Your Turn

The author, now a high school senior, overcomes her reluctance to fulfill a class requirement as she is touched by two articles. 

Father Seán Coyle,

I’m Myla Patricia Aquino, a junior at St Scholastica’s College Manila. I’m writing to you as partial fulfillment of my requirements in Christian Living class. At first I never really wanted to do this task but, on the contrary, not only did I find one article that intrigued me, but I found two very interesting articles. Both are from your September- October 2004 issue.One is your own article on Gianna Beretta Molla, Choose the child – I insist on it and the other Life- giving Moments by Rosemary Taker. As I read these, I realized certain things that seem to be the answer to most peer pressure problems I, and people I know, face right now.

One of my friends once told me, ‘Love doesn’t make the world go round, money does.’ When she told me that, I felt for a time that perhaps she was right. Maybe, we all don’t really need love to survive; we need money to go on. After all, those that we consider as our daily necessities we get in exchange for money. We need money to buy food, to buy clothes and maintain our homes. Sometimes, we even have this tendency to think that money, and money alone, could make us happy since it could provide us with our necessities plus our luxuries in life. This kind of mentality would also lead us to think that we need to work for money so that we could live content. But reading those two articles made me change my mind. It made me realize that money is not the source of happiness and contentment. Simplicity of life often provides us with all the experiences we will ever need to overcome the challenges of life. And with these experiences, we will always find love.

I realized that when you put money in the picture, everything else loses its value and its essence seems to get jumbled up. By the time you realize that everything is complicated, your first initiative is to get money to resolve the issue and to get money is you have to go and look for it. You feel that without money, you won’t live happily because you think that it is the only thing that would resolve everything. An example is when you are hooked on the idea that the only way to be happy is to be popular, and the way to be popular is to acquire the latest gadgets – the latest cellphone model, an iPOD, a laptop, and when you reach 18, you’d want a car. So the way to be happy is to have money. This is totally wrong. It’s like you’re looking for something that is supposed to look for you. Happiness isn’t supposed to be located through a treasure-map, but in the heart of everyone - waiting to be shared.

In your article Choose the child – I insist on it, I felt that every pregnant mother has something to learn from Gianna Molla. We all live in a materialistic, self-centered world and we sometimes have to go with the flow in order to get by. Gianna proved the world wrong by clinging to her faith for survival -- not to what her environment dictated. During her last days she involved herself, not in enjoying the world for the last few moments, but in pursuing a better relationship with Him. And it seems she died a happy death. It made me realize that when all else fails, He will always be there for us no matter what the circumstances are. As Rosemary Taker puts it in her article, ‘…becoming vulnerable and powerless has brought me closer to God and strengthened my prayer life.’

On the other hand, I admire Rosemary Taker. It takes great courage and a huge leap of faith to be able to step, no, jump down from the world she’d grown up in and known and enter a place she’s not even sure she can handle. She showed great initiative in putting aside her desires and even some needs to perform missionary work, which happens to be her passion.  Work deeply rooted in love paved the way for her to experience instances of happiness and contentment.

As for my life, I’m not sure if I’m ready to leave everything I own - material things - to experience the happiness the simple things in life might bring my way. But one thing I know now for sure, love would be the only thing that would make my world go round.

You may email the author at: torete_03@yahoo.com