meddling Catholics and zombie urbanites
October is Indigenous People’s Month in the Catholic calendar (yes, somebody made it up at some point, I kid you not). So at Mass this morning, the priests were joined by three men wearing bahag and one woman wearing what looked like a malong. When the celebration was over, the commentator called two of them to the lectern to share a few words. The woman was very brunch-crowd friendly, saying she enjoyed celebrating Mass with the community and that she and her peeps are more than happy to share water and what-have-you from her ancestral lands with us Manila folk because her tribe loves us. Swell.
Then one of the men gets up to the mic. He has a sure, forceful voice and straight out he says that he fears for his tribe because there have been other religions coming in to “tame” their culture, so much so that it’s been a while since he has seen a traditional wedding happen in his tribe – that practice, or at least the way they used to practice it, was one of the first to die. I tried to pay attention to the rest of his brief speech, but the shame and discomfort of the whole situation just made me, and my ears, retreat into my imaginary black hole. This man, by the way, travelled to Manila with a Catholic bishop. The absurdity of the situation doesn’t end there, though. After he finishes speaking, as with the woman before him, the Mass crowd applauds enthusiastically. Enthusiastically. It was such a palm-meet-face moment, my forehead hurt.
This is the community I live in. You know that suburban drone that was home to Nancy Botwin and her fatherless boys? That’s my village.
The least we could’ve done for that man, who sat in a freezing church through an hour-long ceremony he didn’t believe in, was apologize for insisting that our goodwill translate to converting him to a religion he had no need nor desire for. But this is the unspoken tragedy of the less fortunate, isn’t it? It’s not that they are poor; it’s that the people who are helping them want to wipe their slate clean without even bothering to ask if that’s the charitable thing to do. This man did not need us telling him that worshipping trees is an idiotic thing to do. He just needed help getting clean, running water to his village. He should be able to pray to whatever goddamn plant he wants to.
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