The Length of Lent

by Remmon E. Barbaza

After going through this Holy Week and finally reaching the joyous day of Easter, we will have gone through the whole length of Lent. Indeed, we are told that the word “Lent” has its roots in “long,” with the Old English “lencten” meaning spring. We can make a guess and say that perhaps it has to do with the lengthening of day during spring.

But the fact that Lent traditionally lasts for 40 days tells us that it is perhaps really meant to be experienced as a very long period, since we are also told that in the Biblical tradition that is what the number 40 really signified (among other things).

Lent is not just meant to be experienced as a very long period, but also as a very long period in an utterly barren place that is the desert. And that can be quite frightening. Because we are also told that the number 40 in the Bible meant a period of testing, spending 40 days in the desert must be the ultimate test.

Tuareg, Algeria. Photograph by Brent Stirton, National Geographic.

What are we being tested for? What is being tested—measured—by the length of Lent?

As Kafka once observed, “the distance to my fellow-men is for me a very long one.” Imagine then the distance between God and mortals! We cannot even begin to fathom the terror of this distance, a terror that can be deadening in its silence. Even the Son of Man experienced the deadening silence of this distance when, in the very moment when He needed comfort and assurance, He felt abandoned by His very own Father.

But the distance between God and mortals becomes palpable not just as we experience the absence or even withdrawal of God, but also when in our sinfulness and capacity for evil we realize we cannot be helped except through the grace of God.

Retreating into the desert and staying there for 40 days can really be a most frightening prospect, not just because the desert is barren, but also because there is nothing much to do there. In the desert, boredom can kill us in a much more terrifying way than the lack of water and food can.

The German word for boredom is “Langeweile,” literally, a very long while. Boredom is the experience of a very long while during which there is hardly anything to do. Our contemporary world detests boredom, and so we either suppress it or cover it over. “Kill boredom,” says one billboard ad for jeans.

But the German thinker, Heidegger, tells us that boredom is a profound human experience that we would do better not to run away from, but rather bear in the fullness of its weight. Boredom contains within it the possibility of letting us see ourselves and the world with clear eyes, precisely at that moment when the world and its meaning seems to slip away from our hands, when a seemingly unbridgeable distance stands between us and everything we hold dear and familiar.

Perhaps our question then is not only what it is that the length of Lent measures—to which we replied initially as perhaps the measure of the distance between God and mortals. Perhaps an equally decisive question is what allows us to measure this distance, this length that is Lent.

The German poet, Hölderlin, tells us that poetry is the measure of the distance between mortals and the divine, and that we mortals measure ourselves against the divine all the time. That is the reason why we call ourselves, and us alone, mortals, even though we assume that animals and plants die, too. We are mortals only as measured against the immortal God.

This “poet of poets,” as Heidegger called Hölderlin, also meant that poetry is the measure of all measures. The same poet said that “full of merit, yet poetically the human being dwells,” reminding us that it is not all the things and benefits that we derive from the earth by and in themselves that will enable us to live human lives, however full we are of them. Rather, it is the way we dwell on earth that makes us human.

John the Evangelist must have sensed God to be a poet (or the poet in God) when he described with such beauty and simplicity what the Incarnation was all about: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

My former teacher in Filipino literature, the poet Benilda Santos, once told our class that the reason why the Pharisees and the scribes never understood Jesus was that He was speaking poetically all the time, whereas the former were trapped in legalistic (and even moralistic) thinking. Indeed only through poetic sensitivity and insight can one understand the Teacher when He tells us to look at the birds in the sky and the lilies in the field in order not to be crippled by useless anxieties, or that He would destroy the temple and build it again after three days, or that the bread He was about to break was His body.

To be sure, the Pharisees and the scribes were also measuring all the time. But their measure was not poetic. Theirs was the measure of calculation and control, of scheming and machinations. Fundamentally, they were measuring everything against themselves, and thereby were to be found wanting.

Thus, only the pure, poetic soul can really go through the whole length of Lent. Without poetry—which is a gift, and a gift most supreme—we cannot even begin to understand what it means for us to be dust, and how unto dust we shall return. Without poetry we cannot understand why it is in dying that we can live, and how only by denying ourselves can we gain everything. Without poetry we cannot understand the glory in the very humiliation of the Cross.

What is the length of Lent? What does the length of Lent measure?

Only poetry—the measure of all measures—can enable us not only to go through the length of Lent, but also to realize that only in bearing the weight of the distance between God and mortals do we discover His abiding nearness.

But if God must be a poet—He is, after all, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us—then He Himself is the measure of all measures. He is Poetry made flesh. And so as we endure this very long time in the desert—the whole length of Lent—may we find, as we stand before the Cross and await His glorious resurrection, our true measure.

* Photo above available in http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/tuareg-desert-walk/. Accessed 3 April 2012.

An Unsettling Impeachment

by Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez

Before I begin, and before you read this, I would like to make this disclosure. My wife was a court attorney at the office of the Chief Justice for 6 years. However, I only met him once and that was when CJ Corona swore my wife in as a judge. I do not know him as a person or as a Chief Justice except for what most people know from the papers and some amusing office stories I hear from my wife. I am writing this not because of any loyalty for him but because I voted for the Liberal Party and I had high hopes that this party would be the traditional party that could rise above traditional politics. If you think that my thoughts here will be biased because of any of these things I disclosed, then you should skip this piece.


The impeachment of CJ Renato Corona shocks me and leaves a hollow feeling at the base of my stomach. I know that the way I am thinking about this issue and how I am reacting to it places me squarely on the other side of the fence of people I have campaigned for good governance and democratic reform with, but I can’t help it. I have been trying to make sense of my own reaction to this whole event because it bothers me to be thinking so differently from the people I so admire and struggled with for the marginalized, and so far this is the most I can make of how I feel.



I believe that my unease is multi-layered and so I will begin by exploring the layers of it. The first layer of disquiet is this: everyone is so angry at the Court for having shot down the truth commission idea. Truly, I was one of those people who wanted so much to have a truth commission to unearth the perceived evil that the GMA people accomplished. More than that, I wanted her to pay for the evil if indeed it can be proved. However, the truth commission was not so well conceived that it could arguably shown to violate the constitution. In ruling that the executive order (EO 1) creating the Truth Commission is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court’s majority declared the EO violated the equal protection of the laws clause of the Constitution when it singled out the GMA administration as the subject of the Commission’s investigation. The majority believed that there are no substantial distinctions between the GMA administration and other past administrations to justify being singled out in the EO. The dissenters, however, disagreed and believed that it is reasonable to say that the GMA administration is different from other past administrations and can be treated differently. There is no definitive answer either way, and it would have taken a minor revision for the order to be approved by the Court. The Chief Justice sided with the Court’s majority. It is difficult to see why he should be condemned for his stance on an issue which is contentious or for a majority opinion he did not even write. If we wanted that Commission to unearth the evil that GMA Inc was and is, then why didn’t the government lawyers do their job well? Shouldn’t something like this have been crafted with such impeccable legal logic that it could not be faulted for its unconstitutionality? And yet it was so easily shot down, and when it was shot down they didn’t just go ahead and do the revision. I don’t think we should fault the Supreme Court for the administration’s sloppy lawyering. And yet we did—so much that we want CJ Corona to fall for it. Even if the Court was acting out of misplaced loyalty to the fallen ring master, why are they being blamed for the administration’s shoddy work?

I think this is true too for the latest crisis that sparked this unsettling impeachment. When the Court issued a temporary restraining order against the DOJ watchlist which would have allowed GMA to travel, she was not yet charged of any crime and, in fact, the DOJ was still in the process of investigating her for possible prosecution. Unquestionably, the right to travel is in our bill of rights and may be impaired only “in the interest of national security, public safety or public health, as may be provided by law.” Others opine that the there should have been a hearing first before the TRO was issued. But there is no law or rule requiring that. Again, this is not the decision of the Chief Justice but of the En Banc. It cannot be said that the majority of the Court which includes the Chief Justice had no basis in law for its ruling as in fact they were upholding a constitutional right. And yet since the dominant voices in society have determined that they decided wrongly then the Court is wrong and biased despite having legitimate bases for its decisions. Wouldn’t this whole crisis have been averted if the cases against the ex-first couple of corruption had been filed properly and earlier? It had been how many months already since the government was supposed to have prioritized this case, and still they could not come up with a properly filed case. Even if they say, as they do, that it was a difficult case to put together, still they were able to file it over the weekend after the TRO was issued. Why were they so slow before that if they could produce a case instantly when the TRO was issued? Wasn’t this another case of bad lawyering? The administration lawyers just have to admit that they were almost out maneuvered. What could have been their excuse for the delay? And why blame the Court for having decided a case in a way that could arguably have upheld a constitutional right? I am no lawyer, but I am a citizen and I would rather that the Supreme Court err on the protection of a citizen’s rights, no matter how evil, than for it to bend to the will of those in power or the popular sentiment. We cannot violate enshrined rights just because we want to make a person pay for her crimes: that is the slipperiest slope we can slip on. Just remember how our parents allowed Marcos to take liberties on our rights just to defeat the threats to social order.

