The evolving generations that came after she had retired to a hidden monastic life have had no more recollections of her. Yet the few living that had known her had remembered her for that rare erudition and elegant pedagogy
On the day of her death on July 19 the previous month, the University of the Philippines Alumni website published a succinct but fitting announcement:
“Former UP Professor of English and Comparative Literature Josefina Dionisio (JD) Constantino (28 March 1920-19 July 2024), known to many as Sr. Teresa Joseph Patrick of Jesus & Mary, OCD, passed away at 4:00 a.m. today, 19 July 2014. She was 104.
“Sister Teresa is a UP College of Education and Columbia University (English and Comparative Literature) alumna. She was a student of pioneering fictionist and creative writing teacher Paz Marquez Benitez at UP and Pulitzer-winning poet and critic Mark Van Doren at Columbia. Later, she held grants and fellowships at University of Edinburgh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan.”
“In UP, she was Secretary of the University and the Board of Regents under President Vidal Arceo Tan (1951-1955). Her students include National Artist Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, poet Virginia Moreno, Inquirer columnist Belinda Olivares Cunanan, and former Malacañang Press Secretary and Manila Bulletin Editor-in-Chief Crispulo Icban.”
And then UP mentions the numerous books she had published, both before and after she had become a cloistered Carmelite nun.
The noted Filipino creative writing and comparative literature academic Jose Wendell Capili posted news of her death on social media. I had reacted not because I had known JD in a personal way, but because I recalled my childhood when her name had echoed during conversations at family meals. In the 1970s, JD Constantino was running a well-loved opinion column in a national daily. She had also worked at the Development Bank of the Philippines where her boss, DBP chairman Pablo Lorenzo Sr., was an affinal relative.
My parents were in awe of JD’s writings and of her cerebral mind. She wrote as a guiding star for her columns in the Manila Chronicle, which she entitled Faith and Freedom. The columns were published five times a week until 1972 when martial law was declared and newspapers were shut down by the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship.
The announcement of her death rekindled an article that was written of her in 2010, after she had turned 90. It was penned by the well-known opinion journalist Ceres Doyo, perhaps the only writer ever who was able to interview JD when she had entered monastic contemplative life never to be seen again in the classrooms of UP Diliman. Ceres gave me her kind permission to quote widely from her article that captures so well JD’s remarkable intellect and spirituality.
“She talks a mile a minute. She is abreast of the goings-on, perhaps more than most. With fire and frenzy she continues to write as if deadlines were still part of her life,” Ceres wrote.
“Her erudition shines through in conversations. She laughs, she listens, she remembers. She talks about the Philippines with great passion. Through her body of written works, she communicates to the world.”
“All that, but for more than three decades now, prayer and total commitment to God have been the essence of her life, the defining mark of her vocation.”
JD was born in Tondo, Manila to Jose and Susana Constantino who were “persons not of great means but of great faith,” Ceres wrote. The year was 1920, when having Filipino women writers was in its seminal development. She attended Torres High School and graduated cum laude and class valedictorian for the BS Education in UP in 1940.
She took to teaching immediately after graduation, at the V. Mapa High School, one of the country’s oldest and most revered, and at her alma mater Torres High School until World War II broke out.
“I refused to teach the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere program,’ she recalled, and instead took a job as social worker at the Department of Social Welfare. ‘The war literally blasted me out into an ‘unreal city,’ she said, borrowing words from T.S. Eliot. ‘We ministered to all types of emergency needs and to the returning prisoners of war from Capas, and survivors of the Death March.”
She later joined the UP faculty after the war and in 1947 was sent to Columbia University for her MA in English and Comparative Literature. The school of choice was propitious. Her favorite professor was Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize laureate for poetry. Van Doren introduced JD to the works of his student, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and his famous book The Seven Storey Mountain.
She went back to UP after completion of the MA. “My postwar students were sharp and gifted,’ she recounted. ‘My universe was more truly global. I had become cosmic in spirit and more deeply Christian. Literature was once again my life and love.”
