Anumang Hiram Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang

185 Pages·2006·3.957 MB·English

by  Revelation Velunta, Editor

ANUMANG HIRAM

KUNG HINDI MASIKIP

AY MALUWANG

Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng

Teolohiyang Pumipiglas

Ferdinand Anno
Melanio Aoanan
George Buenaventura
Romeo Del Rosario
Aileen Isidro-Carbonell
Patrick McDivith
Antonio Pacudan
Deborrah Reyes
Afrie Songco-Joye
Lizette Tapia-Raquel
and
Revelation Velunta, Editor
Union Theological Seminary
Dasmarinas 4114 Cavite, Philippines
1
Anumang Hiram, Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang
Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas
Copyright©2006 Union Theological Seminary
[Philippine Christian Center of Learning, Inc.]
All Rights Reserved
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means , electronic or mechanical, including
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or in writing from the publisher. All requests for permission
should be addressed to Union Theological Seminary, Aguinaldo
Highway, Dasmarinas 4114 Cavite, Philippines.
Revelation Velunta, Editor.
Anumang Hiram, Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang:
Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas
Ferdinand Anno, Melanio Aoanan, George Buenaventura, Romeo
Del Rosario, Aileen Isidro Carbonell, Patrick McDivith, Antonio
Pacudan, Deborrah Reyes, Afrie Songco-Joye, Lizette Tapia-
Raquel, and Revelation Velunta
Artwork:
Jeepney, p.142, by Emmanuel “Wing” Garibay
Tabo, p.106, by Ferdinand Anno
Lola, p.84, by Aileen Isidro Carbonell
Cover Design and Photography by Revelation Velunta
ISBN 971-93530-1-5
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Contents
Anumang Hiram, Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang

Revelation Velunta
4
The Subversive Pilgrim
and the Liturgical Rhetoric of Struggle
Ferdinand Anno 6

Teolohiya ng Bituka at Pagkain:

Tungo sa Teolohiyang Pumipiglas

Melanio Aoanan 32

God, Community, and Us

George Buenaventura 55

Re-Imagining Jonah

Romeo Del Rosario 67

Ang Saya ni Lola at Saranggola

Aileen Isidro Carbonell 85

Kanlungan: A Filipino Protocol for Pastoral Care

Patrick McDivith 91

Martha’s Discipleship: A Feminist Interpretation Based

Upon Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza’s Hermeneutical Model