The second important layer to my unease, and I believe it may be the unease of many others, concerns the very process of how we impeached the Chief Justice. As we now know, the impeachment complaint was passed around blitzkrieg fashion to make sure that the administration party mates and allies in the persecution of GMA signed the document immediately without having to subject this to discourse or deliberation. Classic railroading or bulldozing is what this was. And tactically, this move is extremely admirable. However, what the administration is doing with this impeachment is to accuse one of the leaders of the pillars of our government of corruption and of acting in a way that undermines the will and welfare of the people. Actually, what it is doing is accusing the majority of the Court of being corrupted by GMA Inc as seen in its collegial decisions. Whether the administration intended it or not, such a serious accusation undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court, because at heart we are saying that the Court’s most recent decisions were defined by the undue influence of the immediate past president. With such a serious accusation, one that would set in motion a process that would paralyze the Senate and start another media circus, the accusers should make their accusation with some seriousness grounded on deliberation. Otherwise, this just looks like the vindictive act of one section of the elite against another.

image from wikispaces

A colleague of mine thoughtfully suggested that perhaps the Liberal Party and its allies took on this tactic because they were responding to the very tactics of the enemy. I agree that this was perhaps a response to the perceived reprehensible tactics of GMA and her cohorts to which we were subjected in the last 10 years. She did seem to use the tyranny of her majority to undermine our economic and democratic systems. However, I heard from Secretary Rocamora, a reformer in the administration who heads the Anti-Poverty Commission, that this administration wants to realize reforms profoundly enough so that they cannot be undermined even by a non-reformist government. I admire that sentiment and goal, however, I see this impeachment strategy as a tactic so grossly low, something on the level of GMA herself, that it only furthers the cause of non-democratic governance. I agree with the administration reformers’ strategy that every act that the government accomplishes now should be a precedent as to how we should govern. This makes it doubly disturbing that we will persecute GMA and her allies through the tyrannical acts of an undiscursive and vindictive majority. Just because we are on the side of the good and reform does not justify our means which clearly exhibit the worst of process railroading. Of course, this is allowed by constitutional procedures, but it kills the discursive quest for articulating the just and the good.

The last layer of this controversy that disturbs me is this: ultimately, this whole process is all about the exercise of political power by those who have it. One of the LP traditional politicians actually said on TV that Corona should resign because they have the numbers in the Senate and he should just spare himself the embarrassment. That is just the most crass statement made on the impeachment and it reveals how this whole impeachment is a bullying by the administration of the persons who are an obstruction of their agenda. No matter how just one’s agenda is, one cannot and should not thoughtlessly move to destroy one’s enemy—especially when this destruction could destabilize our already fragile governance system. The recent attacks on the Supreme Court, with their virulence and lack of nuancing, have truly planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of the public. With such an intense accusation, I as a citizen would like to know if the Supreme Court’s decisions are grossly biased for GMA and if indeed they are a hindrance to our quest for justice and reform. In the end, this is what the impeachment is about. The administration feels that the Supreme Court cannot function as the supreme arbiter of the meaning of the laws and ours acts in relation to these—that is their message to the public. I for one, as a member of that public, a citizen who voted this party into power, would like to know if indeed this is true. And so the Chief Justice should not resign! The citizens need to know if they can trust their Supreme Court. Of course, all this hinges on the hope that the Senate will remain fair and just in the impeachment trial. And or course they must, because now more than ever we need to know.

I should be rejoicing during this time. Now that people who have the same reform agenda as I have are in power and they can get things done—and hopefully the right way. But I am not rejoicing. I am very unsettled. And of course, the more political among us will say that I am being naïve again. That in the real world, we need to act in any way that will push forward our reforms—and to a level that reform will be difficult to dismantle. However, we have seen how their zeal can actually damage procedures of good governance. These tactics could actually further entrench the ethos of injustice, corruption, and the tyranny of the majority.

I know that those pursuing GMA feel that they are doing all they can to fulfill their moral duty. And I agree: making those who have wronged us pay is a moral duty. However, to do our moral duty, we must do it properly—with attention to detail, respect for procedure, impeccable lawyering, and utmost respect for the spirit of the rule of law and democracy. The moral crusaders and reformists must remember that they are standing in for a majority whose genuine will and aspirations they do not really understand or know. And as they try to build a world that they imagine does respond to the will of the majority, they should not destroy the processes that will allow this majority to one day represent themselves.

Notes From The End Of The World As We Know It 11: Education at the End of Life as we Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The other night, my children were having the most delightful and intelligent conversation. My son had not seen his sister in a while and he was so excited to be sitting at the table with her again. And, as usual, when he is excited or happy, the words flowed at a torrential rate. He was telling her about his latest favorite thing, which was to be read Greek myths to. As he was sharing various points of interest, he blurted out: “And you know, ate, how silly this Pygmalion was? He fell in love with his own statue. His own statue that he made! How ridiculous is that?” This was my just turned six year old son who, later on, with similar explicatives, explained how sad it was that Prometheus had to be punished for stealing fire for the people. With this, my son and his 20 year old ate engaged each other in a conversation on the tragic and ethical issues explored by these myths. In truth, that conversation wasn’t as profound as I’m making it sound. Most of it sounded more like: “I know! That’s so sad right?” and “Why would anyone open the box? That’s so dumb!” But the reason I thought that this conversation was so intelligent was not because my son knew his mythology. That’s not a sign of intelligence but of exposure to a certain culture because of one’s class. Rather, the reason I thought that this conversation was so smart, was because my six year old was able to pick up on and analyze the elements of high tragedy in the myths and comment on them from his own perspective.


I am starting with this story because my son is not so manifestly smart in school. You see he goes to a traditional pre-school where they are made to sit on a desk and follow a rather fixed curriculum. It’s a wonderful curriculum, mind you. But it is a very traditional one and pushes all the children to learn standard things according to a standard plan and does not really allow them to explore learning with their various intelligences. This is why my son, who can discuss Greek mythology and argue against the necessity of hell if God is a loving God, is not one of the smartest kids in school. For the longest time, they were even reporting that he did not complete sentences when at home he would be using words like “ridiculous” correctly and as part of complex sentences. Thus, my son hated school even if he loves seeing his teacher and classmates.

I remember when I was in school how I too was not very happy. More so than my son because, in the old days, teachers thought that threats and fear were their best tools to coax learning. So I always felt like a dunce because, despite the threats and the fear, I could never get the lessons as quickly or as rightly as the other kids. I was always in the middle, insignificant and never feeling particularly bright or capable. The kids on top had tutors, driven parents who either drilled their students constantly and/or brought food to school for the teachers on an almost daily basis. I was there to passively get knowledge drilled into my head. My happiest time in school was play time or, later, illicit smoking breaks. I don’t think traditional school suited me because one was either one of the herd who was asked simply to receive information and skills, or one excelled because one was driven and tutored to empty excellence. In the end it was never about discovery.

When I got to the university, all of a sudden, learning was so much fun and was so wonderful. It was so because, by this time, I had learned not to care about grades. I never actually did care about grades when I was in primary and secondary school because grades only made me feel mediocre and worthless. But when I reached college and started studying literature and philosophy, I was allowed to forget about grades. The less I cared about grades, the more I learned to learn and the higher my performance was evaluated—a fact that seems ironic to most, but not for people who know what learning is genuinely about.

I remember how it felt when I first discovered learning. It was when my literature and philosophy teachers first started talking about literary and philosophical works as living works to think about, to engage with, and build upon. Parmenides’ poem was a living testament that invited you to immerse in the first articulation of Being. Brilliantes offered a world of symbols and feelings that allowed you to explore your own. Later, my history teacher taught me that the pasyon was a framework for a whole revolution, and we could sift through the thought of Bonifacio and Jacinto for its traces. For the first time, we were invited to think and not to repeat. For the first time, dead people stopped being dead and we could see with them, feel with them, love and hate with them, imagine new worlds with them, and then we were invited to think our own thoughts in response. How wonderful was that? If study time in my youth was spent crying over homework that didn’t mean anything to me, this time I could not get enough of reading assigned texts in college. I believe that my daughter experienced the same kind of liberation when, from a traditional school, she was allowed to experience creative learning in a UN high school and later in the university where I teach. Learning, all of a sudden, was exhilarating because it was discovery and liberation. I was truly led out of the cave and I was basking in the living light. Certainly, this was not all the time because we had our share of uninspired teachers. But when the teachers were good, we soared.

