How do we solve the problem of Duterteeeeee?

Eighteen months into office and still, Rodrigo Duterte escapes identification; well, at least as far as my little world is concerned.  Whenever two or more people are gathered, and the discussion drifts into politics, there Duterte is in the midst of them.  Whether it’s a casual chat between cabbie and passenger, a family reunion, or a no-holds barred exchange between friends or among media colleagues, I find myself having to articulate more seriously than I would want, an opinion about the Philippines’ 13^th president. 

Due perhaps to my occupation as a media person, I am always, always asked “What do you think of Duterte?”  I maintain that I don’t think of Duterte at all, but an answer is expected of me just the same.  Just two weeks ago, at a small gathering of religious and laypeople, the subject of Duterte inevitably sprung up; then a nun grinned and broke into song, a la Sound of Music: “How do you solve the problem of Duterteeeeee?”   Aye, there’s the rub!  I don’t see Du30 as a problem.  Were I to join the nun in a duet, I’d change the lyrics into “How do you solve the puzzle that’s Duterteeeee?”

I love solving puzzles, from the simplest kindergarten stuff to Mensa’s mind bogglers—and the strangest chief executive that Pinas has ever had must be a puzzle somewhere in between.  From everything Duterte has revealed of himself since pre-election time to the present, I see as a work in progress.  Neither the man nor his work is a simple thing, and so the relationship between him and the people—as the Facebook population would say—is necessarily “complicated”.  It would be imprudent (and a waste of time) to say anything conclusive about him or his work, in reaction to his actions, because he himself appears to be a bundle of contradictions.

Earlier on, when “PRRD” was just beginning to be exposed through media, I would cringe at his cussing (as we say, “Ang lutong magmura!”), being embarrassed for the Filipino people.  “Gawd, what would the international community say, we have one of the most foul-mouthed leaders in the history of the world?”  And I’d also frankly criticize him for his brazen display of misogyny, particularly when he joked that he should have been the first to rape the murdered Australian woman missionary.  “Kadiring presidente”, I’d hiss.  But as time marches on and the man reveals more and more of himself through word and deed, I—for the sake of my blood pressure—am finding it judicious to view him with a little more Christian empathy.  The man seems unhinged, but being so is not without its uses. 

He’s unconventional—attending important functions in T-shirt and jeans, or a barong with sleeves rolled up, with total disregard for diplomatic refinement—but so is his inaugural menu.  Avoiding unnecessary burden on the national coffers he chose to feed the dignitaries with munggo and danggit.  Impressive conviction—how many of us would dare do that?

He contradicts himself.  He once declared, with clenched fist, that he would ride a jet ski to plant a Philippine flag on a contested island grabbed by China.  But now he’s playing footsies with China and tightening the noose on the United States.  Does he know what he’s doing, or is it part of a clever strategy?   He once said he’d kill his own children if he found out they were using drugs, but is now mum on the six-billion peso shabu shipment from China that dragged his son’s name into the controversy.   Once rejecting being compared to the loose-lipped US president Donald Trump, he said “He’s a bigot, I am not.”  Months later, after a friendly phone chat with Trump where the latter expressed support for his drug war, Duterte totally forgot that he might be dealing with a “bigot”. 

He carelessly makes promises he can’t keep.  Remember when he swore he’d stop cussing because his daughter was getting the flak in school on account of her president-father’s laughable foul mouth?   He tried, his speech became bland, but only for a week or so.  And also that incident when he said God talked to him on the plane, and he promised never to cuss again because “a promise to God is a promise to the Filipino people”?   And that campaign trail promise to rid the country of drugs in three-to-six months?  See the pattern?  Same banana.

He trivializes matters.  He blurts out something infuriating and then turns around and says he’s just joking.  Irate over the pronouncement of US human rights experts about the drug killings being a crime under international law, Duterte exploded into expletives, called the experts “stupid”, and threatened to pull out of the UN, only to say later he was just joking.   At a campaign rally he said about the raped and murdered Australian missionary:  "Nakita ko ang mukha, maganda… sabi ko sayang, na rape, pinilahan nila.  Galit ako dahil na-rape siya, pero maganda, naisip ko, dapat ang mayor ang pinauna nila.” (I saw her face and I thought, 'What a pity... they raped her, they all lined up. I was mad she was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first.)   His office defended his “joke”, saying it was simply “how men talk,” but later on issued an apology to pacify furious female voters.

