When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  “What have you done to me?” she cried.

  “You have given something of yourself in order to know,” answered the sea.

  The little doll remembered the lovely feeling and was curious, so she dipped her foot. When she withdrew her foot, however, it was no longer there. In some inexplicable way, she felt very good about it. So she continued going further and further into the sea, losing more and more of herself, all the while knowing the sea more deeply.

  As the wave broke over the last bit of her, the salt doll was able to cry out, “Now I know what the sea is. It is I!”

  The little doll discovered that she had indeed gained the promise of immortality. However, immortality requires the loss of our ego. Only with the detachment from the ego will we find heaven.

  London, 2017

  Seven years on, I was still grappling with the same questions, although initially, these had been relegated to the back of my mind as I enjoyed the easy life in Manila. Later in that period, however, a series of watershed events would change my life irrevocably.

  The years immediately after my 2004 return to the Philippines were perhaps the most tranquil of my life. When I hosted my 60th birthday party in 2007 with 60 guest-witnesses, I was indeed thankful for my many blessings. Everything seemed to have coalesced and fallen into place. I felt totally free to embark on a new chapter to my life, to develop new interests, meet new friends, see new places and, perhaps, even have enough time finally to write.

  I took stock of my income and assets and concluded that I was after all comfortably financially independent, and will probably be for the rest of my life. I should never have to have financial insecurities again. Up to that time, I didn’t feel financially stable working as an independent consultant, and had been too concerned with balancing my day-to-day earnings and expenditures to look at the bigger picture. However, it seemed that I had made some very lucrative investments whilst in London and these were now paying off with enough cash to retire, if not in luxury, certainly in comfort.15 The sense of freedom was exhilarating!

  In Manila, I bought a beautiful and spacious home directly facing a golf course in a good location, with a weekend cottage in the cooler hillside town of Tagaytay—some ninety minutes’ drive away. I enjoyed playing golf whenever I had some free time, either by myself or with others. I initiated new activities in a social club where I had become a member, and joined the company of ladies who lunched. My previous major irritant—the Filipinos’ inefficiency and what I thought was their lackadaisical attitude towards work—was more tolerable now that I was generally retired and not as concerned about productivity.

  My son Paul seemed to be doing fine as well, first at Harrow Boarding School, then at Bath University in the UK, majoring in international management and modern languages. We talked to each other weekly. He always seemed happy when I called. Even my stormy marriage seemed to have stabilised. My husband Klaus, living in Germany and myself in Manila, developed a closer relationship long distance than when we lived together. Indeed, the telephone is a wonderful invention! We would joke—absence makes the heart grow fonder. We both looked forward to these regular calls, and as mentioned earlier, two or three times a year, during school breaks, the family got together for a holiday.

  I also got along better with my family of orientation, even though I thought I had little in common with them. We frequently had inter-generational family reunions, headed by my mother who financed all the gatherings and trips attended by my siblings and their respective families, some thirty-six people altogether. I would join them whenever I was in town, although I would still often miss my father who died in 1987, as he was the one I loved the most.

  Importantly, I was healthy as far as I knew, except for a few anxiety-provoking false alarms. Anxiety was not new to me—I had previously been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). The major reason I came back to the Philippines was for the emotional support of my brother and in general for the warmth and friendliness of the Filipinos, something I had sorely missed in England. Previously, I had lived alone in Buckinghamshire where I was totally isolated. It was thus in Manila where I lost most of my fears—fear of flying, fear of being alone in the night, fear of public speaking, fear of anything that crawled—real or imagined. I even toyed with the idea of stopping my medications. This, I surmised, was as good as it could get. I, who always thought my cup was half-empty, now told myself it was more than half-full. But this was merely the calm before the storm. In only a couple of years, I would face life-changing challenges.

  My mother died suddenly and, as is usual in the Philippines, there were a number of unresolved issues within the family, which led to some deep resentments on my part. To overcome this, I went back to “talk therapy”. It was in the talking through of painful events, as much as the passage of time, that I learned to accept cultural differences. I decided these issues should not break the bonds I had formed with my siblings over the years.

  Meanwhile, in England, Paul said he couldn’t find a job in recessionary Europe and decided to go back to university to take up a graduate course on engineering management, but I later discovered he spent the whole year simply socialising! After I persuaded him to come home to Manila to train, this time for hotel management, he immediately got involved in a passionate and flagrantly impossible romantic relationship.

  Then, Klaus, who had been sickly, fell seriously ill and I found myself constantly flying to and from Germany. Aside from my difficulties with the court-appointed guardian, it was very sad and terribly frustrating to feel there was little I could do except watch him suffer whilst being given what I considered sub-standard care. In a small community like Münster, I could not even converse with people involved in his case as they didn’t speak enough English and I even less German.

  Klaus died after three years. Knowing that more than a hundred billion people had already lived and died before him didn’t ease the pain. Then, a few months later, in October 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: I who had cancer-phobia, who had wondered how cancer victims could bear the burden! The difficult months ahead were when I found my personal God, my spirituality, and my true religion. It seemed all those years behind, I had been barking up the wrong tree. I remembered St Augustine’s prayer:

  You called and cried, and burst my deafness.

