Velez: Finding my church in the time of Dutertismo

I GREW up knowing God has two names: Jehovah/Yahweh and Buddha.

Sundays would mean Sunday School, and later in my college years, Sunday worship. The rest of the year, we attend birth and death anniversaries of granddads and grandmas with Dad as we witness Buddhist prayer chants and rituals.

Having two religions in the house can be interesting, but it can also be distressing. Especially when Dad debates about the Bible, and why we only go to Mom’s church and not Dad’s temple?

Then there’s Dad’s favorite question: If you get to Heaven, try to identify Adam and Eve.

This is the kind of stuff that can fill up hours of debates and interpretations of the Bible with no end, just like those debates at Rizal Park. When the President mocked the Original Sin doctrine and claimed he speaks to his own god, now we see this kind of debates online between the God-fearing and the Digong-cheering.

We can debate all we want about Christianity. This is the religion with the most number of churches, doctrines and versions of its Bible.

We can also debate on the malpractice of faith. But while we condemn priests for pedophilia, do we do the same on this pastor-friend of the President who is implicated in drug trafficking and driving away Lumads to build his prayer mountain?

We can also debate on the good Christians. The martyr Fr. Pops. Sr. Pat Fox. The three Methodist missionaries who are in immigration limbo, their missionary visas on hold and their work investigated just for joining fact-finding missions. Then there are the three Catholic priests murdered, two of them during Mass.

It’s a strange situation, where Duterte doesn’t raise a howl on these killings and persecutions, and his minions who probably haven’t studied Divinity or slept through Theology class define what religion and missionary work is. Is Dutertismo the new religion, or the new opium?

But beyond these debates, Aglipayan Bishop Felixberto Calang reminds us that we must not be diverted from knowing the issues affecting our country.

Poverty is there. Endo is forever. Train (law) is pushing prices higher. Yet the government is busy sweeping away the tambays, the unemployed, and the poor. Soldiers lord over Lumad communities. Peace talks are in danger of being canceled.

It’s another way of saying, the President better deal with the matters of the people he is sworn to serve, leave religion to the shepherds. It’s ironic that Jesus said a person shall not live by bread alone, but his kingdom speaks of salvation or liberation in the social sense where the poor can live with justice and peace.

It is perhaps best to say that you found religion that can guide our way, and our country too. There are two verses from both Christian and Tao I try to live by:

“Faith without action is dead.” “In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. In daily life, be competent.”