Editor's Note: Jaime Vergara has been a regular contributor to the Opinion page of the Saipan Tribune and this week’s series will be his last this year.
A valedictory piece was my way to end my opinion writing days in the Saipan Tribune. What originally was planned as a single piece will actually be six. Today's gets a downbeat on the island's symbolic life, followed by its economy and politics, then the public schools, a dash of up-close-and-personal, and finally, our broadsheet attempt at polylogue (more than dialogue) in the glocal village.
Apologies to Kierkegaard for the title. Those who have followed our musings will receive the same stream-of-consciousness style, different from the syllogism of an essay, or an article to inform, or an invitation to subscribe to a formulated point of view. Instead, our existentialist bent to share “what is true for me” will continue. The usual caveat applies: if interested, welcome; if not, move on and see you at the next bend!
Eleven years ago after Thanksgiving, I arrived on Saipan to administer the affairs of the Immanuel United Methodist Church at Koblerville. Started as the English language congregation of the Korea-related Immanuel Church on the invitation of Lee Myung Taek, Muksa-nim, it was later chartered into the connectional system of the California-Pacific UMC community. The founding pastor, Barbara Ripple, wife of ex-CDA head Jim Ripple, later assumed the superintending function of the churches in the Hawaii District (including Guam and Saipan), which led to my “recall” while hanging out with the workforce development folks of Honolulu's WorkHawaii.
The congregation's stated mission was formidable, but vocationally challenging and personally engaging: “Gathered from all corners of the earth to worship God in the traditions of the Christian faith; we are sent out to serve those with unheard voices, including children, elders, guest workers, the homeless, those with addictive behaviors, those who hunger for knowledge of the Christian faith.”
Having served as a covenanted religious with the global staff of the experimental family Order:Ecumenical, patterned after the monastics, and sallied forth with contemporized communal vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (Oikumene, the household of God in Greek, demythologized to mean “the real world”), I was in mission at Immanuel.
Presbyterian-raised diabetic Gary Bradley, S.J., of the big heart, expansive mind, and celebrated Chuukish fame, became my first colleague on island. It was short-lived. He celebrated a dramatic and glorious exit while lifting up the holy Eucharist at Kristo Rai in mid-2000. He was a Jesuit, an Order that lost its traditional papal storm-troopers' standing in the Vatican after the Basque Pedro Arrupe led it out of the cobwebs of the Holy See. Trained as a medical doctor, he was in the suburb of Hiroshima when Tinian's Little Boy paid it a visit. Subsequently, he tied the religious faithfulness of the Order to works of mercy and justice, earning him and his Order the distance of the Vatican's Magisterium. The expansive SJs of Chardin and Kuhn were replaced by the secretive Opus Dei of Iberian Escriva, now popularized by Dan Brown's tale telling.
A group of Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesians, along with Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, with Caucasians from the U.S., Canada and Australia, serving contract workers from China, Bangladesh and Pea Eye, the Immanuel UMC congregation moved its altar to the lanai of its Marianas Resource Center in Oleai. The congregational pastor was the center's executive director. At the time, expats in the Commonwealth were in exodus, and the congregation's self-support base, like the island's economy, got precariously thin.
A church's ranking officer defined the choice: be a religious pastor or stay as a secular social worker, but not both. It was a false choice. Going through a difficult crisis of appropriate professional conduct and personal behavior at the time, it was easy to self-defrock and return one's ordination to the appropriate Episcopal hands.
This rehearsal of events is not to call attention to the United Methodist Church, nor, heaven forbid, be interpreted as a self-congratulatory epistle of this itinerant evangel. It is to illustrate a major collapse occurring in the shaping of our social matrix that mirrors the vitality of our communities. Or, expressed negatively, we point to the irrelevant religious luggage that we still carry whose symbol system has become an illusory and escapist portal to our contemporary existence.
Or, more bluntly, the refreshing air of Vatican II and the theological reawakening of the 20th century, echoed in our mainline seminaries and universities with their incredible wisdom and charters of compassion, seem to have been left inside the walls of academe. Or, put another way: our pastors and priests leave their brains behind when they move to their parishes! They get sucked in easily with laic territorial quarrels and petty squabbles, e.g., on the color of the choir robes, or, edifice complexes air-conditioning in the tropics, than with real life's questions, challenges and demands!
Common piety lives in the ancient three-tiered heaven-earth-hell cosmology of Ptolemy, get frenzied on Jesus idolatry, and lives off the body-soul dichotomy of ancient Greek-Roman-Egyptian physiology, long abandoned in our centers of learning. Our island Roman churches have forgotten their catholicity, a feature of their difference from Eastern orthodoxy; our Reformation forces are encrusted in theological debates, equating faith with assent to a set of beliefs. Some still wage the Inquisition, others are stuck in defending defunct papal authority; Luther's progeny are doctrinal stalwarts for scriptural inerrancy. All are marketed as fundamentals of the faith, and pox on the houses who do not subscribe to them! Thus, it is no surprise that we are stuck in the patriarchy of religion, in the machismo of politics, and the glass ceilings of corporate offices.
Truth begins as heresy, we are told. But reality overcomes. Pockets of self-conscious authentic Christian resurgence are occurring, albeit outside institutional confines. The force of cultural diversity is leading to the appropriation of spirit traditions outside the shadows of the cross and the silence of the empty tomb. Fr. Gary once exclaimed: “Ours is not an issue of being religious; ours is an invitation to be spiritual.” Paul of Tarsus fought the strictures of Jewish moralism and the constricting arrogance of Greek thought in his time so that “humans may live in the spirit world in the midst of this world,” and live it abundantly. Let us recover our spirit lives! Let us live!
Home | Weather | Advertising | Classifieds | Subscription | Contact
Us | About Us | Archives
©2006 Saipan Tribune. All Rights Reserved
