A sermon I delivered in two worship services at UU Church of Palo Alto.
I wonder how many ministers speak about their ex mother-in-law.
Erlinda, bless her soul, may she rest in peace. She taught me so much about
radical hospitality. Maybe people who live close to abundant seas are the
most hospitable. Why wouldn’t they be when food is just a shoreline away?
And when home is easily built by stone, wood, or mud available
everywhere? Erlinda taught me what abundance was. She, her brood of 8,
and her husband, lived on a reclaimed area in a poor fishing village in
Balanga, Bataan. Once in a while when the tide is high, they vacate their
flooded home for hours until the tide is low again. I was in love with
her daughter Ycon. I met Ycon in a women’s delivering a fiery speech over a
crowd. Her mother Erlinda was to me the strangest woman with no ownership
of any sort, except for a home that her husband had inherited from her
father-in-law. It was about the size of an 10-cubicle restroom. At least
that’s how I remember it, it’s probably smaller, but it felt bigger because as
it would provide lodging for sometimes 20 people. They used to give me
the best place in the house because of how I got introduced into the family.
One day, while already living with me, Ycon woke up at 2 am crying. She said she is having some premonition that she still cannot determine. I just sat with her and listened. Within a couple of minutes, the phone rang, it was her aunt telling her that her grandmother had died. We immediately traveled 2 hours to where her grandma’s remains was given to a funeral parlor by the hospital that they couldn’t afford to pay. They were calling all their relatives everywhere to raise $500 to claim grandma’s remains and transport it to Balanga, which would be about 5 hours driving. I used some elbowing and intimidation with the funeral parlor saying, “These people have zero money, they have nothing to pay you, and you will end up with a mess to clean up, or you could hand us the remains now.” So grandma’s remains were released to me. I also offered to drive them myself. This was all illegal, driving the remains of grandma 5 hours from one city to another, but there was no money forthcoming. So that is how I was introduced to the family.
There are two competing narratives in the world today: the narrative of despair and the narrative of hope.
In my country, when someone is hopeless, we throw them in the gauntlet of roasting and ribbing, ridiculing their hopelessness, inviting them to the sea where water is warm, the sun is out, and the sea life is teeming nibbling at your feet. Sometimes we tell all our friends, don’t let that friend in despair be left alone to their destructive thoughts. We will disturb sadness until sadness cannot house itself in someone’s body. We know our life is abundant this way.
Those who suffer trauma after floods or typhoons are often allowed to cry with many people by their side. We are a touchy feely bunch and we usually let them sleep on our laps, or our shoulders, or our benches and sofas. Sometimes, my friends know how to treat me right by just driving me around aimlessly, the feeling of motion is good for me. Sometimes the torrent is good for me, the rain pouring all over me as I walk barefoot in the mud. There is something about the way we allow ourselves to feel our feelings that is liberating. It helps us get in touch with each other. Feelings are like wifi, they allow us to connect on a bandwidth that allows life on earth to comprehend itself and sustain itself.
It all depends on point of view, but my faith in humanity is restored everyday when I see a deep-seated abundance of love that exists in people.
Last Friday close to the beginning hour of Ramadan, three non-Muslims defended two Muslim women from being harrassed on the light rail train in Portland by a white supremacist. The harrasser viciously attacked the three brave men. Two of them died. 53-year-old Ricky John Best and 23-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche. The surviving victim is 21-year-old Micah David-Cole Fletcher. There are two sides to this story. One of despair, one of hope. Think about that for a minute. Let it sit with us. (A moment of silence.)
Karl Menninger, imminent American psychiatrist in the 1950s,
uttered, “Are we not now duty bound to speak up as scientists, not about a new
rocket or a new fuel or a new bomb or a new gas, but about this ancient but
rediscovered truth, the validity of Hope in human development?”
“Hope is not a brand new concept in psychology. In 1991, the eminent positive psychologist Charles R. Snyder and his colleagues came up with Hope Theory. According to their theory, hope consists of agency and pathways. The person who has hope has the will and determination that goals will be achieved, and a set of different strategies at their disposal to reach their goals. Put simply: hope involves the will to get there, and different ways to get there.”
Psychologists have plunged into depths of study into hope proving that it is a mechanism that releases the mind towards creativity and creativity also releases the mind for hope. For me, hope is where God invites people to have confidence and persist in dreaming of better things. In the account of the gospels, when Jesus first read from the scrolls, he read what may arguably a manifesto of hope. In Luke it is told:
Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom, and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Wouldn’t you just love to hear our 3 UUA co-presidents to finally say, “Today we declare that racism is history in our churches, the invisible will be visible, different cultures will find expression, our hymns will have polyrhythm, our emotions will be held communally, non-members will be welcome front and center, our art on our walls will reflect counter-oppression heroes too, and our joy will surpass any fear of donor fatigue.”
There are two stories of the Philippines, for instance, one is where we are primitive, poor, and in despair. The other story is that we are a country with almost zero mass shooting, almost zero hate crimes, and almost lots of stories about taking in refugees from wars since the Holocaust. We have a crazy president but we have a prolific and wise population who doesn’t take him seriously. All you hear about him is words, you don’t hear about his action. Duterte has been mistakenly perceived to have pivoted away from US relations while implementing a postcolonial independent foreign relations which includes friendship with Russia and China and other countries in the world, as opposed to the historical dependence on US "advice."
If you have not heard, in my country there is now a town about the size of combining cities in the Bay Area, that is under siege called Marawi City. The size of the Philippines is somewhere between Nevada and Arizona, but with 7,641 islands, it’s been pretty hard to capture in whole.
Last week, a band of criminals declared themselves ISIS to get CIA funding and started an attack. The skirmishes between them and the government resulted in about 80 casualties.
With support of people in Marawi City, President Duterte declared
Martial Law over the town. People on the ground said they smell “American
stink” because the level of misinformation has been too obvioius. Americans
have relied heavily on gossip and fact-twisting.
The situation is now coming under control anyway. Our network of knowing each other as Filipinos is so thick, narrative twisting will be a challenge.
I will go back home after GA, a bit excited to be back where paradise is teeming with non-GMO, organic, free-range, non-processed, zero nuclear fallout, no tasering, drug-free, and laughter is abundant. Where women are as powerful as men.
I was ordained in this religion with no dogma to offer a world desperate for answers; by tradition to be called the Reverend in a world irreverent about moral ascendancy; to stand for a people of my sexual orientation met with intolerance and violence in the world; to be present as a person of color in a majority-white denomination; to represent a liberal faith in a country so Catholic that one can be jailed for “offending religious feelings”, And it sure rocks to be the first out Filipino, lesbian UU minister.
