Palm Sunday 2010

Father,
Palms mainly mean “Welcome” for many people:
welcome the Messiah
welcome the Suffering Servant
welcome the Miracle Worker
welcome the Healer of our sicknesses.
Waving is easy; it’s festive and entertainment is what we are used to.

But could those palms also mean:
waving we are to the system that induces suffering
waving we are to our own indifference
waving we are to our lack of discernment
waving we are to the noise we are used to and kills our call to silence.
waving we are to the divisions over petty matters
waving we are to all our struggle for self-preservation, self-perpetuation, or self-exaltation.

Father,
what if you help me change my props,
from the palms to the foal of an ass
me riding the creature,
entering my own Jerusalem, heart throbbing
as i say “Yes” to my own fears – of my own wounds, death, becoming insignificant, losing all securities and powers, pulverized into dust as a mortal being?

What if…
instead of the palms
i waved the tail of the donkey
as a way of claiming the need
to enter my own human vulnerability
because saying yes to You in silence and service
entails the nakedness of Him
whose last piece of cloth
was even raffled.

What if Father?

——–

Photo credit: RogueSunMedia

If you have the means, would you order a shark fin soup?

I have not tasted a shark fin soup, and decide today i will never order such if i found myself billeted to a Chinese resto. Here’s why:

A bowl of shark fin soup can cost $100

A single fin is worth more than $1,300

Shark hunters are only after the fins; dead shark bodies are often discarded and to think that sharks have low reproductive rates

Each year, 73 million sharks are killed mostly in the name of trade and business

10 million kilograms of shark fins are exported annually to Hongkong by nearly 87 countries 

Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and China are the biggest shark fin consumers

Shark fin soup consumption conveys status symbol

Spain, Singapore, and Taiwan are the biggest suppliers

What’s the big deal currently? At the UN-initiated 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Doha, Qatar (March 13-25, 2010), soup-consuming countries listed above sabotaged and rejected the proposal to ban the trade on the following endangered ocean dwellers:

spiny dogfish shark

scalloped hammerhead

oceanic whitetip sharks

bluefin tuna (for sushi)

and red and pink coral

Environmentalists considered this an embarrassing triumph of trade over science, of profits over conservation.

It makes me think: sharks are often portrayed as deadly for human beings, and not necessarily as important members of the ocean world and ecosystem, perhaps in order to justify the human violence (whose undergrounds are consumerism, status symbol, or wealth) against them. That they are “killable” indeed. Now – who ends up the real killer and threat to the ecosystem?

——–

Photo credit: Joshkay

Still on the Sexual Abuse of Children

“Being a Christian is not cutting yourself off from real life; it is entering into it more fully. It is not failing to go deeper; it is going deeper than ever. It is a journey into the heart of how things really are.”

Rob Bell
Author – Velvet Elvis

There is something truly disturbing this Lent, not because it should not have happened, but for the mere fact that it grinds with the liturgical rhythm of Lent. It is un-veiling of what Lent is supposed to be – a time of repentance, honest inward-looking, bleeding with our very wounds, both personal and institutional.

The Vatican is bleeding this Lent, almost in self-imposed suffering, for secretly allowing pedophiles to roam around like lions looking for someone to devour. From the American stories of abuse to the Irish cover-up and now to the German connection of the Pope to pedophilia, the world is left to stare with anger and suspicion over what’s going on indeed in most confessional cubicles, and for some fundamentalists, is turning this into an opportunity to viciously attack and tear down the whole Church as if pedophilia is as epidemic as malaria. And how the Vatican is handling this insanity and very un-Godly mess! Bring it on the mess this Lent. There’s no other road to healing but to tell the stories of the wounded and wounding pedophiles and whatever clandestine structures are feeding them. There’s no other road to healing than remembering in repentance and compassion the secret stories of the innocent abused.

A lot needs honest admission in this Church.

Infantilism (or baby-ing instead of showing the way of honest silence for example) of the weak leaders through rigid and even surreptitious structures is one.

Overreaction, or even groping in the dark over postmodernism (gender issues; growth of personal authority) is another.

