Reason to believe

Halfway through Father Ed’s talk yesterday evening, I was struck when he speculated on the probable cause of Jun Lozada’s seemingly incessant episodes of crying that has been recorded, transmitted and viewed by the public. Jun Lozada had earlier told Father Ed that he felt as if he was mourning the passing of his old life, in light of having made an irreversible decision to step into a future that he hadn’t imagined and planned for.

This was at the second buffet dinner cum forum that a group of concerned Filipinos organized at Bistro Lorenzo, a Filipino restaurant here in Phnom Penh, yesterday evening. More than 40 people filled the restaurant, a combination of old (from the first forum) and new faces. The Father Ed I’m referring to is Ed dela Torre, a former priest/activist/political prisoner and later, a government official. He was in Phnom Penh on a business trip, but he was prevailed upon by the group to give a short talk on the forum to speak about the state of affairs in the Philippines. We were fortunate to hear from him because Father Ed had at least a couple of conversations with ZTE-NBN witness Jun Lozada and he offered us a fresh look at Jun Lozada.

For the benefit of the new participants, Dinky presented her powerpoint slides. I still found it compelling, to tell the truth. But she soon gave the floor to Father Ed. And as Father Ed was elaborating on the point of dying and rising again in the theological, philosophical, and practical sense, I suddenly thought of cataracts.

As a Nursing student in the early 90s, one of the requirements in the third year was to assist in 5 major and 5 minor surgeries in the operating room, one of the areas of rotation in the hospital. My first major surgery was called ECCE (Extra-capsular Cataract Extraction) and this caused me undue panic. Not because I was afraid to perform poorly and risk the wrath of the surgeon and my clinical instructor but because the night before, I prepared for an Appendectomy (removal of the appendix). I was informed of the change 45 minutes before surgery. So I had to orient myself with a new set of surgical tools, which were–for obvious reasons way different from an abdominal surgery, memorize these, and prepare them accordingly.

But this is not the point of my story. I was able to perform well in that surgery, by the way. But what really struck me was the image of the cataract as it was being extracted from beneath the surface of the eye. It looked like a fish scale from a big fish (carp came to mind). Being the good Catholic that I was then, I thought of the conversion of Saint Paul, when the regaining of his sight was described as scales being removed from his eyes. Whoever had his cataracts removed must really feel relieved to see things clearly again. I never saw the patient after his surgery. I would have asked him to describe how it felt to be able to see again.

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