  You gleamed and glowed, and dispelled my blindness.

  You touched me and I burned for your peace.

  How do you describe a fear that totally immobilises you; then, in your desperation, feeling there is Someone there, sitting beside you? During my long days of treatment, as I watched myself being constantly wheeled into a suffocating tube, forbidden to move, I felt Him holding my hand. Whilst in prayer, He whispered the answers to my questions.

  Then came another anxiety creeping up within me—that if and when the going got better, and the tearful pleas were heard, that I might forget all the promises I had made and might, once again, lapse back into my former self. Perhaps I need not have worried, because faith, like love, is not a sustainable passion but is, rather, a commitment. You trust because you choose to. Then you develop a set of beliefs and practices that nurture this trust. These need not coincide with formally organised beliefs and practices, but they are yours. They are your truths.

  Back in 2010, I thought that I needed to adjust my lenses in order to see God more clearly, but didn’t know how. Now I see that bereavement, and my experience with cancer, had taught me the way. Trials and suffering are the cleansing fluids of our foggy lenses. They either break those lenses or make them sturdier. In my case, my lenses became more focused, giving me a personal map I had not travelled with before.

  My first conclusion was that belief and faith are not the same. Belief is a faculty of the intellect. Faith is a faculty of the heart, of the soul, even. Your mind can be fickle or stubborn, lazy, or overly critical. Faith is the trust that you have. My model, St Therese o
f Lisieux, described it as the complete abandonment of the child as it sleeps in the crook of its father’s arm. You can have faith without clarity in your beliefs. In my case, I found that I can trust without having to believe in some of the organised Church’s doctrines and dogmas, and that in spite of my doubts, or perhaps because of them, I can lead a more meaningful spiritual life. This is not true the other way around, for belief is meaningless if it is not accompanied by trust. You can believe but not care.

  My clearer lenses showed me the essence of Christianity and I am now comfortably trying to weave my life around it. I had thought I was an agnostic because I had all those questions about beliefs, but I also thought I was spiritual, simply because those questions were very important to me. The nuns who taught me catechism would blush if they heard some of these questions. Did Jesus of Nazareth literally rise from the dead? I didn’t and still don’t know for sure. This is the most basic tenet of Christianity: the belief in the Resurrection. Easter is the most significant day in the Christian calendar. However, does the Resurrection mean literally rising from the dead? How important is it to believe that Jesus of Nazareth factually turned water into wine, raised the dead, and walked on water? I don’t have the certitude of the belief systems most of my Filipino Catholic friends hold. But I now remember what I had read somewhere—that doubt is good. It keeps you from being suffocated by absolute certainty. Moreover, holding the “right” beliefs is not necessary in order to be a good Catholic. In fact, such attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs can lead to fundamentalism, and thus to rejecting those who don’t share the same creeds.

  There is no need to believe as I had written in 2010. Faith is sufficient to satisfy my yearnings. What is necessary is to behave, to behave in a way taught to us not by the historical Jesus of Nazareth—we don’t know him—but by Christ in the Bible, a book which I now believe is not history but allegory and myths to live by. Whilst my new personal religion does not include some of the teachings of the institutional Church, it has given me answers. I am encouraged to learn that Pope Francis has likewise emphasised Christian practices over Catholic dogmas. The leader of the institution of the Catholic Church says I am acceptable to the Church and that is enough assurance for me.

  I attend Mass in a small chapel in the building where I live, part of the diocese of Taguig City in Metro Manila. Very recently, I listened to the priest in his sermon say that he had heard from one of his parishioners a comment that was against an important dogma of the church, and that he (the priest) was tempted to tell him (the parishioner) outright that he should be ashamed to call himself a Catholic. In the past, I would have felt uneasy, perhaps even a bit guilty over the fact that I could sympathise with his parishioner. Now I only felt lonely, because I knew that I was possibly one of the few, if any, amongst those participating at Mass who would have disagreed with him.

  I once approached our priest, offering to help fund a financially needy seminarian in the selfish hope that perhaps I would get to know someone with whom I could share my thoughts. I was surprised by his reply, “Don’t help the smart ones, they have the tendency to leave.” Why, I thought, has the Church anathematised critical thinking?

  That said, I am reminded that the Bible says, “Whenever there are two or three gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” Is it in order to instill some commonality in this community of believers that the Church teaches us to believe in her many doctrines and dogmas without condition? The early Christians lived communally. They formed strong social bonds. Yet, even then, they had a variety of beliefs. The Arians believed that God the Son was not God in the same way that God the Father was. The Nestorians believed that Jesus Christ had two distinctly different natures in two persons—the divine and the human—albeit in one body. It was only later that, in order to unite the community under one belief system, the political winners of the various Church councils established their arcane orthodoxies, and their fellow Christians who held “heretical” beliefs were persecuted.

