Till the next reunion, mga pais!

School reunions I know usually don’t last more than a day, capped by a night of singing and dancing.  It is vastly different at the Sacred Heart Seminary where the celebration lasts for three days, and each paisano is encouraged to relive the life of a seminarian he had been probably decades ago.  That’s why going to these annual reunions is like a going home of sorts as the institution was once home to its alumni in their years of growing and maturing.  To a lot of us, those were the best and most unforgettable years. These were times when our core values and beliefs were formed and moulded, probably never to be  erased.  To most of us, these values have remained at the foundation of our manhood, our guide as we weaved through the tortuous paths outside the priestly vocation, our anchor as we made painful choices.

Hence, reunions keep us in touch with fellow travellers in the path outside that priestly vocation we had once coveted.  For a long time, I could not understand these feelings of ‘high’ that many paisanos had expressed, the ‘kamingaw’ that they unabashedly proclaimed.  It seemed natural if one had been  out for a year or two.  I had that feeling before.  It was like being marooned in a world of strangers.  It was difficult to adjust one’s life to the world outside, accustomed as I had become to five years of routine and community life.  It took some time before secular life outside the gates normalized, and I no longer missed the old life.

But this ‘kamingaw’ after 10, 20 or 30 years of  life outside is difficult to understand, especially for someone who has become a jaded skeptic.  I am not saying this is not true because I have seen the happy faces of paisanos as they hugged each other, clasped their hands or patted their backs.  I have seen how middle-aged men with thick bellies enjoyed telling and retelling stories of their adventures inside the seminary decades ago, their faces lighting up as they guffawed at their own misdeeds.  Some of these were tales made at the confessional, of priests who went out of the confessional bellowing: ‘Puro na la masturbation!’

Indeed, what other mortal sin could one have committed?  Stealing papayas and coconuts?  Stealing somebody else's turubakon?  Sleeping while in meditation?  Reading comics during study periods?  Escaping from opus manuale?  Smoking inside comfort rooms?  None of these could qualify as mortal sin. There was one seminarian who got expelled during the time of a rector who is now a bishop.  The boy had befriended the rector’s dog and kept the poor beast addicted to masturbation, so that it always performed the sex act on the boy’s leg.  When the rector saw what had happened to his poor dog, he expelled the boy pronto.  In the institution’s history, that was the only instance when a seminarian was expelled for getting a dog addicted to sex.

The seminary is almost 75 years old.  Stories of this kind abound and are kept alive in the telling of those who had witnessed them, and they never fail to elicit guffaws of laughter.  They bring us back to the years when we were young and crazy, and the greatest pleasure was not derived from masturbation but from fooling Fr. Prefect, from the time of the German SVDs to the secular priests.  Fr. Prefect was the mortal enemy of the boys who made life difficult for the priest by deliberately committing infractions of the rules.  It seemed like a badge of distinction among peers.  The more infractions, the more adventurous and exciting life was.  There is probably no one among us who have not had committed a sin or two against the prefect of discipline.  Today, we have kept a treasure trove of stories that we tell as glasses of bahalina make their rounds in small groups of contemporaries.

I am just beginning to understand  this ‘kamingaw’ thing.  All along I thought paisanos have not graduated beyond the drinking and all that.  Yet there is more to it than really meets the eye.  I am just beginning to see that at the core of these gatherings of brotherhood is the reinforcement of kinship unfelt at the surface, a solidarity of values and beliefs articulated long ago by our spiritual directors in many spiritual conferences.

I have just been too jaded for not noticing earlier.  There is a depth of values that probably revisit each and every soul at these gatherings, but realization comes only when one pauses to reflect on it.  'Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.'  Right, boys?

Till the next reunion, mga pais!