A sermon delivered at UU Society of Sacramento on October 16, 2016.
Below are prayers composed for this event and I song I wrote that was sung on the same occasion.
Hello everyone. I am happy to be here today. It is quite an honor to be with you all. I come from a very small church in Manila, of about 120 square feet, with about 70 members, maybe 100 attendees on good days, about 50 of them are youth and children. 2 of those have grown up in our church in the last 10 years. Now 19 years old both Julieto Sulapas and Elson Balla are now members of our Council of Deacons. We are in the shanties of Taguig City in Manila. When we say Manila, we usually refer to any of the 17 cities in Greater Manila. I just celebrated the 3rd year anniversary of my installation in that church as their ordained minister last October 13.
I can tell you a best-kept secret. I am said to be the first out lesbian minister in the whole non-Western world. And if we can prove that wrong, I will win a foot massage in some bet I made with a friend. Meantime, it’s a chip on my shoulder. I imagine maybe one generation later, a lesbian will know of me, look for my work or writings in Starr King, and I don’t want to disappoint them. I want them to know it mattered that I came out and that I’ve been a good model. I try to hold things lightly still. Breathing in.
Do you know of the figure of speech metonymy? Not a lot of people do. Metonymy is an interesting figure of speech. It is better known in the form of name-calling. Or it could also be like calling horse-racing the track or calling a person in corporation the suit. That is metonymy, the reduction of a complex thing into a one thing.
It is much like this tattoo on my arm, “Love is life”. Is love really all of life? All of it? I always grab a good chance to tell you my tattoo story. Nepal was hit by a big earthquake that killed 9,000 people and injured 22,000. One year later, just last March, help was dwindling. So I volunteered for a month working in the epicenter of the quake, engaged myself in rebuilding, learning to make very decent bathrooms and earthquake resistant homes from ground up. 120 volunteers were there from 50 countries. Moving rubble took most of our time. It was penal colony hard labor. 2 weeks into it, I contracted a parasite.
I had to travel 4 hours down from the mountains of Nepal where you could clearly see the caps of Everest, and into Kathmandu, the city, and stay there for a week. For a week I was down just taking my meds and riding it out. My good fortune was that it coincided with the Holi Festival, the festival they throw colored flour onto you. So I pulled myself out of bed and walked outside just to feel it. A young woman, probably 18, approached me and said, would you like a tattoo on your arm. “Don’t worry”, she said, “it’s henna”. She did it for 5 minutes and so I went back to bed.
A few days later, I went back to base, rode 4 hours again. Every day from base, we would go up an hour to work and come back an hour to base again. We would eat an austere breakfast and move. Workers started to notice my tattoo. One day, my friend there from Bangladesh Uttam, asked me if I wanted my tattoo made permanent. I said yes and word got out. On the day that we were going to do it, a crowd of volunteers started to mill around, soon they pass food and drinks. They massaged my shoulders for the pain as Uttam started to trace the drawing with his new needle. Everyone was asking what does that Sanskrit say? Love is life was the answer until two literate Nepalis came along. They were shocked and asked, “What are you trying to say?” You could almost hear a pin drop when the Nepalis said, “That is saying, “Forehead is life”. Then Rury from Ireland started to chant, “Forehead is life! Forehead is life! Forehead is life! As the crowd chanted with him. He said, “Don’t change it Tet, it is so poetic! F.I.L.”
Sometimes we could get stuck in our reductions, our metonymy, our One Thing In Life. In my counseling of mostly lesbians and in my countless conversations with oppressed people in the Philippines, I have seen that my approach has evolved into that of helping recover their conversation with everything. It. Always. Works. And conveniently even over Facebook. My friend recently lost her leg to diabetes. A few months later, she blames her moodiness and temperament to why her lover left. Over Facebook, I counseled her. After a few weeks of seeing her grieve until she had nothing left in her, it would be time. I would ask them questions like “What do you like about things around you?” It always starts with gratefulness.
Love isn’t life. Love isn’t everything. Love would have killed her. Instead she found her place in everything by slowly conversing with every single thing. David White drove the point home in his poem “Everything Is Waiting For You”
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
In the Philippines, the UU faith is 60 years old. Our founder Toribio Quimada is a martyr. He was gunned down because he had been working for farmers to acquire land titles invoking the new land reform law in 1987. His house and church property was burned. His family barely escaped. We go by the 7 principles of Unitarian Universalism, but we also have an eight principle enshrined in our church constitution, “There is God.” That sense of connection to everything is what many people call God. And as the saying goes, “Where there is God, there is no need.” Alternatively, “Where is connection to everything, there is no need.”
Deepak Chopra said, “Evil is a constricted view of reality.” Sometimes we call it a schtick. “Oh, grandpa’s schtick is carburetors. He may have been bad at everything but truly he was good at that one thing.” It’s easy to let one thing be everything specially if it’s rewarding to us. It could be a lover, a car, a "passion".
