"Just Be" or "Just Do It"?

"Just Be" is the title of a column by Bernadette Sembrano in the Philippine Star, a daily broadsheet here in the Philippines. There she writes about the lives of ordinary people she has met, mostly Filipinos, here and in her trips abroad in connection with her job as a Broadcast Journalist with ABS-CBN.

Reading her columns has often made me wonder why she chose that title since, to my knowledge, she has never explained it. Then one day it struck me that perhaps her column title's significance and aptness lie in the fact that she writes about people with emphasis on who they are and not so much on the things that they do (although most of them do their thing extraordinarily well).

"Just Be", I thought, is completely different from the shoe giant Nike's slogan of "Just Do It". It is the difference between 'being" and "doing".

What is the difference? You might ask. Let me try to illustrate it from my own experience.

Earlier in my chaplaincy residency training in Hawaii, my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) Director casually told me in one of our regular evaluation and experience processing sessions: "Danny, your Head Chaplain asked me to thank you for the wonderful job you did last night. The family of the patient you attended to was very appreciative of you."

"What?" I replied in surprise. "But I did not do anything! And I could not do anything. The patient died and so I just stood there and stayed with them. They didn't even know, I suppose, that I was praying until I offered to pray with the family", I added.

"Exactly", she countered. "I said they were appreciative of you, not of what you did… That's what you are there for. It is your being there, your presence and not what you do that matter to them a lot. Don't worry, there will be more of these cases coming."

My Director's words still did not sink in me even then and I let it at that while keeping in mind and pondering further what she just said.

True enough, my fellow-students in the group and I got used little by little to just being there without worrying what to do as we continued to process our experiences as chaplains-in-training with our Director's help. Two times a week we gathered for class with her and discussed the meaning of our ministry experience especially in the light of Christian teachings and our role as hospital chaplains in the context of who we truly are given our background, our culture, our family, and so forth.

During individual supervisions once a month, she drummed into our ears that we are first of all human "beings" and not human "doings". She emphasized the value of truly listening not just to what is being said but especially listening to what is not being said. She constantly pounded on the importance of being fully present to the other as we assess the pastoral needs of our patient so that we can respond appropriately.

But because we were coming from a mass culture of "doing" as espoused by Nike's "Just Do It" and from a world where only those who do great things are valued and recognized, our sought-for process of paradigm shift to the culture of "being" was difficult, slow, and painful.

Fast forward to the present. It has been six months now since my hospital chaplaincy training was rudely and suddenly interrupted by my quintuple by-pass heart surgery. Today, my left arm where they "harvested" a blood vessel that was used in the by-pass is still partly numb. My chest and sternum occasionally hurt.

I have been told by my doctor that I can expect full recovery only after a full year of hibernation.

Thus, in the meantime, I am here at home doing nothing, or so I thought. I don't contribute at all to the family income; my wife with the help of a daughter runs the family business. Unlike before, I hardly do household chores. I find it difficult even to drive for my wife and children. I am doing nothing and I thought I am inutile. But I have awoken and recognized my mistake.

Slowly my experiences and learnings in CPE are all coming back to me. Now I realize that I am still a husband to a loving wife, a Dad to four wonderful children and daughter-in-law, a grandfather to an adorable kid, a brother, a friend, and most of all a child of God. I am still someone, after all, even as I am unable to do things . And that makes the difference.

In the Book of Exodus, 2:14, Moses asks God what his name is and God answers: "I Am Who I Am".

I have just realized that it is when we are confronted with what we are or who we are in our own innermost being that we are closest to God Who is.

"Just Be".

An All Souls Day Story

It was a Thursday around this time last year, I remember, when a strange thing happened to me. That day I had an experience that seemed to forebode the sad news of death in my family.

I was still in Honolulu, Hawaii at that time doing a year of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) residency program and was posted at Queen's Medical Center. As one of the lay chaplains in residency, I was assigned to several units one of which was the Cancer Unit where one of my main responsibilities was to visit patients and provide them with pastoral/spiritual care.

I was then in the office when I happened to retrieve from our telephone message box a request to visit a certain patient at the Cancer Unit. The message also gave the name of the patient plus room number. I took the message without bothering to find out who had actually sent the message and then proceeded to the unit to visit the patient.

The patient was an attractive woman in her early thirties with Hispanic features and brown skin. We started to converse. But as she was sharing something about her family, she suddenly stopped talking looked at me with wide eyes and went: "Do you have someone close to you who have just died?"

I got startled and replied: "No, but wait", I said. "I do have a brother, also a cancer patient, who is now in serious condition at a hospital back in the Philippines."

"I don't mean to scare you, but I think… I can see his spirit beside you," she added.

I suddenly had goose pimples but managed to continue: "Do you have the gift of seeing spirits?"

"Yes", she replied, "but wait, let me close my eyes and concentrate." She closed her eyes and after a while she went again: "I made a mistake, he is not dead, but hovering between life and death. He is struggling whether to let go or not. I can see the letter M. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Yes, "I said, "M is the initial letter of our family name."

"I can also see the color Pink," she continued.

"That is his favorite color," I said.

She went on and said other things about me and my family most of which were accurate. I silently prayed for my brother as we continued with our conversation where she even shared with me photos of her only child, a two-year old daughter (or a son?), from her computer.

I later shared the story that night with my wife Thelma in the Philippines when we got the opportunity to chat on the computer. I did not think then that the experience was significant at all especially since I had received news the previous Sunday that my brother had gotten better. I consoled myself too that maybe he would pull through after all and I would still see him when I get home in September 2007 after my residency program.

Then the sad news came one morning a few days after.

The telephone call from my wife Thelma came at around 10am of November 6, 2006, Hawaii time. It was around 4am Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at that time in the Philippines and so I knew right away that it was bad news. Sure enough, she told me that my second eldest brother Renato died very early that morning at a hospital in our hometown in the Philippines. The end has finally come for him after years of struggling with cancer of the throat that has spread in the last month or so to his other organs. He was the first to die among us siblings of 6 boys and 1 girl.

My brother Renato and I

At that point, I remembered the experience with my patient and tried to recall the event. I checked my calendar. It was only then did I realize that that particular encounter with a cancer patient happened on November 2, Feast of All Souls in our Catholic liturgical calendar!

Could it be that my brother's soul was there beside me that day as I was talking to a cancer patient in Hawaii, while he hovered between life and death in the Philippines? Could it be that he was trying to communicate to me then? And what did he want to tell me?

To put some closing to that experience, I decided to visit with that cancer patient again the day after I got the news of my brother's death, to thank her and to tell her that my brother had passed away. But she was gone. I surmised that she had been discharged. A check with the computer records, however, revealed nothing on this particular patient! Apparently, the hospital never had a patient with that name and in that room. Who was she? And who called our office phone and referred her to me?

I am now back home here in the Philippines and it will be All Souls Day again in a week's time. I wonder now what strange happening is waiting for me as I visit my brother's grave for the first time.