If people can’t tell when he’s joking and when he’s not, it’s probably because the man himself doesn’t know how to make heads or tails of the problems in his hands.  He sounded funny and bragging when he said, campaigning, “If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out.  Because I'll kill you…I'll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there."  But thousands of drug related deaths later, mostly of drug users and pushers who “resisted arrest” by the police, we realize Duterte wasn’t joking about fattening the fish in Manila Bay, by feeding them the small fry.  A funny joker president?  Scary, to say the least.

Joking or not, Duterte makes brash off-the-cuff remarks that should easily earn him the title of “Pambansang Kahihiyan”.  Anyone who causes him displeasure he cusses as a “son of a whore”—former US president Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (“a fool”) over human rights issues, and Pope Francis (“you son of a whore, go home and never come back”) for indirectly causing him to get stuck in a traffic jam.  Du30’s mouth also spewed obscenities when the European Union urged his government to investigate human rights abuses, calling the EU hypocrites, giving them the dirty finger, and accusing them of "atoning" for their ancestors’ sins and "guilt feelings" over occupying other countries in the past.

Are his intentions noble?  Is he a misguided maverick?  He always says he loves his country and would get rid of anyone harming it or hurting the Filipinos.  But the drug users and pushers are Filipinos, too.  So why is he vowing to kill the country’s alleged three million drug addicts—“I’d be happy to slaughter them as Hitler massacred the Jews… to finish the problem of my country and save the next generation.”  Or does he simply enjoy shocking polite society, as when at a meeting with businessmen, he bragged about being a womanizer thus, "I was separated from my wife. I'm not impotent. What am I supposed to do? Let this hang forever? When I take Viagra, it stands up."

If the surveys are to be believed, PRRD seems to be still enjoying a high trust rating.  Why?  Is it because he pushed for free education up to college, higher salaries for soldiers and teachers, more services for the poor, the purge against corrupt officials, etc. etc.?  I for one, though neither a fan nor a critic of the man, think his warrior nature served the country well when he put his foot down on the terrorists during the Marawi siege.  The first video I saw of it was of the ISIS recruits burning the cathedral and bashing the images inside.  The fact that the terrorists are well funded from abroad shows this is a real threat to the country, and the president for once acted as a president should—with determination to fight off the invaders.  I shuddered to think what could have happened had the one sitting in Malacanang then been any of his rivals—Roxas, Binay, Poe, or (RIP) Santiago?

If everything is wrong about Duterte, then not everything could be right about the 16,000,000 Filipinos who put him into office.  They heard him during his campaign.  They knew he was a womanizer.  They enjoyed his jokes and his kanto-boy cussing, and yet they counted on his promises and voted for him.   Lest we forget that the Philippines is not just its president, or the president and his supporters, but is each and everyone of us, we need to discern more in order to make of ourselves the best we can be for the sake of our country and the future of our children.  How do we solve the problem of Duterte?  Accept that in spite of our purest intentions there are things we cannot change—surely not the habits of conflicted leaders that go against our grain or violate our standards of decency—and so try to focus on changing ourselves.  We can help ourselves through prayer and obedience to the Father.  How do we solve the puzzle that’s Duterte?  How do we face the challenge that’s Duterte?  Like it or not he is a challenge to our faith, our humility, our charity, and our avowed desire for God’s will to be done.  And that’s the truth.        

Of relics and expectations

With the fourth visit of the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux in the Philippines, we may expect another surge of devotion for one of the country’s most popular—if not the most popular—Saints.  Although claims of miraculous healings or conversions have been made since her relics’ first visit in 2002, visit organizers admit that they have yet to document, gather, investigate, and authenticate such stories for them to hold water as an evangelizing tool for the Church. And that takes time.

Devotees venerate the relics of St. Therese  at the Carmel Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Tuba, Benguet

 Our crowd-drawing events—for instance, the Black Nazarene procession, papal visits, fabulous Holy Week processions—seem to reveal the Filipino predilection for spectacle and drama.  (Remember the “EDSA Revolution”?)  The long queues to kiss a believed-to-be-miraculous image in shrines (Manaoag, Antipolo, Quiapo, Padre Pio, Divine Mercy, et al) or during the veneration of visiting relics all over the country also present an interesting study of the Filipino’s faith in divine intervention.

But lest we forget that divine intervention does not always come in the form of earth-shaking events, let us remember that St. Therese herself did not ask for miracles but instead walked the path of the “little way”, missing “no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.”  And let us not forget, too, that Therese’s desire for holiness didn’t come by itself—she was even such a temperamental child that her mother didn’t quite know how to handle her—but instead was unwittingly absorbed through the nurturing of God-loving parents, Zelie and Louis Martin, the first married couple proclaimed as Saints by the Catholic Church.

