Towards Adult Faith: Essays on Believing

Towards Adult Faith

Essays on Believing

ASUNCION DAVID MARAMBA

Towards Adult Faith: Essays on Believing

By Asuncion David Maramba

Copyright © 2014

Asuncion David Maramba and Anvil Publishing, Inc.

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Dedication

For my husband and children, especially our son, Ricky, who cut a door on the walls of my Catholicism and showed me a world outside, except that he walked so far afield, only God can meet him at the horizon

For my brother, Fernando, who, unsolicited, sent me clippings and books on theology, making me realize that the Institutional Church is less than perfect

For the hundreds of seminarians I have taught that they may serve and live for a truly fulfilling, enriching and kinder Church

For all those who responded to my columns, pleased or not, who helped me feel a pulse of the Church

Thank You

To all those who helped me break into print:

the late Felix B. Bautista

Ambassador Bienvenido Tan

Eugenia Duran Apostol

Benjamin and Alfredo Ramos

Lorna Kalaw Tirol

Karina A. Bolasco

PDI Opinion Editors Jorge V. Aruta and Rosario A. Garcellano

Legend

PDI – Philippine Daily Inquirer, Commentary

MC – Manila Chronicle, Humanly Speaking

Ver. – Veritas News Magazine, On Living

MD – Manila Digest, The Changing Church

Pan – Philippine Panorama

VM – View From The Middle

BC – Beyond the Classroom

SIM – Sunday Inquirer Magazine

WM – World Mission Magazine

(Ed) – edited

(Ex) – excerpt

Contents

Preface: A Personal Journey

Chapter I: Walking Out of the Box

Traveling Light And Free

The Religious Box

Lent Doesn’t Mean Suffering

Never Mind—We’re Very Religious

Be Kind To Sinners

Growing Up Or Growing Away

Cafeteria Catholics Are Serious Catholics

Spiritual But Not Religious

Toast To Conscience

Chapter II: Acts of Faith

Journey And Arrival

Viva La Virgen

Saints Are Real

Why Should Miracles Be Impossible?

Is the Country Being Run by a Spiritual Government?

Holy Week Is A Good Time To Withdraw

Relax, Go Swimming

How Could Ayala Forget?

To Dwell Within

Thank You, Mother Teresa

For The Soul, Less Is More

The Holy Land—For Tourist And Pilgrim

Chapter III: This, We Can Handle Ourselves

Who’s Living An Immoral Life?

The Family—Ideal And Real Perspectives

The U.S.—Moral And Traditional?

Strange Bedfellows For Wednesday Group

Surviving The Bend In The Road

Dear Bishops—Hello And Goodbye

Humanae Vitae And Cafeteria Catholics

Cues From The U.S.

An Open Letter To Bishop Socrates Villegas

Not All Is Mystery

Obey, Decide Or Drift

At Last—A Consensus Bill On Population

Jueteng Is Now Black

Condoning The Condom?

Still Hot News—The RH Bill

The Same Yesterday, Today And Forever

Chapter IV: The Institutional Church: Ruling and Commanding

Update From Catholic America

The Kingdom Of God

Again—Is Dialogue Possible?

Is The Church Listening?

Sobriety As Response To Church Controversy

To Use Or Not To Use The Pulpit

A Roller-Coaster Week Of Highs And Lows

Church No Longer Exempt From Scrutiny

Chapter V: Priest, Prelate, Pope

The Changing Church: From One Moral Question To Another

Service—Gratis Et Amore

Lowland Views Of The Cordilleras

Dear Pope

Always A Priest

When a Pope Asks Forgiveness

A Writer’s Encounters With Cardinal Sin

Take Care And God Bless

Dear Pope, Surprise Us

Bishop Stands For Morality All Over

Giant Step For A Priest

Father Ed—Challenge And Dilemma

Inspired Recovery Of The Lost Voice

To My Dear Student-Priests

This One’s For You, Father Ariel

Priests Who Know Who Is Church

What Do You Think Of Pope Francis?

Chapter VI: Liturgy: Beyond Ritual and Royalty

When War-Time Was Peace-Time

What’s Wrong With Formula Prayers?

