My last blog was created while I was attending a seminar in Quezon City. It’s a mandatory seminar for lawyers to update us in new legal developments. I’ve attended other seminars before and I managed somehow to plod through them with gritted teeth. This seminar was different. Most of the lecturers were former judges who are professors of law as well and their manner of lecturing brought me back to law school.
One lecturer was my professor at the UP College of Law. He was the Head of the UP Office of Legal Aid in my time. He remembered me. He told me I hadn’t changed one bit. He said during his introduction that he was happy to see his students in the audience, especially those he remembered for their beauty and brilliance. I doubt that he was referring to me, but as he said that, he glanced over to me with a twinkle in his eye. He had always been witty, I give him that.
The seminar schedule was grueling: lecture session started at 8 am, break at 10 am, lecture session resumed 10.15, lunch break at 12 noon, lecture session resumed at 1 pm, break at 3 pm, resumed at 3.15 pm and session ended at 6.15 pm for four straight days.
At first I found it physically difficult to be comfortable. The thought of the long hours was dreadful. But when we ended with a picture taking last night after the last session, as I was going home, I was surprised to find myself a little sad. I felt like a child taking a roller-coaster ride for the first time: I felt daunted. The roller-coaster tracks seemed impossibly high and unreliably rickety. But once on board, I found that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. So that when the ride was over, my face still felt numb from the pull of the wind and the gravitational force, I knew I would miss the ride and will surely ride again given another chance. I felt disappointed that the seminar was over too soon. Looking back now, that was the same way I felt about law school: just when I had gotten the hang of things, made sense of things, felt slightly adequate, law school was over and it was graduation day. Isn’t that the story of our lives?
That seminar reminded me why I went to law school in the first place. I went there to learn, not just to train. I went there to sharpen my intellect and develop a legal mind. I went to law school to make a difference in this world, to make a difference in the world around me. The legal education was a tool and a weapon to build and to protect lives and properties, ideals and ways of life.
I find it most painful when I see my old professors from law school and they ask me what I am doing now. I cannot help but think that I am being held to account for what I have done with the tool and weapon I had been given. And what have I done?
When I look at my peers, my accomplishments seem light and sparse, as rickety and flimsy as roller-coaster tracks. When I see my law professors, they are luminaries ablaze and next to them, my legal light is flickering. Their very presence seems to reproach my failure to be what I was bred and trained to become, a lean mean legal machine. Yes, that is where the sadness comes from. Ideals were raised, standards held aloft and I do not in any way measure up. It always makes me sad to disappoint those who believed in me, those who invested their time and strength in me. But I have chosen a different path. Those things that could have been gain for me, I had already counted loss to gain knowledge of Christ. I have not made a mistake, I am sure, but proof of the soundness of my choice will only come in eternity, when I see my Savior’s face. The things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. I lay hold on the promise that whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it. Lord, we have left all, to follow thee and this is the price I have paid. I have not given up much. A good legal reputation, a thriving and lucrative practice, the esteem of my contemporaries, these are only momentary. I have invested my life in things that have a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. And I am content.