Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone

Chicken Ala Carte

This video was shown to me by one of the Vietnamese brothers who live here (hence why the link is in Vietnamese), it is a short film which was made in Manila in 2006. I think it is worth a watch.

This Year's Christmas Card

As many of you know Steph and I usually send out Christmas cards. This year unfortunately we won't be sending any cards, so please accept this picture and poem as our offering to you for Christmas 2011!

(Both were produced by Steph)

The gift of Christmas

As Christmas time approaches

And the cold, dark nights draw in

Curled up beside the flickering firelight

Watching snowflakes begin to fall

In a swirling of frosty blue

And dazzling white

Comes the warm golden glow

Of the gift of Christmas

The warmth of a fire of burning love

Of a comforting spirit of hope

Wonder and joyfulness

Warming hearts and souls

Cradled in a manger in a stable

Cradled in a heart full of love

Is the bright warm flame

Of the gift of Christmas

As Christmas time approaches

And the sun still beats down hard

Stretched out beneath the canopy of shadows

Watching palm trees rustle and wave

In a haze of dreamy yellow

And fiery red

Comes the cool silver light

Of the gift of Christmas

The freshness of a breath of inspiring change

Of an unsettling spirit of challenge

Newness and vitality

Refreshing hearts and souls

Cradled in a manger in a stable

Cradled in a heart full of energy

Is the cool refreshing breeze

Of the gift of Christmas

Misa de Gallo

 Literally ‘Masses of the Cockerel’ or ‘Dawn Masses’. There is a tradition here in the Philippines that during the nine days leading up to Christmas mass is celebrated every morning at dawn.

So both yesterday and today we have dragged ourselves from our beds and made our way to the church for a mass beginning at 4.30am.

On the first day we were expecting a half filled church populated by the ultra-faithful. We were wrong! Arriving at 4.20am the church was already packed to capacity, far fuller than for a Sunday mass, with only standing room available within the building. Outside there were half as many people again stood or sat on portable chairs. The attendance was truly impressive. All sections of society were present from new-born babies to the elderly, and unlike many European churches those in their teens and twenties were very much present.

These masses are a form of fasting. To attend them is to give up a usual activity in order to assert that following the way of God is more important. For nine days those who attend sacrifice a bit of sleep in order to make time to prayer more.

For me as a foreigner, these masses are testament to a better understanding of fasting than we sometimes have in our western churches. The masses are in no way woeful laments; rather they are celebrations of joy.  Sleep is sacrificed in favour of something better, a really life giving celebration. The pain of losing sleep is more than compensated for by the joy of celebrating God’s love.

We are only two day in but the sense of joy and positivity emanating from these masses has so far been worth a bit of lost sleep.    

How valuable is human life? How valuable is my life?

Living here at DBTC these are two questions which I find myself asking a lot.

Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and humanism all preach the equality of every human being. Every person is of equal and infinite value. According to these traditions the value of a human life cannot be attached to a person’s level of productivity or usefulness. We have a value greater than what we do. This is a tenet of belief in which most of us would assent to believe.

But living here in the Philippines the reality of inequality is powerfully evident to me every day. The Philippines is a deeply unequal society. The richest 10% earn more than twenty times more on average than the poorest 10%¹. The rich live like middle class Europeans or Americans whereas the poor live in slums without running water and without access to decent education or health care. Virtually every service here is privatised, state provided services are very sparse and of a very low quality. If you have money then all is well, if you don’t then life is very hard.

Already we have had a student drop out of his studies because his grandmother became ill, the families already stretched income couldn’t stretch far enough to pay for medicine, so he left his training in order to work and be able to buy the necessary medicine. It is possible that he will never get another chance to study.

Privatised health care means that the poor are thrown into poverty by illness and the destitute are simply left to die. Private education means that the wealthy get their children well educated and into well paid jobs while the children of the poor are taught in larger classes, and with fewer resources (sometimes without even paper and pens), so all but a few are destined to end up in poorly paid jobs.

Many of our students have to work in the evenings to earn money despite attending 11 hours of college every day. Lots of them try to eat only once in the day so as to save money.

Being here has made me appreciate the importance of public institutions like a good postal service, a good library service, clean water and reliable transport networks. Universal access to these things is a hallmark civilised society; in the Philippines they are available only to the wealthy.