“And then the persecution of the Faith at UP began. I was the finest target, making the trio with president Vidal Tan and Fr. John P. Delaney, SJ. That fight made me a national figure overnight, for the alumni who rallied behind me were all over the country. That was my first crucible after the war.”
In 1955, she accepted a year of faculty fellowship in the Humanities at the MIT. She resigned from UP in 1960.
Perhaps the best first-person anecdote of JD was written by the 18th UP president Francisco Nemenzo, on the penultimate year of his administration in 2004. In his report to the university, he wrote of his teachers in his UP college days when he was a “provinciano Cebuano,” of which his No. 1 teacher was JD.
“There was that class in freshman English. I chose the lowest section because Professor Josefina Constantino (now Sister Teresa of the Carmelites) was known for her enormous patience with the linguistically handicapped. I was starting to feel at ease in her class when the English department decided to run a placement test. Since my English teachers at the Malayan Academy in Cebu had taught me how to write, I landed in Section 1. My classmates came from the elite schools who spoke English with Ateneo or Maryknoll accents. I cowered in my seat, scared of being called and be an object of derision.”
“The English department rejected my request to return to the lowest section, but for some reason I inspired Professor Constantino’s missionary zeal. She offered to teach me English even though, technically, I was not her student. Hoping to bring me back to the religion of my youth, she lent me the books of Thomas Merton and Cardinal Newman and urged me to imitate their style. She asked me to compose essays in response to their ideas and patiently showed me how to add power to my clumsy sentences. She failed to improve my style and restore my vanishing faith, but she raised my confidence in spoken English.”
Cloistered contemplative nuns do not actually turn their backs on the world. When the cloister door shuts behind them, they pray for the world and all its concerns. It is an unusual vocation that many may not be able to understand amidst the rat race we live in. That turning point for JD came in 1974.
Her spiritual director of many years was the American Jesuit James P. Moran. “He sent me to the nuns at St. Theresa’s College for catechism lessons,’ Sr. Teresa recalled. ‘He was horrified that at age 22 I had not read a single Catholic book.’ Moran would soon learn that his precocious ward was questioning many articles of the faith.”
JD became a lay tertiary of the Discalced Carmelites. Since the war when Moran was her spiritual director, she was beginning to be drawn to the Carmelites. Fr. Moran waited. JD had family duties to fulfill even though marriage was not in her horizon. Her decision came 30 years later.
On March 25, 1974, three days before she was to turn 54, JD entered Carmel. Ceres Doyo writes: “At about the hour of her entrance, Fr. Moran breathed his last.”
She took the name of Sister Teresa Joseph Patrick of Jesus and Mary, of the Order of Discalced Carmelites (OCD).
“I took to Carmel as fish to water. I was finally home, never to leave it. I was enamored and awed interchangeably of what I thought was a medieval but fascinatingly modern habitat, shuttling between Trent and Vatican I and gingerly taking steps to Vatican II. I was interiorly rejoicing over the many hours of prayer and the silence and solitude I had forever so longed for. It was truer now, ‘life as prayer and prayer as life.”
She would later publish her semi-autobiography, “Cry, Beloved Mother Church Rejoice!” She also published a collection of essays on Fr. Moran, “Priest of Fire and Flame.” She also wrote two volumes of “Personalizing Russia,” her reflections of her stay in Russia where she had once observed contemplative life. Her Faith and Freedom columns composed of reflections, meditations, recollections, letters, prayers and essays have been compiled in a book and bylined in her nom-de-plume Susana Jose, after her parents’ names.
“These hours of prayer are gloriously free hours, free only for God and which is pure worship, because all else are naturally woven into the daily tapestry of unceasing prayer with vigils far into the night and long before dawn.”
“Without the contemplatives, she said, paraphrasing Merton, this country would have broken apart.”
“These pure hours of timeless, spaceless, wordless, imageless being in Being, this pregnant emptiness, Christ fills through the Spirit for the whole humankind and the cosmos. In the words of St. Teresa of Avila: “Solo Dios basta’ (God alone suffices).”
She was 50 years a Carmelite nun. JD Constantino was one of the most brilliant gems this country had ever produced. Antonio J. Montalván II
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