When finally she exited the airport at Cebu, Joycie smelled something she had not smelled in a long time. She smelled a difference. The obvious was easy. She smelled something burning somewhere. Not just the gas fumes, but beyond that there was the smell of burning grass, possibly set to flame before it had fully dried. And then there was the faint smell of food as if its aroma had travelled quite a long distance just to entice her. And beyond that still, the smell of people. Not people in general. These people. Hers. And then she knew she was close to home.
The priest met her at the gate. She did not miss the personal significance of that. She reminded herself to be careful with him. He showed an emotional vulnerability that she knew she must be careful with. He was a man. Perhaps a man of his God but a man nevertheless. And she needed a friend to lead her back to what was once her own front door.
The third and last leg of the journey would be a very long walk up a mountain. But before that, a boat ride that they decided would be good just for old times. They decided correctly. It was a beautiful evening ride over a calm sea under a cloudless night, the light from the cities as it fell away blending into stars, the moon, not quite full yet, reflecting on the water. And of course, she remembered what a beautiful part of a beautiful planet her country was. She will want to paint here.
But she wondered what particular monstrosity hid inside her friend. Now was not a good time for the priesthood and his religion. Eventually, they might argue about that. But for now she did feel a personal sympathy driven perhaps simply by the fact this religion manifested itself to her now in the presence of this strange man she could talk to and who talked back to her not from the distance of a pulpit nor by rote through ritualistic incantations and prayers. And she did see the God inside him, not all the time, but at strange moments when he thought she was not watching. And it was to her a mysterious God who revealed Himself especially at those times when the priest was most human and, she felt therefore, the most weak.
Of course, she had read the text over the Internet, had read about priests molesting children and then allegedly being protected by their superiors. She had read as well all the conjectures about how that institution has amassed untold wealth. She had even read the one about Pope Pius XII being a friend to Adolph Hitler and Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Fascists.
She only took all these half-seriously. The religions were always putting each other down. But on the other hand, she wondered if atheists realize how closely they have transformed science into something close to a religion, treating it with the same reverence and trust as the religious did their gods. Soon it might become an institution with its own pope. Quite certainly, it has its store of amassed wealth just as ill-gotten, its own priests, its own hierarchy of the most powerful and the most respected and, most importantly, the most funded. Soon it will be a case of the kolon calling the kalaha black. And as for art? It is exactly the same way.
But it is science that is the worst of all. For if you only looked at science not just as discipline but also as institution with its own history and then applied the same measures the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church has been subjected to, the accounting would be far more dismal. Think only of researches done on animals and humans during the last world war. How many people have been impoverished or tortured or killed in the name of science or because of its fruits, its bombs? It is all the same for all institutions over history, countries, ideologies, beliefs, religions—all are guilty and always to heinous extents. All humans hide a monster inside them. The normalcy is only a mask. It is their individual nature. And when they become groups, institutions, religions and countries, they become huge and brainless monstrosities capable of the most hideous things. And like all other institutions in history, no one is operationally in control, no one actually responsible.
And why should this priest’s religion be any different? To say that his church is evil because it is historically proven to be so at points in its history is to say all things human are evil and that all humans by their very nature are evil. And this could not be so for Joycie. It was always better for her to think that we are only monsters trying to untwist ourselves despite our nature and where we have come from. She had always made her art as a mirror to show the monster inside everyone. But always she painted the monster as beautiful as it was ugly and capable of other things besides those things it is historically faulted for. Haunting and haunted as they were, they were always capable of forgiving and only by that virtue therefore also capable of saving each other. They needed only to see and then be tolerant of the monster that hid inside each one of them. No war has ever been fought for tolerance.