Felix Bravo’s Weblog

Editor’s Note: I have noticed that the posts in my blog which have the greatest number of hits are those about self-improvement and self-betterment, those that encourage and inspire, rebuild faith and buildup faith, reconstitute hope and refine the soul. So we are making this gem from Leroy Brownlow available to everyone, to members of the Lord’s church and others as well. Brother Brownlow could say it better than I do. He was one of those thousands of admirable souls in the kingdom of Christ, whose number we hope will keep increasing. Information on reprints may be sent to Brownlow Publishing Company, Inc. 6309 Airport Freeway, Fort Worth, Texas 76117, USA.

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Giovanni Verga was a man with class— he belonged to the landed gentry— but wrote about the common, the low, and the mundane, in a writing style noted for its terse accuracy and intense passion. Called verismo, realism, it became the pattern for the later Neo-Realism school of thought among writers.

Yesterday one preacher saw that realism, one fit for the opera, a stage drama. Could be a Palanca winner of a short story. “La Lupa” in Giovanni Verga’s story means she wolf; it is a vignette of one Sicilian life, of the intense mundane passion of that life. Find that story and enjoy reading. In the mountains of Cebu above the village of Bonbon, “La Lupa” is a woman who owns a small chalet on top of a hill, who with her drinking husband also tills three plots of flower farms hugging the hill. Her husband had once attended the preacher’s Bible teaching sessions, albeit with his beer mug or a bottle of Vino Kulafu, but “La Lupa” never came in spite of the invitations. Later her husband also stopped coming: The preacher’s preaching stood in the way of him and his beer mug.

“La Lupa” is a weary soul but she never gets tired of acquiring things. Their house is a pantheon of modern gadgets, which their two kids enjoy using, but the couple, “La Lupa” and her husband, don’t. “La Lupa” goes back to her wandering when opportunity permits, her husband back to his wine.

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The lady at the cash register knows I am angry. She can’t look at me, and chooses to talk to the wall. She pretends to be reading from a notebook that keeps a record of e-load sales, gives a casual glance at the SIM card number I have given her. “Sir, there is actually no record of a customer with this SIM number.”

I shot back at her, in a voice low but firm. “I was that customer. I remember your face, I remember you getting my money. But I have not received that load I had paid for. And it’s been two days.”

She keeps silent. Her male office mate comes over and makes me explain why this lady has gotten my goat. He nods his head, and glances at her. Never a word.

“I have said, and I want to say it again, that you have just presented the most convenient reason for milking me of my P300. This ends it. I am not going to argue with you anymore. The Lord shall judge between us.”

My anger has not yet subsided. But three hundred pesos is really a thing not worth fighting for.

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If you go through life without learning any lesson from cyclone Nargis or China quake or typhoon Halong, you’re not only doing something unthinkable, you’re missing something. Even the Burmese junta has capitalized on their national weakness to keep the US naval ship at bay, and would allow disaster to pile upon disaster than to accept aid from the enemy; that’s the lesson they learn. The loss of many lives in China, many of them children from one-child families, would perhaps make the Chinese government rethink about their forced abortion policy to keep the lid on their population growth; the quake should put an end to that one-child policy. Typhoon Halong on the other hand has kept the blogs and the emails running. Already there is an appeal for help from a preaching brother in Pangasinan.

They never stop blowing, these contrary winds of life. They keep inserting themselves into an otherwise peaceful landscape of our lives; and we keep exerting efforts to battle them. Jesus once restrained the wind, a project of great impact meant to teach His mastery over nature; today man’s little project of restraining the wind is by turning off the electric fans, making him the master of the switches. Contrary winds, they always come on days we never expect. God no longer restrains these forces but rather permits them to blow against us. But as He lets these winds into the landscape of our being, He also sends us moments of quiet, brief cessations, lest we be overcome.

Like the rain and the sunshine, the Lord of nature sends storms and tornadoes and hurricanes and cyclones and quakes to both the just and the unjust. Leaving Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and other isms and becoming a Christian will not make you escape these opposing winds of life, contrary to what the Pentecostals teach. Ancient history has been witness to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Christians had been burned or torched, fed to the lions, massacred wholesale, or sent to work in the mines until they perished. The more prosaic threats to a child of God keep on coming, and they are now legions: racism, hatred and xenophobia, misrepresentation and betrayal of trust, gossiping and character assassination, ostracism and church politics, government-imposed hardships. As contrary winds of life, all or any of these will blow against you, a child of God, in all its terror and fury.

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It is an honor to have friends. In fact I am honored to have bosom buddies who have told me they’re going to die for me. I have suspicions that they might be joking, since we have been partners in everything. But I am always on the lookout—they might make good their promise.

On the other hand, it is not necessarily a dishonor to have enemies. I have not seen or heard of anyone who has not made any enemy. Jesus had. Paul and Peter had. While social decorums may find enemy-making a downside, it is next to impossible to be able to live as old as 62 with your life story having no villains. It simply does not make you normal. My wife has become insomniac because of the enemies I had; on the other hand, I have become amnesiac as to the number of people who have desired to do me harm. No, it is not a compliment for one to be without enemies at all. “Woe unto you,” says Jesus, “when all men shall speak well of you” (Luke 6:26).

When it comes to making enemies, I am very choosy. None of those I had guided to enter the kingdom, none of those I had baptized, had become my enemies either in the kingdom or out.

I had tried to make friends of my enemies, because it was what the Lord desires for his disciples to do. It wasn’t easy, but I did. I had hugged the man who once tried to stab me to death, reconciled with the cousin who once tried to stone me, made peace with the mountain man who wanted to hack me with a bolo. The past is past between us. The lady who became my most rabid enemy had patched up with me, and she it was who later defended me from those who would destroy me by word and by deed. Yes, it is a sweet thing to be able to live under one world roof with former enemies now upgraded to friends.

