This is a sermon I delivered this morning at my church as something of a wrap-up and discussion of my year in the Philippines. I simplified and focused on a few key lessons, because explaining an entire year in a twelve minute sermon time is impossible. For those who couldn't attend, and for those friends of mine in the Philippines who read this, this is what I learned from my year in Baguio:
Magandang umaga po! That means good morning in Filipino. Now, I’ll be honest, I never actually managed
to pronounce that greeting correctly.
Even at the end, if I actually tried to greet someone in Filipino, it
tended to end with them commenting on my cute American accent. So perhaps I should instead greet you the way
my fellow teachers and I always greeted one another at school. Good morning sirs/ma’ams!
The topic for this sermon is
lessons learned in the Philippines. I
really feel as if I’m cheating all of you a bit with that. Because, you see, I will still be figuring
out exactly what I learned in the Philippines for another few years. I’m not great at noticing what I’ve learned
in all its details until a few years later, when I realize how I’m applying it
from here on forward. But everyone
thought it would be a bit too much to leave all of you wondering about my time
there for the next five years, until I got my thoughts together. This is instead a patchwork of concepts, a
scaffold I will be building and thinking on for years to come.
With that in mind, let me begin
with the concept of being a stranger. In
my day to day life in the US, as a young white healthy woman, I’m not exactly a
stranger or an oddity to anyone around me.
I get a few extra comments on my hair, but in general I can walk down a
street and not be considered unusual.
That changed in the Philippines.
I was living in Baguio, which, as an American-planned city and a major
tourist hub, did have a decent population of American visitors, but still, off
of the major tourist destinations within Baguio, I was the only white person
people would see in a week or a month.
Most of my students and fellow teachers had never really talked with an
American before, and there was apparently a lot of nervousness about my
coming. All the fears and nerves I had
about going into a strange new environment were echoed in the people who were
hosting me, who were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to talk clearly to one
another, or that I would be judging them.
I learned that there was a strong
element of grace involved with making the transition from stranger to guest,
both on my host’s part and my own. They
had to risk my rejection and judgment of their world, their lives, and I had to
risk my comfort zone, to put myself out for their own chance of rejection. That level of hospitality towards a stranger
is a terrifying challenge. I was lucky,
in many ways. As Attorney Floyd, one of
my major contacts within the national church, put it much later, one of the
benefits the Philippine church found from YASC was rediscovering and
strengthening their own cultural focus on hospitality towards the
stranger. That code of hospitality is
embedded into the Philippine culture, especially among the mountain tribes, and
it is what gave them the grace to risk my judgment to still offer me a new
home.
That initial hospitality led me
into being able to open myself up in what has become my father’s favorite new
story to tell about me. As many of you
know, my mother runs a day care in our home, and I have helped her with the
children any time I was living at home.
Because of that, I fast learned that the easiest way to distract a small
child from a meltdown if we had to run errands was to always keep some level of
toy in my bag. Bubble solution was my
favorite, because it worked for almost every age range. I hadn’t meant to bring it along to the
Philippines, but I did have bubble solution in my purse and it made it through
the airport security. During one of the first
invitations I received from the college president, Ma’am Bridget, I was
introduced to her five-year-old granddaughter.
This girl had never met an American before, and she was rather nervous
around me. During lunch I ended up
pulling out the bubble solution and blowing a few bubbles to distract her when
she got restless at the pace the adults were eating at. It seemed like that was all it took, the
willingness to play with her, before she relaxed and began to enjoy my
presence.
I found that bubbles worked with
the young children I encountered everywhere in the Philippines. No matter where I went, they were initially
very nervous around someone who looked so very strange in comparison to them,
but they relaxed when I brought out the bubbles and began to play.
It was perhaps a similar thing to
the bubbles that led my seventh-grade class in particular to be comfortable
with me. I was helping teach Christian
Ed to the 8th grade and above in the high school, but for the
seventh graders I instead was helping with Practical Spoken English. At the beginning, I was simply going over
pronunciation so that they had a real live native English speaker there to
help. As the year went on, my fellow
teacher also had me bring in some other American speeches to let them hear how
it was spoken and written by native speakers.
One of the speeches I brought in referenced the chicken dance, and I
commented briefly that all the kids in my generation had learned to dance that
one in grade school. My students were
far more interested in the concept of me dancing the chicken dance than in the
content of the speech, and I promised that if they participated through the
whole class in our discussion about the speech, I’d bring in the music and
dance the chicken dance for them the next class period we shared. Guess who ended up teaching a little over a
hundred 7th graders how to dance the chicken dance the next
week? That lesson in abject humiliation
of their teacher probably did more to make them comfortable with me than anything
else. From that point onwards any time
there was a whole-school activity the 7th grade girls were the first
to claim me as their extra teacher.
Playfulness and the willingness to look stupid and risk someone else’s
judgment of you go far in bridging barriers.
And make no mistake; bridging
barriers was my real task in the Philippines.
Everything I was teaching to my younger students was something a priest
or teacher trained in basic theology could have covered. Even when I was asked to teach a course in
the newly established Lay Institute, discussing the roles and relationship of
science and religion, that could have been done with a tag team of a college
science teacher and a priest. What I was
really there for was to keep the connections going between the Philippine
Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church in the US. Hang on a moment, I’m going to get
theological. The two great theological
heresies of the American churches, in general, are the concept that we can do
it alone, and the concept that we need to rescue the world. Both of these heresies come out of the
feeling that America is special and different, that what we as Americans have
is unlike any other country in the world, and that we either need to save it
for ourselves or export it to everywhere else, because nothing else is quite as
good. It is, explicitly, what most of
our mission work from the 19th century onwards had at its core. We can’t just bring Christianity out into the
world, we have to bring American Christianity, with all of its cultural
assumptions, to the world.
…Yeah. That definitely has its issues. Unsurprisingly, when we finally dropped that
bit of cultural imperialism from our mission and outreach, we mostly also
dropped doing mission work. We no longer
wanted to do it wrong, so instead we stopped doing it much at all. We pulled in as a church and turned our focus
to squarely within our own borders. From
one extreme to another.
When Young Adult Service Corps was
first established in the 2000s, David Copley, our founder, wanted to work to
directly combat both the isolation tendencies of the previous decades, and the
imperialistic tendencies of the century and a half before that. YASC was conceived as a way to build partnerships,
to stay in communication with other Episcopal and Anglican churches around the
world. We are sent out, but not to
create another top-down structure with ourselves at the top. We instead join with the local church and
work with them on what their priorities and goals are.
And in the end, the work was
secondary. It was about the friendships
made, about making different parts of the world, different parts of the church,
real to one another. It was about playing
the same kind of games with little girls and boys in vacation bible school in
the Philippines that I would play here in the US, about having wine and
conversation with a co-teacher as he vented about the work involved with
running the school newspaper. It was
about explaining to a group of seventh grade boys what snow actually feels
like, and braiding hair with my seventh grade girls as we watched the
volleyball tournament and remembered to cheer when something exciting
happened. It was about all the quiet
moments in which we knew each other and were known. It was about overriding all those moments
when I would feel isolated and weird for the moments when connection existed,
and friendships began.
That’s what I learned in the
Philippines. Well, that and that
killi-killi is the Filipino word for armpit.
I taught preteen boys, after all.