Because of my own experience of liberation, I want to tell my son when he comes home from the school where he is not so smart not to worry. “
High school and grade school are meant to be like that—a cave of dark learning. There’s no other way to learn the basics but to sit and memorize and give back what your teachers want you to learn. Ate had to go through that and now she’s learning better things in college.” But then, I am beginning to hear about progressive schools. They say that in these schools, there are no grades and children are taught in a way that does not put a premium on what they can memorize but on how they can discover knowledge on their own. They are not stuffed into large classrooms where they are anonymous and uniform, but each one is encouraged to discover and realize their own special talents. In these schools, their learning rhythms are respected.

Just last month, my wife and I visited the open house of one such school. And we were so surprised to meet the children there. They seemed like such nerds. Not the annoying kind who were in your face because they needed to let you know what they knew so that you would think they were special, but the kind of children who were so obviously smart because they had learning and were excited by it. The kids did presentations on things they discovered in school and as they did, they spoke like a different breed from the children herded into traditional schools. They had knowledge that they genuinely understood—knowledge that empowered them because they knew how they got to it and why it matters. They seemed like products of a system that respected their creativity and capacity to participate in their own education. Because the school does not run according to competitiveness and the measure of grades, the students seemed to be into learning for the sake of wanting to know and to understand. They were independent learners that early. They obviously came to knowing because it was fun or it was important to them or it fascinated them and, therefore, they could and wanted to share it. There on the tables and floors of the school were eager children able to explain why ocean currents run the way they do, how plants depend on their roots for sustenance, and how proportions can be derived from a circle. A friend whose son studies in that school told me how her grade five son and his friends once obsessed about explaining the Euclid’s theorem and ended up spending some nights and days working on it.

I am excited for my son to study in a school like this after three years of dwelling in the cave. I can’t wait for his mind to be set free not just at home but also at school. I can’t wait for his independent, inquisitive, brave and adventurous mind to be affirmed by someone other than philosophy professors and his family. But more than this, I am excited for my son to be in a school where he will learn to be a leader in the age of the end of life as we know it.
As we come to the end of life as we know it, we will have to re-imagine civilization. Things we took for granted will no longer be the same. How we eat, how we manufacture, how we plant, how we are sheltered, and how we earn our living will have to change. We will have to rethink the meaning of development, of success, of the good life, of comfort, and of affluence. Who will lead us in this dreaming, this recreating? Will it be the children of the cave who were taught that learning is pleasing and conforming? Or will it be the children of the light who were taught to explore the wider world according to their passion and imagination? Will the children who had to be driven by competition, pressure, and the need for affirmation lead us? Or will it be the children who were empowered to discover, taught to cooperate in birthing knowledge, and inspired to challenge themselves to break boundaries?

My friends say that traditional schools are good for some children because strict structures make them flourish and progressive schools for others. I believe that. I am just glad that there are alternatives that will nourish the other children whose minds are dying to be set free because they will be facing a time when the structures we know will break down and better worlds will need to be built.

Notes from the end of life as we know it 10: Solidarity Economics or Spending for a Better Worldl

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez, Ph.D.

One of the most economically stagnant and impoverished sectors of the Philippine economy, and even of the world economy as a collective, is the agricultural sector. Here we always find the worst poverty. Often, the rural poor are in a world of economic stagnation where there are no roads leading to a life of stability: to a life where people are able to provide for their most basic needs. If you live in the areas where farming is the main source of income, it is most likely that you have no access to affordable credit. Most probably you are in debt with local traders or informal lenders and that every planting season you sink deeper into debt because the prices of input continue to rise up to three fold and the prices of your produce continue to fall up to one half of their value. Most probably you live in areas where fields flood when it rains and they dry up completely when it doesn’t. Surely you do not have crop insurance so that, when the crop fails, you dig yourself even deeper into the debt trap. You may not have access to electricity and you may need to spend much time and energy to access potable water. When you need to plant, you have to pawn your harvest in advance to a trader who will dictate the price of your produce aside from exacting a steep interest rate, and when you harvest, income is never enough for household expenses and food for the whole year. Thus, your children whose schools are far away, have difficulties completing primary school—not to mention the higher levels. The life of the farmer isn’t a joke as the old song says. It may not even be sustainable. For someone who is outside the reality of their lives, it is almost impossible to imagine how they navigate from day to day. But they persist despite the odds stacked against them by a world that has deprived them of opportunities for building a good human life.


The people of the soil are neglected by our economic support systems and yet it is from them that we derive our sustenance. They are also the keepers of our deepest traditions and the bearers of the wisdom of a life bound to the earth. It is in our interest to ensure that they flourish. However, governments do not fund them enough to respond to their needs and businesses are too short sighted to relate to them beyond exploitative and extractive relations. In order to genuinely help the farmers develop, they need to be assisted in ways that aim to reform the exploitative systems that keep them poor. We have to have relationships with these farmers that can give them a sustainable and livable income and provide them opportunities for them to build a good life. We have to be able to engage them in a way that restores justice and dignity to them. This is not because we want to be charitable in the usual condescending sense of the term. Rather because we want to do right by them who are providers of essential goods and services. If they are providers of the food that keeps us alive, we should want to ensure that they flourish. To ensure this, we will have to pay them a fair and sustainable price for their produce. We want to do right by them because as human beings, it is difficult for us to rest knowing that our lives are purchased at their expense. And it is true that our lives are purchased at their expense. We have food because they continue to plant for us even if they don’t earn a livable income from this. Because we want our food to be cheap, we overlook the fact that we don’t pay the full cost of production, i.e. that we don’t shoulder the cost of a living income for the farmer because they are too powerless to make us. The farmer bears the brunt of rising costs of fuels and fertilizers and the unpredictable weather because we insist on cheap food and the traders insist on keeping profit at a level that serves them. If we can stand in solidarity with farmers and do right by them, they can begin to build better lives. And when their lives improve, our lives improve because when the income of the poor improves, all other industries and services grow. It is in the interest of our flourishing as human beings and as economic actors that we stand in solidarity with the poor.

Social enterprises aim to rectify this exploitative relationship with the marginalized by realizing fair and just practices in their enterprises. Some practice fair trade which ensures that their trade with the poor assures these people of a fair price for their produce. There are enterprises that allow for capital from the mainstream economy to fund businesses that empower communities at the margins of the mainstream economy. One such economic enterprise is the Good Food Company.

This business was started by young Christians who belonged to a prayer community and felt the need to translate their faith into concrete acts of social responsibility. They decided that they should engage in a social enterprise that both supports the farmers in their quest for a good, human life and to support the organic farming movement—the latter for economic and environmental reasons. This they would do by providing the farmers access to capital, organic farming technology, and a sympathetic, enlightened market. They would help the organic farming movement along by adding to its adherents. They would also serve their supporters in this endeavor by creating an enlightened market composed of people who do not just consume but understand where their food is coming from and who are producing their food. Their subscribers would be introduced to the health benefits of organically produced vegetables and they will be given the opportunity to support environmentally responsible food production systems. Not only the farmer will gain from this arrangement by the consumer as well, because through this system they will be transformed from consumers who unwittingly exploit farmers. The enterprise will liberate their subscribers from being supporters of unjust economic and environmentally destructive practices and will allow them to become active participants in the building of an economic order that this ecologically sound and just.

How they do this is simple. A partner must subscribe to their vegetable delivery service for 12 weeks. For Php 400 a week one gets 3.5 kilos of vegetables that are organically grown. One is also invited to community events where one can meet the farmers, listen to their stories, and see how the farms are run. The partners of Good Food are also asked to make certain sacrifices. For instance, one has to pick up the produce every Saturday at certain pick up points. They have to temper their desire for shinny , extra leafy chemically treated vegetables and accept that organic and healthier vegetables look skinnier, duller and less crisp looking. Also, they must be used to getting the vegetables in season. Usually, one gets the same vegetables on a regular basis and one cannot dictate what one gets. The reason for this is because, if you follow the rhythms of nature, and do not pump the land and water systems with artificial fertilizers and pesticides, you cannot force off season vegetables to grow pretty and shinny. But in this way, one is able to become a more just consumer who can rectify one’s relationship to the earth and to one’s fellow human person.

