Testing Boundaries

Sermon delivered in two services at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 11 Dec 2016.

Hello everyone.  I am happy to be here with you today.  I am a Filipino. 

It may soon be hard to be a Filipino in the US or any US-occupied country.

Thomas Jefferson said every generation needs a revolution.  For Filipinos, every generation has 2 revolutions, well except maybe millennials, we still haven’t figured them out. 

I’ve just been to Standing Rock this past weekend. It was my 2^nd trip. I came last month with 500 clergy. I was there last Sunday when they announced Obama denied easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline.   I was there when emotions erupted, people cried, miracles were declared.  I was there stuck in traffic in a car from the Veterans forum in Cannon Ball heading back to the Oceti Sakowin camp.  I couldn’t believe it.  Everyone was shouting Mni Wiconi!  This is my fifth successful revolution.  But, of course, every success is fleeting and incomplete.

I’m only 46.  I wonder how many transformations I will support in my lifetime. I’ve successfully supported dissenters in Burma, Burundi, East Timor, Standing Rock, and have become the dissident myself in the Philippines during two peaceful regime changes.  I have founded a Facebook Page called Human 3.0, which gets about 3,000 views a day in only its first year.  That is a good start.

Today we live in a society that has little regard for privacy.  Every one is a citizen with global stakes.  Your bank choice will tell us  your level of support for humanity.   If you still operate with credit cards rather than cash, you are enabling establishments in your neighborhood to get robbed of thousands of dollars of cuts. You are making banks more powerful.  These banks that have stakes in oil and arms, we don’t need them.   Your votes are no longer secret, you campaign openly anyway, then why is the ballot still secret and cannot be audited properly?  I’ve been in a presidential campaign in the Philippines when we were shown a googlemaps type of technology mapping all the votes for president and vice president on the level of street address.   At some point, we need to out our choices.

Filipinos have no word for privacy. The West introduced that sense for 500 years without much success. Especially where people are most needy, boundaries usually blur.  We allow ourselves to need each other.  It helps us depend less on banks and the government.   This is how the Philippines has been hard to rule over by the Spanish, Japanese, the US, a dictator, and a plunderer.  Each of them getting ousted by us. It is hard to take over this country where ordinary citizens have no secrets.  None of them could have a stronghold where the strongest currency is a community.

We have taken in 1,200 jews from the holocaust; 400,000 vietnames refugees during the Vietnam War; thousands of Russians during the Bolshevik revolution, thousands of Chinese during the Japanese Invsasion, and recently 6,000 Rohingya Mulsims fleeing Burmese oppression.  All these in only a century.  And now the Philippines is the fastest growing country in Asia, faster than China.

Except in protection of our bodies and safety, most Filipinos will make you feel like you have been friends a hundred years. Most stories told to me by foreigners are about Filipinos at their best in hospitatliity.  I met an American when I was in Nepal.  He said there’s a Filipino in Morocco who cooked for a whole hostel of strangers.  It turns out I knew this Filipino, my friend Jethro.  He’s a restaurateur in my country. 

Another time, in this church I met an immigration activist who said they were taken in by a Filipino family --- they came in empty-handed and they came away with sleeping bags and food.  Then there’s a congregant in Mt Diablo who told me she had feared taking her husband to a senior retirement home, but now she is happy a Filipino is taking care of him. We seem to have that sparkle of hope in things we do.

What is the Filipino way?  Our way is in knowing that kindness is never done alone. A whole community is looking after our risks.  When you accept a Filipino, a whole loving community is promised you, awaiting your acceptance of the rules of trust.  We got your back.  But if you aren’t real with us, as we say it, you lose face, perhaps you know it as --- face value.

Community goes against so many things in America, where neoliberalism forces you into living in isolation.  People engage in desperate talk nowadays. It seems people more cynical get more airtime and respect.  You’ve got racists in the White House.  You’ve got huge oil corporations ignoring human rights and civil liberties.  You’ve got Black Lives bludgeoned in the public square, in broad daylight, our modern day executions.  Muslims are getting attacked as they are named and blamed.  People of color are getting attacked with over 800 hate crimes since Election Day.  Rain comes in waves of death, ocean floors have turned to ashes, birds fall hungry from the sky, fish beach on the shores, the land is parched, the skies are dirty, the rivers are poisoned, and the air cries for relief.  Do we need help or what?

What shall we do?  No, don’t help the poor alone, have a community behind you or at least a group of friends with you.  Don’t help the poor because they’re poor, help them because they’re your equals.  Adopt those you help as equal to your friends.  It doesn’t work when you remain a giver all the time, give them a chance to help you too. 

My partner Janice was in a fastfood chain the other day and offered to sit with a woman who looked homeless.  Janice, being Filipino, wanted to cheer up the woman.  As the woman related her story, Janice cried as they dined together.  The woman ended up giving Janice a pair of pants to cheer her up.  This, Janice graciously accepted.

In the Philippines, we have word: lambing. We will constantly ask for your attention, help with small things maybe, knowing full well we just want more interactions with you because we like to get to know you.  Or, this is how we teach you to need people.  Because according to evolution, needing is okay.

Yet, we can give you our bedroom and sleep in our own sofa if you needed it badly.   Don’t be fooled we don’t do that because you’re white or you’re American.  We’ve been doing that to everyone.  We are an ancient land of 7,600 islands with more than a hundred cultures and languages, not dialects.  We have had women generals in our armies before you had elected a woman president.   We have been shaped by priestesses before you could even talk about your rape cultue.   We know what we’re doing.  Do you really think you have white privilege?  Do you really think that being beneficiaries of white racism is a privilege? It’s a trap. It’s a smokescreen.  That which you own will own you.

My point in all this is, we can always go to the same church, ride the same trains, live on the same street, but if don’t start talking to each other and helping our neighbor in concrete ways, we become weak. 

We are not vulnerable when people know more of us.  We are vulnerable when no one knows us enough.  Know us not with facts but with feeling and trusting.  I invite you to test your western boundaries and weave into each other’s lives living love and trust. 

No matter how I get wounded everyday ranting on Facebook and offline about racism, I still go out and talk to everyone in my campus.  Because, it’s just something we need to keep doing: testing boundaries and learn from each other.