Clerical status and the confusion over the extent of political involvement in the State led into more confusion for the people.

Privileged hierarchy over the laity continues to be wounding.

But the most appalling, to echo blogger Maggie Ross, is the dwindling lived vision of the Church as a sacrament, a mere pointer to the Sacred because most leaders are so drunk in its worldly and noisy power, no longer setting an example that “union with the self-emptying God” is the ultimate humbling power and source of self-forgetful service for humanity. It’s not essentially about being ordained or being in religious life. It’s about our life in God through Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

If the Church as an institution continues in its project of self-conversion before our humble, crucified God, you and I also partake in this grace of conversion. I eat the same bread of the children, shared the same baptism. I must change endlessly until death before him who is always thousands of steps ahead of me. And so my Church leaders. And the way to partake with this goal of conversion is from within the Church herself, in being honest to the rhythms of her liturgical seasons – hot or cold.

Should we say Lent is a comfy time of mere entertainment from Passion plays? Ah-ah.

Baptism of Repentance: A Prayer for the Massacre Perpetrators

Gracious God,
You called John the Baptist
to preach a baptism of repentance on Your people.

i hear the words,
but not often the message.
For we do not always understand wisely
that the immersion into the baptismal water
is an invitation into our own dying to our self-centeredness,
a crossing of the River Jordan from our self-centered desires into new life with Christ.

Forgive me God,
for always underestimating my own baptism.
This Sunday,
I am reminded again
that my immersion demands from me
to repent for my sins.
May my confession be truly translated
into some newness in my life.

This Second Sunday of Advent,
i light 2 candles –
one for my sins,
and another in remembrance
of the perpetrators of the Maguindanao Massacre,
that Your light may find its way
into the darkest corners of their hearts,
awakening them from being servants of darkness,
into servants of light
by way of repentance.

Gracious God,
whose other name is Allah,
lead us again into our own baptism of repentance. Amen.

Maguindanao Massacre: God Is Watching

God is watching…

• how they planned it
• how they orchestrated human and other resources
• how the 64 victims feared for their lives before their last breaths; died very violent deaths
• how people become prisoners of FEAR
• how money and power are used to instill those FEARS
• how the pursuit of JUSTICE is carried out

In His time, He will act accordingly: this is my greatest hope. In history, there were no Hitlers or PolPots or Stalins who were not humbled from their seat of powers, condemned by their own savagery. In His time and not sooner the Truth will bring those murderers into their own self-condemnation and die lonely deaths, leaving their wealth and prestige rotting like carcasses, totally now abhorred and abandoned into absolute forgetfulness. Not worth a human memory at all. Only for the sake of a story of how the bloody defilement of the Garden of Eden, the Eastern side of the story itself was altered by not covering their scrotums. In the absence of repentance, shame is also lost. In God’s time – the flaming sword of God’s justice will overturn their sense of absolute control into a dog’s dung they would regurgitate from their bellies and out of their troubled minds and consciences. In His time BECAUSE HE IS WATCHING…over this land in violent disarray.

Maguindanao Massacre: A Pain Into Advent

Any normal human being could not easily get over with those images of mangled lives. I haven’t. I cried while listening to Jessica Soho’s official Network statement on the tragedy, asking every viewer of the choices at hand: peace or violence. Part of the tears was grieving with the grieving; a segment of those, for the enactment of human being’s capacity for demonic control, a reversal of how Godly we are capable of. Thank God for tears: when human suffering becomes absolutely absurd and enigmatic, tears seem to hold the bewilderment and the tension, alluring the human psyche and soul into some deeper cry for justice and strength only the tearful God on the cross could catch. It feels this way in the silence of a prayer: “God, what’s going on in this Christian country? Why, after 2 thousand years of ongoing Self-disclosure, must the violence of the crucifixion continue?”