It is without a doubt more difficult to be a just, earth friendly consumer. This is because the existing systems are set up to be unjust to the producer and to treat the consumer as an unthinking cog in the consumption machinery—a machinery that destroys our shared home and our capacity to engage each other as caring beings. But actually, companies like Good Food Co. should make it a little easier. The enterprise is already set up in such a way that it makes the consumer a person who can be just and responsible to the earth and to one’s fellow persons. The only sacrifice is having to pick up your vegetables, to be ready to eat less pretty vegetables and less variety of vegetables, to pay a higher, but fairer, price and to sometimes bear the costs of natural disasters by not receiving vegetables. A small price to pay for being allowed to take part in the rectification of unjust systems and improving lives—the farmers’ and one’s own.

So far, this enterprise has been sustainable but barely so. It is a struggle for them to get a sizeable number, something like 60, of subscribers per 8 week run. I though it would be easier for them because this group belongs to a nationwide Catholic movement which claims to espouse the values of justice and environmental responsibility. However, there are not getting substantial support from this community and are still relying on friends and family to commit to supporting their good work. People still prioritize what is convenient even if it means maintaining systems of injustice and destruction.

We are facing some of the gravest crises that our species has ever brought upon itself. Massive poverty and inequality do not only cause untimely deaths and unnecessary suffering, but also worldwide violence and instability. The environmental catastrophes we are facing are going to cause massive shifts in where we live, how we live, and how well we live. The work of social entrepreneurs like the Good Food Co. give us feasible alternatives to our exploitative and destructive economic systems. They also offer us alternative systems of production and distribution that not only preserve the earth but also build community. If we are to emerge whole from the end of the life as we know it, the more enterprising among us should explore even more ways to justly, environmentally, and creatively produce our needs. As for the rest of us, we should support these enterprises so that our spending and consumption becomes a means of rebuilding civilizations and rediscovering our better selves.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 9: The Church at the End of Life as We Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

It is a difficult time to be a Catholic. I find it hard to identify myself with the Church because of the way its apologists are conducting themselves these days. Firstly, there was the whole debate on reproductive health. I believe that many of the people who were advocating for a reproductive health bill, Catholic or not, were acting out of a genuine desire to preserve life. Many of the people I knew who felt so strongly for a reproductive health bill were men and women who spent decades of their lives helping poor women find ways to realize their potential as persons despite the crushing weight of unjust poverty. They are fighting hard for the passage of some kind of reproductive health system because in their conscience, in the very depths of their reason, they judged that such a system would enable women to be come better persons and mothers—if not wives.

Thus, I found it so painful to see how official and unofficial defenders of the Church attacked the persons who, in their best judgment, thought that the reproductive health bill was the best way to save the lives of suffering women and children. Instead of engaging these men and women of good will, the outspoken apologists of the church launched an attack against the proponents of the RH system. There were veiled threats about excommunication. Those who believed in an RH system were labeled haters of life, of families, of children. Lines were drawn so harshly that dialogue was almost impossible. Clearly, this antagonism was first created by the angry Church apologists because they made so many venomous statements. And of course I understand where they were coming from. In their own conscience, they saw that the bill could propagate a prophylactic mentality, promote casual sex especially among the young, and cause the deaths of innocent, unborn children. And they could very well be right. All this time of conflict, they have been projecting themselves in the media as angry, intolerant, self-righteous hounds of heaven who are ready to condemn and excommunicate anyone who did not agree with them.

And then this CCP exhibit comes into the public sphere. It was meant to be offensive and so it did offend. Personally, I agree with the CCP board member who said that the exhibit was aimed not to offend God or to desecrate the Holy but to reflect on the kitschification of iconography. However, I do understand how the placing of a penis on the cross may have been an unnecessary crossing of some line. And often shock art can be adolescent and lacking in profound insight. But again, the reactions from the protectors of the Church are so rabid. There was the immediate labeling of people as blasphemers and anti-Christs. (One logic went like this: They are the anti-Christ because they are anti Christ.) However, the CCP board clearly acted with the best intention to promote the best art. Bad judgment or not, they did not deserve to be labeled the anti-Christs (if a plural could be made of that) or intentional blasphemers out to desecrate all that is holy. Was there no room for dialogue between people with the best intentions and good will on this issue?

Why were the Church defenders so rabid and violent in their hearts? Perhaps it is because they feel that God is being hurt in all this. But this is what we are perhaps forgetting in all these debates: God is bigger than all of us. If the RH Bill is wrong, God will find a way to make it right no matter the outcome of the debates and the passage of the law. If the controversial exhibit did offend God, God can absorb more mud than any iconoclastic artist can fling at him. We shouldn’t worry so much about God and His agenda that we resort to the ways of hate and violence. Because more hurtful to the building of the kingdom than the passage of a potentially dangerous, life-threatening law or the blaspheming of Jesus’ holy image is the losing of faith of the people of the building the kingdom in love. Today, more and more, the people of the Church are presenting themselves as a rabid, intolerant, reactionary, and spiteful. They are coming off as desperate to keep their influence and power over the people—so desperate that they will use the tools of anti-love to achieve what they believe love calls them to do.

People of good will are now being turned away from the Church as a home of their hearts or as a partner in their service to the people of God who are suffering much from pain and sorrow. How can people of good will desire to partner with the Church or draw energy from her if her energy is so negative and draining? Instead of being the beacon of love in the world, the people of the Church have been projecting a harsh, unappealing light.

This is very unfortunate because I remember that it was the Church's face of love that made me want to remain a Catholic. Until I was in my third year of college, I was an agnostic. I wasn't sure if there was a god and I couldn't reject the possibility outright because I had all this Catholic guilt and fear in me. I'm sure most of us remember how we were made to believe in God—there was always a mixture of “believe or be condemned to the fires of hell and Mama Mary loves you so much she'll cry if you don't love Jesus.” However, there came a point in my life when I realized that much of the evil around me was perpetrated by Catholics. The hacienderos who stole land or paid their kasama's an unfair and non-living wage were Catholic. The politicians who supported Marcos and were even the backbone of his dictatorship were the best friends of the Church. The businessmen who broke-up unions and denied their workers their just wages were the ministers of the Eucharist. Even the leaders of the Church seemed to support these perpetrators of injustice and suffering by turning a blind eye to the evil and even gaining in wealth and luxury from this evil. For the longest time, I did not want to belong to this Church and was just waiting to gain the momentum or strength of will to actually reject it and transcend the guilt and fear that this rejection would entail.

The other reason I did not leave the Church so easily was because I wanted to give myself a chance to find God if God indeed existed. In my heart I thought that if there was indeed a God and believing was such a good thing, why is it that the people who believe in him are the worst people I knew? But still, there might be a God and if there was, it was worth finding out. So I stayed in the Church and went to mass because if there was a God, He would probably manifest here.

I had the good fortune of going to a Jesuit university where good Jesuits worked. Here, I met Fr. Ferriols who showed that being a Catholic and being wise were not necessary contradiction in terms. He showed me that the wisdom of the human person ought to lead to an awakening to the Holy and that the gentle quest for truth could lead to the opening to God's presencing. I met Fr. Green who taught me that you ought to call God love for that is what God is. Then (then) Brother Danny Huang taught me that you cannot call yourself a Christian if you did not love God's poor and fight for justice—that being a Christian means establishing the kingdom of God in all you do. Fr. Joel Tabora taught me how to live that loving struggle for God's people and what it meant to concretely build God's kingdom on earth. These were the men of the Church who in my youth taught me that the Church is about love and justice, that it was about wisdom and hope. These were the men whose loving presencing told me to stay—to follow and see.

Because I stayed, because they taught me to look for God where love lay, I found God. Quietly, undramatically, but certainly, I found God in my silences as the embrace that overwhelms, as the joy that wells up, as the calm that says all will be well. And even today, when God is more silent, less presencing, I cannot but believe that Love is for Love was too real to deny.

If the Church genuinely believes that it is God's presence of earth, it must be the presence of love—not vindictiveness, or hate, or anger, or desperation, or violence, or pettiness, or venom. The Church must be love for God is love. Does it want more unborn children to be saved, then it must go among the people who sleep in the streets, who scavenge in the city's decay, who try to harvest in fields that alternate between flooding and drying. They must be there in love’s listening and witnessing so that men will not force their wives to have more children than their wives’ bodies can afford and those that oppress the poor learn to serve God in justice and not just through donations and the sponsoring of Church events. If it wants the lay persons to venerate Christ and honor Mary then its priests and nuns should invite them by showing how such veneration brings forth people with hearts who open to embrace all who dwell in sorrow and loneliness and despair.

