NO ONE IS AN ISLAND

Homily for Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter 08 May 2020, John 14:1-6

“In my Father’s house, there are many rooms.” Today I invite you to reflect on just that line in the Gospel.

But first, allow me to begin by telling you the story of Pao, short for Paolo, the boy who was born in jail. I wrote about him, with his permission, of course, in the book entitled THE GOSPEL OF MERCY ACCORDING TO JUAN/A. He had just finished high school and was going into college when I first met him in jail; he was then serving as altar server for my First Friday Mass with the jail inmates.

He struck me as a jolly young man, the type who would win in a Mr. Congeniality contest in a school campus if there is such a contest at all. I wouldn’t have thought he was born and raised in the most unusual circumstances if he had not told me the story himself. His mother had been arrested (along with his grandmother) for syndicated estafa, a nonbailable case, right during that year that she happened to be pregnant with Pao. She gave birth to him in prison a few months later.

Pao would have been taken for sheltering by the DSWD as soon as he was born, if his mother had not pleaded to be allowed to breastfeed her newborn child for just a few more weeks—as advised by the midwife who had assisted her at the delivery. When the social worker came back a few weeks later, the mother told them that the child had been taken to the province by her close relative, which was of course not true. Even the jail guards and the inmates had cooperated in concocting the story because they had all become very fond of the boy, in the meantime. The prison warden himself stood as godfather when Pao was baptized in jail.

And so Pao grew up in prison; he was the only one inside who had the freedom to move from cell to cell, and inmates eagerly volunteered to babysit him. He got used to calling them all the male prisoners daddies and uncles, and the female inmates mommies and aunties. And to the great delight of the prison warden, the behavior of the prisoners radically changed because of the presence of Pao. No gangsterism, no fighting, no cussing, no smoking whenever Pao was around.

When the mother and grandmother of Pao got convicted, there was no way they could take Pao with them to the Prision Correccional of the National Bilibid Prison. And so Pao had to stay behind in the city jail. It was a tearful parting but the whole prison community assured the mother that would look after Pao. They even put up a common fund for Pao’s elementary education.

Pao went out everyday to a nearby school for his regular schooling, and returned to the prison after school. He even received special tutoring from some of the better educated prisoners, so he did very well in public school.

Incidentally, Pao’s mother and grandmother are now out of prison and, together with Pao, have become family again. But Pao continues to visit his “larger family” and care for them.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, because I was reminded of him when I read the line in today’s Gospel where Jesus said, “In my Father’s house, there are many rooms.” Pao himself narrated to me that once, he was invited by one of his classmates to have lunch with his family (I mean that classmate’s family.). When he went back to jail, which he considered his home, his daddies and uncles in one cell surrounded him and asked him excitedly how it went and what it was like. Here’s what Pao told them, “You know, they have very small houses outside. Here I have a big house with many rooms. There are very few people in their families—just one daddy and one mommy. Here I have many daddies and mommies. So I told them I belong to a big big family that lives in a big big house with many rooms.”

But you see, Pao was somehow correct. Home, after all, is not just inside the four walls of our dwellings. It is rather wherever people can make space for each other, where people treat each other with respect and care. Come to think of it, even if people are related to each other by blood, or even if they live together under one roof, if they hate each other or spite each other or treat each other with contempt, they will be like strangers to each other. They will not be a family. Their house will not become a home.

Isn’t it beautiful to hear of the many creative ways families try to sustain their connectedness to each other even as we are forced by this pandemic to keep a safe physical distance from each other, especially in the effort to keep the elderly and the vulnerable from getting infected? Aren’t we touched by the sight of couples or children and grandparents kissing each other while standing at opposite sides of a closed glass window or door?

None of my twelve siblings is into Facebook, but they literally transformed our Viber chat group into something like FB, doing all the sharing, commenting, liking, news updating there. My sister who recently celebrated her silver wedding anniversary prepared all the ingredients to a sumptuous meal in the province. She managed to have all her pre-cooked materials sent to the house of another sister through a delivery service, with the instruction on how to put it all together, garnish it, adjust its flavor and and have it sent to yet another sister’s house for repacking. Meanwhile my brother’s daughter already arranged with another delivery service where to have the repacked food picked up for delivery to the rest of us. And then, today at lunch, we sent photos to one another of the same food—present on our tables, gushing about the flavors that remind us of our late mother’s cooking. That’s family, beyond the physical distancing.

Please, let us stop using the word social distancing and switch to the right terms—which is “safe physical distancing” even while we try to remain close to each other in spirit. Social distancing is about consciously putting up barriers from each other on the basis of religion, economic status, educational status, political convictions, etc. It has a very negative meaning. It’s when we treat each others as OTHERS than as NEIGHBORS, when we become intolerant of each other’s differences and refuse to even enter into dialogue with them.

There can be no community without COMMUNION, without the spiritual or social bonding which we can still nurture even while we are physically distanced from each other by situations like imprisonment, war, migration, or even by circumstances like this pandemic.

You cannot grow a community from every collectivity unless the people who have been brought together learn to open their minds and hearts to each other, unless they learn to feel the joys and sufferings of others as their own, unless they learn compassion and care.

Jesus is our model homemaker par excellence. He teaches us to treat every human being as a brother or sister, not just those we are related to by blood. By teaching us to call on the same God as Father, he also teaches us to regard each other as brothers and sisters. No wonder he calls himself THE WAY. He united divinity and humanity in himself. In him God becomes permanently connected to humankind and humankind to God. He also becomes our strong link to each other as we call ourselves members of the same body of Christ.

When we started our relief operations in our diocese, a question was posed to me by a parishioner: will we also extend assistance to non-Catholics? I answered and said, “How can we not do so and still call ourselves Catholic? To discriminate against those who are poor, hungry and in need, just because they belong to another religion, is the most unCatholic kind of behavior I can think of,” I said.

Remember what we used to sing in Church when we were much younger? Remember that song NO MAN IS AN ISLAND? Let me quote it but try to make the lyrics more gender-sensitive and a bit more inclusive. Instead of NO MAN, we can just say NO ONE.

NO ONE IS AN ISLAND
NO ONE STANDS ALONE
EACH ONE’S JOY IS JOY TO ME
EACH ONE’S GRIEF IS MY OWN
WE NEED ONE ANOTHER
SO I WILL DEFEND
EACH ONE AS MY NEIGHBOR
EACH ONE AS MY FRIEND!