life, had had suitors. One night, coming home from a party, she had an epiphany and knew she wanted to be a nun. As she prepared for bed, Myrna remembers listening to Frank Sinatra singing these lines on the radio, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day/ You’ve burst your pretty balloon, and taken my breath away/ Now you must wake up…” For some reason, the ballad crystallized her feelings. (I think the worldly Hoboken crooner would have enjoyed this tidbit.)
Her decision made my mother unhappy. Just six months before, Joseph, one of my older brothers, had entered the Society of Jesus, convinced of his calling to be a priest. Partly, my mother’s unhappiness stemmed from the fact that she felt my sister didn’t quite know life yet, hadn’t explored its possibilities. Too, she and Joseph, working in the secular world, had considerably lightened the economic burden of caring for the rest of us, for by then my mother had become the main breadwinner; my father, moored in a castle of discontent and bitterness, welcomed these defections to the Divine. In time however my mother accepted my siblings’ decisions.
Myrna’s experiences as a missionary in the Philippines’ remote rural south, then in the Indian state of Kerala, and her studies in Europe, made her see how, in a country as poor and beleaguered as the Philippines, asserting a communal bond with the less privileged was, to her, much more compelling than the traditional route of contemplative isolation. She once told me that living among the fisher-folk of Mati, Davao Oriental in Mindanao, for two years during the Marcos regime “saved me from being a dried-up prune of a nun.”
As an educated urbanite, she initially displayed a smug self-righteousness, thinking she and the American missionaries based in Mindanao had true faith while the peasants only had superstitious beliefs. “My pompousness crumbled upon hearing their genuine faith reflections and their from-the-heart prayers. It was a real, liberating experience.” Marcos had declared martial law in 1972, yet the intensity of these peasants’ faith when confronted with an emboldened military opened her eyes “to the deeper realities of my country, those whom I previously never knew nor appreciated as bayani [heroes].”
It wasn’t so much that the fisherfolk performed what would conventionally be thought of as heroic deeds but that in leading ordinary, honest lives, in earning a modest living from the sea, and in trying to make sure that their children’s lives would be better, they had to be brave. And by being part of a Basic Christian Community—where members of a community, especially among the poor, were encouraged to become activist Christians organized around principles of social justice—they often became targets of harassment or worse by the army. In a throwback to a biblical Galilee, the fisherfolk activists Myrna worked with were thought by government agents to be subversive, charged by the army with spreading communist ideology. Myrna remembered the courage of the people she worked with, such as Nang Vecing, a fisherman’s wife. “She was no coward, whether facing priest or police. She said things as she saw them. Jailed by the local military unit, she declared: ‘Maybe the soldiers don’t know the gospel of Jesus and so they confuse Marx with Mark.’”
She remembered too a fisherman by the name of Noy Tonying, who, tagged a radical, was also jailed, his fishing boat confiscated. Myrna described him as a tiny “flashlight penetrating the sea of darkness.” This metaphor occurred to her after an unforgettable experience of being with Tonying and some cathecists at sea when their boat began to have engine trouble, putting them at the mercy of the waves. “I had a flashlight which helped to throw light, enough to fix the engine by and get us back to shore.”
I asked her if she felt she had taught the fisherfolk something. “Something for sure. But much, much more have I learned from these mayukmok [ordinary people]. Through their unsung lives and unheralded deaths, they bring in the ani, or harvest, of justice and peace.” The situation there had gotten worse, she pointed out, during the subsequent decade, with even more brutal militarization. “And how is Mindanao today?” she asked rhetorically. “Still bleeding. And its mayukmok are still standing tall, honoring their faith in life even by their dying.”
Would Joseph have fit in, here in Banahaw? Certainly not as the Jesuit priest he once was—not only because that role was reserved for women but also because he had found the urge to start a family more powerful than his vocation. Having been based early on in a remote parish in Zamboanga in western Mindanao—also during the Marcos regime—he would have however liked the tightness of the Kinabuhayan community. He told me that being a parish priest in Mindanao “was a very challenging and fulfilling time for me.”
It was a time, he said, when other Jesuits and Maryknoll priests had started a renewal movement to encourage more Christians to be active, so that his work went beyond administering the sacraments to giving seminars in the barrios and laying the foundation for Basic Christian Communities. The military was suspicious of such ideas, but his parishioners were undeterred. Like Myrna, he was surprised by the response from the farmers: “Their simple faith and their activism were very inspiring.” This was part of why he had become a priest, to liberate “the poor from poverty and from the mentality of the oppressed.” There were other reasons too: faith, what he termed “the experience of the transcendent,” and his admiration for the Jesuits, whom he had grown close to in college.
Malangas, the town Joseph had been based in, had a mixed population of Christians and Muslims in an area that historically had largely been Muslim. Still, there wasn’t much tension in town, though fighting would sometimes break out between government soldiers and guerrillas belonging to the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a secessionist group that at the time was advocating independence for Mindanao as a Muslim state. He remembers going through the town’s dark streets at night and running into army patrols on his way to the pier, where machine-gun emplacements faced the sea in expectation of attacks by the Muslim rebels. Of that time, he says, “I felt a great inner peace and didn’t feel afraid at all, even though my konbento was made of wood and could easily have been blown to bits.” The attacks never materialized.
Joseph had his own problems with the military as well. In a weekly parish bulletin, he had criticized the town mayor for corruption. The lieutenant in charge of the military contingent was the mayor’s son-in-law. “They called a conference in the municipal hall, with all the barrio captains and town councilors present, and invited me to explain under what authority I did these things.” He was able to defend himself satisfactorily, for they didn’t bother him after that, but according to him “being a cleric definitely helped.”
By the beginning of the 1980s, he decided that the priesthood was no longer for him. Today, married and with a growing family and a job that overworks and underpays him, he is no less burdened, but he is happier, willing to do battle with a less-abstract world.
After finishing our breakfast and thanking our hosts, Jaime and I walk with Padre Aurelia down to the river, where other sect members are at work among the rocks and boulders, sweeping the banks, and picking up leaves and debris, widening the channel into which a hidden spring flows and from which villagers get their drinking water. (We have tasted the waters; what a treat!) The living tableau is wonderful to behold. As the people work, Padre Aurelia, another priest, and an acolyte sing hymns beneath a pomelo tree to which a giant cross has been nailed. On top of an immense boulder, candles have been lit. Against the dark-green lushness of the surrounding forest and a slate-grey sky, the men and women work in harmony, with little talk beyond murmured instructions. Hymns float through the glade, butterflies of graceful sound.
We stand awhile and watch the sect members at work. Then, following the river downstream, we come to Templo, a cave that the sect considers sacred and that is marked by a statue of the risen Christ. Just inside are a couple and their child camped out on a cot, the man, lying down, obviously ill. Perhaps they hope their faith will heal him. A few pilgrims, their faces bright with hope, pray in the candle-lit chambers. Nearby, a much narrower cave leads precipitously into the bowels of the earth—to, sect members claim, the waters of Eden. As we have no lights, we don’t descend, instead emerging