I am learning it is more potent to honestly listen to the questions in daily silence. It is more long-term a political solution than some quick, defensive, rational answers that turn chatterers basely comical and detestable. In the honesty that Silence demands, it is safe to go naked without high-powered guns, paid goons and prestige, social influence, mansions, or fat bank accounts. Silence’s simplest and steepest demand is to cultivate total dependence on Someone, and not on something or someone.

So here i am, at the threshold of one of the loveliest seasons i often savor so religiously – Advent. I revel in the progression of the lighting from one candle to the community of 4 before Christmas. The Advent wreath reminds me so much of the hedge of God’s protection within this period or other times of waiting: it is safe to wait at bus lines, in malls and markets, for some commodities prayed for to arrive because God’s hedge of protection is always around me. Nothing is outside of God, not even death or evil deeds.

Aha! But here i am also, dragging those images of evil into Advent’s beginning. I contend the question is rather not “Why” but “Why not”. Hear this from Luke today:

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth nations will be in dismay, perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world,
for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.”

How hair-raising a colossal of turbulence and restructuring of the cosmos! Beyond what we can imagine. Coming in a cloud with power and great glory is the Son of Man.

The Gospel of Luke was written after the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish civilization, in 70AD. The destruction utterly torn apart the Jewish identity, shattering whatever peace and hopes they had for a new world order. It was a deep, searing wound on the Jewish psyche that Christian writers like Luke had picked up and turned this into a “2012” narrative in the context of the second coming of Christ.

So i enter Advent with scary images of the Last Days and the massacre in Maguindanao. The Maguindanao destruction was no less searing and painful than the destruction of the Temple: it cuts deep into our democratic identity and national psyche; it mirrors the violence of the First Century; it showcases the daily Satanic subtleties of warlordism and self-centeredness only to erupt at an uncontrollable time. The Jews must have shed tears and the early Christians must have hoped high. So do i and many others. Still, i will light my first candle of hope and waiting for justice and the best of politics.

————–
Photo credit: zik “Tay”

Homosexuality and the Body of Christ

“The religious discussion of homosexuality often degenerates into a conversation about “them” — punctuated with fantasies of baths and bars, and studded with stories of promiscuity and perversion. These extravagances distract us from a simple truth, profound in its implications: we are the body of Christ and part of our body is gay and lesbian. Who are the homosexual members of the body of Christ? They are not “them”; they are “us.” They are our siblings and our children, our friends and our fellow-parishioners. They are persons like us, striving to live generous lives of maturing faith. They are the ministers among us — priests, religious, lay — who, knowing themselves to be lesbian and gay, struggle to serve with integrity in a church that proclaims publicly that their innermost inclinations are shameful and base.”

James and Evelyn Whitehead

Learning Guitars, Listening to the Greats

What music genre relaxes you? Mine is classic folk songs, even if Dan Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band guitar score is one i can only imitate imperfectly. I’ve watched Fogelberg’s solo on Youtube and the rendition is a soulspeak with his husky voice, the string’s simple and distinct variation, and the seriousness of remembrance and dedication of the song for a dad long gone. I am settled with my limits. But listening to folk music artists is an elevating experience, un-settling in a way on how the synergy of human voice, instruments, the many truths captured by words, turns me discourteous: they’re damn good! As if Beauty had pitched a tent like Jacob pitching one anywhere he went, the built one one adores with a sense of sanctifying distance, and if done fanatically brokers the adorer to carve a desert bull out of it.

Romancing Guitars

Backtrack a bit to the personal limit i alluded to. I’m not a guitar virtuoso, learned to play the instrument only in high school while shaving off the off-key edges of my voice. Statistics: it took me about 4 years in high school and another 4 years in college to hew off those edges and led small gatherings with some confidence. Guitar skills aside, the proliferation nowadays of home videoke would have hastened the process. Manny Pacqiuao would likely be happy to testify over this with his Magic Sing! But no, not during our time in the convent, not even a TV set despite the Dutch coffee and cigars. Thanks to this Dutch frugality, TV shows and movies are never my top sources of entertainment. It’s listening to music and playing some of those!