Isolation is a devil. George Monbiot says, “Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat.”
Organizing can also be a devil. It distills all our individual stories into a dominant narrative (or dominant discourse as Foucault will call it) and again we can lose our own individual conversation with everything.
The field of study of human social networks is fairly new, about a decade only. But what we are finding out is that hubs, or people with links to more people works the same way as places with links to more places in that they develop better than those with fewer connections.
Oppression is really a suppression of conversation --- losing the exchange, detaching from your own power, ailing alertness, lack of clarity, getting drowned in the dominant discourse, getting no affirmation about your story, missing your own narrative, being forced to belittle your story, your spirit. When we are not inclusive, we lose in the conversation with everything. When we are not allowing ourselves to be broken by new experiences, we are losing alertness and indeed familiarity.
The best form of empowerment is to reconnect people to everything, not just to you, your help, or to your blessings, but to direct them back to the everything. Each one of us has a conversation with everything, whether we like it or not, and we need to recover those conversations lost.
We cannot let other people voice their conversation with everything in our behalf. We cannot let media say the Kardashians are important. We cannot let haters silence us. We cannot abandon Mother Earth and surrender her to the clutches of the greedy. We don’t just converse with her, but also the Great Unknown, and everyone who cannot even make it to a Unitarian church who believe in freedom and justice. We cannot leave people hopeless in believing that all religious organizations are the same.
So effective counselors truly help counselees be the protagonist of their own narrative, helping them be the protagonist in their own lives, helping them take back their story, restoring their conversation with everything.
My tattoo story doesn’t end in tragedy. Shocked that he had painted “Forehead is life” on my arm, he immediately supplied the missing strokes. And just at the last stroke of his hand left my arm, the power went out. Everyone was forced to sleep. The next day, rumors started circulating that I still had “Forehead is Life”, then they started to greet me with a hand signal. Rury said, “Oh I should have a tattoo that just says, F. I. L.”
A month later, I was already back in the Philippines, recuperating from exhaustion, I receive a Facebook message from Cerese, an Australian volunteer, she sent me a photo of Rury’s torso with the letters, F.I.L. A few days later, another photo was sent, Josh from New Jersey had F.I.L on his thigh. Another few weeks later, Cerese sent me a note, “Tet, you’re legend!” And with it came a photo of a wall in Everest Bar in Kathmandu bearing the graffiti, “Forehead is life.”
No matter how cool that is and how nice to talk about, and how it’s taken a life of its own, and how it may be immortalized, I cannot imagine my life to be defined by just one stellar moment, or the next, or a better moment. And perhaps that is one thing to think about our UU churches today. What got us here may not be what’s going to take us further.
STONE RITUAL
May water flow through stony paths. May water show us how to work around our blocks. May water wear down hardened hearts. May water bless our intentions. May water bless all in its way. May water take the shape it needs to flow. May water come and go as all things pass. We pray for light and love for those who seek it.
-------
BENEDICTION
Caminante, son tus huellas Wayfarer, the only path Biyahero, ang tanging daan
el camino y nada más; Is your footprints and no other Ay ang iyong mga yapak at walang iba
Caminante, no hay camino, Wayfarer, there is no path Biyahero, walang daan
se hace camino al andar. Make your path by walking Likhain mo ang daan sa iyong paghayo
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CLOSING SONG: PSALM FOR CHANGE
Psalm for Change
Em - Bm - C - G
What good is the holy
if it doesn’t shine in you
What good is life
if we don't know how to live
What good is dreaming
if dreams don’t make us real
Am D
What good is love if you don't forgive?
C G D-Am
Let's know each other and be bold
C G D-Am
Let's work with the wonders we behold.
C G Bm7 C
Let's live the love that we are called to live.
Am Am D
Be the change, be the change, and believe.
Em - Bm - C - G
Why look to heroes
if only to doubt ourselves
What good is faith if we don't bless
What good is religion
if there’s no room for doubt
Am D
What good is truth
if it only condemns.
C G D-Am
Let's know each other and be bold
C G D-Am
Let's work with the wonders we behold.
C G Bm7 C
Let's live the love that we are called to live.
Am Am D
Be the change, be the change, and believe.
Em - Bm - C - G
What good is greatness if no one is a friend
What good is justice
if it’s only for a few
What good is freedom
when you can't be yourself
Am D
What good is peace if it distorts the truth
C G D-Am
Let's know each other and be bold
C G D-Am
Let's work with the wonders we behold.
C G Bm7 C
Let's live the love that we are called to live.
Am Am D
Be the change, be the change, and believe.
Em - Bm - C - G
What good is striving if Mother Earth should die
What good are journeys without hope
What good is glory if love is sacrificed
Am D
What is correctness if you don't have soul
C G D-Am
Let's know each other and be bold
C G D-Am
Let's work with the wonders we behold.
C G Bm7 C
Let's live the love that we are called to live.
Am Am D
Be the change, be the change, and believe. (Repeat)
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