In my son's school, every special Mary day, the kids are all made to pray the rosary. For about 45 minutes, 3 to 7 year old children are made to sit and recite words that they seem not to understand or appreciate. The point of course is to teach them to pray and instill the love of Mary in their hearts. In every single one of these sessions, my 5 year old son cries, or he needs to sit with one of the helping misses so that he doesn't feel too disturbed by the proceedings. I thought that my son only acted this way with during rosary days because he was bored or became restless out of his wits. If I were five and I had to sit through 45 minutes of words that did not mean anything to me recited in a toneless monotony, that is probably how I would react. However, I think, aside from that, there is another reason why he gets this way. One day, out of the blue while we were driving somewhere, he asked me if there really were fires in hell. I asked him why he asked. Because , he said, he wanted to know if he would be sent there. My poor son, I thought, his early education into God is through the fires of hell and the valley of tears when it should be love and joy. He continued, where are the people who killed Jesus? Are they in the fires of hell? Because he said, if God is in our hearts and everyone is in God’s heart, why are there people in the fires of hell?

This is not exactly what I told him. But it went something like this, and this is what I learned sitting in attendance to the Love that is in the universe. There are no fires of Hell if the fires of hell means that there is a place where bad people are punished and made to suffer unspeakable horrors by a vindictive god. No one is separated from the love of God. We will always be in God's heart as He will always be in ours. Sadly, some people choose not to love God and turn away from God's love. Despite that, God never turns these people away or rejects them. And He always invites them in love. But if because of the hardness of their hearts they insist on living selfishly or destructively, and they refuse to open to God's love that is flowing toward them, then that is hell. To be in hell is to be in a state where one can see God is all his splendor and love reach out to you and you cannot open your heart to be touched by him because you chose to be that way. That is the suffering of the sinner. And none of it is caused by God because God does hold us in His heart in love even if we are sinners who refuse God's love.

And I ask, if God is so much love, where is all this anger and condemnation from the lovers of God coming from? Are the defenders of the faith channeling God's love by their violence against the other persons of good will? Did they not consider that people who don't agree with them may be acting for the greater good and that the Church may benefit of the insight of others whose hearts are likewise embraced by God's love?

This is why I am so bothered by the way the Church (through its leadership) is projecting itself in public: to know love, you must be opened to love. The only education, before the memorized prayers, before the worship in sacred shrines and the falling before images, before the memorization of the complex doctrines, is the education of the heart to open to love—to see love where it shows, to feel love where it touches, to hear love where it calls, and to dwell in love where it blossoms. A rabid and vindictive Christendom can only overwhelm the delicate presencing of love. Instead of leading confused and doubting hearts to love, they may be sowing doubt with regard to the transcendent presence of love. I almost missed the call of love having grown up with a Church that focused too much on telling me how sinful I was and how I was at the precipice of the fires of hell. This approach hardened me to the love that seemed so contradictory. This angry, self-righteousness projected by the Church against over the top shock artists and men and women of good will trying their best to empower poor women and children and their denying baptism to the children of unwed parents and their calling women without children incomplete is certainly the noise that counters love.

My education in God, the proper education that opened me to God, was an education in love. Memorized doctrine, the repetitious worship of saints, the contemplation of the fires of hell did not lead me to God. They filled my heart with doubt. The passionate witnessing of men and women of love led me to love and then to embrace the doctrine. Perhaps our bishops should lead us in that kind of education.

We are at the end of life as we know it. We need to learn to build a new order of love because we will face civilization changing crises. Who will lead us in this task of rebuilding? This is a terrific opportunity for the Church because it can influence the new world that is emerging so that this mirrors the Kingdom. But who will flock to it when it is so uncomforting? Who will partner with it when it is so bitter? Who will build with it when its words tear down? The Church can and the Church must for it can lead by gathering the energies of charity for the tasks of the Kingdom. The Bishops called for days of prayer and penitence. That is so apt for we must really repent our ways as a Church that has forgotten that Love calls us to presence love and to have faith that love will overcome. This does not mean that we should be complacent in the face of potential evil but it calls us to use the ways of love in faith for only love will save us.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 8: Repentance and Rebirth at the End of Life as We Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I once heard from a report my students gave that there is such a thing as the autogeddon theory. They said some scientists did the math and believed that we have reached a point of no return with regard to bringing about destructive changes to the earth because of rising population, massive demand for energy and water, the strain of our consumption on natural resources and habitats, and the destructive changes in the climate we are causing. It was never clear to me where they got this autogeddon theory because they were not sure themselves. However, in the subsequent years, it became clearer to all of us that no matter how much we conserve, no matter how much we reduce our population growth, we have irrevocably damaged the earth and we have already brought about massive destruction to nature. It is also clear that we will continue to do so in more massive levels when the full effects of global warming kick in.

As it stands, we have caused the extinction of more species than any natural event. We have raised the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere by 100 times since the start of the industrial revolution and there is no end to that increase in sight. It seems that it will take centuries “for global processes to reach equilibrium.” Even if we cut GDP by 2% per developed country today, we will still raise the amount of CO2 produced by industrial processes. Scientists already estimated that we have overshot the world’s capacity to sustainably support our existence by 120 percent and still we keep growing by about 200,000 people per day. It seems clearer now more than ever that we are destroying our habitable world at unprecedented rates and that we have long passed the point of no return. This means that no matter how much we conserve, reuse, recycle, reduce, live responsibly, consume less, and live with the least impact on the earth that our present state of development affords, we will never be able to restore the world to its prior state when it could sustain human life seemingly indefinitely. It’s just too late. We have eaten and polluted ourselves out of a nourishing home and created this fragile habitat.

How did we get here? There are simply too many of us and a rich minority of us are living grandly wasteful lives. A simple fact from biologist Walter Dodds. Each hamburger requires 3028 litters of water to produce and a full meal requires 5591 liters of water. Imagine how much water that is when you multiply those thousands of liters to the billions of hamburgers Macdonalds and the millions Jollibee have served. Now imagine how many millions of people actually get to eat full meals. Certainly they are not the majority of the world’s population but they are a considerable minority. Now imagine the hectares of land used to grow the corn that feeds the cows and the hundreds of species that had to give up their habitat for our burgers. To think, most of our meals and all of these burgers aren’t even good for us. And because these things we consume aren’t good for us, imagine how much governments and pharmaceuticals spend on research and development, production and distribution of the pills and teas that try to burn away the burgers we shouldn’t have eaten. Yet, his is but a fraction of our impact on the earth. Our continuous production of electronics, low and high end consumer goods, fashion, and luxury items at every level of the social strata has caused us to destroy, pollute, and deplete habitats and resources. Because we produce so much waste and require so much material to sustain us, and because there are simply too many of us, we are destroying the nourishing rock that brought us to life.

So what do we do? The more clearly the data emerges, the more clearly it seems that we have to enact radical changes in the way we live just to make sure that our home doesn’t become too hostile to us. To put it quite simply, we must repent and reform. For those of us who have realized our being in the world in such a way that has been hurtful to society and to our fellow citizens, we expect some kind of remorse—we expect some king of awakening and realization that their way of being in the world has to be reformed or realized in another way. Well, we have acted badly. Therefore, we must be expected to rethink the way we are being in the world. The way we have been for the last century, we have lived like selfish, inconsiderate, demanding, greedy, self-absorbed, arrogant, needy, and gluttonous brats who have an exaggerated sense of entitlement. It’s as if everything in this world existed for our sole pleasure and that our sole purpose is to exploit everything that will let us. Only a few of us even wonder if we were hurting other species, if we have a right to destroy their worlds, or if we should make amends for our boorish behavior. We have lived on this world like parasites without a capacity to regulate our consumption thereby causing the death of our host. We have behaved badly and have come to the end of life as we know it.

As I have always said, this moment is a tremendous opportunity for growth. However, we can only begin to grow and realize our better selves when we first acknowledge that we have realized a way of being in this world that is careless and destructive. However, most of us aren’t even close to recognizing our failings. In Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, the great American hope of this generation, the world leader who people thought was genuinely progressive and understood that significant changes had to be realized in their country’s way of living and dealing with the world and the environment, said, “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” Of course he was delivering his required rhetoric against terrorism. However, I am deeply offended by this notion that the Americans will not apologize for their way of life. Why not? It is their mad consumerist dream that filled our shared atmosphere with more than their share of greenhouse gases, that caused the floods that destroyed the lives of many people in my city, that has caused and continues to cause environmental degradation in their quest for oil, that has bullied my nation into an unfair world economic system that keeps my people poor. They won’t repent for any of that harm? They won’t apologize for their way of life that makes my children’s future uncertain and clouded over by the darkest clouds we can imagine? I think they and those that created this world order do owe us an apology. And we should repent our complicity in their destructive self-realization.