Discalced Carmelite nuns pose for a souvenir shot with Therese before the Saint goes to La Union 

Indeed it could be said that the Church did not make Louis and Zelie Saints because their daughter is a Saint; rather, the Church acknowledges that their daughter became a Saint because she was raised by saintly parents.  I surmise that when Therese wrote “Holiness consists simply in doing God’s will, and being just what God wants us to be”, she must have had her parents in mind.  Before they met, both Zelie and Louis had wanted the religious life—he as a monk and she as a nun—but God wanted something else.  So they met (curiously, on a bridge) and barely four months later got married.  Still, with their consuming desire for sanctity, Louis and Zelie decided they would, while married, live a “celibate” life together—but God didn’t allow that either.  A priest soon advised them to do as married people normally do, have children, and raise them for God.  They obeyed the priest, but prayed for sons with the noble intention of offering them to the Lord as priests—but again, God had other plans.  They had nine children, and the only two boys God took back in their infancy, along with two girls in their childhood, leaving the couple five girls who grew up into adulthood and became nuns, all of them.  For decimating all of their dreams, did Zelie and Louis balk at God’s alternatives?  No, they would go with the flow.

About the pain of losing her children to death, Zelie would write in one of her letters: “When I closed the eyes of my dear little children and when I buried them, I felt great pain, but it was always with resignation. I didn’t regret the sorrows and the problems I had endured for them. Several people said to me, ‘It would be better to never have had them.’ I can’t bear that kind of talk. I don’t think the sorrows and problems could be weighed against the eternal happiness of my children. So they weren’t lost forever. Life is short and full of misery. We’ll see them again in Heaven.”  And in another letter, she summed up the essence of parenthood: “When we had our children, our ideas changed somewhat.  We lived only for them.  They were all our happiness, and we never found any except in them.  In short, nothing was too difficult, and the world was no longer a burden for us.  For me, our children were a great compensation, so I wanted to have a lot of them in order to raise them for Heaven.”

Perhaps this is one value to be learned from the fourth visit of the relics of St. Therese of the Child Jesus in the Philippines.  Returning to our shores at a time when we are losing our children due to disasters, human traffickers, war, or a contentious vaccine, could Therese be hinting that we befriend and imitate her parents so that we may also cherish and raise our children as gifts from a loving God?

Relics bring the presence of Saints in our midst. No doubt there will be more stories of miracles or favors granted during the six-month duration of the relics’ visit; churches again will overflow with people pleading for succor, even those who hardly go to church.  As we queue up to kiss or touch these holy remains and pray for favors through the Saints’ intercession, may we realize that our Church presents Saints to us not only for our edification or comfort but more so for our imitation.  What would we do if we do not receive the miracle we hope for?  We take a cue from St. Zelie Martin who, dying of cancer, went on pilgrimage to Lourdes (France), praying to be cured.  Denied her request, she wrote in a letter:  “The Blessed Mother didn’t cure me in Lourdes.  What can you do, my time is at an end, and God wants me to rest elsewhere other than on earth.”  A faith that does not hinge on miracles but aims for surrender to God’s will—perhaps that is what we should pray for.  And that’s the truth.

Bethlehem without borders

By Teresa R. Tunay, OCDS   On my last birthday, I was struck by the cruel truth that I will this year be celebrating my 73^rd Christmas.  Seventy-three, OmG, it’s like ice water thrown at my face.

I usually dedicate my birth month to examining my life and meditating on mortality—and it helps that it’s the month of all Saints and all souls.  Last November turned out to be nostalgic—which confronted me with the fact of aging, because nostalgia is a right most deserved by those coming closer and closer to the grave.  Thinking, “God, how many more Christmases will You give me before You finally call me back?”, I reviewed my Christmases as far back as memory could take me, and asked myself which of those brought me closest to the baby Jesus.  It’s a no-brainer: the Christmas that did this was that which etched itself earliest in my memory—with the help of the creche in my Uncle Jose Fermin’s house, painstakingly put together by his wife, Tita Chol.

This “belen” was the highlight of my childhood Christmases—a huge table by the Christmas tree (live pine) covered with sand to contain a miniature Bethlehem, not only Mary, Joseph and the baby in a manger, but also the Three Kings, a caravan of camels, shepherds and sheep, goats, cattle, a rooster (!), and an angel floating over the manger and holding a ribbon that said “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”.  These plaster figurines fascinated me endlessly, introduced me to Bethlehem, and fuelled my imagination as I fondled them, in the same way that maybe a little boy today would play war games in his mind with plastic soldiers or “Star Wars” figurines.