Antonio Pacudan 95

Teolohiya ng Butas na Tabo

Deborrah Reyes 107

Motivation, Madness, and Ministry

Afrie Songco-Joye 115

Ukay-Ukay Theology: A Proposal

Lizette Tapia-Raquel 127

Jeepney Hermeneutics: Beating Swords into Ploughshares

Revelation Velunta 142

Contributors 180

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ANUMANG HIRAM, KUNG HINDI MASIKIP AY MALUWANG
Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas
INTRODUCTION
Seminaries and divinity schools have, for years, been described as
marketplaces of ideas. Unfortunately, many such institutions have been
marketplaces, or more appropriately, malls of Western ideas. In other
words, if one were to go “shopping” in these “malls” of theological
education, one will be amazed by the number of stalls, stores and shops
offering “imported” goods: from theologies, to liturgies, to libraries, to
models of hermeneutics.
“I cringe at the thought that the more we train our students, the further
they are drawn away form the poetry and the arts, the thought forms and
patterns, the hermeneutics, the sentiments and feelings, and the
imaginative and visioning processes of their own people.”1
Anumang hiram, kung hindi masikip ay maluwang. Anything borrowed is
either too tight or too loose. The saying is true with clothes. It is equally
true with theology. “Panahon na upang iguhit ang sariling palad. Panahon
na upang lilukin ang sariling hugis. Ihabi ang sariling talambuhay.”2 We
need more “shops” that proudly offer the depth and the breadth of diverse
Filipino articulations and constructions of theology.
Anumang hiram, kayang iwasto para ‘sakto. Nevertheless, the Filipino has
the ability to transform anything borrowed to fit him or her perfectly. We
also need more “stores” that showcase the Filipinos’ religious imagination
that empowers them to beat swords into plougshares, to turn weapons of
mass destruction into instruments for mass celebration, and to transform
jeeps into jeepneys.
This anthology is an attempt at doing both.
THE PARABLE OF THE STONE SOUP
A long time ago in a barrio far away came a very old woman. She was
probably just passing by because she took the dusty road that bordered the
small community. Because it was almost dark, she stopped by the roadside
and began to build a fire. She took out an earthen pot from the bag she
lugged around and, after filling it with water, set it over the fire. Out of the
same bag she brought out a small river stone and a pinch of rock salt and
put these in the pot.
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An old woman alone by the road is hard to miss. Soon children were upon
her. “Lola (Grandma),” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking
soup,” she answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a
while there was a huge circle of children gathered around the fire as the old
lady narrated stories about elves and fairies and dragons.
It was late. It was dark and the children were still out so their parents
began looking for them. They eventually found them with the old lady.
“Lola,” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking soup,” she
answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a while there
was a huge circle of children with their parents gathered around the fire as
the old lady continued telling stories of elves and fairies and dragons.
“Lola, “ a mother volunteered, “I still have leftover meat at home. We can
put it in the pot.” “We have vegetables we can add to the pot too!” another
remarked. And so everyone brought back what they could and put these in
the pot. Eventually, the whole community shared not just stories but a hot
pot of soup that began with a cold river stone and a pinch of rock salt.3
As members of a communi ty of about 85 million scatt ere d acro ss 7, 107
islands, where scor es of languages are spoke n, the authors of this coll ection
don’ t hav e the soup. Nor does Union Theological S eminary. What we hav e
are ingre dients to share and these are ingre dients we are alwa ys re ady to
off er. UTS has been doing so fo r almost one hundre d ye ars.
In a country whose tra di tions are both pluri-fo rm and mult i-vo cal, we are
among the many who hav e fa ith stories to share . And there are many , many
more whose stories of fa ith are ye t to be share d.
This anthology is an open inv it ation to start sharing…
Re ve lation Ve lunta
In ternational Wo men’s Day , 8 Marc h 2006
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THE SUBVERSIVE PILGRIM AND THE
LITURGICAL RHETORIC OF STRUGGLE
By Ferdinand Anno
This essay is a review of several performative and spatial objectifications of
contemporary political dissidence in the Philippines. Specifically, it tries to
connect these political ritualisations to the popular idea of the sacred and
amplify the case of a dissident mass going through a subversive pilgrimage.
Firstly, it re-presents a ritual dimension to the religiosity of struggle and its
dramaturgical reconstruction of the Filipino story. Secondly, it examines how
the rali (the protest rally, still a political enigma to the uninitiated), in the