Christmas Is For Remembering

We Can Sing, Why Don’t We?

We’re Dressing Too Casually For Mass

The Edifice Complex—Going, Gone?

A Swing Through Europe: Images And Impressions

The Religious, The Profane and Nature’s Grandeur

The Latin Mass—Beyond The Language

The Making Of A Statue—Teresa Of Avila

We’re Cultic Up To Santa

The Real Test For Mideo Cruz

Where Is Jesus’ Seamless Garment?

Folk Religiosity In The Catholic Heartland

Chapter VII: Church and State

The Last Time With Feeling

There Has To Be Church-State Relationships

Time To Study The Separation Principle

Is The Church Sensitive To Scrutiny?

Justice: The Higher Standard

Will The Church Back Off?

In Defense Of Our Priests And Bishops

Chapter VIII: Another Round For the Laity

Two Decades Of SCA

BEC: Reaching Out To All

Inspiration From A New Fellowship

Has The Time Come For Lay Preachers?

The Church On A Fast Track

It Is Consummated.—The 6th Word

Mansions In The Church

Whatever Happened To Communal Action?

An Active Laity—Real Or Imaginary

Blessed John Paul II And Sensus Fidelium

Dakilang Alalay (But Not For Long?)

Pray—Pay—Obey

High Hopes For The Laity Too?

How Will The CBCP Handle This?

Resourcement, Rediscovery, Revival

Chapter IX: Reactions as a Pulse of the Faithful

On Calls For Church Reforms

Let’s Remain Friends

On Truth And Faith Seekers

‘Believers in Exile’ from various religious groups

Truth cannot be forced

Vatican II unknown to Catholics

On Church Trappings

Time for Disrobement Process

On Hierarchic Ambivalence and Vacillation

Shepherds lost in quagmire of corruption

On An Evolving Church

Cry from the heart

Spiritual satisfaction in living with the poor

‘Bleats’ to open minds within Catholic Church

‘Brilliant’ take on ‘churchly dominance’

On Women

Women religious are assets to the Catholic Church

On Pope Francis

Pope Francis skilled in Ignatian discernment

Reactions As Pulse of the Faithful

You’ve got mail

Cheers And Jeers

Chapter X: On the Cusp of Change

The Church: Close-Open

A Wake-Up Call For Church Reform

Issues For Church Reform

Limbo Closed, Doors Opened

Public Opinion Within The Church

Is The Church In Crisis?

Time To Revisit Vatican II

Refreshing Papal Style Makes Sense

Will Francis Wave Flow Into Our Shores?

The Author

PREFACE

A Personal Journey

Why don’t you collect your writings on the Church in a book? I was eighty-one, ready to lay my pen down. Why not indeed put together my last collection?

I have been a columnist from 1984 to 2013. By 2013 I had logged around 130 columns and around a dozen short and long articles on the Church. In the beginning, Church and Religion was only one of many topics I wrote about, except in Manila Digest, a diocesan newsmagazine where I was asked to write a column from its first issue in January 1989, to its last, in October 1990, and which understandably dealt with the Church. By 1997 to 2003, I noticed my columns on Church and Religion picking up. By 2004 I discovered that I was writing mostly about the Institutional Church, its frequency increasing to four out of five columns in Commentary of Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI).

Towards Adult Faith won over titles I toyed with: Pew and Pulpit, New Wine In Old Wine Bags; both of which I eliminated because they precisely highlighted a Church with too many dichotomies. Walking the Church almost made it but I was variously walking with, in, for, against, in spite of, the Church. Confusing. I settled for Adult Faith which is in fact my main advocacy and the cause of enough frustration vis-à-vis the Church.

As I arranged the Table of Contents, the headings and sequence serendipitously fell right in step with part of my own spiritual journey, tracing and tracking its evolution and that of my writings as well. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. My Church writings and a facet of my spirituality were reflecting each other.

