For most of my time in the Philippines I was involved in conducting parish missions, either as part of a team or alone. Most of the missions were in small-town parishes, consisting in a small town with a few streets, a church, government buildings, a marketplace, a plaza and residences; and then many villages, either along the main road in both directions from the town or up into the hills. The mission team would meet the parish priest and his parish council to discuss the goals of the mission, set targets and plans. Then we’d begin.
A typical day would be as follows: rise at 6am, take a cold shower either at the well or from water stored in a barrel. Breakfast consists in a cup of coffee and some bread (Filipinos have a fuller breakfast of rice and other dishes; in this respect I stayed stubbornly Irish), then some quiet time to prepare for the day. Most of the day is taken up with visiting people in their homes, in preparation for a gathering later in the evening.
The two essentials for the visits are my guides and a guitar. The guitar is necessary because after chatting with the family and finishing with a short prayer, we sing a few songs. The guides are a great help really, especially when I am still new to an area. Filipinos are generally shy, and even more so when the visitor to their house is a foreigner (Amerikano, as we’re generically called). So the guides break the ice and we chat with the family for a while, about their lot in life, current news and then I invite them to attend the evening’s gathering – either in a chapel or someone’s house.
A typical gathering goes like this: we sing together for 20 minutes, using copies of a book I compiled. We start with old familiar hymns, then I teach them some new ones. The atmosphere is prayerful but not stultifying. Then we pray a decade of the Rosary, and then we have our bible text, usually a gospel passage, sometimes from one of St. Paul’s letters. We ponder the reading and then a few will share, and then I will say my few words.
One of my favourite passages is the healing of the paralytic let down through the roof of the house wherein Jesus was teaching (Luke 5: 18-25). The account in the gospel is quite brief, but if we let our imaginations range, we can picture some of the action. As the stalwart stretcher-carriers were hauling the paralytic up onto the roof there surely were comments from the onlookers: maybe poking fun at them for being so persistent or strange in their action; and surely the homeowner had some choice words for them when he saw the roof of his house being dismantled! But what persistence; I’m sure that if I had been carrying the stretcher and found no entrance via the front door, I would have given up, headed home and comforted the paralytic with a weak “next time hopefully”. But these stretcher bearers were made of sterner stuff: if we can’t enter by the door, let’s think of Plan B; haul the man up onto the roof! Amazing. And to think that carrying the stretcher to the house was tiring enough in itself, what effort was required to drag and push and cajole the sick man, first up to the roof, then down in front of an amazed Jesus (he says so himself, how he was amazed at their faith in him). And what was the motto of the stretcher bearers? Even though Filipinos in the rural areas have little enough English, when I pose that question and begin the answer “No retreat…” someone will always finish the quote “…no surrender”. Those stretcher bearers are my heroes: what grit, what determination, what die-hard faith. And they remain completely anonymous. Presumably they walked home together with the newly healed ex-paralytic, conscious only of having done a good turn for a friend, entirely unaware of the tremendous legacy they have bequeathed 2000 years of gospel readers.
Jesus healed the paralytic and healed every single sick person he met, no exceptions. To quote one of my favourite theologians, David Bentley Hart: “For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God”.
I really feel the need to highlight this point of the Lord’s mission to combat & heal sickness because it’s a commonplace for many people to see their ailments & diseases as coming from God. How misguided, how hope-sapping. This belief is very common, at least in popular speech, because in the face of sickness or tragedy, the automatic response is to say “well, accept it, it’s God’s will.” I then give a couple of examples to illustrate how this is not so. That God may permit such tragedies to happen is both a mystery and a source of anguish for people who believe in a good God, but that is very different from saying that God wills or decides that such things happen.
I relate how a woman in her 30s came to see me one day in a state of distress & anguish. She had just come from the doctor’s clinic and he had read the result of her various tests, revealing that she had breast cancer in an advanced stage. This surely was a tragedy. I expressed my sorrow and mentioned that I may be able to seek financial help from some wealthy parishioners to pay for treatment, but she wasn’t listening. She said that, when she was younger and later as a married woman, she had her “vices” and that now God was paying her back. Well I could hardly believe my ears. The cancer had come from God as a punishment for her bad deeds, the exact opposite of Jesus’ healing of the sick! Now instead of health and well-being being God’s good gift to us, cancer and other diseases were heaven-sent. Where had she learnt this belief? I don’t know, but it’s pretty widespread, and it’s a complete betrayal of the Gospel preached & practised by Jesus.
A ship sank in Philippine waters some years ago, and more than 800 people drowned, a good many who were children. I met a man the next morning in the mission area and he expressed sadness about the tragedy but said we should accept it as “God’s will”. A few factors could be responsible for that ship sinking, and some spring pretty nimbly to mind: (1) the captain may have been negligent; (2) were the coastguard authorities paid off to let the ship sail, even though there was a storm raging at the time? (3) was the ship itself in poor shape, due to lack of good maintenance? Who knows? I don’t know. All I do know is that the good God and father of Jesus had absolutely nothing to do with the sinking and drowning of so many. But that’s the typical reaction: “it’s God’s will”. It’s just a reaction and maybe many don’t really believe it. But any feedback I’ve received from my talk on the healing of the paralytic has always been positive: “you mean it’s not really ‘God’s will’?” It’s a liberating idea to realise that tragedy & suffering will surely come, but that God is not their source. In fact, according to the book of Revelation, God will create a “new heaven and new earth” and will “wipe all tears away” (21: 1, 4). Much more hope-giving than the God of cancer and sickness. Better the sweaty, health-restoring faith of the stretcher-bearers than the hope-dissolving belief in a distorted gospel of Bad News.