When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  Secular Europe does not so much question the existence of God as make Him irrelevant to their daily lives. My husband was nominally a Catholic. He came from a small university town called Münster in northwestern Germany, the subject of the joke that goes “Rome–Paderborn–Münster” to mean “Black–Blacker–Blackest”. Until the recent migrations, about 90% of the citizens of the community were fervent Catholics. Indeed, they have a beautiful cathedral, destroyed by the British during World War II, but now completely rebuilt in all its splendour. They pride themselves in the fact that their bishop, protected by his parishioners, was one of the few who openly preached against Hitler.

  Shortly before eleven o’clock each Sunday morning, my husband would dress up for church. When I once asked why he was so religious every time he was home, he laughed. It was tradition. He and his friends looked forward to going to Sunday Mass because they thought of it as going to a free concert. They listened to a beautiful Bach and a powerful organ, the sound of which rose up to the heavens, or at least to the top of the cathedral’s restored Gothic steeple. Bach was their prayer, he said. As an added bonus, the men would then congregate in the nearest kneipe with their schnapps and beer whilst the women retired to the nearest cafe for their coffee and cake.

  I cannot blame my husband and his friends for secularising the most fundamental of all Catholic rituals. Europe was subjected to years and years of religious wars—internecine strife caused by the belief that one’s religion was the one true religion. Even within the same religion, one’s theology was the one true theology; and as though this were not enough, then went on to persecute those who did not share their own set of beliefs. Perhaps it is this particular history that made my husband and his friends wary about religious dogmatism.

  Or, possibly, it was the evolution of European thought. When first introduced in Rome, Catholicism—or simply Christianity as it was called before the emergence of various Christian sects—was obsessed with dogmas. In order to unite the warring Christian factions, a set of dogmas known as the Nicene Creed (later transformed into the Apostles Creed) was finally summarised in AD 325. The Roman Emperor Constantine promulgated that anyone who wanted to call themselves Christian must believe in the Nicene Creed. Thus, when Christian Rome shared its religion with the Western world through the arrival of “barbarians”, and disseminated it through its citizens exiting both Rome and Constantinople, the second Rome, the Nicene Creed went with it.

  It was not until the 18th century, with the advent of the new philosophies of the Enlightenment, that the European mind started to question these basic tenets. Since then, it has never looked back. When the promulgations from Rome, or now the Vatican, do not mesh with their notion of moral rectitude, many Europeans simply brush them aside. (America too was born from the European ideals of rationality, with the one main difference that, their nation being new, Americans are more experimental. Unlike the Europeans with their deep sense of tradition, Americans are eager to try something new, to be easily discarded if and when it doesn’t work. This was further encouraged by the founding father’s promulgation of the separation of church and state, freeing Americans to pursue different religious paths.)

  Thus it was that my husband and his friends were very comfortable with their religious life, or rather their non-religious life. When we were together outside Münster, my husband could as easily go to church as not. When attending Mass—he thought he should set a good example for our son—he always received Communion, yet he never went to Confession. Confession, he said, was between him and his God, so why should he let another human being participate? This practice of picking and choosing which dogmas and practices to adopt was so common amongst European Catholics that it prompted his kababayan (countryman) Pope Benedict V, to call them “ à la carte Catholics”.

  What was good enough for my husband, however, isn’t quite good enough for me. I have never felt comfortable with my religion in the way he felt about his. Perhaps, it is because even though I matured in the West, I am basically a product of the East. I remember having been a great admirer of the behaviourist B.F. Skinner who reputedly bragged that if he were given a child before they were five years old, he could shape them to the kind of adult we wish them to be. Even as I embraced the rationality of the West, I could not shake loose my roots in the more mystical East. More than beliefs, I want to have faith.

  My first stirrings of doubt occurred when I was younger and too busy with the daily concerns of life to think much about Catholic dogmas and doctrines. Without too much introspection, I diligently went to Sunday Mass, although I increasingly noticed that I did not feel refreshed by it. It was an obligation I wanted to fulfill and then dismiss. Unless the priest had an especially thought-provoking message during his sermon, it was becoming a waste of time, only justified by a sense of deliverance from an otherwise nagging feeling of guilt and fear.

  As I started to question my own Catholic upbringing, I went straight to the heart of the matter—the veracity of the Bible. I thought about biblical stories, applying the literal translations of my youth. Common sense would tell you that no matter how large an ark, it could not possibly accommodate two of every species of animal on earth. Such mysteries were partly solved for me when I started reading religious history, and understood how historical events can give birth to myths by which a people can live. Sticking to the historical Bible, I read about the great plagues that visited mankind from time to time and suffered by the people in Egypt around the time God slew every Egyptian first-born. That pressured the Pharaoh into allowing Moses and his people to leave. I read about the tsunami that occurred at about the time of the parting of the Red Sea. It seemed that biblical characters such as the vizier Joseph did indeed exist, along with the great kings Saul, David, and Solomon. Their lives have been documented in other sources aside from the Bible.

