THE ART OF LIFE

My friend Mark, a Eucharistic Minister from Church, had given the Host to hundreds, if not thousands, of communicants but this credential did not prepare him for the occasion. It happened one gorgeous Saturday morning in May when little girls and boys in white attires beamed in their quest to fulfill the next Sacrament in their young lives. Little Andrew stood before Mark, his shy tongue sticking out for the grace, but Mark just looked at him and appeared lost. The truth is, he wasn't; he was just hoping for intercession that his knees did not turn to jelly which would have folded him like a piece of cardboard. Mark was so joyfully overwhelmed by what he was seeing - little Andrew as virtue personified - that it took some prodding from the Minister standing next for him to give the host to the waiting tongue of little boy already. But everyone understood. It was Andrew's First Communion, and he was Mark's 12-year old son.

A lot of things and people and events in life come and go but some, while a little less common than others, happen to strike us like a bolt of golden lightning that move us to a stupor of great scope. It could be a matter of newness of the experience, or has something to do with our relationship towards the deliverer of the experience, or however we look at it it is just beyond explanation - we simply feel it with new heart, see it with new eyes, and it makes the occasion our own version of Adam's in the Naming of the Animals. The great Ralph Waldo Emerson hits it in the head when he said that the art of life has its own pudency and will not be exposed; that nature, like books, belong to the eyes that see them. Which means that while one occasion may be mundane to others - the occasion leaving the person the same way as it greeted them, nothing gained, nothing lost - the very same occasion may mean to others as the secret key to levitation.

My sister D had been to many places and had herself immersed, even if momentarily, to hundreds of cultures, but she could not get over the experience of witnessing the ceremony surrounding the formal incineration of a tattered American flag. The simplicity of sacredness, to her, was simply breathtaking. The young boy in Arthur Miller's Bulldog comes home after having sex with an older woman and starts playing the piano. He never knew how to play it before, but plays it nonetheless with notes that must have been snatched out of the air, with a melody so magically beautiful that it shocks his mother.

In a previous post I have mentioned about seeing a woman officiate a Mass at St John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan. I did not know it was a woman, at first. I was by the door and she was facing the altar. When she turned around, directly looking at me, that was when I found out it was a priestess, my first and only time to see one and officiating at that, and I thought her eyes beamed like flashlight, causing me to freeze that felt like an eternity. I swear, too, in the divinity of Fr. Mother, that I moved an inch above that holy ground.

Ahh, my moment's monument, I found the secret key to levitation.

MY TEN GREATEST BOOKS

...in their order of greatness.

This selection is not cast in stone. One day I will read a better book and it will snatch its own number. One day, too, I will explain why these wealth of literature mean so much to me.