I am praying as someone who lived in the squatters and slums of Third World Manila and now live with certain privileges of the First World in the occupied state of Hawaii, privileges that are not afforded to the 90 percent of the people of the Philippines and privileges that are not afforded to the indigenous working-class Hawaiians in their own land. I am praying as someone who is trying to be a Christian in the First World, trying desperately to hold on to my faith—a faith that I learned from my mother.
In many ways these privileges that I have gained have made it harder to pray and live out my faith. Lent has begun. It will be a time of solemn prayer and a time of reflection.
Many Christians will be called to observe the suffering of Jesus. Some will choose to give up something that is taken for granted. We may give up a certain type of food, rice or sugar for some; for others it’ll be meat or a favorite dish; yet others may choose to fast, abstaining from all types of food. There is beauty in this observance—there is beauty in it's intent. Absence of comfort has the potential to make us realize the kind of logic that First World peoples operate on—the logic of convenience. And logic of comfort. It is not difficult to translate the logic of convenience to a faith of convenience. It is not difficult to translate the logic of comfort to a faith of comfort. A faith of convenience may allow us to see the suffering of Jesus. Some will react, with fervor, by blaming the Jews and some will put the blame on Pilate, discussing a kind of state sponsored torture. The problem is it stops there, and begins again next year’s Lent. A faith of convenience will look and then look away, fast. And a faith of comfort will just be that: faith makes one comfortable. And makes one feel good. And stops there.
I want to share with you the kind of faith that I imagine; the kind of faith that is practiced by many of the 90 percent poor peoples of the Philippines; the kind of faith that is uncommon to the 81 families who own the Philippine Islands; the faith that plants marunggay and harvests oranges in Makua Valley; the faith that restores our umbilical cord to each other and the land; the faith that struggling poets live and write about; the faith that is not always sweet, sometimes bitter, but always good for the soul; the faith that is a threat to the ‘national security’ of empires; the faith that can make wider the 'window of vulnerability' of the those in power in order to make wider it’s window to grieve because grieving makes us human again and again and again. Any attempt at closing this sensitivity to life’s openness to grieving and therefore suffering is an attempt to trade false pretensions of security for the love and grace of God.
I am slowly realizing that a faith rooted in convenience and comfort is what I am headed towards. It is a faith that moves away from the faith of my mother.
This is the faith that has saved me—and I wish to share my story during this Lenten season:
As a child I suffered from a weak body, a body that does not allow me to breath with easiness. In many nights, in unexpected hours, my lungs would struggle for air, my body would suffocate, and then would start to shut down, and in a matter of minutes darkness would envelop my mind and body. With her arms wrapped around me, rosary in her hand, she would slowly bring my convulsing body to calmness. I would feel my clothes wet with sweat and drenched in my mothers tears. Her recitations would go on and on and would fill me with hope: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…" The slow but methodic rhythm of her repeated supplications and the command of her voice would make my weak lungs be filled with air and resurrect my body, at least for another night. After each painful episode I would ask her, “Why would god let this happen?” Like her God, she remained silent.
I struggled with this experience. I struggled to make sense of this in light of my faith.
I realize now that it wasn’t pain and suffering that brought up my faith. It was the love of my mother. It was her unwillingness to surrender to pain and suffering; it was her courage to resist letting go of a sickly child and resist what seemed to be inevitable for a dying body. Her faith made real her imaginations of a resurrected body. Her faith is married to hope, one that springs eternal, one that is forever, and one that is called virtue.
I want to say explicitly that this kind of pain and suffering is not the way to God—even if it has made me closer to God—closer to Her love, closer to His compassion and closer to the righteousness of the Land. This pain and suffering was caused by poverty, because we had no access to health care and because our Philippine government tacitly declared 90 percent of its people invisible—dead—alive only when it comes to collecting taxes and during elections—something our U.S. government have in common.
We must guard ourselves of theologies that promote suffering as the way to God. In the suffering of Third World peoples, women, queer and the working-class, we cannot afford more violence in the form of starvation, rape, abuse, domestic-violence, and illiteracy as a means to God. We must not endure this kind of suffering. We must never let the tears of the oppressed to flood humanity, to let it go this far would have been a failure to recognize that there are people suffering in the first place.
Faith is resistance. It is the refusal to let people go hungry; it is the reclaiming of our souls and bodies; it is the courage to move away from abusive relationships and all forms of violence that harms life; it is the sheltering of the homeless; it is the disarming of the industrial military complex, the refusal to arm humanity with weapons that have the ability to wipe out a whole race in a matter of seconds—without a tear; it is the speaking of many languages; it is the crying, laughing, grieving and rejoicing all in one emotion; it is the making louder the cries of the oppressed.
In this season of Lent let us move with a more vigilant hope and a more critical faith.
May the grace of god, the wisdom of our ancestors and the breath of the land guide us to always affirm life. Amen.
This is dedicated to the poet and theologian Emily Joye McGaughy. Your shared tears and woundedness helped me to see the U.S. with a more open faith and more hopeful future. In the coffee shop and over the marina I witnessed your deep compassion for people, for your father. Your theopolitcal love has guided me in my time in Berkeley. Aloha and Dios ti agngina.
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