  My exploration of biblical history, however, was an intellectual pursuit lacking in emotional resonance. On the contrary, it simply raised new questions. When someone read a passage from the Book of Joshua during one Sunday Mass, I asked myself why we should emulate a man who committed genocide in order to populate the Promised Land solely by the Israelites, the supposed chosen people of God? Come to think of it, there seems to be nothing in common between the militant Yaweh and the compassionate Jesus of Nazareth. Why then include the Old Testament in the Bible, unless we want to call ourselves Judeo-Christian?.

  Lacking friends who asked the same questions, I was discouraged from further musings. I continued, however, to search for a more meaningful experience from Sunday Mass, which now became the focus of my religious practice. I was then residing in London within a ten–minute walk to two Catholic churches: Our Lady of Victories ran by the diocese, and Our Lady of Carmel ran by Carmelite priests. Every Sunday, I would go to one or the other depending on which schedule was convenient for me. One Sunday, I put paid to our Lady of Victories after listening to the priest rile over the injustices done by the Anglicans to the Catholics. This was a five-hundred-year-old grievance against Henry VIII and his successors who confiscated Church properties, including her beautiful churches and monasteries, and bestowed them to the Church of England that he had founded.

  Another sermon at Our Lady of Carmel I found even more offensive. The Anglicans had just passed a watershed decision: to ordain women priests. Now, some more progressive Catholics were instigating a similar reform for the Roman Catholic Church. The argument was that with the increasing difficulty of the Church to attract new vocations, it needed to take more practical measures by, like the Anglicans, recruiting women priests. As was my habit, I settled myself at one of the front pews, only to hear the priest from the pulpit thunder out his opposition. Women, he said, had no place in the priesthood. It was mandated by no less than Jesus Christ himself who only called on male apostles. I was so disgusted that I left in protest, click-clacking with my high-heeled shoes all the way out in the hope that my opposition would have reg
istered on everyone.

  I sought a third church and found it this time in a chapel called Our Lady of the Assumption. I thought the sermons there were much more inspiring. My first time around, the priest talked about the weaknesses of the apostles—the impulsive Peter, the way the chosen twelve jockeyed for positions of favour—and ultimately how Christianity transformed them into moral giants. I later found out he was a teacher of theology and that made the chapel even more attractive to me. As he increasingly fraternised with his affluent, mostly French parishioners, however, I thought his sermons became rambling, the result of a lack of preparation due to too many parties. When I mentioned this to my more pious older brother, I was admonished that regardless of my suspicions about my pastor’s social activities, I should hear Mass because of God and not because of any particular priest. This was of small consolation to me.

  My first inclination was to look for yet another church, but of course I realised this was not the solution. It was only much later that I was able to articulate this nagging feeling of unease, a feeling, which I have since learned is shared by many. Could it be that the Roman Catholic Church has fallen into a time warp? In the name of immutability, has it become obsolete and anachronistic, no longer responsive to the needs of its people? At the same time, it demands unquestioning obedience, much more suited to the time when its parishioners were uneducated and uninformed.

  I was already seriously asking these questions when I came back to the Philippines in 2004. If anything, I found the country even more religious than when I left, if not more spiritual. Outside people’s homes, reliefs of Mama Mary were ubiquitous. Personal notes, text messages, public addresses were punctuated with religious references, reminiscent of European medieval practices, Old Spain transported into present-day Manila. I was surprised by these as I had always felt that my faith—and my relationship with my God—was a private affair and not something I wore on my sleeve or broadcast from the rooftops.

  Two of the greatest institutions in the country—shopping and attending Mass—are often performed simultaneously under the great, vaulted roofs of the malls, voices ringing with religious fervour and pop music playing in unison—the sacred and the profane in tandem. I found this uncomfortable, to say the least, considering my Western proclivities towards sequential activities in well-defined spaces. Nonetheless, I suspended passing judgment and sometimes went merrily along with my extended family to attend Sunday Mass at the shopping mall.

  My sister knew a visionary. She and her friends went with the woman around the country and witnessed the visionary fall into a trance before each apparition of the Virgin Mary. Whilst my sister and her companions were not similarly blessed, they witnessed the beads of blood coming out of the woman’s forehead and the stigmata on her hands and feet when in deep prayer. My sister would come home with golden dust that she had collected from the ground as it fell from above. I could not understand her experiences, but perhaps, I repeatedly told myself, I was not meant to understand but simply to accept her own sense of validity.

  My sister-in-law used to make a practice of giving me religious books and prayers for each birthday and Christmas, no doubt thinking of indulgences she could earn if she converted the only “unbeliever” in the family. My mother who, in her old age, had grown more religious, complemented these books with her own similar presents, as did friends who wanted to share their faith as part of their apostolic work. I received so many religious books that they formed a small library, not one of them read, not one resonating within me. On the contrary, I felt as though my personal space was being invaded, and I often could not help but feel annoyed over such presents.