That evolution began in 1984 with the column head On Living in Veritas Newsmagazine (Ver.) up to its last issue in May 1987; continued in the column, The Changing Church in Manila Digest (MD); on to six initially unnamed columns in the Manila Chronicle (MC) from June 21, 1986, subsequently named Humanly Speaking on August 3, 1986 to February 25, 1991 and finally as occasional contributor to Commentary in Philippine Daily Inquirer from April 30, 1992 to December 2, 2013.

The columns and articles neatly fell under nine headings which became the chapters of the book. Data of first publication (and reprinting) are provided at the end of each piece. Another chapter consists of selected reactions and responses, and two columns tackling reactions.

I have written an Introduction, actually mini-essays, for each of the ten chapters which I hope you read. Each Introduction simultaneously points to the subject matter and drift of the selections in the chapter and to the progression of my passage toward Adult Faith; interesting to others, only in the sense that everyone, except those absolutely certain about their belief system, goes through his own inner peregrinations, forward, backward, or in circles.

You could say that most of my writings, concurrently for some time, in Veritas, Manila Digest and well into Manila Chronicle from 1984 to 1991, were the cradle Catholic in me; although even then the questions were already showing. I was already twitting the Institutional Church, enough to be dubbed a critical moderate in the 1987 Citation for the CMMA award.

It was in Commentary for PDI where I concentrated on the Church, as ever, moderately, but not seldom mistaken as radical, only because the Church moves ever so slowly. On the onset, bear with the repetition that it is mainly the Institutional Church that I write about.

It seems odd, considering; but I take it as a vindication that my four awards come from Church-related organizations and Institutions.

Turn the page now and watch or walk with a person’s journey towards Adult Faith. It might be yours, too.

Asuncion David Maramba

2014

Chapter I

Walking Out of the Box

What made me walk out of the box?

That I could not discuss or disagree with certain ecclesiastical positions, mindsets and attitudes without being regarded as dissenter or attacker of the Church;

That I could not doubt absolute certainties without that grade school image of my guardian angel weeping behind me for temptations of faith;

That I kept hearing more myths on top of the myths my generation had been taught and docile faithful allowed to continue to live by;

That a lay person does not, may not critique the Church

And with a son who opened my mind to a cosmic universe in which planet earth was but a speck and that this planet which I thought was Catholic or should be Catholic (!) was in fact peopled by diverse cultures, races and religions;

How could I not feel cramped in a climate of insularity or parochialism that I had to break out of?

In 1994 I wrote, "I feel like a key because I am still opening doors, questioning a number of ‘givens’ and searching for answers more assiduously than ever before."

I became curiouser and curiouser and shifted from literature, which I majored in and taught for forty years, to theology. Clearly, I needed to unlearn and learn many things.

I ventured out of the box. But one thing was very clear to me. I was going to throw the bathwater, but I was going to keep the Baby.

Traveling Light And Free

Inside me there’s another kind of clutter where the urge to shed is equally compelling. But here in the soul, discerning what must go and what must stay and what must be sought is far more difficult. It is this soul-searching, coupled with truth-seeking, that is now most challenging.

I have had my share of religious episodes. These past years I find myself in yet another such phase. This time I have imperceptibly inclined not toward religion but toward spirituality. Religiosity seems like an alter ego that many people turn on and off like spigots of their casks of charity and good works. I want something more—how shall I say it—a character infused in my being that I cannot turn off because it’s me! Religion is comfortable, but this unfamiliar terrain of spirituality can be stormy.

To be sure, the Catholic religion is where my spirituality began and where it will continue, but I feel that I have to get to its core, shorn of its many distractions. For Catholicism is in a way a cluttered religion, packaged in rituals, ceremonies, opulence, dazzling to the eye and ear, and played out in both the folk and the royal varieties . . . .

My religion also seems to be unduly confined by a thousand and one beliefs, rules, decrees, pronouncements, and exhortations that probably need review or pile up in virtual storage. Adding to the complexity, every one of them is still regarded by many as hard and fast dogmas.

That is why I have been erasing a slew of Catholic cliches not only for being cliches but especially because they carry a load of misleading ideas about guilt, suffering, piety, abjectness, sexuality, salvation and perdition, etc. from which timid and thoroughly programmed souls may never recover.