But guitars, yes a convent and church cannot afford not to have one. It’s crippling for a liturgy without its command for unison, rhythm and glee. If you grew up in the countryside, you can imagine what i mean: choir members glancing at each other first to gather hints when to open mouths for the big Am…oopps…Alleluia! Countless were the times when i sabotaged those choir bodies for the wrong chords, messed up introduction, playing the wrong song. Humiliation is always part of any learning. I kept strumming anyway through raised eyebrows and sabotage-pointing: in mananitas, haranas, Christmas carolling, house blessing, Holy Week processions, barrio fiestas, and burial ceremonies. It was learning past the living and the dead, sumptuous meals and Christmas coins, from Ang Mga Minatay (The Dead) to America’s Horse With No Name. The opportunities were there; i only need to scale off incrementally my fear of failure. In the stretch of my experience, no dead came alive again, laughing.

The Dutch Connection

Over a small bottle of Matador brandy, i played one of my faves: Vincent by Don McLean. Slowly, i was reminded of Darbs’ recent comment on my post My Silent Madness: “starry, starry night…” the very first line of the song. Then 3 days ago, i got an email in Dutch from a former Dutch mentor, a confidential one mistakenly sent to my inbox. Strange after not having heard from him for a long time.

Vincent is deep and dark, the message tragic and beautiful. It’s a song in poetic motion, bringing and beholding back the inner beauty and madness of this great Dutch artist we all know by the name of Vincent van Gogh. Now, there are 2 ways of talking: the poetry of the song, and that of van Gogh’s life. Briefly, let’s recap van Gogh’s talent and tragedies first with the aid of Tita Wiki:

• Died at the age of 37
• Fathered Expressionism with 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches
• Worked as an art dealer
• Fall in love with a landlady’s daughter: rejected
• Grandfather was a minister: failed the entrance exam to study theology; also failed in a 3-month course at a Protestant missionary school
• Became a missionary to a small village; brushed with church authorities and left
• Wanted to marry his widowed cousin: rejected
• Quarreled violently with his father, also with cousin-in-law
• Fall in love with an alcoholic prostitute; Vincent defied his father’s objection
• Fall in love with a neighbor’s daughter: opposed by both families
• Impregnated a young painting session model: Catholic priest forbade modelling for him
• Lived alone through the sale of his paintings with bread, coffee and tobacco
• “Teeth became loose and caused him much pain.”
• Diagnosed with gonorrhea
• Worked with great European artists of his time
• Cut off the lower part of his ear lobe after a fight with a fellow artist, gave it to a prostitute
• Suffered from hallucinations and delusions
• House was closed by police upon his townsfolk’s petition
• Confined to an asylum
• Depression went deeper and “walked into a field, and shot himself in the chest with a revolver
• His last words: “La tristesse durera toujours.” (the sadness will last forever)

There you go, peeps – the beauty and madness McLean tried to capture in his song:

Vincent

Starry
starry night
paint your palette blue and grey

look out on a summer’s day
with eyes that know the
darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills
sketch the trees and the daffodils

catch the breeze and the winter chills

in colors on the snowy linen land.
And now I understand what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
they did not know how

perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry
starry night
flaming flo’rs that brightly blaze

swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in
Vincent’s eyes of China blue.
Colors changing hue
morning fields of amber grain

weathered faces lined in pain
are soothed beneath the artist’s
loving hand.
And now I understand what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
perhaps they’ll listen now.

For they could not love you
but still your love was true

and when no hope was left in sight on that starry
starry night.
You took your life
as lovers often do;
But I could have told you
Vincent
this world was never
meant for one
as beautiful as you.

Starry
starry night
portraits hung in empty halls

frameless heads on nameless walls
with eyes
that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the stranger that you’ve met

the ragged men in ragged clothes

the silver thorn of bloddy rose
lie crushed and broken
on the virgin snow.
And now I think I know what you tried to say to me

how you suffered for your sanity

how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
they’re not
list’ning still
perhaps they never will.

Next time, i’ll try to explore some theological openings from such a colorful life. Meanwhile, i’m leaving you this quote from our man:

“…to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces that lead to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture.”