You may consider enemies as the villains in your life, but some enemies became heroes. Abraham Lincoln, for example. Alive, he was the most hated man in the southern United States.

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Within a week of each other, two disasters had hit two places on a grand scale, in Burma where over a hundred thousand died or are missing in the wake of cyclone Nargis, in China where tens of thousands perished in Monday’s earthquake.

We decry Burma’s junta regime for its verrry slow response to the tragedy, for its self-serving but clumsy attempts at whitewashing its image, showing its military distributing aids to cyclone victims, its generals visiting the victims in two or three or places, one even patting a child who cries, broadcasting these video images to disprove the accusations of its being a bumbling, fumbling, incompetent regime, for its idiotic insistence of holding referendums in spite of this great misfortune that happened to the country, referendums meant to legalize its hold to power, for giving much air time to dishing out criticisms of its critics, for walling its people in and for stalling foreign aid workers who come with their aid, for reason that we now understand as its way to keep from the world’s eyes scenes that could prove the regime’s incompetence and its inhuman treatment of its own people—scenes of countless bloated bodies floating on its river and littering its delta landscape, reminding you of one big countryside cemetery, maybe smaller than Texas, but still big, or one big countryside funeral parlor, where the odour and the stench of death will forever remind you of your failure as a government.

On other hand, we praise China for its quick response to aid the victims of the quake.

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I like this man Arnold Schwarzenegger, once the world’s leading bodybuilder who went on to become one of the biggest stars of Hollywood, and then California governor. “The Austrian Oak” really deserves the world’s accolades. He has the build, the strength and the natural charisma to make it in the limelight. His first role in Conan The Barbarian in 1982 suddenly made him a movie star. And I never missed any of his big hits: The Terminator (1984); Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). I would pause for a while, or postpone what I am doing if I see him on HBO; or I would rent Schwarzenegger CDs to play on my DVD player. These films alone made him one of the highest paid movie stars, his fame guaranteeing him a place in the industry’s Hall of Fame. When he ran for governor of California in 2003, and won the recall replacing Gray Davis as governor, I in this little corner of the world cheered him on. When he was re-elected to a second term in 2006, I said to myself Californians really need Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He could run for the White House, except that the U.S. Constitution bars him from running because he was born outside the United States.

The recent news reports say that the California Supreme Court has finally granted gays the right to be wedded, which in effect legalizes their sinful lifestyle, and the most recent one says that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger respects the court’s decision and “will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.” And I said, “What’s happening to you guys?”

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An old bird advises a young bird not to spend much time hopping from one twig to another twig on an acacia tree by the side of the road that leads to the forest.

“But I want to have a good view of the world around us, the better to enjoy the beauty of it,” the young bird insists.

“Birds are not supposed to be aesthetically minded and enjoy the beauty of their surroundings. Give that job to the painters and the artists and the loafers. You are supposed to find worms to eat,” says the old bird.

“You are a tyrant among birds. You want to lord it over us. You don’t listen to reason.”

“Well, tyrants also have common sense. Remember I am much older. You are young and still need to eat plenty of worms.” It goes without saying that in the world of avian creatures, the number of worms a bird has swallowed in his lifetime is the measure of his wisdom and experience.

Because it is an argument that no one will win, the young bird has decided to abide by the peaceful co-existence policy among avian creatures: You do your thing, I’ll do mine.

It is not known if birds too have adrenalin, but this young bird is so hyperactive he really wants to hop and hop and fly from one twig to another and chirp and chirp to his heart’s content. The morning sun is not yet high up in the sky. But a little boy is up from bed, and wants to try his skill with the new slingshot his father has made for him.

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My literary romance with Burma began with Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay,” a piece that high school literature education could not do without. I dreamed of taking a dip in Irrawaddy River under the shadow of a pagoda on a cool afternoon, camping out in the outskirts of Rangoon while watching the stars frolic in the sky, or romping in the park with a Burmese tiger cub as a way of fulfilling my nostalgia for the youth that I’ve lost.

Other times I dreamed of getting a job as a police officer in Moulmein to see how it feels to be George Orwell, who wrote in his memoir: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” I also fancied myself being taught the Manipuri language by a Burmese girl. A minority dialect in Burma, Manipuri is more common in India than in this country of Kipling’s Mandalay romances, therefore a Burmese girl who knows it surely rises above her equals. And I imagined taking up the challenge of the Hkakabo Razi, the highest peak in southeastern Asia, living there for a month. With my Burmese girl teacher for company, I thought that challenge was more pleasurable than Everest. There we could subsist on a Burmese diet— boiled rice, a little spicy meat, some vegetables; hot noodle soup flavoured with coconut; ngapi sauce made from fermented fish; mangosteen, custard apple, and tepid green tea poured in small cups. The gentle life that is Burmese land—far from the madding crowd that is the military junta— one can have on a platter as wide as one’s palm.

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It happened a month ago. I was not sure what the man’s motive was, but he sent me an email. Well, the kind of email salesmen would invent when they wanted to make a big sales pitch.

My reply consisted of a two-letter word: No. It was the shortest reply I made for the longest that he sent, trying to promote a drug I could not afford, and even if I could, it would be the kind of drug I wouldn’t buy, since I see no need for it. He was selling me Viagra. But before I blocked his email address–before I consigned him to the spam bin–I took a second look at it. Because, believe it or not, I just received an email purporting to come from me!

Dear readers of this blog, the man was trying to copy my English, my way of writing, my style. He was trying to be me. That’s wonderful, I would say. I too would be happy to have a namesake for company. The problem was this man’s grammar was very bad and his diction was even worst!

He was my copycat, and he was not even trying hard!

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