Jewels of the Pauper

     
There is a thought that comes to me sometimes (the old
captain said) as I sit by my window in the evening, listening
to the young men's guitars, and watching the shadows deepen
on the long low hills, the hills of my native land.
          You know, we are a remarkably poor people: poor, not
only in material goods, but even in the riches of the spirit. I
doubt whether we can claim to possess a truly national
literature. No Shakespeare, no Cervantes has yet been born
among us to touch with immortality that in our landscape, in
our customs, in our history which is most vital, most original,
most ourselves. If we must needs give currency to our
thoughts, we are forced to mint them in the coinage of a
foreign tongue; for we do not even have a common language.
          But as poor as we are, we yet have something. This
pauper among the nations of the earth hides two jewels in her
rags. One of them is our music. We are sundered one from
another by eighty-seven dialects; we are one people when we
sing. The kundimans of Bulacan awaken an answering chord
in the lutes of Leyte. Somewhere in the rugged north, a
peasant woman croons her child to sleep; and the Visayan
listening remembers the cane fields of his childhood, and his
mother singing the selfsame song.
          We are again one people when we pray. This is our
other treasure: our Faith. It gives, somehow, to our little
uneventful days a kind of splendor: as though they had been
touched by a King. And did you ever notice how they are
always mingling, our religion and our music? All the basic
rites of human life ― the harvest and the seed-time, the
wedding, birth and death ― are among us drenched with the
fragrance of incense and the coolness of music.
          These are the bonds that bind us together; these are the
soul that makes us one. And as long as there remains in these
islands one mother to sing Nena's Lullaby, one boat to put out
to sea with the immemorial rowing song, one priest to stand at
the altar and offer God to God, this nation may be conquered,
trampled upon, enslaved, but it cannot perish. Like the sun
that dies every evening, it will rise again from the dead.
― Fr. Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.
1943