bones of the victims, and the disfigured faces and leprous limbs that were all crowding around me. So much for sensitive eyes.

The second time and many times after that was with Tony, the leper, who used to hang around outside our dining room at Loyola House of Studies. His nose had been eaten up by the disease so that when he spoke, you had to listen between the lines. I always wondered how he managed those jeepney rides around Metro Manila.

We are all of us a broken people. No less wounded than lepers. Our skin may not break, but our hearts do. Our noses may not fall, but our spirits do.

Why then do we feel so right in banishing broken people from our presence? We say they are sinful, they are hurtful, they are horrible, they are infectious.

Why can we not see the fear that lies beneath our righteous disdain of the other? We who are known to be most hospitable to the foreigner or the stranger, why do we not see the willful ignorance behind our own intolerance of those who are different from us?

Some of the facile dichotomies we set up between dirty and clean, between sick and well, between the profane and holy are, well, only skin deep.

Our idea of community is sometimes built on the illusion of sameness. Catolico cerrado is an oxymoron because to be catholic (the root is the Greek kath holos, or “according to the whole”) means to be open to the universal, to be all-embracing and to have a reach wider than what our arms can hold.

You know you’re Filipino if you belong to circles that progressively become smaller and more numerous. You’d think that fragmentation was only for grenades, but you see this fissile tendency even in holy places like churches and schools. We’d rather secede from the whole and splinter into rival camps than endure the painstaking work of accommodating dissension or diversity. We repair to our tribal circles and fraternities to nurse our fractured pride; we dig in to fortify our religious and ideological positions faster than we can find common ground.

We would readily defeat and divorce the other rather than dialogue with the disagreeable. Worse, we even invoke God to be on our side.

You know you’re Christian if you can resonate with what Jesus does today. He crosses the perimeter of our little circles to reach out to those we have excluded. He does this to redeem us, even if ironically he himself ends up outside “in deserted places” and dies outside our walls.

“If you will it, you can make me clean.” That was the leper’s prayer to Jesus in the Gospel story today. The conditional phrase in the prayer (“if you will it”) is a masterpiece. Godwilling, we sometimes say. If God doesn’t will it, we will never be clean; nature will take its course and we will die outside, a leprous mess. It is a masterful way to start a prayer, to pass the ball on to God and to premise all this on His willingness. It sort of puts the pressure on Him. If you O God want to get things going, you will have to will it first. The burden dear God is on you.

“I do will it. Be clean.” Now that in turn is a masterpiece of a reply to a prayer. I your God do desire it. Be rid of whatever it is that defiles you, and know that it takes more than rotting skin to be sentenced outside the perimeter of heaven. All it takes is a devious, thieving, unrepentant heart (the kind you might find in colluding contractors together with their corrupt padrinos in politics) to be exiled outside the walls of the new Jerusalem.

Be clean. You don’t have to have sensitive eyes to see that that reply of Jesus puts the pressure back on us.

Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin SJ is President of Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan. For feedback on this column, email tinigloyola @yahoo.com

The Jesuit Vocation Promotions Team invites male 4th year High School students, college students and young professionals to a Vocation Seminar. It will be held on March 7, 2009, Saturday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at St. Therese of the Child Jesus Parish, U.P. Los Baños, Laguna. For more details, please contact the Jesuit Vocation Promotions Office at telephone number (02) 4266101 or mobile number 0917-JESUITS (5378487) or email at atongsj@ yahoo.com or [email protected]. You can also visit the website of the Philippine Jesuits at www.jesuits.ph.