Saint-Making, Mother Teresa, Center for the Sick and the Dying, and My Tayuman Life

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 3 SEPT 2016. SAT. N2.
Saint-Making, Mother Teresa, Center for the Sick and the Dying, and My Tayuman Life

[PAGING ALL the CAMILLIANS who went through the same training as I did. And for years.]

TODAY, the Vatican did it.

We have one more saint, and we just hope that all these saints in heaven are not too specialized that they look like highly skilled medical men and women (OK, call them doctors and miracle workers) for every anxiety and form of zealotry of believers.

That is from A to Z for you.

While on that road to Catholic priesthood--I failed big time!--I was assigned for more than a year to do apostolate at a Mother Teresa house, or a center if you wish, for the sick and the dying, the stress more on the dying than on the sick.

It was not only me but so many others in that same order we joined, possibly about 30 at anyone time.

I can rattle off others I have been assigned: Kidney Center, Lung Center, Heart Center, Mental Hospital in Mandaluyong, the Bilibid Prisons (yes, Senator De Lima: I got there first before you, madam!), National Orthopedic Center (you remember this, my dear best friend, Dr Henry Navarro of St Mary's University), and some others.

Saturdays were spent for that moronic MS, military science aka ROTC, and Sundays were not rest days but days of obligation.

Of the most memorable apostolates I did, it was at the Tayuman Center for the Sick and the Dying of Mother Teresa, with the experience of bathing a terminally ill man, and him promptly dying after taking a bath. That, perhaps, is the odor of heaven.

At a certain point, I was assigned to do the cleaning of bed sores, and the hydrogen peroxide would almost always develop foam, filling up the holes in those wounds that have caved in to hit the bones in some cases.

In those days, I could not touch meat. I refused to eat meat.

All these 'works of mercy' -- corporal works of mercy, they called--were part of our training as 'ministers of the sick'.

We were simply naive: we did not question the structural implications of what we were doing. We did not question the very meaning of hospitals and similar institutions.

That is the very logic of those who opposed the canonization of Mother Teresa. She simply became a willing instrument of the same status quo that produces that same terminally ill people, the same unwashed, the same sick who lay counting their breaths before they die.

I think of these things now, and I do not know.

There is the urgency of helping the poorsick who need most your help.

But there is the urgency of questioning the social structures that make it impossible for us to take care of our sick and the poor and the homeless and the wretched and the impoverished and what have you.

So there: let there be Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and let us question the social institutions that produce and reproduce the same problems why we have centers of the sick and the dying, those people who are left behind in this discourse of liberal democracy and social justice.