Self-immolation, perfect and imperfect contrition, a hundred days’ indulgence, living in sin, etc., couched in dogmatic certitude, no longer ring true for me and are certainly not enough to answer life’s questions.

My praying has to be distilled. I have crossed out all the saccharine and languorous phrases in my favorite prayers, all the vessels of purity, the chains of sin, and the heavenly fruits, etc. Rehashed reflections and messages come like a drone in my ears. It is time for nada; it is time to be still.

The baggage has become stifling. I have been unloading. Learning and unlearning continue.

The spirit, it seems, is focusing. The trimmings and the pat formulas are fading away. I guess it’s a return to simplicity that I seek as close to the way Jesus envisioned the Church and how He would want it to be or not to be . . . .

God is as He is. This is the ultimate simplification, the ultimate refinement. I try to stay with it. The clouds and the crown have melted away; so have capricious perceptions like the angry God, the Fount of Love, etc. So must everything else we have made God out to be. It’s rediscovering Him with new eyes, a child’s eyes. It’s like seeing Dicken’s Christmas Carol every Christmas season—always new, always simple, always pure. We arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. It’s going home again as naked as when we first arrived.

I travel lighter and more freely, as in a new wind. I feel more authentic and whole. The journey is very personal, tranquil and disquieting in turns, inevitable when one disturbs the universe and when one deals with the realm of paradox, of mystery, and of faith. People can have the same religion, but for spirituality it’s every person for himself . . . .

But the small, safe, and smug Catholic world of my youthful innocence has now been breached by the much bigger world out there . . . .

I thought that aging would be the age of consolidation when everything would neatly fall into place, the age of quietude when questions would cease. Instead, being and God and cosmos keep coming back like the theme of a song without which, I guess, there is no song. Such is this enigmatic journey into the center of the soul . . . .

(Ex) Life from the Cusp

Anvil, 2003

The Religious Box

Gilda Cordero Fernando wrote, The shape of the majority of institutions around us is square. They fit very well in boxes . . . . They’re religious, government, corporate, bank, academe, painting, writing, fashion design. It’s the box people who run our lives.

Implied is that a lot of people stay in the box or are kept in by the institution. Also implied is that the box hampers full growth. And insinuated is that some indoctrination has been perpetuated by the institution.

Let’s take a look at the religious box. For many, it’s none of the above. It’s the repository of all truth, morality and rules for an upright and holy life. With a couple of cushions thrown in, it’s the safest place to be in. No discomfort there; no desire to venture out.

But for many, the box can be constricting. It is lined by slogans and watchwords to believe in and live by. Let’s trace a journey of life in the box.

In childhood we were promised with the joys of heaven but also told of the fires of hell. When you commit a mortal sin, your heart is black (properly illustrated in our prayer books) and your guardian angel is weeping (also illustrated). You’ll go straight to hell. How many sins have we invented, listed and confessed: I looked at a kissing scene in the movies, but I tried to resist it. As soon as we entered the age of reason, the Ten Commandments and the rules of the Church were to be taken seriously under pain of sin.

Into adolescence and the sins of the flesh, we were told of people living in sin, and no longer vessels of purity. Sex was never mentioned but that is what much of the anxiety was about. Moral dogmatism was upon us: black or white, right or wrong, good or bad—no in-betweens, no ifs and buts. One size fits all. A series of don’ts ran our lives. What was allowed? The chaste kiss; one foot between partners dancing the slow drag. The cross of life, guilt and sacrifice entered our vocabulary and lodged in our psyche.

That as young people, we managed to have fun and fall in love was the miracle of youth and perhaps repudiation of the lengths taken by the guardians of morality. Hand in hand with this somewhat puritanical upbringing was one of the happiest chapters of our youth. Catholic Action was our cry and we were committed to defend the Church without question.

With such zeal, we slipped into adulthood, taking for granted that we must always support the priest.

But all in all, we didn’t mind. We were quite content in the embrace of the Church, guide above all and protector too.

In fact, we never even thought we were in a box until we found ourselves straining for adult and authentic faith. We had outgrown childhood and would no longer be led like children.