The “belen” would since then accompany me through life.  When I was a young girl, Christmas decorating was a family affair where everybody had an assignment; I was expected to help make the “parol”.   When I reached my teens, I was put in charge of the “belen”, but my creations were nowhere near Tita Chol’s elaborate tableau—just a few cardboard cut-outs of the most important characters propped up on a bed of “hay” on top of the television cabinet, or a ready-made “scayola” set placed beneath the seven-foot Christmas tree, among the gift-wrapped empty boxes.

However, there was one Christmas I was too busy to keep up with the “belen” tradition—being in the thick of preparations for a wedding.  In fact, on Christmas night, my fiancé and I were in Quiapo, ordering flowers for our wedding the next morning.  

The time came to bring Bethlehem to our own cozy home through a “belen” for our little son.  It was fun to craft my own nativity scene from cardboard cones and crepe paper, at times supplementing the catechesis with an assortment of pretty nativity-themed Christmas cards collected through the years.

It was exhausting for me in my 20s to braid together career and homemaking (I was wife, mother, tutor, nurse, yaya, diplomat, psychologist, etc.) so that there were Christmases without any manger scene at all in our house—just a white Christmas tree fashioned from tissue paper and shiny balls, or worse, a foldaway meter-tall plastic evergreen, a mere ghost of the fresh pine Christmas tree of my childhood.  (By then it was already a crime of sorts to cut down Baguio pine trees).   But what we didn’t have in the house we enjoyed outside of it; we would drive around to gawk at life-size crèches in town plazas and churches, and the motorized Christmas tableau that was then the pride of COD Department Store in Cubao, and years later, Greenhills.

One day we received a Balikbayan box from the United States; inside was—Wow!—a 19-piece ceramic nativity set my mother-in-law Flor de Liz had painted at an arts-and-crafts class for senior citizens!  How sweet of her!  With lights, décor, and props added, it was to become a conversation piece for many many years in our modest home, so gorgeous even Tita Chol would have loved it!  But now… what’s left of the set is stashed away in a storeroom; I don’t think I’ll ever want to put it up again.

I had lent the whole set to a retreat house, putting it up myself.  I was happy to share my joy to so many retreatants and guests, but when it came back to me, the Baby Jesus was missing, and a lamb, and a camel, too!  Were they broken?  Pocketed by some child who couldn’t resist their cuteness?  None of the staff could tell—as though the trio merely vanished into thin air.  It saddened me a bit, for what’s a crèche without Baby Jesus?  Never mind the sheep and the camel. 

Now that I’m recalling its glory days, and about to savor my 73^rd Christmas, I find that the nativity’s magic can still transport me back to the age of innocence, imagining that the Baby Jesus (after years of being displayed in our living room) had grown tall enough to mount a camel and look for the lost lamb.  “That’s why they disappeared,” I tell myself and muse, “for all I know I was the lost lamb, with one leg caught in quick sand, slowly being sucked into a system that served many gods but had no time for the One True God.”  Irony of ironies, in reality I’d gotten lost while looking frantically for God, unaware that in my meandering He was looking for me.

Do I now have a nativity scene at home?  No, I don’t.  Tell me if it’s due to old age.  In the Holy Land where over several years I have escorted pilgrims five times, I have strolled in the Shepherds’ field in Bethlehem, venerated the place of His birth, walked down Via Dolorosa bearing a token cross, done the whole pilgrim route over and over again it’s like the classic “been there, done that”.  It matters little to me now whether or not I have a crèche in my “hermitage”, but I do seriously wonder how Jesus would feel about the state of Bethlehem today, in the light of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this endless fight over borders.  A carol rings between my ears: “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…”  I cannot say Bethlehem today lies still.  Peace is elusive in the place where the Prince of Peace was born.  Were Jesus to revisit Bethlehem today as man, would he weep over it as he did over Jerusalem before he was crucified?  And would he be welcome there?

We can outgrow Santa Claus, but we should never outgrow Bethlehem.  In spite of all that Bethlehem has been through, we continue to celebrate the fact that our Savior was born there, and pray that one day we can say to the Lord Himself, “I am Bethlehem; come, be born in me.”  The carol reverberates inside my head: “O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray.  Cast out our sin and enter in, be born to us today…”  As I write this, I pray that each of us may become a Bethlehem without borders, witnessing to the love of God for all mankind.  And that's the truth.