Open Sea Spirituality

Written for a course in Starr King School for the Ministry -  Education to Counter Oppression - Core Intensive |  Intercession 2017  | Prof. Dr. Gabriella Lettini  | January 18, 2017

Open Sea Spirituality

Radical hospitality, communal interbeing, and diversity that lends to ungovernability as lived in 7,641 islands of the Philippines makes for Rev. Tet Gallardo's personal spirituality. Welcoming cultures for centuries including refugees from the Holocaust, Vietnman War, Bolshevik Revolution, Japanese Invasion, Burmese persecution, among others, the Philippines has also been a haven for about a million white American retirees and homeless. And yet are no doormats, they have undergone a 100-year period of revolution from 1898 to 1998 ousting the Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese, a dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and a plunderer Joseph Estrada.  Now one of the top 5 fastest growing economy of the world, gender gap is high up with Scandinavian countries, 95% literacy rate, this country has been lending money to global financial institutions in the last decade.

In a culture that is based on much oral tradition with a long history of intermingling multi-culturalism and a history of refugee intake, it is hard to keep up with provenance.  I would say that my ancestors and my culture are to whom I am most indebted. 

The part of the Philippines where I grew up, Davao City, is a melting pot of many foreign visitors.   It used to be the largest city in the world with 602,937.131 acres.  
Much of my spirituality has been derived from the many life lessons I’ve gathered from meeting strangers of different nations.  I was an inquisitive child and would often quiz my family’s visitors as much as I could about God, the earth, nature, and the universe.  I was much known for this growing up that whenever there would be visitors, I would be the assigned host to keep them entertained, even when I was just very little – as little as 3, as far as I can remember.

Generally, the Philippines had been a historic passageway from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific for as long as recorded history.  The country used to be known as Maia.   In Davao City, my best friend Darwin was half-Indonesian.  At school, I had Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu schoolmates, and they didn’t mind being educated in “Christian Living” because it didn’t seem to contradict with their teachings.  A lot of Vietnamese refugees, among the half a million who took refuge from the Vietnam War, often visited our glorious city.  Malaysians often also roamed its streets and took up business there, along with people from Bangladesh, Korea, and other parts of the world.  Our family friend Gigi was married to a German, and so I grew up getting all these German chocolates every so often.   Americans of course could be seen every so often in their best behavior afraid of the defiant southern Muslims who refused to be colonized by anyone.

My grandfather was a well-known geodetic engineer who facilitated the granting of formal land titles to indigenous peoples and other wealthy families.   He knew Badjaos, the sea-faring people, whose hair are bleached blonde by the salty sea with skin as dark as the deepest brown of desert people.    He also knew Moros, as some of the poor Muslims were called as a result of the adapting of the Spanish language while losing the nuance of discrimination and without connotaton of disrespect among our lands.  They would sometimes visit us with gifts.

Many foreign visitors during ancient times were brought to our shores for the promise of gold, nickel, and platinum, among other minerals.  The Philippines is known to be one of the countries with the densest deposits of these.  Known as the seafaring capital of the world, Filipinos comprise 20% of the world’s seafarers, second to which is the Netherlands.  We certainly loved to travel even during ancient times and therefore accepted travelers as we would have wanted to be accepted abroad.  Here’s a photo of the Manunggali jar that was discovered in one of our caves that dates back to 710 BC.[1]

However, one artifact stands out in showing how the first inhabitant in these islands came here at about 70,000 years ago.  He has been known as the Callao Man, whose foot bone was discovered only in 2007.[2]

Thomas Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a revolution”. In the Philippines, we’ve had 2 revolutions per generation.  We’ve kicked out the Spanish, the Japanese, the United States, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and the plunder president Joseph Estrada all within a period within the last century.  We’ve accepted 1,200 jewish refugees during the Holocaust, half a million Vietnamese refugees during the Vietnam War, white Russian refugees during the Bolshevik revolution, thousands of Chinese fleeing the Japanese empire, and recently, 6,000 Rohingya muslims fleeing Burmese persecution. We are now arguably the fastest growing country on earth.

All of these open-ended revolutions, visitations, intermingling, diversity, and embedded spirituality of hospitality has served the Philippines well over centuries, despite the ambitious and reptilian goals of empires to take everything we’ve got and burn us down to the core.  This spirituality helps us in our resilience against the onslaught of storms, not just man-made catastrophes.

I am proud to be of this spirituality.  I don’t think there is one or few persons to whom we could say made us this way, but we can attribute to our shores many of the lives born here and borne by these lands in welcoming embrace.  It is a question of whether Gandhi was the father of India or was India the mother of Gandhi.

Even when the Catholics came here to the Philippines and ruled us for over 400 years, it wasn’t easy.  The Portuguese conquistador Ferdinand Magellan, who circled much of the world was killed by a Muslim here for trying to conquer.  Prior to the Spanish, back 636 years ago, in the 1300s,  we were already Muslims with a sophisticated government as Muslims in the middle east had.[3]  And so Filipinos, with all of the more than 100 indigeous peoples in it with all their different languages (not dialects as they are often mistaken for) had been proven truly hard to rule over for long.  Anti-authority comes easy to the Filipino, freedom of thought, language, and inquiry had been of primary importance until notions of civility advantageous to their colonizers were promoted with carrot and stick, or perhaps with arms and “education”.

I owe most of what I know about spirituality from the many animists who continue to influence our folklore, our cinema, our arts, and our conversations.  Immanence and transcendence were too natural for us.  We know this from the significant portion of Sanskrit that can be found in our language until now that can be traced from as early as fifth century AD.[4]

This Open Sea Spirituality as I would like to call it helps us understand interbeing better, that when we try to counter oppressions, it is best to not always do it in confrontation but in fulfillment of something larger, which is community.   Until now, the Filipino is still in diaspora.  According to one study, Filipinos made 4.7 million international trips in 2015 with Vietnam, Dubai, Japan, the Maldives, and Switzerland as the top destinations.[5]   We simply like other cultures.

The good thing about it is everytime strangers here in the US learn that I’m a Filipino and if they happen to know the Philippines  or a Filipino, they won’t be able to stop smiling at me as if the memory triggers a good old party they can never forget.  And then I’m treated well after that.

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[1] Michael Charleston B. Chua, "The Manunggul Jar As A Vessel Of History", Artes De Las Filipinas, April 27, 1995, Last Accessed: January 18, 2017. http://www.artesdelasfilipinas.com/archives/50/the-manunggul-jar-as-a-vessel-of-history

[2] DNews, “Callao Man’ Could Redraw Philippine History”, Seeker. November 27, 2012, Last Accessed: January 18, 2017. http://www.seeker.com/callao-man-could-redraw-filipino-history-1766074602.html

[3] Mucha Shim Quiling, “Tawi-tawi celebrates Karim’ul Makhdum Day”, Mindanews. November 7, 2016. Last Accessed: January 18, 2017. Bongao, Tawi-Tawi. http://www.mindanews.com/peace-process/2016/11/tawi-tawi-celebrates-karimul-makhdum-day/

[4] Jessica Klakring, “The Tagalog Language From Roots to Destiny”, Birmingham Young University. Last Updated: Monday, September 6, 1999. Last Accessed: January 18, 2016. http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/Ling450ch/reports/Tagalog1.html

[5] Paolo Abellanosa, “Filipinos Made At Least 4.7 Million International Trips in 2015.” Workalife. June 12, 2016. Last Accessed: January 18, 2016: https://workalife.com/2016/06/12/filipinos-4-7-million-international-trips-in-2015/