form of the martsa, relocates the struggle in to the realm of the sacred ­
however the latter is broken down into temporal vistas. And thirdly, how
space, i.e., Mendiola, now Don Chino Roces Avenue, further celebrates the
visions and hopes of a people in rituals of anticipation, hence, grounding
and historicizing of the pagbangon muli-ng-sambayanang-Pilipino (the
‘resurrection-of-the-Filipino people’) phase of a people’s paschal story.
I. THE RALI: A DRAMATURGICAL CASE FOR SUBVERSIVE PILGRIMAGE
The pakikibaka life-rite, a religio-political appropriation of the ritual process
(Van Gennep, 1960, Turner, 1969), is a life course basic to the experience of
the more ‘this-worldy’ - the ‘radical and Evangelical’ (Mendoza, 1999) of
Filipino Christians. ‘Separation’, ‘marginalisation’ and ‘reaggregation’/
’homecoming’ (Van Gennep, 1960) are anthropological tools that can help
describe the Christian life as constituted in and around the Gospels and
tradition. The life-rite moreover puts forward the Christian as, movement-
wise, a pilgrim, always seeking for that new reality in a radically new word.
Bound to the writ and values of the Christian community, the faithful senses
the responsibility to subvert anything that negates these values, thus, the
idea of the pilgrim as subversive. Ironically, this life-rite manifests itself not
in congregations, communes and fellowships Christians organized for
themselves - but outside them, in a pagan world where life and death are in
perpetual contestation. Subversive pilgrims are now finding themselves
more in morally ambiguous worlds. The Christian church, from its
‘Constantinian’ (Yoder, 1972) subsumption has, in its imperial thrust for
institutions, also established a form of ritualism that has stunted the
evolutionary course and revolutionary potential of ritual vis-à-vis social
change processes. Such ‘Constantinianism’, according to Hauerwas, has
made the Christian community or the church ‘invisible and weightless’,
‘disembodying rather than solidifying Christian identity’ (Reno, 2004: 311).
The rite of passage as an enacted process of humanization, and as
expressed in terms of pakikisama-to-pakikibaka (de la Torre, 1986) or reed-
to-people processions (Anno, 1998), is also symbolically contracted and
enacted in spatio-temporal rites. Not unlike the Christian liturgy, the pasyon
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(Ileto, 1979) or the contemporary paschal myth of a people’s struggle is
also celebrated in time and space, in images and symbols, and in
performative movements and utterances. It is thus necesary that before a
theological re-reading and liturgical re-framing takes place, the pakikibaka
has to be understood in its own symbolic-connective (symbollein) terms ­
ritual terms.
A people’s pakikibaka as a passage dramaturgy is most visibly and fully
embodied in street rites popularly known as the rali (protest rally) - the
symbolic center of a social upheaval’s multifarious ritual expressions. The
word rali registers in popular imagination as synonymous with virtually all
forms of struggle. The word has gone beyond its literal self to subsume, in
its symbolic significance, all existing forms of resistance from the armed
uprising in the countryside to the ‘parliament of the streets’. From the First
1970s’ Unang Sigwa (First Quarter Storm, January-April 1970 protest rallies)
to the Welgang Bayan (People’s strike) and People Power mobilisations of
the current day, the rali has established itself as the people’s main form of
self-insertion into public life and discourse. And thus has, by incident and
design, transformed itself into a formal composite of the various forms of
resistance, configuring pakikibaka’s wide-ranging, far-reaching multiformal,
and multi-modal expressions.1 The rali, in other words, is the pakikibaka in
its more popular form - where the struggle identifies and communicates
itself, reaches to a broader number of people, and where it is able to
establish itself in memory and popular consciousness, and even
institutionally in national legislation work.
Makibaka, huwag matakot (dare to Struggle, fear not!) is the rali slogan
that continues to establish the oral-aural and act-ive link between the rali as
a specific public performance and the politics of struggle as a whole. It was
from the Unang Sigwa rallies that makibaka or pakikibaka re-emerged as a
‘national battlecry’ (Lacaba, 1982: xxiii), and gained its iconic significance
as a word/ slogan among activists in popular struggle, literature and public
discourse (Bautista, 1988: 26). An all-embodying form of dissident political
action, the rali can also be seen from a dimension that sees the act as a
ritual performance involving movements and utterances. In the rali, people
take to the streets in ritualised performance that attempts at translating
dissident thought into action and visualisation, and/or a performance that is
integrative of dissident thought and action/visualization (Bell, 1992: 32).
Conventionally, the rali is consummated by marching, chanting, speeches,