Almost imperceptibly, we began walking out of the box as we felt that the Church—in turns, unyielding, late, or inadequate—seemed unable to handle or match the escalating complexity of life and of the world on several fronts. Vatican II with its aggiornamento had tried to open the box, but so shaken was the status quo that conservative forces in the Church closed it again.

Many also trekked out, seeking deeper faith encounters and modes of prayer enriched by still untapped spiritualities.

But what pushed us consciously out of the box was putting the mind on hold, which the Church seemed to prefer—what with its penchant for cover-up, silence, and its inquisitorial disposition. To paraphrase Shylock, do we not have brains? And to recall Aquinas, is not our intellect the superior faculty of man?

We chafed over the absence of discussion in the Institutional Church, widely observed to be allergic to intellectual discussion and not exactly warm to dialogue. We felt gagged. Heartbreaking was it to see and read about priests and theologians, silenced or isolated. What a great loss to the Church. So obsessed seemed the Church with uniformity rather than the buoyancy of unity in diversity. By this time, several of the slogans had become hollow or even questionable platitudes.

Inside the box, seeking any clarification on the what’s and why’s of certain Church teachings was so forbidding, it became an act of bravery to do so. Routinely met like heresy or attack, such honest inquiries were automatically dismissed as temptations against faith. Inside the box we could not, for example, ask why no denunciation for a clear attempt of bribery on the eve of the CBCP July meeting came from the collegial bishops.

Inside the box it was usually shhh. Where then to go? Little choice but outside where the air is freer.

Jesus broke out of the box fashioned by the scribes and Pharisees. Surely he didn’t create another box to put us in. Something about the Institutional Church did that. There is so much to preserve in the box, but also so much to discover outside.

"Commentary," PDI

October 14, 2006

Lent Doesn’t Mean Suffering

Religion is not to blame. Its defects arise from the way any religion is implanted in a culture. In our country, Lent, for example, is not just a penitential season of forty days. Along with it has trailed the cluster of suffering, sorrow, sacrifice, guilt, and fear that has settled as a suffering mentality bearing down on many a Filipino and stunting the country.

Ours has been a mea culpa religion. Striking our breasts is a characteristic posture of our souls. My lola (grandmother) did it at dawn and dusk.

From the age of reason, barely out of childhood, we were taught the Act of Contrition; the perfect one, mind you, to be prayed just before we went to sleep; because your salvation depended on it. Even the rosary, one of my lasting loves, hasn’t been spared. Praying it means calling ourselves a sinner 50 times! Add to that all the other prayers where we call ourselves sinners and by golly, we’re sinners. We are very imperfect and incapable of pursuing holiness without God’s help; but most of us are not inveterate sinners.

On callused knees and on the knees of our souls; owning unworthiness and imploring mercy; it’s no wonder that our practice of religion makes us such abject creatures. The abjectness does little good. It leaves us feeble; fertile ground for guilt and fear—that we’ll go to hell, that God exacts tribute, that we must sacrifice and do penance, that we can’t really be happy because there’s the cross of our lives. Some cannot even enjoy without feeling guilty. Some are actually fidgety when they have no cross, for surely, it will drop like a bomb soon.

To this day, such debilitating stuff we hear from some homilies! Exclaimed a priest, How do people know you’re a Christian? By total suffering unto death! And this mystery called suffering which is hard enough to crack as it is, becomes even more confusing. Somebody observed that our so-called sufferings and crosses could be cut by 50 percent because a good portion of them are self-inflicted (we’re flagellant, remember?) and many of them are not crosses to bear but situations to fight.

We’ve been fed a severe, penitential religion. In my childhood, many old churches had that Dantesque painting of hell descending in loops to a pit of fire with black devils with horns and tails and that fork, pushing souls into the flames. Thank God that picture enthralled me as a picture, not as damnation.

Without malice, elders and teachers planted fear and guilt on those in their care. All those panata (vow), all those huling habilin (death wishes) ("Anak (child), you must marry that man. Anak you must finish the priesthood.), all those veiled threats (Sige, it will happen to you too.") And so goes the cycle of remorse, guilt and fear.