The sad and seemingly hopeless fact is that only a few people understand that the way we live is not good for us. It is a lifestyle that treats the world as a resource to use and consume as, what Martin Heidegger would refer to, as standing reserve. We look at the world as a thing waiting to be used. Its various habitats and myriad life forms are but mere resources to tap as we think of more complex ways to feed and amuse ourselves, to make our selves feel alive and immortal. Nothing, not even our fellow human beings, are thought of as individual and separate beings who have an existence that bears its own value other than that we confer. Nothing exists for us unless it is something useful or amusing or consumable. And because we have seen the world in the light of its status as standing reserve, we have refashioned it in such a way that it exists according to our demands. Our jungles are no longer primordial, our animals no longer wild, our skies no longer a transcendent sheltering dome, our seas no longer an impenetrable depth—all are touched by men with a heavy hand that cannot help but alter and destroy what it touches. And so, Mr. Obama and all the rest of humanity—especially man-kind—we have much to apologize for and much to be sorry about. We have treated our world and our fellow living beings with such utter disregard that not only have we fouled our own nest, we have driven other beings to extinction. What kind of species does that make us? The kind that no one with any sense would want to move into their neighborhood. Unfortunately, we have taken over the planet.

It is time then to admit that we have somehow come to a point when our drive to a more successful way of being in the world has become a bane to others and to ourselves. We have realized our human potential in such a way that it has become harmful and dangerous to others. We only have to admit that our way of being has not been desirable so that we can move on and become better persons. Unless we can come to that realization, we will continue to be the bad neighbor, the stupid parasite, and we will drive ourselves into extinction.

How then do we repent? Max Scheler explores the experience of repentance in his essay “Repentance and Rebirth.” Here he shows how repentance is an act born of the realization that one has concretized oneself in a way that violates the order of values, or in a way that violates or fails to realize the highest potential of my self. Somehow, perhaps because of the presence of a model person that allows me to intuit my fullest potential, or more simply because I am confronted with the pain I have caused others with my way of being, I realize that I have realized my worst possible self and that I need to renew my commitment to a more creative way of being in the world that values myself and others. According to Scheler, and I believe this is true, there is an aspect of grace in repentance.

All of us, in our finitude, can only see the world according to our own system of values, according to our own rationalities. The reason we do what we do is because we think that this is the good thing to do based on our own way of understanding and valuing ourselves and others. We engage in this orgy of consumption because we thought it was the best for us—we still do. No one set out to foul the nest. We only wanted to improve our lives by getting the most while paying the least, to gain the most pleasure with the least pain. We set to have children because it was a joy and an assurance of continued existence. We built our cities because it felt like the safest way of living. We are structured by the prevailing systems of valuation that define an ethos. This ethos tells us that our way of being in the world is the most beneficial and the truest way of realizing our humanity. To realize that our way of seeing and engaging the world is actually perverted is not easy because we can only see things through our own system of values. It takes the coming of another who bears another way of being or seeing, the advent of disaster, or even just the quiet moment of sudden insight to awaken us. Best of all, it takes the miracle, rare but not unheard of, of seeing myself for an instant through the eyes of the transcendent source of the good to shatter my certainties about who I am and awaken me to the need to realize my better self. That is a rare act of grace, but every day we are challenged by others to rethink our priorities, to reevaluate our desires, to reexamine our certainties. If we are open to that grace, we can awaken to our possibilities.

In our time, in this suitable time, we are confronted by our own folly. There is no greater mirror to our souls than our ravaged world. Thusly, we are forced to confront our false conceptions and valuations of reality. The main reason for this is because we will not survive otherwise. So we can say that we are being pushed to repent our destructive way of being. Global warming is the grace that prods us to repentance. The only proper human response to such an awakening is to embrace it. Without embracing this and without repenting, we will always be caught in the ethos of our destructive selves. A destructive way of being is like a rail that keeps us running in a particular direction unless we can break from it. Thus repentance is like a disaster of sorts—a derailing that wrenches us out of our destructive self-realization so that we can reevaluate our being in the world.

Of course there will be the sorrow one feels for having to see one’s self this way. It can never be pleasant and can even be debilitating. One can feel hopeless about one’s self and fall deeper into one’s destructiveness because one may not have the will or imagination to see one’s self other than this negative realization of personhood. However, only when one embraces one’s brokenness, when one accepts that he has lived for so long according to this distorted realization of the self, can one begin to pick one’s self up and realize one’s self otherwise. Until there is no reevaluation, acceptance of one’s shortcomings, and repentance of one’s patterns of concretization, there will be no potential for rebirth. But the first step is humility.

Humility calls for our acceptance of our finitude and our brokenness in our capacity to realize our potentials as persons. If it is grace that awakens us to awaken to our destructive selves, perhaps it is also grace that will draw us to our greater potentials as persons. This time at the end of life as we know it, there is a call for rebirth. There is an urgent call for humanity to collectively awaken to more authentic ways of being in the world. What can realize such an awakening? Perhaps if there are enough of what Scheler calls model persons, i.e. bearers of systems of values that will shape a more creative way of being in the world, then we will be able to understand how we can achieve our potential. Perhaps, if more people are engaged in the task of reimagining our civilization, we will be able to pull ourselves together and build more just and less consuming economies. Perhaps, if it is not too late and if we are not in the early phases of our autogeddon.

But whether it is too late or not, we must repent and find ourselves reborn to a new way of being in the world.

Let's Talk About Sex. And Women. (Thoughts on Issues Related to the RH Bill.)

by Rowie Azada

I'll start by sharing three insights that struck me at different times in my life.

Insight number 1. When I was in college, we studied the Catholic doctrine on contraception, marriage, and sexuality for a Theology class. I remember thinking to myself that it was very difficult to follow the Catholic doctrine on contraception, but at the same time I was also struck by how much faith it had in the kind of love a husband and a wife could have. The only "Church-approved" methods of family planning--natural "birth control" methods--were entirely dependent on open communication lines between husband and wife, and on a husband's respect for his wife's body and her sexuality. There was also a strong concern that "a man ... may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection" (HV 17, encyclical given in 1968). There were other parts of the doctrine I had many questions about, but I thought that the emphasis on a man's respect for a woman's body was quite cool.

Insight number 2. When I was a fresh graduate, I was hired to translate for an American journalist who was doing a story on contraception in the Philippines. We visited a number of urban poor areas in the Philippines and interviewed women who had eight or more children. We asked the women why they had so many children and their answers were often along the lines of, "E kasi madalas umuuwi ang asawa ko nang lasing, kaya alam mo na ...." Many of the women we interviewed said they had tried the pill but didn't like the side effects they said the pill gave them; when asked why they didn't use a condom instead, they often said, "E ayaw kasi ng asawa ko."

Insight number 3. I read a statistic a few years ago that showed a correlation between a woman's level of education and the number of children she had: the more educated a woman was, the more likely it was that she would have less children. I don't know for certain what the cause of the correlation is, but I'm guessing that maybe a more educated woman has a surer sense of self, and therefore feels more empowered to make decisions about her entire life, including her sexuality.

========

Why do so many poorer families have so many children--often far more than they can afford? There are probably many answers to the question, but based on those interviews I did several years ago, it seems that for some families, part of the reason is the dynamic between the husband and wife, the communication--or rather, the lack of communication--about sexuality. My guess is that many women cannot say no to their husbands/sexual partners, or cannot assert their own opinions and views about sex in the bedroom.

It is a shame that in this debate, the Catholic bishops and religious have been focusing only on the issue of contraception, because I think that there is much more in Catholic doctrine that can contribute to the discussion on reproductive health. Reproductive health begins, not in public clinics or barangay health centers or in school, but first and foremost, at home, in sexual relationships. Of course, the State cannot legislate respect between sexual partners (other than prohibiting domestic abuse), but by framing the issue of reproductive health mainly as a debate about contraception, the current participants in the debate are missing the opportunity to draw attention to what I think is at least an equally important issue: the power relations between sexual partners.

Why are women in our culture unable to be frank about sex? Why are men in our culture more vocal about sex? Both are equally misinformed about sex, yet in the power relation between man and woman, the woman acquiesces to the man. Despite all theories that ours is a matriarchal society, this is one area where women lose out.

I remember the last huge art-related controversy in school, around a decade ago. A theater group wanted to stage the Vagina Monologues. However, some administrators (not priests), reacting to the play's strong language, refused to endorse it as an official school activity, and banned it from campus. The group went ahead and staged it, off campus, but the banning caused a huge uproar.