mass singing, cultural performances, display of iconic images and symbols,
flags, effigies, murals, masks, banners, placards, etc. But since the rali is a
performative rite conceived with radically transformative objective, its ritual
character should be seen more in the light of the more gerundive word-
form: ‘ritualisation’.
A. The Rali and Ritualisation. According to Tom Driver, ritualisation suggests
an employment of a more ‘developmental perspective’ in the understanding
of ritual activity (1988: 12). From this more dynamic view, ritual is not the
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eternally static formal activity ‘dropped from heaven’ but one that is
‘created in the course of time on the basis of ritualisations evolved by many
species, not least our own, to cope with danger, to communicate, and to
celebrate’ (1988: 12). The foregoing definition also practically appropriates
a now strongly established consensus emphasizing ritual as a creative
process and, or a ‘transformative performance’ (Turner and Turner, 1978:
244), expanding though not necessarily deviating from the more
conventional or classical attempts at definition (Alexander, 1991: 12). This
re-focusing on the process of ritualisation also interfaces with what
Catherine Bell points to as an emerging new paradigm in both ritual studies
and ritual practice (1997: 264) - a new paradigm that is only now leveling
the playing field of ritual politics, meaning, the glossing over of the ‘we-
them’, ‘scholar-practitioner’ paradigm, and bringing about ‘social
expressions of a new freedom to ritualize’ (1997: 260ff, 263). But for the
purposes of this paper and a slight shift from the self-critical context of Bell
(of contemporary ritual studies as having the potential to ‘subordinate,
relativise, and ultimately undermine many aspects of ritual practice ... and
traditional ritual authorities’), this essay focuses on the expanded concept
of, and space for, the praxis of ritualisation away from the boundaries of
strictly religious rituals to political rites - pakikibaka rites in particular.
The interest in pakikibaka life-rites wells from the currency of an increasing
configuration of the political and the cultural, or specifically - protest politics
and religion in the manifestly quasi-religious ritualisations of resistance.
B. Ritualisation in a shifting theopolitical context. Since the 1986 People
Power Revolt, protests in the latter’s mould like Edsa Two (January 2001)
had been reviewed more as a ritual phenomenon in liturgico-theological
terms. The erection of the Edsa Shrine centered solely on a distinctively
Catholic icon, however, objectively inflated beyond proportion the narrative
of the Catholic hierarchy’s participation in the said event. This literally
monumental objectification has unfairly undermined the more dramatic
narrative of converged voices and forces that dates back to the earlier years
of the Marcos dictatorship. It is not without this messianic pathos - a
lingering institutional interest, that the religious establishment had gradually
considered protest mobilizations as rites with potential theological and
liturgical significance. Nonetheless, on the one hand, interest in post Edsa
1986 protest politics is well within the frame of an ongoing theological and
missiological project approached from various commitments and
perspectives within the church.
In Inculturation and Filipino Theology, Leonardo Mercado dealt with secular
political ritual but only briefly and from the prism of inculturation concerns
using mainly Van Gennep’s and Turner’s concepts of liminality and anti-
structure, respectively (1992: 131-137). His main emphases were on the
structure-anti-structure dialectic in rituals; and on the identification of these
secular rituals’ ‘root metaphors’, ‘liminal’ and ‘communal’ character (132). In
another stream of inculturation praxis, Gaspar, a lay theologian and
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community worker, grappled more directly with protest rituals, but partly or
mainly, in their already ‘religionised’ forms (1986). Pumipiglas: Teyolohiya
ng Bayan, originally a liturigco-cultural production, demonstrates how a
theology and liturgy of struggle can emerge from the relocation of the
‘streets’ into the Roman Rite and vise versa (vi). This mutual ritualisation­
politicisation process is the same mode being experimented in liturgical
contextualisation practices among a few but significant number of
ecumenical communities in the country for some decades now.
Among the predominantly Christian Filipinos, two rituals are on a path to
convergence: the religious rites of the church and the public ritualisations of
protest in the ‘parliament of the streets’ and in ‘marginal critical’
communities (Veiling, 1996: 1ff.). The church rite is itself steadily
challenged from the margins and outside by popular piety where people are
asserting their authority, albeit unofficially, over ritual interpretation and
practice. As cited above, protest rites on the one hand are effecting a
radical shift in liturgico-theological thinking among those reached by their