  Now that I have decided that Christianity does not require absolute knowledge and certainty in beliefs, but only a trust and a wager in God’s love, my job has been simplified. I have to search for like-minded friends, to find a Christian community where I might belong. So far, this circle is limited to writers of books I read, Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong, and James Carroll, to name but a few. However, I also appreciate the friendships of the small community who attend regular Mass at our chapel.

  I think back and am reminded that with all my promises to God during those difficult months after I was diagnosed, I never said I would believe without question whatever the Catholic Church told me. I never promised to obey all its teachings. Jesuit priests often say that obedience is a virtue of humility, but is this obedience without question? There must be some other way to practise humility. We are all different, with different experiences and different personal histories.

  Going back to what I first wrote in 2010, I now realise that my confusion then had been the result of previous, discrete elements of conditioning that had not been glued together into proper insights, rather like a mixed salad without a dressing. I could not reconcile mystical experiences with rational thought—in other words, the Eastern and the Western parts of me.

  For example, the organised Church’s timeline, founded in the East, maturing mostly in the West, reflected the realities of the particular place and time during the various periods of its growth. The Muslim invasions of the 7th century drove a wedge between the East and the West, isolating the West from Eastern influences, (and of course, vice versa, as the East was isolated from the flowering of Western thought in later centuries). Through various historical accidents and political expediencies during the Western Medieval Age, many dogmas were hammered out—dogmas that must be obeyed, often reflecting the moral vision of wise leaders then, albeit people of their place and time. This was the case even as Christianity split into different orthodoxies: Rome against Constantinople. The Latin Church went its own way but split again into different denominations during the Reformation and beyond. By the time of the Enlightenment period, many Western intellectuals considered what was outside reason mere superstition. These “superstitions” often included the mystical experiences of the East.

  What we have today is an amalgam of this moral heritage amidst the cultural norms of our age. In my ruminations, I was sometimes tempted to think that the institution of the Catholic Church corrupted the message of Christianity, what with its avaricious popes, pious but unjust kings, brutal defenders of the Faith, and more recently, paedophile priests and their protectors within the hierarchy of the Church. Perhaps the organised Church did corrupt Christianity, and perhaps not. What I feel is that the Church is a human institution, subject to human strengths and frailties. It may be flawed but we need institutions in order to form communities, and we need communities to keep us from isolation. Without communities, religious impulses alone are not sufficient to give us meaningful lives.

  Moreover, I am not capable enough to develop a coherent worldview, so I must attach myself to traditions that have evolved through the centuries, incorporating the thoughts of great peoples far smarter than me. I must search for that authority, that institution, which teaches what best resonates within myself.

  I tried attending an Anglican Church, then a Presbyterian Church, and a mega-Church of the born-again, amongst others. I discovered that all these Christian Churches are preaching basically the same message: they all teach us to love God and our neighbour. As I was born a Roman Catholic, and if Catholicism is just as good as any other Christian sect, why not remain one? No, contrary to what the priest in my parish said, I am not ashamed to call myself a practising Catholic. It is part of my identity.

  This begs the question—what do I believe in? After all, your beliefs are how you make sense of your life. I am reminded of some of my readings.

  The Bible represents the visions of the God
worshipped by ancient Israelites and Jews, and early Christians. Many of these writings are complementary, but at times, passages we read can also be contradictory, including passages in the four canonical gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. More broadly, the Old Testament has a warrior God, the New Testament a peace-loving God. These to me simply reflect the spiritual needs of the times; Yaweh, for example, fitted the conception of morality among the powerless Jews who needed deliverance. They were denied their homeland, and oppressed by a succession of conquerors. By the time of Augustus in the 1st century AD, there was general peace—Pax Romana—despite the intermittent persecution of Christians, starting in the time of Nero in AD 64, through Diocletian in the beginning of the 4th century, and ending soon after, when Constantine ascended to the throne. The New Testament has thus a more peace-loving God.

  Yet, violence was always never far behind—from genocidal wars to the gladiatorial games. The Holy Mass, as it celebrates the life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death, is also a reminder and a resolution of the violence inherent in the human race. Our propensity to violence is in our DNA, ingrained there through hundreds of thousands of years when we survived by hunting and gathering—scientists now believe homo sapiens already existed some 300,000 years ago. Christ as a victim of violence is recreated every time we attend Mass, with bread and wine transubstantiated into his mystical body and blood, which he enjoins us to eat and drink. Instead of denying the existence of violence, he channels this proclivity to do harm to our fellowmen by teaching us acts of forgiveness and mercy.

  No one knows for certain who wrote the New Testament, although possibly Greek-speaking literate followers and disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. By the end of the 4th century, twenty-seven books had been declared canonical. These have been passed on to us whilst the rest vanished into oblivion, that is, until relatively recent discoveries—in particular, the lost gospels found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. The most well-known of these so-called Gnostic Gospels is the Gospel of St. Thomas. These documents tell us that there were a number of other gospels apart from the four canonical gospels, reflecting the diversity of early Christian beliefs. As Christian orthodoxy was cobbled together in the succeeding centuries, however, those gospels not aligned with the beliefs of various Christian leaders were declared heretical and destroyed.