The bridge

Neneng crossed herself as she left the priest in his little hut near the village chapel. She found him a bit strange but still she liked him. He represented for her the things that were “out there,” everything she was curious about. On the footpath to her house she thought she saw something strange. She thought she saw the priest asleep curled up like a baby asleep on a dark shadow that disappeared swiftly into the moonlit night. She ran all the way home.

The priest slept soundly. It seemed almost as if he slept on a bed of warm air. Even in sleep he talked to his God in a perpetual confession of the limits of his own humanity. What does it mean to be a good Catholic? The complexity of the times requires its own complexity of answers. What does it mean to be a good priest? There would be as many answers as there are priests. We are a once-feudal-colonial country modernizing ourselves inside a post-modern world. That must mean a host of problems unique to us as a society.

Take for instance the problems of poverty and oppression. Surely we know these problems derive from our colonial past. We did not invent them for ourselves. They must derive from our own unique history as a colonized people. Our poverty might be compared to poverty in other countries, Africa for example. But the comparison will most likely reveal essential differences. Africa, for instance, is not mostly Catholic. We are unique. This uniqueness is our weakness, and yet it may also be our greatest strength. Filipinos have a unique perspective. No other people can look at the world the same way we do. We face a unique set of problems. We will have to come up with our own set of solutions.

The colonial masters have gone away for something like a century now. By the time they left, the country had become what it was and little has changed since then. We are still unequal. Most of us are still poor. We are not yet entirely free. Our revolutionary heroes fought for all these. Their revolution was only partially won. It is not yet over. It continues and it has a name fixed by global convention. It is the post-colonial revolution. But what can this mean? What does it mean to be a good post-colonial Catholic?  A good post-colonial priest? What does it mean to be a good post-colonial Filipino?

The central feature of post-modernism is that truth is indeterminate in the sense of absolutes. We can never tell what it is with true certitude. The truth must be spoken in words and words are always by their very nature insufficient. This does not mean the truth does not exist. This simply means we do not have the words to absolutely describe it. In the absence of a better option, the truth is what we assert it to be. This is a liberating idea. It means that we are all Filipinos only because we say so. Nobody is a Filipino unless he or she says speaks the words to somebody else in clear terms: I am Filipino. Filipino is my birthright.

Thus, an Ifugao may walk about in his most traditional G-string. His traditional wear says only that he is Ifugao. Unless he said out loud that he is Filipino, he would only be Ifugao. In a sense, the Ifugao are fortunate in that they have their traditional wear, which works as a sign that says they are Ifugao. The Filipino is more problematic. Besides saying it out loud, what other signs are there to say that same thing? It does not follow that we are Filipino just because we say we are Catholic. We used to be confused that way. It is not our Catholicism that makes us Filipino although it is true that most of us are Catholics. If we wanted to say we are Catholic Filipinos, then we have to have the words and signs for the two concepts. The Catholic part is easy. We have our rituals, our crosses and saints. The second concept is more difficult. What texts and signs do we have to say we are also Filipino. The good Catholic Filipino is a complex entity requiring his or her own complex of symbols and signifiers. Unless we define what these are, we will always be confused. We would not really know who we are beyond the name Filipino.

What other signs for Filipino do we have? A love for God and country, the urge to freedom, the dream of making things better—those are important symbols. But how can they mean anything at all unless they  translated to loving the poor and making them free? And unless we loved the poor and made them free, how can we ever really say we love our God, our country and ourselves? How can we say we are free?

He woke up in his room at his convent in Cagayan de Oro. It was still early dawn so he decided to take a walk to the bridge, which spanned the river. There was an old lady with a thermos of hot water for coffee. He searched for a good place to sit. The woman offered him her own plastic chair. He declined. She insisted because he was a priest. Before the coffee was finished he had made his decision. He had never been to America. He decided he should deliver Datu Juan’s letter himself. The river moves but never goes away.