Past the White House

A Sunday walk down Buray Avenue, September 12, 2021

A little past one on a Sunday afternoon I decided to walk home, under a sun that kept losing its nerve, ducking behind thick dark clouds and then peeking out again like Peter Pan at a nursery window. My way took me past the White House where the Divine Master once lived. The house has grown old and largely untended, and the few patches and improvements someone began on it in recent years now lie fallow and unfinished, as though the workers stepped out for lunch and the lunch lasted several seasons. Walking by, I wished it had been preserved the way the Rizal house in Calamba has been preserved, with a gate people could pass through and rooms they could stand in. From the road I could see its side, the outer walls worn by weather and by the slower erosion of years. If walls could speak, or could keep the voices and whispers that passed through them long ago, what a joy it would be to put an ear against them and listen backward through time.

I never met the Divine Master, and the thought of him comes to me as melancholy and gladness at once, the way news of a wedding reaches someone who missed it. When he crossed over I was still in elementary school and living far from here. Blessed are the ones who saw him, who felt his presence and received his blessing in their own bodies. Why I am so certain of it I cannot fully explain, but I am certain that the man people called the mysterious superstar of the South was no ordinary man.

Over the years I have read a great deal: the controversies around the acts of Jesus that scholars now call myth, theology and comparative religion, physics, the theory of knowledge. In all that reading I have found no other figure who could pass his powers of healing and miracle on to the people who followed him. The wonder-workers on my shelf, Pythagoras, Moses and Elijah, Apollonius of Tyana, the Comte de Saint-Germain whom his admirers treat as a saint, and Cagliostro, kept whatever gifts they had to themselves. Nor have I read of any man who could change his own appearance across a single day, a child in the morning, a vigorous young man at noon, and an old man by afternoon.

Saints and adepts have shown bilocation on many recorded occasions, and the sages of India had their siddhis. The Divine Master possessed those powers as well, and beyond them, so far as my reading goes, he alone among those who have been called men, if man is even the right word for him, raised the dead to life and brought a newborn out of nowhere into a family's arms, a child the members call reincarnated. Jesus of Galilee turned water into wine; Ruben Ecleo, the stories say, turned seawater into gasoline. He calmed raging seas and winds, and he could stay underwater for hours at a time.

One story I carry with me concerns a little girl crying over a broken toy. Master Ruben went to her smiling, closed his hand, opened it again, and a bird was there, which he gave to the child in place of what she had lost. The blind received their sight, the lame walked and the deaf heard, and barren women conceived after he made magnetic passes with his hands over their wombs. He foretold future lives and future events, and the people who told me these things insist that every one of his predictions came to pass. The professionals who tried to account for him came away with no account at all, and he remains, for me and for many who knew him far better than I ever could, a mystery who walked among ordinary people.

Those were my thoughts as I walked down Buray Avenue, scattered and nostalgic, with no particular order to them. Midday had gone quiet. From the top of the street the road ran all the way down to the sea, and when I looked around there was no stir anywhere, since many of the people indoors were taking their naps, others had settled lazily in front of their televisions, and the children bent over their phones. The road down memory lane is a long one, though I should correct myself, because the memory belongs to other people. It came to me secondhand, assembled from those who met him and saw his miracles with their own eyes, people who shared their private thoughts and experiences with me the way Chaucer's pilgrims traded tales on the road to Canterbury.

What still moves me is that so many of those witnesses are alive. Some have gone, some remain, and years ago I had the chance to speak with Tatay Cuper Edera, an eyewitness to the three men from the yacht anchored at Cabilan Island. The last verse of John's Gospel says that if everything Jesus did were written down, the world itself could not hold the books (John 21:25). Our situation runs the other way, with the resources at hand and the witnesses still among us, and what we lack is a writer whose pen can carry the weight of his deeds.

I once dreamt of a book titled The Life and Times of the Divine Master. Its contents never reached me. Whether I opened it and read it in the dream I cannot say, since nothing of the text survived waking, and all I kept was the book itself and the title on it. I have wondered since whether it was an Akashic record, a book meant to be read only in the spiritual realm.

The melancholy stayed with me down the length of the avenue. I grieved for things that passed before I could witness them, and I wished in my heart I had been there to see. His voice, his walk, the gestures of his hands as he spoke, all of it has reached me only through other people's telling, and I cannot explain why that lack should weigh on me as it does.

I kept walking even though my knees, troubled since the year before, ached with each step. On the right a large black boulder stood among the houses, a remnant of the past still intact, with homes climbing above and below it. Handsome concrete houses, well kept and flowering, rose against a backdrop of gray and broken-down dwellings. In the shade of a tree a half-naked man on a bench was taking the air, and farther on a ladder leaned against a street post where, I guessed, a lineman had left it when he stopped for lunch. Stores of every kind lined the way down, shops and small establishments one after another. This is the same street his feet once trod. The walk toward the sea is the easy direction, all downhill, but it means keeping your back to the shrine the whole way.

I hate to admit it, but when I passed the Admin Building I missed Grand Master, and with him everything that building once held for the rest of us.