Gunnar’s Faith

February 21, 1989

Gunnar’s Faith

Contrary to whatever impression my earlier pieces have given, I am not, within my own family, the true believer and defender of the faith. At best I am a born-again but non-Charismatic Catholic. Truth to tell, the real hardliner at home is a twelve-year old kid, Gunnar.

Gunnar is not his real name, of course. It is Victor Benedict, Victor because his grandfather on the paternal side carries that name, as did his maternal great-grandfather, now long-deceased. And Benedict because he was born on the feast of St. Benedict, the family patron.

Gunnar is half-Chinese, and goes to school at Xavier. His father describes himself as a Taoist-agnostic, whatever that means, while his mother is a baptized, though non-practising Catholic.

My sister and brother-in-law stopped going to Sunday mass and the sacraments long before Gunnar was born. They’ve had him baptized on their own and let him go to his first communion and confirmation with his classmates, but that is all. For the rest of his faith life, he is pretty much on his own.

Such as his family religious upbringing has been, being Catholic is a big thing with Gunnar. So big, in fact, that he has been having lively discussions with his father and not a few sleepless nights over the fundamentalists.

Now Gunnar and I don’t even discuss these things in great detail, this much I know: his tiff with the born-again's (some of his classmates and their parents are) stems from the purely personal and practical, rather than dogmatic grounds.

My nephew, you see, prefers his life straightforward and uncomplicated. He thinks two dishes on the table is one too many. If he likes a shirt, he will wear it to death. Most of his friends date back to first or second grade, and he has been going to the same barber with the same frequency for nearly as long.

As with his life, so it is with Gunnar’s faith. For him, being a Catholic is as much a given as being a boy and being half-Chinese, and he likes the sense of permanence it brings. He is into things that endure, and what’s lasted all of 2,000 years is good and true enough for him.

Gunnar thinks, and I completely agree with him, that all these public debates with fundamentalists will lead nowhere. We’re right and they’re wrong, so what is there to quarrel about? Let’s not bother with them and go our own way, he suggests.

Gunnar’s notion of going his own way is he’ll just continue serving mass in school regularly and saying his prayers on rising and retiring. Mine, I tell him, is as follows:

I will hear mass and go to communion daily, and take him and my nieces to church every Sunday.

We will resume praying the rosary together before the family altar (which has three images of the Blessed Virgin) at home every evening.

We will take turns praying before and after meals.

No meat will be served at home on Friday, within or outside Lent.

I will give each member of the household a Catholic bible, a rosary if he or she doesn’t have one yet, a medal each of the Blessed Mother, St. Benedict and our Guardian Angel.

We will bring flowers, light candles and pray at my parents’ tomb at least once a month.

The family will tithe to support the following causes: parish projects; the education of seminarians; a home for the aged; a community of monks in Malaybalay.

In short, if Gunnar and I have our way, our family will henceforth do everything that the born-again's say we shouldn’t. Because if we are right, and they are wrong, we must and will gladly pay the price in full for our religious convictions, no ifs and buts about it.

Having been sealed with the sign of faith at baptism, other options are no longer ours to take. Catholic at birth, like all forebears have been, we will be Catholic until the very end, and so, if we can help it, will all those who come after us.

And if that be intolerance, we will forever bless and thank the Lord and His Blessed Mother for it. May they guide us always on our pilgrimage through this valley of tears, on our way back to the Father.

Hold Fast to What is Good

February 7, 1989

Hold Fast to What is Good 

If you were lucky – if the acoustics and speaker system of your parish church are good, if the celebrant had good diction and wasn’t in a great rush, and if the length of it failed to lull you to sleep – you finally heard what the good bishops have to say on the fundamentalist scourge last Sunday.

Otherwise, dig up last Sunday’s edition of the papers. They had brought us the story at crack of dawn, with full text or extensive quotes therefrom as well as background and reactions from both sides.

All agree it was the biggest Church story to break since the hierarchy finally turned its back on Mr. Marcos in 1986. But its impact was blunted, and by no other than those it concerned the most – our pastors. As of the last mass of the day, they had not yet received their imprimatured copies of the text.

Whatever the story behind the story was, last Sunday’s reading of the pastoral from the pulpit was anti-climactic. At best, it came after all the blood from the message had been drained. At worst, it made our parish priests look like stooges. Which brings me to the point I deem most needful of stressing.

Hold fast to what is good, as such Church pronouncements go, is an outstanding one: elegant, sober and precise. As it should be, for the doctrinal teachings it reiterates are profound and fundamental, and the errors it repudiates grave and insidious. But is it enough?

I’m afraid that to see the born-again movement as being primarily a doctrinal issue is to miss the raison d’etre of its overwhelming success altogether. And to fight it on that ground is to doom any hope of a counterfoil ab initio.

For when all is said and done, fundamentalism is not about dogma or substance, as it is about personal charisma and form. More precisely, it is about communications skills and logistics, in which the born-agains are past masters and the Church itself, frankly, a bungling amateur, in this country at least.

Debate doctrine with the fundamentalists, and you fall into a snake pit. You may say all the right things, but they say the wrong things with more flourish and repeat them more often that they become, excuse the pun, bible truth.

In effect, this is the Thomasites story all over again. Picture it: the most wholesome Caucasians descending on some God-forsaken barangay in the boondocks to dispense honeyed words as well as free medicine, free sandwiches and soft drinks and yes, free bibles. When such gods come visiting, who can resist?

Are city mice less pervious to such charms? Just vary the approach a little and yoy get them equally hooked.

To employees, offer group dynamics seminars, with bible lessons thrown in for free, of course. To businessmen and professionals, how about a fellowship in a hotel ballroom with your own kind, where you talk about faith, yes, but also prosperity?

In these fora and on the TV and radio talk shows the fundamentalists have now pre-empted, the message is always upbeat, the communicators attractive, voluble, and eloquent, the atmosphere familiar, joyous and exuberant. If you don’t get what I mean, watch the 700 Club.

Their point, of course, is not theory but practice – how to acquire what one glossy booklet now making the rounds calls Power for Living. Success through faith: the born-again phenomenon has thrived because it has been able to drive home that fundamental equation better than anyone else.

And what has the Church offered the bewildered and the wavering as an alternative so far? Not much, to put it mildly.

Churches that are invariably filthy and overcrowded. Uninspired services. Meandering, haphazard homilies. Ancient curates grumpy to be bothered for confessions, baptisms, blessings or funerals, and younger ones equally averse to taking on such dull routines, busy as they are teaching the poor to curse their fate.

The nuns and seminarians? A strident, embittered lot whose notion of holy zeal is to rail on TV shows, man picket lines and march beneath red banners. Who take care of the classrooms? Lay catechists, part-timers for the most part, just slightly more enlightened than their charges.

So there’s the rub as I see it. The Church has no one to match Pat’s, Ronald’s, Ray’s and Nestor’s winning ways, no success stories in the league of Gary V. and Jolas (who needs graven idols when you have the real thing?) to show off, and definitely no free sandwiches, soft drinks or bibles to bait the masses with.

Hold on to what is good? The Church’s first job, it seems to me, is to to prove that we, not they, have the goodies. The battle is now joined. Abangan!