Sermon delivered at The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood on February 5, 2017.
Good day everyone! I’m
happy to be here and yet also I’m very very tired. I have been without a day in
the warm sea for 6 months now, but I also know I’m halfway done in this school
year at Starr King. It’s always a mix of
the good and bad, isn’t it. And
everyday, I toil to correct assumptions people make about the Philippines. And our president, Rodrigo Duterte, is not
helping any.
There’s more to be said, but this sermon is not about
politics. It’s about conversation. It’s about how we come to conversation with a
defense against being changed by it. God
bless people who change their minds after being shown scientific evidence or
being told about reality, not alternative facts.
No one knows that last Thursday Duterte has suspended 23
large, long-established mining firms from plundering and pillaging our
communities. No one knows that he has
thrown out the oligarchy’s exemptions from agrarian reform so that farmers can have
genuine rights to land. During his first
100 days in office, 700,000 drug users surrendered. 700,000 have tested positive and now
overwhelm the rehabilitation systems, not killed. The Philippines used to be the worst country
in the world for journalists with 35 killed every year, now no more. What can I say about the killings in the
Philippines? Horrific! Sadly, 1,000 deaths a month has been the trend since
last year, before Duterte.
But people talk about it here as a blessing that they are not
in the Philippines. They are happy they
are here and not there. Even more so
before the elections. Don’t we just love divides and classifications. First, these
divides feel like choices as if people carefully decide which nation to belong
to or which race. If that were true, we may
all be tanning in the Philippines. More than half a million Americans are there
right now.
The Philippines has taken in refugees in every war since the
20th century, including more than a thousand Holocaust refugees,
half a million Vietnamese refugees, Russians, Chinese, Muslims. The Donald might even say, “You’ll love it,
it’s true”.
Second, divides and classifications make us feel a sense of
self and even identity. It’s like going
into a Starbucks shop and saying I’d like a macchiato, extra-shot, with soy and
honey, make that warm, not hot. Do that everyday, and you will feel that
identity is real. Where I live back in Manila, 5 Starbucks stores are within a half
mile of me. That was my ritual. That
identity kept me in a glamorized job that was not close to what I’m worth.
Third, these classifications and divides give us a feeling of
freedom from something. People here say,
thank God I’m not in the Philippines, or thank God I’m not in Trump’s
list. Thank God, I’m not
underprivileged. Thank God I’m privileged.
But which one is privileged? The person who can afford the highly-priced fresh meal or the person
who is born in a country where they get fresh meal without discrimination. Are you privileged to be in a scarcity model
of breaking your back and trampling on others to gain human rights or would you
be privileged if you lived in an abundant society where human rights are for
all?
Conversations are the best places to wage conflict and yet we
don’t know how. We are so used to
divides in our conversation we don’t come into conversation to expose them and
mend them, but to keep them secret.
We are used to the conversational model of “shutting down”
and “mic drop”. Authoritarianism starts
in such an insidious way. We have
glorified it in our CEOs and entrepreneurs.
It’s about who gets to be god first. It’s about conversations that early
on establish positions of teacher and learner in a one-direction flow so that
teacher is superior and learner is inferior and not questioning the
expert. It’s about ruining credibility
with over-eager criticisms on a masteral level setting a bar so high as the eyebrow,
no one passes. It’s about the inability
to adhere to our democratic principles. We can see the perpetuation of
classroom models that fail to form learning communities. We need intercessors between us because there are
so many things in which we differ despite so many things in which we are the
same, and that’s why we need community.
Now why, why would real conversation be so scary? David Whyte says, “No self survives a real
conversation.” Truly we cannot come into any conversation without being changed
in either of three ways: seeing the self, seeing the other, and seeing the
relationship. But we do this everyday. This
is why we tend to be attracted to our opposite.
Conversation was meant to be a healthy dose of adversarial. Why would this be scary? Why would we be scared of admitting we are
changed? We wouldn’t want to tell truths
in conversation to preserve some comfort level. We don’t we want to wage our
conflicts fully present and in relationship, we would rather wage them in war. Yet, truth-telling is the first act of
justice.
When we ritualize whitewashing or revisionism or avoiding
confrontation in conversation, we give fodder to the the injustices around us. If
we don’t wage conflict well in conversation, we will wage it in wars. We hardly see the rituals we have established
in our everyday lives. The rituals of living now involve establishing routine
that kills creativity, paying taxes to a government that does not redistribute
wealth, going into traffic day in, day out, surrendering our truths, or hiding
our personal convictions in an office meeting. How many of us realize we are always in
ceremony? Conversation is ritual and
ritual is conversation. Whether they
lead to change or revolution is up to us.
Rituals were once established by religions to help the
imagination. For instance, sacraments supplies us with lenses in seeing rites
of passage in terms of who we are, who are the others are, and what to expect
of this new relationship between us and the world--- these are the three things
we change in conversation – me, others, and relationship.
Rituals are not just routines. Lighting the chalice is not the same as
clocking in for work.
No one is stopping
us from blessing the closest body of water and affirming that water is life by
adopting a lake and making its purity levels a part of prayer. There are no hindrances to blessing cohorts
in ritual so that their imagination is well-aided by a community to help them see
the potential of their teamwork.
In my congregation back home, we formed a basketball team
with a bunch of young people ages 13-18.
We didn’t know anything about basketball. We just gave them a bunch of uniforms, told
them to shoot and dribble. They have
never been in a competition before. But we did teach them Unitarian
values. Guess what? Out of the first 5
games they played, they won in 4. All
this, just developing a really good conversation between them.
Rituals are for helping us to see the unseen, the unimagined,
and the obscured. How about coming into
a rally, bringing a ton of rainbow powder to bless the protesters, make the
demonstration festive, and defuse the impending violent thoughts? Emotions will hasten change faster than ideas
ever will. This is why we have Trump, by
the way.
I’ve learned ritual early on.
When a kitten I adopted died and my 3 younger sisters, ages 15, 12, and 10
were so sad about it, I put the remains in a shoebox, dug the earth in our
yard, played a small piano, and prayed with them. I learned early on how easy it is to change the
hearts of people, through the imagination. Our crisis is that of the
imagination, some say.
It is hard to imagine together as a beloved community when we
have constantly put on a face and lied to each other. Since we don’t have a
planet B, we must learn to be in relatioship even with our enemies.
Balanga is a small fishing village in the Philippines where there
was a family with 8 kids. The house is always open to strangers who may eat and
sleep whenever they want. Filipinos are
legendarily hospitable, nothing odd there. I noticed that home was never empty,
there was always someone in the house, but never was this one person there
alone. And I asked the owner, why is
this person not ever alone in the house? The owner said, because he’s a
thief. And yet they continue to welcome
this thief, treat him like family, except just to not trust him with their
belongings, so it worked that way.
In Australia, there was a story of a man who went around knocking
on doors to announce that he was new in the neighborhood and that by law he is
required to inform each one that he is a sex offender. Every one accepted him, but they just would
not leave anyone alone with him, except his wife.
Everyone is flawed. What if we just come to accept that
first. What if we formed allyship coming
out with our vulnerabilities? Isn’t the
revolution nothing else but allyship?
How then shall we form allyship when we are always competing
on who gets to “drop the mic” or to deliver the “word”.
Well, I’m just about to test my theories by attempting to
start up a campus ministry in UC Berkeley. I won’t know who to be, who they
will be, who I’m getting, and how we shall relate to each other. All I know is I want real conversation. And that’s all I’m offering. Let’s see how that’s going to change anything.