  Yet, I envied the simple faith of my sister-in-law. Some time ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which then metastasised, but I had never known a more courageous person. She attended endless healing Masses, countless audiences with Father Suarez and other healers, and continually asked her stream of friends for their healing prayers. Through it all, she seemed to have found an inner sense of peace, a simple faith and trust that, no matter what, God would take care of her. I could not help but feel that here was a true Christian, who through her serenity had lightened the burden of her lingering and debilitating illness, not only for herself but also for those around her. How did she do it? I could never imagine myself being able to carry such a burden.

  Simple faith is indeed a gift, or is it our own choosing? I sometimes wish I could go back to the innocence of my youth, when my religion was more magical, and my spiritual life could be reduced to recipes for salvation. But having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge through exposure to varied rationalistic ideas, I know I cannot go back, only forward. I must tread my own winding path.

  To sum up an article I recently read: religious leaders once thought that it was literacy that was essential to the understanding of the Scriptures, but possibly Christianity is instead about mysticism, and that the more we reason, the less we understand. Like music, religion is not to be understood but, rather, to be experienced. Is that the reason, I ask myself, why the great world religions were all born in the East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as well as such other transcendental faiths as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism? They are all products of a more mystical existence. The Bible itself is an Oriental book. Is it the Eastern sensibility that can more easily suspend the need and desire to understand? Lacking mysticism, exacerbated by the rationalistic theories of the Enlightenment, many of my friends from the West seem unable to identify with Eastern rituals.

  Momentarily, my winding path does not include going to Sunday Mass. I am still looking for a messenger from God who can guide me spiritually, who, from the vantage point of the pulpit, will tell his parishioners what the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark means for a Christian. From Jesus’s parables, what are the lessons I could learn if I wanted to lead a good life? Instead, I often hear only abstract platitudes. Meantime, I am being kept away from Sunday church by the crowds and the heat.

  Friends ask, why should I be so lacking in faith? Was it a prayer at a time of crisis that went unanswered? On the contrary, I have sensed the presence of God, especially when I needed Him most. I once read that fear is the strongest of all human emotions. As a naturally fearful person whose many anxieties run from cancer phobia to fear of flying, I can cite occasions when I was gripped by fear and felt God sitting beside me. During my career years, I had to travel frequently, and had experiences from engine failures to turbulence so strong the aircraft rocked like a toy being tossed in whichever way. I imagined a giant pair of Hands keeping the airplane within His palm, and I felt safe. When faced with uncertain diagnoses about a possible major illness, especially cancer, I prayed a silent prayer and a little voice from inside me whispered that everything would be okay. These experiences reinforce my faith in a good God. Perhaps that is what is meant by religion being experienced rather than understood.

  There is, however, a spiritual thirst that remains in me. To quench that thirst, I need to reconcile two forces: on the one hand, the need to believe using Western rationalistic principles, and on the other hand, the intuitive impulse to have the unquestioning faith of the mystical East. I now have to negotiate these two elements into a single guiding principle for my life. The gaping hole has to be filled with new rituals or new meanings to old rituals.

  I think it does not matter whether Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate or whether he was an exceptional human being, or a prophet, or a man who became God. I find the historical Jesus very attractive. Here was one person who preached love and forgiveness over justice, who understood the weak, and who knew suffering. Jesus, according to the Gnostic writers, showed us He had to die in order to free the Divine Spark from the prison of the body. This Divine Spark can then join the ineffable Godhead. In one sense, we all have the Divine Spark within us, and we all have to die in order to release that Divine Spark from the prison of the body. This is the message of Easter that I find most
appealing.

  From my many years of meanderings, I have learned that God can be seen in many ways. For me, that search has been a lonely process. I have tried transactional prayers, especially in moments of crisis. I have tried meditative prayers when I simply sit and breathe the breath of God. I have tried to look for God in another person’s face. Through these, I have caught a glimpse of His Presence. I do know that He is not the God of my youth, nor the God of my husband, nor of my sister-in-law. I see Him, darkly. His image is still a bit out of focus, and I realise I have to adjust my lenses.

  As I get older and experience increasing aches and pains, I reach out for the notion of immortality. Like many others, I want to leave a footprint behind, but more importantly, I want to take with me the promise of Easter. I recall a Buddhist story written by Elaine MacInnes that I read not too long ago. It is the story of a salt doll. It goes like this:

  There was a salt doll who lived in the mountains. She was a curious little doll and loved to travel and explore. One day, she decided to embark on a long journey. She wandered through hills and dales, visiting new places and enjoying all kinds of adventures. Then, she came to a spot she had never seen before. It was the edge of the sea. She was fascinated by the surging mass of water.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “Touch me, and you will find out,” the sea replied.

  So the little salt doll dipped her toe into the sea. It felt so good! But when she withdrew her toe, it was no longer there!