ONLINE EMPORIUM: October 2008

My eldest son Ramon was a persevering student. He engrossed himself in his textbooks and begged off from the rounds of social connections in which area he never fully evolved. From the academic trenches of college at the Ateneo, the top private university in the Philippines run by the Jesuits where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Legal Management, he immersed himself in computers at the Ateneo's Makati City financial center campus where the graduate school for IT (Info Techno) held court. All in all he spent eleven years being molded by Ateneo.

Led off by the eldest of the clan's fourth generation, Dr. Terence Enverga Leveriza, who was past chief resident at the government run National Orthopedic hospital and presently a practicing orthopedic surgeon at the ultra modern Asian Hospital and the recently renovated and acquired Ateneo Medical City complex in the Ortigas business center, Ramon was among the fourth generation in the Leveriza family line to submit to the Ateneo character formation mill. The very first, Dr. Jose C. Leveriza, earned his undergraduate course in its hallowed halls, and benefitted from a Japanese government scholarship before the outbreak of the World War II to finish his medical course at the Tokyo University. He was fluent in Nippongo as well as in German, Spanish, Pilipino, and of course, English.

Ramon lived in the Cervini dorm on campus for nearly four years. There he inevitably picked up the ways and the outlook of the Jesuit Fathers including walking around the grounds in the cover of darkness for his daily exercise routine. The sobriety and the ever present serious demeanor towards life of the scholastic rubbed off on him. Sure they were excellent athletes and rib tickling punsters with their smart funny jokes, but even those were steeped with high principles which never took a time out in whatever respect. Laughing at life with a studied rein became his personal style.

Ramon's career path after Ateneo took him to Accenture. He spent three years there. After Accenture he moved on to JP Morgan Chase where he is involved with a task force to facilitate the migration of the financial markets into the web. He plans to earn his full software engineer credentials in the process. As it is Accenture is such a providential employer and has given him a blank ticket to return to its fold at anytime and at any price that Morgan Chase is paying him.

It cannot be denied that Ateneo is a shadow of Georgetown University. Ramon's first cousin, Christopher Balmaceda Leveriza from Boston graduated there with a computer science degree at about the same time. In so doing he fulfilled the family tradition of earning a Jesuit training in the U.S. environment. I cited this because Ramon spent part of his grade school years in the American public school system. PS 69 in Staten Island inculcated in him an unshakable American faith in championing what is right and paying whatever price for it. This he took to Manila and the Ateneo. This he found buffeted in the learning echelons of American multinational concerns, Accenture and JP Morgan Chase.

Ramon dated a few nice girls. The last one was a classmate in graduate school. Always something would crunch the relationship near the point of physical interaction. Something or other held him off from plunging blindly forward. The rudimentary philosophy and the imperative analytics of emotional and physical involvement with the like species forestalled his romantic inclinations. Those were a lot of circuitous words only meant to say that he was a geek and a nerd when it came to love.

Ateneans are a religious lot with one foot dug deeply in learning curves of the corporate and another in many variations of worship springing forth from the very basic structure imbibed in the idealistic trek within the ivory tower. More often than not as borne out by contemporary Philippine political and economic realities, the pull of earthly interests take a more forceful stranglehold. The principles of Ignatian altruism are inundated in the whitewater surges of family, regional, and self aggrandizing interests. My son, Ramon Leveriza, with the tenacious burrowing of his American faith in doing what is right at any price pledges to be different. He adamantly refuses to walk the gangplank of those ahead of him to patrimonial doom.

The inside conflicts and the needling ironies took a toll on his psyche and he lost his religious faith. He questioned why things took their turn in such manner contrary to high principle. He stopped going to Sunday service and escaped to the posturings of philosophical treatises and books like Inca beliefs and other offbeat meditations. No women and weird religions, I had to ask him that inevitable question. "Are you a homosexual son?" "Don't be afraid to admit it as I am totally open and tolerant of the third gender." He laughed and almost choked in surprise. "Why, Dad, you think the Jesuits are homos?" "Hmmmm, errr, yes son." I tried to make light of the drama. He laughed louder and stared at me with glee. "In that case, I'm afraid I am homo, Dad!"

My eldest son Ramon Dolor Leveriza speaks English as a first language. He dabbles in Pilipino when he needs to only to be preyed upon by the vendors and the taxi drivers because of his yankee doodle twang. That and a complete adherence to the ideals of the American dream taken in the context of the present financial upheavals, seem ludicrous. But both of us find comfort in the question my own father always rejoined when confronted with the purported evils of the American satan. "Show me a page in history when and where bother turned against brother and brought catastrophic ruin to themselves and their families to free the slaves?" End of argument.

God's special advocacy of instilling love of fellow men, emancipating, treating them equally, and empowering them found no stronger adherents than in America. On a national scale this became truer in the intercontinental divide than in the pious enclaves and tentacles of the Vatican itself. God blessed America with an Abe Lincoln. And in these troubled times, America will turn to a descendant of the very slaves that he freed. God owes America the good karma for its sublime sacrifice of centuries ago in furtherance of very precepts dear to His Own Heart. God blesses America again with Barack Obama.

I prayed so hard to the Father every single day and every waking moment to bring my son back to the faith on his own volition. I refused to sermonize or impose any of my own methods of worship on my son. I believed that his relationship with God was a personal thing and that all the guidance and learning belonged to history. I just told him the one fact that I recognized happened to my own friends. "Son, Ateneans lose their faith only to find it on a more solid footing around the corner." He grimaced beside me in the car and turned to rebuke my moralistic peddling. "If that were true, don't spoil it for me Dad by hanging it like an albatross in my future."

Many years later, just this morning, my son took me aside and said matter of factly, " Dad it finally dawned on me that I have a vocation to the Priesthood. I shall aspire to get back to the Loyola House of Studies at the Ateneo to apply to be a Jesuit Priest."

I think I overprayed.