Two in one

PINOY KASI
Two in one

By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 01:55am (Mla time) 07/12/2006

Published on Page A13 of the July 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

SOME OF MY FRIENDS HAVE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE length of my column, but I'm afraid there's little I can do here. I have to use my assigned space which as you can see goes lengthwise. Sometimes you'll find two Youngblood columns fitting in here, and on the other end of this spread, two main editorials. So I thought that for today, I'd experiment with a "two in one" column. That's two separate articles, but on topics that are related.

Many of my friends ask why I even bother to read the pastoral letters from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). Many Filipino Catholics don't, and yet I think it is important that we do read and reflect on the letters, for whatever wisdom we can glean to guide us through the maze of our times.

Last year, at the height of the Garci scandal, I felt our bishops' pastoral letter was strong enough to warn President Macapagal-Arroyo of a restless nation, even as it urged us Filipinos to restrain ourselves. I felt it was a wise letter, and so this year, I was looking forward to another statement on the political situation.

I'm realistic enough to recognize bishops are politicians, too, playing a game like chess. Our bishops have power (even Ms Arroyo recognizes that), but I'm afraid their latest pastoral statement, notwithstanding the title "Shepherding and Prophesying in Hope," offers little to the nation.

On the moves to impeach the President, the statement says: "We are not inclined at the present moment to favor the impeachment process as the means for establishing the truth," mainly fearing that it will be another "unproductive political exercise, dismaying every citizen, and deepening the citizen's negative perception of politicians."

On the electoral reforms, they simply ask the President to take heed of calls for the resignation of some Comelec officials. Our bishops say they will support Charter change only through a constitutional convention, and they told the press the 2007 elections should push through. (It's telling that the pastoral statement itself refers to the 1907 elections, a point to which I will return later.)

On extra-judicial killings, they nod their heads, yes, they're happening but there are also killings perpetrated by insurgents. That last point about killings by insurgents is valid, but the letter fails to recognize that the government, which wields so much power, has done nothing to address the assassinations of activists and journalists.

Our bishops seem to have saved their strongest words to attack what they claim to be a siege on the Filipino family: "We are deeply troubled by attempts to legislate or make as state policy ideas that tend to weaken or even destroy cherished religious values regarding the nature of life, the nature of marriage as union of man and woman, child bearing, the values formation of children, etc. . . We find them in pending bills about population, marriage and family, reproductive health, and sex education in schools."

Certainly, our bishops weren't referring to Ms Arroyo when they talked about the "state" here since the President has spoken out repeatedly against family planning and reproductive health, which will make Filipinos wonder: Have our bishops bartered the nation to save what they think is the Filipino family?

If our bishops truly care about the Filipino family, they would be supporting family planning and reproductive health programs in addition to vital political processes, the impeachment investigations included. Venting their ire on their own distorted perceptions of the reproductive health bill and sex education, they've lost sight of the real threats against the Filipino family, from the continuing massive export of Filipinos to the extra-judicial killings which have left literally thousands of orphans behind.

The CBCP statement comes through as cavalier, almost as if written in haste. The version I got, from the CBCP's website, is revealing in that it refers to the need to push through with the "1907" elections. Does that "lapse" speak of the time warp our bishops find themselves in, literally lost in another century?

'Tiis'
What is the nation to do without leaders, shepherds, prophets?

We could invoke the virtue, said to be propagated too by the Catholic Church, of pagtitiis, a mixture of patience and forbearance. It's been pushed mainly for women, who, abused and battered by their husbands, are counseled: "For the sake of the family, bear your cross" or "He's your husband, you have no choice but to make the best of the situation."

Our women have made an art of it, raising the children, running the family's affairs against all odds. There's strength, certainly, in pagtitiis and it's tempting to say the nation should see the suffering mother as a model, bearing with President Arroyo until 2010, or beyond. We hear that call constantly: "We have no choice."

But pagtitiis is not without its costs. It can be agonizing, sapping a nation of its will. To describe the dimensions of that pain, I thought of the Chinese word "ren," which is loosely translated into "patience" but actually comes closer to "pagtitiis." Curiously, ren is constructed from those words: the heart, and hanging over that heart, a knife. There's a cleft written across the knife to indicate restraint, but you can still feel the agony that comes with this Asian version of Damocles' sword.

Maybe tiis is stronger, the knife thrust in. Tiis is the feeling we have after we have been assaulted, again graphically described by another word, this time from slang, "tsugi", adopted from the "Tsug" in comic books used to describe a knife or a sword thrust with force into someone's body.

How should an assaulted, tsugi nation respond? We might want to learn from the Japanese, who have borrowed the Chinese word "ren" and combined it with another Chinese word which means "someone" or "a person."

When the Japanese borrow Chinese characters, they don't always use the same pronunciation and original meaning of the word. In Japanese then, the words for "agent" and "ren" produces "ninja." The original ninja were not assassins, as movies often depict them, instead, they were peasant warriors who could not become samurai. As their name implies, an effective ninja is someone who can be patient, who embodies pagtitiis but does so as part of a strategy.

It's an intriguing metamorphosis of meanings and should make us think: perhaps it's not a bad idea to be patient, to feel pain, if we have direction and discernment, guided by our moral compasses. If we need to hold back, to wait, let's do so like the ninja.