Food for my soul

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Evelyn D. Añago, 45, is mother to two girls ages 10 and 6. She is a seasoned marketing and development communications professional, and the outreach and communications head of a development project that is helping improve basic education in the ARMM and other parts of Mindanao.

I have no time to read. Between working 12 hours a day (with preparation and travel times included), taking on extra work for extra income, managing our household, helping the kids with their schoolwork, bonding with my family, and trying to get enough sleep, there’s no time to quiet down and focus on a book. But that’s like killing myself slowly, because books are my lifeline. I grew up with them, and it was mostly to them that I went back to understand the lessons life was teaching me.

It is not so much that I love to read; rather, I cannot resist the wisdom that books contain, distilled from so many reflections and revelations, from so many feats and failures, from so much happiness and hurt. From such wisdom, I hope to know the truth as it is revealed to me a peek at a time and to live what I believe I already know of it day by day, so that at the threshold between this life and the next, I could tell myself I did my best, and so rest in peace. And so I take a little here and there from my travel time, my lunch break, my sleeping hours, and the many moments when I have to wait, to read. 

If one opens my bag at this moment, he’ll find there among my so many necessities — my wallet, hairbrush, face powder, lipstick, tissue, hand cleaner, floss, mouthwash, cellphone, pen, keys, notepad, eyeglasses, fan, and umbrella — Thomas À. Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. This book is a necessity for me.

Whenever I feel sad, I read it to remember that like Jesus, I will survive; and that in truth, I should not become too comfortable in this world, because this is not my true home. Whenever I feel happy, however, I read it just the same, to remind myself to give thanks to the source of all happiness and, just like when I’m sad, to remind myself that I should not become too comfortable in this world, because this is not my true home.

I have read this book before. I can no longer remember how young I was when I first had it and how. Its pages are now yellow with age, and some are falling off. It’s one of the spiritual books that I’ve read, reread, put in my bookshelf, pulled out in moments when I felt I needed spiritual nourishment, and then put back and did not touch for who knows how long. But I can never give it away. Not even during the times in my spiritual journey when I thought everything I knew about my Catholic religion was wrong, not even then could I part with this and my other prized spiritual books. There was always that question at the back of my mind: What if I’m wrong? What if this is the truth?

And so while others have their trophy collections, stamp collections, bag collections, and all sorts of other collections by the hundreds, I have my spiritual book collection by the tens. It’s a small collection because it’s not born of mere whim or whimsy; instead, it is to me like air is to someone drowning, or water to someone choking. It will probably be the only thing I’ll run away with during a fire, or what I’ll wish most was with me when I’m stranded alone on an island. In that collection are the classics — The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, The Way of a Pilgrim by R.M. French, In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine, The God of All Comfort by Hannah Whitall Smith, Divine Mercy in My Soul (The Diary of Sister M. Faustina Kowalska), and of course, the Bible. There are also newer books such as Embraced by the Light by Betty Eadie, Jesus CEO by Laurie Beth Jones, and An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels by Pierre Jovanovich. Perhaps the best proof of my open, inquisitive mind and free spirit are my “unconventional” books such as A Course in Miracles by the Foundation for Inner Peace, the three-volume In the Light of Truth by Abd-ru-shin, the books on the psychic Edgar Cayce (Reflections on the Path, A Life of Jesus the Christ, and Home and Marriage: There Will Your Heart Be Also), and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

I have also opened my bookshelf to good Filipino books such as Simplify and Create Abundance by Bo Sanchez. They have a prime spot on my bookshelf in the midst of books on business and social marketing and writing, which are my professional references.

While I value my books, I don’t embrace them like a fool. Rather, they stir my mental juices. They push me onward in my quest for truth. I read them, I ponder, and I go on living, while testing my new insights here and there; and then I reflect on whether or not they resonate with truth in my experience, after which comes the difficult part of mirroring them in the way I live. Sometimes, though, or perhaps, in truth, more often, it’s the other way around — I live, and as I experience, I try to understand, so I go back to my books. And that is how I came back to The Imitation of Christ after leaving it untouched through many decades.

When I was young, I thought it was too rigid, too dogmatic, and thus, unlivable. Today, after countless challenges, I can more readily fathom the book’s wisdom. Life has taught me lessons that the book tried to teach me before but that my witlessness and selfishness then could not embrace; and now, I go back to the book to affirm my understanding and with it, to reform my life once more.   

Oh no, I am not young anymore, but I probably still have a good number of years to further reflect and reform. It is amusing, though, to think that while in the dawn of my life, I read books to understand life, in my middle-age years, while preparing for my twilight, I am back to my childhood books. Now I’m thinking: Who will inherit them? Will my children treasure them as I do? My one wish, which I’ll probably bring to my grave, is that my children will try to find God, in the books I will leave them or in any other way; and that when they’ve found Him, they’ll glorify Him while remaining forever in His loving care.