"There is no better way to end this year than to count our blessings. "
"There is no better way to end this year than to count our blessings. "
While going over the texts and mails which have been pouring like rain with good wishes and prayers from family, friends and acquaintances, I cannot help but be reminded of the remarks of the iconic Mr William Buckley, Jr., before an audience gathered together at the thirty fifth anniversary dinner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. on November 29, 1988.
Entitled “Toward a Recovery of Gratitude,” Buckley’s remarks served as a counterpoint to the anniversary’s theme “Sources of Renewal: The Permanent Things and the Recovery of Man,” as he reminisced about the founding of the Institute invoking in the process the need for gratitude as an integral part of man’s renewal—a point he precisely advised when he noted in this wise “in reflecting on the theme of recovery, I thought to point to the recovery of a faculty conspicuous for its torpor.”
I thought it proper to excerpt in this yea-end column nuggets of Buckley wisdom as we bid goodbye to 2018 – a year which has seen the country go through a number of challenges, natural disasters and human failures, which has in a real sense sapped some of the vitality and vigor which we evoked as a people in 2017 as we embraced the first full year of governance of the Duterte administration—and help us navigate 2019, the midpoint of Duterte’s term. We note that in this passing year, as the issues and concerns which have bedeviled our country for ages became even harder to resolve and put to rest and as new ones kept cropping up, it is as if the national recovery, call it renewal, which all of us had hoped would be carried over more extensively as President Duterte went about executing his program and delivering on his campaign promises was in a state of “torpor” as Buckley would have it. It has truly been a tough year for the administration and for the country even as Malacañang, of course, raved over the President’s last quarter’s “very good” survey rating.
No doubt even as President Duterte worked doubly hard to deliver his very success became his own handicap as he bruited about in his own unique ways hammering at many institutions, the Catholic Church in particular, as if it has become the main obstacle to our moving forward. A lot of other institutions, other practices even were in the President’s gun sight and he did not mince words to pound at them.
But, in the same token, he also spared a number of other institutions and practices, people even, and was therefore pinned down for such. He was considered too cautious in resolving the rice crisis, for example, and even the smuggling of high-value items like the twice repeated shabu-magnetic-lifter caper. Indeed, if one were to go over the anti-Duterte chatter in social media circles this administration is on its way to being marginalized. Well, that is not likely to happen anytime soon.
But, as Mr. Buckley noted, even as we have a lot to be discouraged about we have much, much more to be grateful for. There is need, he said, to cultivate the faculty for gratitude. And so, I excerpt the more quotable notes from that invocation 30 years ago:
“A country —a civilization that gives us such gifts as we dispose of cannot be repaid in kind. There is no way in which we can give to the United States a present of a bill of rights in exchange for having given us the Bill of Rights.
One offense, however,—the near universal offense, remarked by Ortega y Gassett as the fingerprint of the masses in revolt—is that of the Westerner, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, who accepts without any thought the patrimony we all enjoy, those of us who live in the Free World. We are left with the numbing, benumbing thought that we owe nothing to Plato or Aristotle, nothing to the prophets who wrote the Bible, nothing to the generations who fought the freedoms activated in the Bill of Rights. We are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us.
We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live without any sense of obligation to those who made lives as tolerable as ours, within the frame of the human predicament that God imposed on us—without any sense of gratitude to our parents, who suffered to raise us, to our teachers, who laboured to teach us, to the scientists, who prolonged the lives of our children whose disease struck them down —is spiritually athropying.
We cannot repay in kind the gift of the Beatitueds—with their eternal, searing meaning—Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude—defined here as appreciation, however rendered, of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it—our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt, to revolt against our benefactors, our civilization against God himself.
We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living or dead, mostly dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers and in our deeds.”
Truly, as we bid goodbye to 2018 there is no better way to embrace the New Year than to count our blessings and even our failures as we endeavor to make our lives and that of our people better in eternal gratitude to the Almighty and to those who have, one way or the other, showered us with unrequited gifts of trust, love and wisdom.
A blessed New Year to all.