You think sowing fear and guilt this way is medieval? Culture dies hard. Right after Echegaray’s execution, CBCP reacted, His blood is on our hands. Immediately, a scene in every run-of-the-mill Filipino melodrama played out before me. A father collapses after a quarrel with a son. The mother cries, "Ikaw ang pumatay sa iyong ama!" (You killed your father!)

When you come to think of it, the victim, or casualty, of this melodramatic packaging of Catholicism is God Himself. God is as He is, not what the friars and we have made Him out to be.

So what have I done? Among other things, I have dropped all the abject phrases in my prayers—all deliverance from thy wrath and the chains of sin. When I pray the rosary I often substitute the names of family, friends and relatives for us sinners. Cry your dogmatic heart out; this is not heresy.

The renewed Christians, the born-again, the charismatics know something. The negative is being supplanted by praise and worship, joy and thanks. Some have even ventured into prosperity, success, health and well being. Like most reactions, some are going overboard but they are on the right track. The Spanish strategy of lowliness is losing to the strategy of wellness. Other searchers, stifled by real and perceived rigidity have sought their personal religions elsewhere.

The Church itself is changing the climate now. In recent times, they’ve been earnestly preaching love and joy, and a caring God. But it’s still push and pull between love and fear. It’s hard-going with a religious orientation that has dug deep and taken root in our psyche.

Some time ago, I edited a new grade school series for Religion. The tone and slant were entirely new. It was celebratory of God, life, people, and nature. My grandchildren will grow up different.

Meanwhile, let’s wish for a more liberating and enriching religion, one that will lift us rather than put us down, one that can give a certain lightness of heart and soul, and joie de vivre in the practice of our faith. A lot of learning and unlearning lies ahead.

"Commentary," PDI

February 27, 1999

Never Mind—We’re Very Religious

A priest-friend has been asking me to write on holiness. I was almost floored by the request, for there is holiness and holiness. Who was I to write on the topic? Besides, what I thought might not be exactly what he had in mind. But it’s Lent and people’s hearts and minds may be turning toward that direction; so here goes.

I once overheard a couple of women moaning and groaning over the hapless state of our country. Could anything be done yet? Then, one of the ladies piped in, Never mind; we’re very religious. My shoulders dropped.

The remark is true and false. For we can be religious in an irreligious sort of way. Taken in its popular sense as madasalin (prayerful), our religiousness laden with devotions and pious practices is easy to see. In this sense we are a genuinely prayerful people. Yet the very same people may have no time to vote and as candidates they can have the cheek to cheat. Go up and down the road and the landscape is thick with dualisms. This is perhaps why religious is no longer much of a compliment.

Prayer of course is a given, a sine qua non without which any pursuit of holiness is a sham. And piety or the feeling thereof is one of its most gratifying and sweetest fruits. For peace, refuge and rest, nothing beats prayer. We are entitled to such consolations. For often, prayer time is the only good time in a bad day; the comfort zone in a difficult life. Taken this way, religion or religiousness is comforting and comfortable. Comfortable piety is what it has in fact been called. No wonder that many of us virtually remain in its embrace, as in a bower of peace and quiet.

But this comfortable piety is a little less than compleat Christianity. It shouldn’t be the only fruit of prayer, not especially in times like these. There is another more demanding, more difficult manifestation of prayer. It is engagement with and involvement in the world at large. Committed Christianity is the challenge poised before comfortable piety. Between the two, piety is easy; commitment is hard. Try both. It’s far easier to say, Let’s pray for our community leaders, than, Let’s investigate this questionable fund use in our community.

Moreover this committed Christianity is not as simple as performing good works as in prayer without good works is dead. It’s not as simple as having an apostolate whether secret or public, or giving to favorite charities. Many a pious and pietistic people do this with much generosity—but often as an alter ego outside of them that they can turn on and off anytime; another hat they can put on or take off.

Committed Christianity is more complex than that. The best and simplest description that I have heard is faith that leads to action and action that leads to faith. The full circle is there; the continual flow of one into the other, the inseparable union of the two that they become as one. The commitment is