THESE days, it's important and urgent that we learn to handle our curiosities properly. The developments around, especially in the area of technology, are producing all sorts of stimuli that arouse our interest way beyond what is legitimate to us. And we just cannot allow this phenomenon to go on without being managed well.

The usual problem we encounter is that people just let themselves be led by whatever catches their attention and fancy. Their spontaneous, quite raw reactions to these stimuli are hardly processed and purified, and so many do not realize they are being led more by their instincts and passions than by their intelligence and will, and much less, by faith, which is how we should be guided ultimately.

Things have become really so bad that many people do not see anymore the need to supervise their instant desires to know and discover. And so many times, they fail to realize that they have become overly or unduly nosy and meddlesome, or that they are falling into morbid curiosities and voyeurism.

In the Bible, we have been warned, "Be not curious in unnecessary matters: for more things are shown to you than men understand." (Sirach 3,23) The more down-to-earth variation of that admonition is "Curiosity kills the cat."

There's, of course, good and bad curiosities. A curiosity is good when it leads us to discover things truly helpful to us, and is pursued in an orderly and reasonable manner, with charity for God and others observed along the way.

A curiosity is good when aside from the new knowledge acquired, it makes us a better person, more caring of the others and more attentive to the things of God. It's when it makes us more humble, more eager to serve others.

A curiosity is bad when it's just an idle curiosity, meant only to satisfy a passing fancy or a caprice, or to feed the urgings of passions. It is bad when pursuing it causes disorder and when the requirements of charity are not observed.

A curiosity is bad when together with some benefits, it causes some bad side-effects, like nurturing in subtle ways the anomalies of pride, arrogance, laziness, lust, envy, etc.

Nowadays, you can see many people, especially the young ones, literally wasting time just pursuing their curiosities with the help of powerful technologies that more or less given instant satisfaction.

In fact, I think this is becoming like an epidemic of a certain type of addiction rightly described by someone as an "incontinence of the spirit." What is worse is to see otherwise decent mature people succumbing to voyeurism in the Internet because in spite of their decency they become helpless when their curiosities hit them.

With this development, I believe we are quietly developing a potential destructive moral and spiritual crisis that will explode in our midst sooner or later. Minds are corrupted, souls are perverted in industrial amounts by a sweet poison. We are abusing the goodness of God who has gifted us with many blessings.

We need to be wary of our curiosities or those spontaneous desires to know, discover or experience something. We should readily explode the myth that mindlessly pursuing these curiosities is an expression of our freedom. Sad to say, this is how many people think about their curiosities.

It cannot be true freedom when things are pursued only by emotion-driven curiosities. For freedom to be authentic freedom, the full complement of our human needs and stature, including our faith, has to be considered. Our freedom should be clearly distinguished from its caricature, which is license, or freedom unhinged from God.

While curiosities may start as an emotional movement, they need to be processed more to make them truly worthwhile pursuing. Curiosities should never just be matters of spontaneity. They need to be studied, reflected upon, and if necessary, consulted about.

Our curiosities have to be properly grounded and oriented. They just cannot be allowed to explore the possibilities on their own. They have to be guided. And for this, ultimately what is needed is to relate them to God.

They even should not be guided by our reason alone. Our reason without God, without the help of faith, is like a powerful but unguided missile or mine left to drift in the sea. It can hit anywhere, and can be indiscriminate in its targets.

We need to rein in our curiosities. And so it would be good if they are brought out in the open, avoiding pursuing them in secrecy aside from what healthy discretion would indicate. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Being ensconced here in the U.S. of A., I was not able to join with friends and relatives the protests commemorating the 5th year of the enforced disappearance of Luisa Posa-Dominado and Nilo Arado of

SELDA and Anakpawis, respectively. Both were abducted, April 12, 2007, in Cabanbanan, Oton, by elements still unknown. Unedited hereunder, May Wan, Luisa's daughter, writes of shared joy, laughter, and tears, and idealism, too, she imbibed from her mother. Read on:

I love talking and hearing stories about Nanay. She has such an exciting life full of adventures that seem to come straight out of a fiction novel. The time she escaped through the roof of their stockade cell, repeating the same feat a few years later with a different set of cellmates. The time she gave birth while a platoon of soldiers were looking for her and even burned the paltera's hair. The time she escaped, was caught, gave a false name and had to deny her own grandmother. But when I think of her, I usually remember boring stuff, times we spent talking and eating, watching movies, doing something together, memories that would mean nothing to anyone besides me. Before listening to what my sister has written, please allow me to share some of these memories, so that you may have an idea how she is as a Nanay and how much we miss her.

My mother is not a skilled cook. All I remember of her culinary repertoire is burnt rice and one perfect lunch a long long time ago when she fried the chicken very well. But maybe I learned from her all the practical knowledge I really do need. She did taught me about the solar system, first aid, bank transactions, grocery shopping and marketing tips, water conservation, how to clean the sewers without dirtying your hands, how to collect candle wax in a ball and use it to polish the floor of the jail cell, how to mend a broken friendship with pinipig ice cream, how to crochet, how to wrap your hair with a towel so it won't fall off your head, how to be stubborn and righteous, how to know your self-worth and not seek the constant approval of others...the list is endless.

When I was an only child and a brat spoiled by affluent relatives, my mother scolded me each and every day, or so I feel, due to my snobbish behavior and extravagant habits. She told me how people worked hard for each grain of rice I put in my mouth or negligently scatter on the floor or the table. Being unused to life in jail and to daily chores and to not doing everything one wants, I got mad at her for being mad at me. She then explained to me that people only scold those that they love and care for because they want their loved ones to be better persons and have better lives etc. etc. Now, years later, remembering this, I am entirely secure in the knowledge that I am the person that Nanay loves most in the whole wide world.

Nanay was a mother not only to me and Tamara but also to my cousins and to all the people she has sheltered. Our home, our lives are filled with people who have felt abandoned and neglected, people suffering from nervous breakdown, youths who have run away from home, women who have been raped or beaten or probably both, pregnant women approaching single motherhood and even just imperfect people who seem to irritate everybody else. I admit that I sometimes question why it has to be my Nanay who needs to help everyone with their problems all of the time. But one time, she was telling me about a girl who has run away from home and was staying at our house, had a fight with her boyfriend outside the gate in full view and within hearing distance of all the neighbors, threatened to cut her hair and scared my aunt who thought she was trying to kill herself with the scissors. Nanay said that she only pitied the girl and wanted to hug her because all the girl really needed was a mother. When she told me this, I thought how lucky the world is to have this woman who wants to help those who need it most. And lately I've been thinking how lucky I am to have the best Nanay in the whole world simply because she's mine.

I am hoping that in sharing this with you might make you see your own mother clearly, all the small and seemingly insignificant things she does for you that you might not appreciate much now but would attain a degree of significance only when she is no longer there. (Next week: Tamara on her mother)