agitations. One of the catalysts of this mutual ritual exchange is the
introduction of Basic Christian Communities during the 70s (Nadeau, 2002:
xv; New Internationalists, 2004). The spread of these primarily liturgical
communities has to a significant degree helped in directly bridging the gap
between social action and religious rites (Youngblood, 1990: 101-137;
Nadeau, 2002: 111-116; Samson, 1999). Popular protest and religious piety
outside of the BCCs, however, have their own way of coming together as
popular rites had been, since the colonial period, a potent form of anti­
establishment mobilisation. Even in its introverted moment, popular piety
has been clandestinely political, or ‘infrapolitical’ - embodying and
expressing the subversive consciousness and veiled defiance of the masa
(Scott, 1985: 4).
The integration of protest into the theological and liturgical discourse in
BCCs and beyond, among politically engaged clergy and lay people,
provided the context for Carvajal’s argument on the development, among
an increasing number of Christians, of a more ‘dynamic worldview’ as
opposed to what he assigns as monistic and dualistic worldviews (Carvajal
in Torres and Fabella, 1978: 102).
People consequently shift the focus of their scrutiny from the ideal to the
historical, from the other world to this world, from essence to existence,
from God to human beings. ... They [also] find hope in the knowledge,
objective and scientific, that the present state of things is not an eternally
decreed order, static and permanent, but the result of concrete historical
material forces. They begin to be conscious of a world that is not a finished
product but a seed that must be developed and brought to fruition by their
own creative powers. Human beings are coming to their own (1978: 102).
ToS emerged from this confluence of the political, the liturgical and the
theological (Gaspar in Battung, 1986; Fernandez, 1996: 24). ‘The people’s
9
celebration of their pain and struggle’ writes Gaspar, ‘is the matrix that led
to the birthing of the theology of struggle’ (Gaspar, 1988: 48-49). Thus,
there is an emerging theological and political context that is providing an
interpretive and creative base for new ritualisations in the service and in
celebration of a people’s process of becoming. But how does this ostensibly
modernistic theo-political context correspond with the very process of
politicisation into pakikibaka in view of the given religio-cultural mores of
the Filipino?
C. Pakikibaka rites and Filipino spirituality. Catherine Bell, summing up
Radcliffe-Brown, essays that rituals ‘simultaneously expresses and creates
the sentiment of dependence on a type of moral spiritual power that is
thought to transcend the realm of the human’ (1997: 28). Following
Durkheim’s reduction, that ‘type of moral spiritual power that is thought to
transcend the realm of the human’ may be the one ‘social solidarity’ (25)
being sought in sociopolitical phenomena like the Philippine ‘People Power’
revolts. This proposition run true to the experience of many protest
participants, especially those clueless neophytes (like Marie, the ambulant
vendor at her first rali). Their fears, anxieties, and doubts while still in small
groups on their way to protest mobilisation are assuaged and mollified as
soon as they are assimilated into and swamped by a humungous crowd of
raliyestas. But, primarily, it is that ‘moral spiritual power’, at many times,
projected theologically as the God who favors the powerless and less
privileged, that is apprehended as the moving force behind mobilizations for
just causes. I would mention at least two examples here, the 1986 People
Power uprising, a populist uprising that had brought together political
groups from varying ideological persuasions, and the January 1987
Mendiola March of the biggest and more militant farmers’ organization in
the country, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP [Peasant Movement
of the Philippines]) (Maglipon, 1987: xi).2 An observation by Randy David
would perhaps suffice to give us a picture of how the People Power revolt,
at its prosecution a ‘revolutionary’ event, was transformed into a ritual,
the language was utterly mystical, the language of ritual, of something that
unabashedly supernatural. You have all these men and women going down
on their knees before the tanks and advancing soldiers. The Cursillistas
were saying their rosaries all through the night. It was not the language of
the Marxist, it was not the language of the liberation theologian; it was the
language of the supernatural (Maggay in Elwood 1988: 63).
Melba Maggay, a social scientist also paints the broad ecumenical face of
the religio-political ritual that was taking place,
On our right we had the Muslims, doing their prayers five times a day. On
our left we had the Cursillistas and the Nazarene women making their vigils
all night long. And of course there were the evangelicals singing their hearts
out, singing Onward Christian soldiers.(1988: 64)
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