To live in a land where one life is so obviously not of equal value to another is deeply unsettling. I don’t deceive myself into believing I come from a land where things are any more civilised. The globalisation of economics means that inequality is the responsibility of all of us; be it visible outside our front door or thousands of miles away.

Words about equality are very cheap! Sadly most of us live within the sphere of influence of an economic worldview which acts to commodify everything and everyone into a unit of production then hang a price tag on it. None of us are worth anymore than the value of our function. In a world where everyone and everything has its prices there are inevitably those not worth the spending money on to keep alive.

At the heart of all of this is a sickness of which it is hard to make sense. Dwelling too long on these questions forces me to question whether the world would really gives a damn about saving my life had I been born in a slum in a poorer part of the world. Confronted by the shocking negative answer to that question I become driven to try to earn the privileges acquired by an accident of birth. But this striving in turn leads to dead-ends; trying to earn our right to be considered valuable can only ever lead to dehumanisation and all too often it leads to mental illness.

But what alternatives do we have?

¹ http://www.newint.org/columns/country/2004/09/01/philippines/

A Day in the life of a TVED Student

This video, which was created by Steph, tells the story of an average day for a Technical Trainee.

A New Reading Site – Part 2: Reading the Bible

Continuing from the thoughts I shared two weeks ago this week I want to expand on that theme a little. Being aware of my own reading site is of paramount importance when living in a very different culture from my own.

One exercise I have found fascinating during my time here is to attempt to deconstruct my own reading of the bible. The bible is a very ancient text; it has continued to be read through thousands of different cultural, political, economic and religious worldviews. Through all of this history up to today people have found within these texts meaning and inspiration, but crucially they have found this meaning and inspiration in very different ways. Too often we assume that the truths we find (or don’t find) in these texts are those which were intended by the original authors and those understood by all peoples throughout the world and throughout history. I all too easily assume that my interpretation is ‘The Interpretation’.

One of the challenges of reading the bible here is to try to put to one side what seems to me to be the most obvious interpretation of the text and instead to try to see it, as best I can, through the eyes of the people here.  The reading site of the people here is, of course, much closer to the reading site of the first Palestinian Christians who actually wrote the New Testament. The Philippines is a country of vast inequality, it is dominated by powerful neighbours, and it is a country of visible religious fervour.

Take the example of Matthew 23:14-30, the text to which we give the subheading  ‘The Parable of the Talents’¹. This is a text which reads very differently when read from the different perspectives of the rich world and the poor world.

In the rich world we understand this parable in completely non-economic terms; the master is a benevolent God who demands that we make best use of our abilities. We with all our wealth and opportunity look at the text from the perspective of the servant given Ten Talents. This parable has influenced us so much that we have even come to call our abilities ‘talents’. So most often preaching on this text in the rich world will be about making the most of our abilities and not being like the bad servant with one talent who wasted what God had given him. His punishment at the end of the story is just desserts for his wasteful behaviour.

Try reading this text from the perspective of the poor man of the story, the man given only one Talent. This man, like many people here, maybe struggles to find enough money to survive, this man’s opportunities are maybe very limited, each day this man might run the risk of not being unable to feed his children. Such is the world in which many people here in Cebu live.

From the perspective of this man the actions of the master (in the parable) cannot be those of a benevolent God, they are the actions of an unmerciful master, they are the all too familiar actions of the rich and powerful over the daily lives of many people here who are made to suffer merely for being poor. Thus the parable is no longer a metaphor for the kingdom of God, but a symbolic narrative of their real world where the already rich get richer and the already poor are trodden on. The consequences handed out to the servant with one talent at the end of the parable are not the actions of God but the callous reaction of the rich towards those who are unable or unwilling to participate in the economic world of the rich. Take for example the many people here who suffer for lack of the medical resources which the richer world takes for granted, or those who suffer from a lack of access to the education that the richer world takes for granted, while at the same time the richer complain about (what they call) high taxes. Those in poverty are all too often blamed for being poor.

One biblical story, but two very different reading sites produce two very different interpretations. Neither is necessarily right or of more value. The challenge to all of us is not to believe that our own perspective is the only possible perspective.

(¹ I have borrowed, and adapted, the two reading perspectives of this text from the ‘The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics’ by the American theologian ‘Ched Myers’)