I watched the play and loved it. The next day I talked about it with some friends. "In one of the scenes," I began, "where a character started talking about her 'puerta' ..."

A male friend who had also watched it responded, "A oo, kadiri talaga yung scene na yun ...."

"Kadiri?" I said, surprised. "I thought it was so powerful, so moving ...."

"See, the thing is," I continued, "men have porn and locker room jokes to talk about sex. Women have nothing. When men talk about sex publicly, it's funny. At least, it's funny. When women talk about sex, it's 'kadiri.'"

If we want to increase reproductive health awareness, giving condoms or pills for free at health clinics might help a little. But it won't be enough. Let's go beyond this contraceptive talk. Let's talk about people. Let's talk about relationships. Let's talk about women in relationships and how we can help women speak up.

*picture from http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/

The Nativity and Public Space

by Remmon E. Barbaza

As Christmas nears, many of us feel oppressed by the madness of road traffic, long gift lists, and endless parties and reunions. But we also relish the joy and peace of Christmas in the quiet of our homes. These opposing experiences point to a tension between private and public spaces.

The story of the Nativity is itself a struggle involving private and public spaces. The God who chose to insert Himself in human space and history, who “pitched tent among us”—the same God who made space for the heavens and the earth in loving acts of letting-be (“Let there be…”)—now finds Himself without a space to lay His head. There is no room for Him in the inn.

*image taken from The Biblical World

So there He is to be born, in a manger, marginalized from the very beginning. He knows these margins very well, these edges of human society and history. This God will begin from the margins, live in the margins, and die in the margins of our human spaces. His earthly life is a story of reaching out to those who live in the margins, those who are marginalized, and hence out-cast. We want them out of our spaces. But God wants them back in.

Although not couched in the socio-political language of “private and public spaces,” the teachings of Jesus do point to something that speaks of such distinctions. He would, for example, exhort people to transcend the selfish confines of the family. The family is a kind of private space. We feel at home in it. But Jesus says that we cannot be called children of God if our love was limited to our families. For indeed even the cruelest evildoers among us love their own families.

We Filipinos pride ourselves in having close and tightly knit families, which indeed is a wonderful thing in itself. But as in any other good thing, when corrupted it can degenerate into something destructive.

That our state is run mostly by families and clans—and often with the same names over and over again—tells us not only that the family is stronger than the state, but also that, on the fundamental level, we have not yet learned how to recognize the public space that lies beyond the narrow and often selfish confines of the private space.

The Ampatuan massacre is an extreme example of the violent imposition of the self in public space, where the will was not satisfied with simply marginalizing people who challenged the legitimacy of its power, but went so far as to brutally and physically wipe them out altogether from our shared space.

Violating laws with impunity can thus be seen as an illegitimate appropriation of public space. But before we fall into the illusion that the impunity claimed by the Ampatuans is something extreme and remote from most of us, we would do well to think again. For we might discover that there are degrees of acting with impunity, and that each one of us acts in one degree or another.

Gone may be the wang-wangs, one of the loudest and most disgusting examples of the imposition of the self in public space. But we still get subjected to the tasteless self-promotion of public officials who force the ugly sight of their names and faces upon public space, or car owners who seem to demand entitlement by announcing that they are “LAWYERS” or “PMA CLASS so and so” (yes, in screaming capitals), or doctors who are not necessarily responding to emergency calls but seem to demand special treatment through their “Doctors on Call” stickers or plates (thereby perhaps preventing other doctors from actually responding to life-and-death situations).

How many times did we get stuck in traffic because some selfish driver stopped right at the street corner, totally unmindful of others whose right to unobstructed roads was not respected at all? And when such a thing happens, how many times do we see traffic enforcers look the other way? (One need only observe what happens at the corner of Kamias and EDSA, for instance, on any given weekday, to see how disorder has reached insane levels.)

How many times have we heard of a friend or a relative die in an accident because a couple of buses or trucks engaged in a mad race, or else “encountered brake failure,” indicating that their drivers and operators did not recognize that the right to drive a vehicle is exercised in public space and therefore comes with the serious responsibility of ensuring public safety? Did not the Vatican itself identify reckless driving and road bullying as two of the modern sins?

In gated villages (itself a phenomenon of spatial segregation), we also witness how some supposedly educated, Mass-going and rosary-reciting residents usurp upon the public domain, disregarding common space by blocking fire hydrants, street corners, and driveways, while being the first and loudest ones to complain when their own spaces are blocked by others.

But we need not look further and outside ourselves. The Nativity invites us to enter into that most sacred space, from within which alone we can take a hard look at ourselves, and see to what extent we have violated the common good by unlawfully usurping upon public space, and all because of our illusion of being the center of the world.

Simone Weil tells us that to love is “to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all the points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world.” Such love is the love that the Nativity invites us to receive.

Our spiritual life demands that we pass the social and political test of recognizing and safeguarding public space. After all, we pray that His will be done on earth as in heaven. Failing this test will only belie all claims to religiosity and spirituality, and unmask them as nothing but sheer hypocrisy.

And so as we slowly enter into the heart of Christmas, we are invited to behold the unfolding of this wondrous story that is the Nativity. It is the story of this ultimate act of displacement, when God willingly divested Himself of His divine nature, displacing Himself in order to bring everything back to its proper place.

Among the first ones to witness the unfolding of this wondrous story were those who lived in the margins, too. We must learn from them then, these shepherds. Like them we must approach the manger, quietly and without any expectation, with hearts open and ready to wait.

There, in the manger, where the true center is.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 7:

These Are The Fundamental Beliefs That Define Our Lifestyle

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Once I was asked by the university to share with the faculty some points about simplicity of lifestyle, I took the occasion to sit down with my wife and articulate the fundamental beliefs we live by. Here I share with you the fundamental beliefs that shape our lifestyle:

1) We believe that there is a being of great Love in the world who governs our existence. This is a fundamental certainty that is grounded on existential experience for us. This just means that we have felt this Love’s presence and cannot but respond to it.
2) This great Love calls us all to share in their act of love for all being.
3) The great suffering in the world caused by human beings is painful for this great Love to see. And if we do participate in their Love, we cannot live without orienting our lives toward the alleviation of this suffering.
4) The task of serving the suffering and the poor is not an incidental task but the very central task of our lives.
5) There are many ways to serve the suffering in every arena of our lives. But our work only becomes an act of service when it is centered on serving the other and not our egos or our need to be needed or our reputations.
6) A life centered on service is the only path to finding yourself and to finding your potential as a person. It is the only way because a life lived only for the self keeps you from recognizing the call of love that calls you to your potential as a person.
7) Our lifestyles—that is the way we consume, entertain ourselves, engage in leisure, and work, or the way we maintain ourselves in existence—must not be exploitative. Although we have a right to maintain ourselves in existence, as workers building the kingdom, we have no right in causing the greater suffering of others in these acts.
8) We must in fact try and build up the lives of others in our acts of self-maintenance. This is perhaps what they refer to today as solidarity economics. Examples of this are acts that affirm the right of the marginalized and deserving to make a living: buying from neighborhood informal sellers rather than big stores, actively supporting alternative or non-mainstream artists, or choosing to pay a just wage for the services of those who help us.
9) We must not focus our lives too much on acquisition, consumption, and luxury for the sustaining of such desires often requires us to engage in the accumulation of wealth which in our world cannot be done without others paying for it. I believe the realities of global warming and worldwide poverty are clear proofs of this. Sadly, those who pay the sins of our excesses are always those who did not even choose to live or desire to live according to these excesses.
10) We are required by Love to make sacrifices in big and small ways for the marginalized—on the level of structural change and on the level of small acts of deliberate affirmation and support. Thus, we are called to live simpler lives or even sacrifice some or much of our own income to empower the disempowered.
11) Ultimately, we are all called to take part in realizing the revolutionary structural changes that will ensure that the suffering of others is ended. I use revolutionary here in the Christian and Marxian but not Marxist sense. The Christian sense still demands the changing of social structures but demands a transformation of self in love and justice.

Of course we don’t live this way of life perfectly, but we try to live it as much as possible. It’s not always easy. It means resisting a consumeristic lifestyle. That for us is the hardest aspect to accomplish because we are in a sense programmed to find consolation for our hard work or for our difficulties in buying things. We also try to find affirmation for our value or self-worth by what we own. So it’s sometimes hard to resist being consumers or even losing sight of our values in trying to engage in activities that will make us earn better in order to live more luxuriously. But we try to live according to our convictions even in simple ways like engaging our neighborhood service sector and paying them more than exploitative wages. We don’t ask for discounts from poor vendors. We buy our supplies from local, informal sector merchants even if it costs more. We consciously buy Filipino as much as possible. We take vacations only in the Philippines. And we have committed to professions that will pay us less than we could potentially earn in order to focus on service.

