God Saved the Collegium: Perula Orientis at 3
When my good friend Billy—then a Master’s student doing his thesis in the University of Asia and the Pacific’s (UA&P) political economy program—suggested that I create a “speakeasy” for the discussion of academic research projects more than two years ago, I never realized that things would ever turn out the way they did.
As Billy was, at that time, busy going to and from Mindoro for his thesis, I was left to build and manage this ambitious project from scratch. I started by gathering a group of friends—both students and professors—who were interested in having intellectual discussions. We held our meetings at the cafe on the fourth floor of UA&P’s Administration and Library Building. Not long after, we started having formal dinners at my house.
I christened this group “Academia Draconensis,” because I believed that we the students, faculty members, and alumni of the University constituted a ‘nation’ of Dragons. But, as academically inclined as I was, I was young, dumb, and totally clueless about how to navigate people, much less organizational life. I was deathly afraid of making mistakes, and yet I sought to conquer the world. Needless to say, I failed. Badly.
I fell in fearful love and pushed away a lot of good people. Draconensis was dead in the water. In my fear of making mistakes I made all the mistakes I could possibly conceive of myself making. So by the time May of 2024 came around, I was lost, heartbroken, and very much faced with my failings as a leader and as a person.
But over the corpse of a slain Draconensis, God gave life to the Collegium. A Muslim friend of mine whose name literally translates to “Christ bearer” (it’s complicated) told me to build everything again from scratch. So I did. I found myself having to learn things that I should have learned years ago, the hard way. From how to build value to an organization to the meaning of prudence: “knowing what to do and when to do it.”
And in the process, I made a lot of mistakes, some worse than others. One of my mentors told me: “Be open to the good . . . and the bad.” So came the online forums, the Latin classes, the essays and the poetry. But also more crises, many failures, and many more disappointments, many of them can be blamed squarely on me. I would probably die of shame if I had to tell you all the stupid things that I did or went through in managing this organization.
But all throughout, God was there. God saved this organization from falling apart more times than I can remember. He sent us many consolations in the midst of the various questions we had to face together as a Collegium. This does not mean that there are no more problems—there are many. But God always gave us the means to overcome them. Without God’s help, we would have been gone or in a very bad situation long ago.
God was with us in the people who kept the boat steady during every storm, and helped us climb back onboard whenever we fell off. There is a whole list of people I can name who gave me counsel in my need, who helped me manage things I could never have managed on my own. Every fellow, member and associate of Perula Orientis who continues to remain faithful to our mission is a godsend in the literal sense of the term. And, although I can only speak for myself, I am sure that God has also provided the other officers of this Collegium with ways of making sense of things when things stopped making sense.
It is often said that when God calls you to something, he has already factored in your stupidity. I can only speak for myself when I say that He has certainly factored in mine. We continue to live, learn, and look toward the future. And most importantly, we continue to love. We continue to love God who gave all of us our existence and who is the ultimate end of all intellectual work. We continue to love our fellow man, who we seek to bring closer to Christ by the formation of a truly Christian culture in our midst.
In the end, God will judge us not based on how many articles we publish or how many people we can win over for the Catholic cause. He will ultimately judge us based on one metric: love. Did we do whatever we are doing now for the love of God and, for His sake, our fellow persons? Our intentions, it is clear, should be constantly rectified toward this end.
The Collegium, of course, has many needs. But if you are to pray for one favor for us from the Divine bounty, it would be this: that we may learn how to love God more and more each day, and act on our love in all that we do—both within the Collegium and without it. The Collegium is temporary; our fate is eternal. May we never, ever lose sight of Him.
It is for His sake that God made each and every one of us. And it is certainly for His sake that He saved us from certain doom and continues to sustain us, day by day. There are many uncertainties ahead of us, but I am a firm believer in the fact that God sometimes allows things not to make sense now so that they can make sense later. For us in the Collegium, things certainly made sense much later than when they first occurred to us.
Pray for us always. Thank you for your continued support, and may God bless us all.
