There still are

The other week, I had lunch with one of my readers, Fr. Luc Mees, who teaches at the East Asian Pastoral Institute (EAPI). We talked about education and discussed our experiences with our students.

I shared our department’s latest worry: we are being ordered to hold our thesis classes online. Online thesis class was difficult during the pandemic: it was a mismatch for communication research and practice, which thrive on fieldwork, continuous discussion to disentangle findings, and plenary gatherings to iron out kinks in theory, operationalization, even design. Our students always tell us how they wish they had more onsite consultations.

Father Luc shook his head. It wasn’t right, he said, to impose a single mode of learning without acknowledging the unique needs of the learners and their field of study. It is an advocacy he and I share, and one in which he has a wealth of experience: he has lived in many different countries, studied different religions, and taught people from different cultures.

For his part, Father Luc was disappointed that, due to lack of funds and lower enrollment, fewer theology schools were offering subjects in Missiology, the branch of theology which, he said, “studies how to bring people of different faiths and backgrounds together to share their faith and to strengthen their commitment.”

However, he went on, there were still people, whether religious or lay, who needed to know about the nature of mission. Some of them were in his current batch at EAPI. The rest he met over the years, as a teacher who learned so much from his students not only about the beauty of their countries and cultures but also about the urgent needs of a diverse, modern church.

Father Luc shared how his students would sometimes tell him how he had given them new or challenging things to think about. His students learned from dialogue with their classmates as well, when they interacted in sessions and encountered a rich tapestry of cultures and lives. They realized what it truly meant to be on a mission: they had to be curious, teachable, willing to listen, open.

The mission for the church, I found, as I thought on Father Luc’s words later, mirrored many personal callings. We are sent out, whether by our vocation or dreams, to know people fully, ask questions, impose nothing. We need to allow the humanity in someone to surprise us, because there are still souls that yearn for grace and seek the divine, and they must be fed no matter how few they are. There are still learners who crave interaction, whose fields are enriched by being in the presence of others, and who must therefore be given space for such exchanges no matter how rare their species might seem.

In following a perception of the majority, one is in danger of dismissing the diversity that so enriches our community. When we mistake the majority for identity, we risk shortchanging our own mission. We risk betraying our own calling.

All these insights remind me of what happened after the book club meeting, which I talked about last week. I wrote my column in the car on the way home, hurrying while my thoughts were coming in hot and fast: there are still readers! Our conversations are invigorating rather than social battery-depleting! I feel alive!

My pen spilled out the words, and I finished everything just as the car dropped me off at a transport hub in Makati. I paid my fare and marched to the trains, on a high, proud of how fast I had worked. When I disembarked in Quezon City, I reached into my bag to check my phone … and reached … and reached…

And came up with nothing.

My veins ran with ice. I had left my phone in the car.

I couldn’t remember the driver’s name or his plate number. I had no second phone. I had paid in cash, so there was no third-party record of the ride.

I walked out of the station and spotted the cyan car of the fleet, plugged in and charging. I begged the driver for help to track the car down.

The driver made me sit in the backseat while he tried to contact the helpline. When that didn’t work, he sent a message to the drivers’ group chat. When that didn’t work either, the driver apologized, but he shared my number with the group in case anyone could offer a lead later.

When I got home, I opened my laptop and found two messages. One was from a passenger who had found the phone and asked the driver to look for me online. The second was from the driver himself, who asked where I was so that he could bring me the phone.

I told him I could return to Makati so that he didn’t have to drive all the way to Quezon City. He refused: he asked for my address, then drove to my place, through traffic and rain, so that he could give me the phone himself.

Lesson learned: do not forget to secure all belongings.

Bigger lesson learned: despite the horror stories that fill our news feeds, there are still kind souls and good people whose first instinct is to help rather than criticize.

There is still good in the world, and a world inside every human being. We only need to be open to surprises.

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