We have also chosen to raise our children ourselves as much as our professions will allow. In this way I believe we can raise persons of love and service who will themselves grow up to serve. Concretely, this means we have no stay-in yaya. In this way we have raised a 17-year old who I am proud to say is at least aware of the suffering of others and hopes to serve them through her writing. Now we are still raising a 4 year old and I must say it still requires great sacrifice on our part. I find it particularly important to raise my son so that he will grow up to understand how fathers themselves need to be persons of service in very concrete ways. He must understand that men must know how to cook, clean the house, and serve the people around them in order to break the sad tradition of spoiled, useless boys in our country.

On a personal note, it is difficult to continue this lifestyle without any structural support. It is hard to be a just consumer when most businesses are structured unjustly. It is hard to raise one’s own child when there are no day care centers in your work place and when you can be left out of so many things because you did not choose to prioritize your career over your fundamental responsibilities.

Sometimes it’s painful to see the outcome of your own choices. Sometimes it hurts to see others advance in the world who have chosen to live otherwise. It is a little more poignant now as sometimes I watch the world proceed without me as I chase a little boy around our little world. Clearly the successes that the world recognizes are not always for those of us who have chosen to live in service, except perhaps for a few happy exceptions. But the rewards of a life justly lived are found in the living of it. For living such a life keeps us closer to our truth, to our potential as creative human beings, and to the Love that bears us in their heart so that we remain focused on what is most important and find ourselves in the end made whole.

van Gogh and the Real Thing

by Michael G. Aurelio

As with many passionate souls,
the moment had come when his faith in life was faltering.
—Albert Camus, Notebooks

The turning point in the Ridley Scott film A Good Year finds the protagonist Max Skinner (Russell Crowe), a successful trader who just inherited from his deceased uncle the vineyard he grew up in, given two choices by his boss: “money or your life.” He had just come back from his unplanned and poignant visit to his uncle’s vineyard in Provence, France to arrange its sale. In his short stay there, however, he was also able to revisit his youthful years and remember the happiness he once had and now could no longer afford.

To be on a “holiday,” unfortunately, is unthinkable in the unforgiving world of trading. Wanting to know what he was committed to and where his heart lies, the owner of the firm, the no-nonsense German Sir Nigel, asks Max to decide on his own fate. Either he leaves with a discharge settlement “with a lot of zeros,” or stay and accept an offer for a full partnership.

Before their short, straightforward dialogue, Max had noticed, among other pieces of art, a beautiful painting showcased on the wall. It was Van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star. He inquires about the work of art, and his boss says that the one on the wall was a 200 grand copy—but the original, he nonchalantly adds, securely sits in a vault in the basement of his house. This strikes Max profoundly and images of his youth and his vineyard rush back to him again. Now certain with a decision, Max goes back to Sir Nigel and asks his gray, efficacious boss: “When do you ever see it, Nigel? The real one? When do you look at it? Do you make late-night pilgrimages down to the vault just to see it or . . . ?”

Asked about what he meant, the scene is cut and the next one shows the retired successful trader back in Provence taking back the woman he loved and the life he all along wanted to live. 


*

When Vincent van Gogh submitted himself to an insane asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France on May 1889, the artist was in the middle of his late period which saw the beautiful Starry Night Over the Rhone and his famous The Starry Night created. The thick swirls and dark strokes of night skies splashed with hopeful stars—and these would increasingly grow thicker, darker, and brighter—would distinguish not only some of his later works but, as held by most, also symbolize his deteriorating mental state toward the end of his life.

Starry Night over the Rhone, September 1888

The Starry Night, June 1889

Bouts of debilitating depression, psychoses, epileptic attacks and delusions had been plaguing the genius, requiring several hospitalizations. In one unfortunate instance in December of 1888, he threatened the life of Paul Gauguin, a fellow artist he had befriended earlier, with a knife. That night, seeing that he was yet to effectively use his knife, he cuts off his own ear, wraps it up and gives it to a prostitute who we can presume was anything but delighted.

Unbalanced, condemned to be a lone artist, though still one of the most gifted painters of his time, van Gogh would continue to yield the only weapon he possessed to ward off his demons in the sanatorium. He would do there what he did best: he would paint, and paint, and paint at a furious pace. Cut off from the world he had retreated from and which wearied him so, van Gogh would there take inspiration from what he would see in his supervised evening walks around the asylum.

What particularly caught the eye of the artist during those times, along with olive trees, were cypress trees. I imagine his awe and fear of those natural towers, ones which are usually found in cemeteries, lording it over the moonlit paths he took at night. Shaped like a candle, straight as an arrow that shoots to the heavens, cypresses have since ancient times been referred to as both the tree of life and the tree of mourning. The paradox, while clear, is amusing.

Vincent would later confess his fascination with cypress trees to his brother, Theo. Referring to cypresses, he wonders in a letter penned in the asylum:

It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them . . . It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly. (25 June 1889)

Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890

Road with Cypress and Star, completed a year later in May 1890—around the time he finally left the asylum in Saint-Rémy—would be what he later on called his “last attempt” in depicting his beloved cypresses on canvas. In another letter accompanied by a sketch of the painting, van Gogh describes the work to Gauguin, who had since forgiven his one time knife-carrying friend:

I also have a cypress with a star from down there. . . . A last attempt—a night sky with a moon without brightness, the slender crescent barely emerging from the opaque projected shadow of the earth—a star with exaggerated brightness, if you like, a soft brightness of pink and green in the ultramarine sky where clouds run. Below, a road bordered by tall yellow canes behind which are the blue low Alpilles, an old inn with orange lighted windows and a very tall cypress, very straight, very dark.

On the road a yellow carriage harnessed to a white horse, and two late walkers. Very romantic if you like, but also ‘Provençal’ I think. (17 June 1890)

On July 27, at age 37 and two months after giving up on breathing life into the dark cypresses of his nights in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh would walk into a field of wheat with a revolver and shoot himself in the chest. While he would survive from the blow, he would die two nights later. To a mourning Theo by his side, Vincent’s last words were “The sadness will last forever.”

*

Road with Cypress and Star may initially confuse the viewer who may not be familiar with its name. Two different heavenly bodies hang on the ultramarine sky. While the moon betrays itself with its crescent shape, the other, much brighter body on the left, with its yellow and green radiance, may be mistaken for the sun. That said, van Gogh’s stars and moons are more difficult to distinguish from each other in earlier works such as The Starry Night and Starry Night over the Rhone where more stars light up the night sky.

But in Road with Cypress and Star van Gogh only gives us a lonely star, which is then accompanied by a redundant moon “without brightness.” The world at the same time looks brighter and darker for the melancholy. The scene below is nevertheless lighted sufficiently, and even more so than the earlier works. The light from this single star, deceptive at first, should then be more brilliant than van Gogh’s earlier, more numerous stars.

Dominating the painting is van Gogh’s beloved cypress tree. Its tip exceeds the top of the frame, its blacks and dark greens contrast the blues of the sky and the browns of the canes, and it stands right in the middle—something which is counter-intuitive because the eyes find it harder to focus on the middle of a painting or a photograph, and because it delays the viewer from attending to the other elements in the work. The cypress’ odd placement cuts the canvas in two and separates the effulgent star and the shadowed moon. The cypress reveals its two faces here, one that celebrates the brilliance of life, the other that mourns nightfall and death.

The contrast in the sky marked by the cypress is replicated in a more evident manner below by a divided road. The bypath on the left is constricted and narrow as it begins, while the path on the right is easily accessible. On the wider path on the right we see two “late walkers” enjoying the cool and “romantic” night. Behind them a horse with a carriage, presumably following their direction, has just appeared.

Van Gogh is telling us something here, that these late-night pilgrims have chosen the easier yet less illumined way; and that while they may have in the day persisted on seeing things as they are, or things as they should be, they have by the dead of night resigned themselves to what may be counterfeit and mere copies of the real thing.

The moon waxes and wanes, fights and gives up, as stars may light up the skies or altogether hide—as does our love for this earth. Love gratuitously bestows black evenings with glow and hope, and sustains the breath of the artist who despite many failures still believes that the world’s beauty could be attained and real happiness could be reached. Love of life is the counterweight of the enigmatic darkness and eternal sorrow of the world, and the artist is the balance on which truth and happiness are weighed.

But no amount of love can ever match the weight of an indifferent world. The colors on his canvas inevitably fade because the artist can only use paint diluted with tears.

Melancholy, December 1883

June 30, 2010
For Arnel Reniedo