OPEN-HANDED

Homily for Monday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time, 8 June 2020, Mat. 5:1-12

Many years ago, after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, I had an unforgettable conversation with an old farmer in an evacuation center. The man narrated to me how he had lost everything after a heavy rain had triggered a mudflow that buried their whole barangay, including his rice field, livestock, his house and all his farm implements under almost 30 feet of lahar. After a long conversation, a brother priest from the seminary approached me and said the bus was ready for our departure so I said goodbye to the old man. He was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was a priest. Before we parted ways, he drew out a twenty-peso bill from his pocket. He took my hand and kissed it and put a twenty-peso bill in the palm of my hand. I was of course surprised. “What is the money for?” I asked. He had a faint smile on his face and he said, “How blessed I am to have talked to a priest. Would you please say a thanksgiving Mass for me, Father?”

I took his hand and pressed it on my forehead so I could also receive his blessing and put back the twenty pesos into the palm of his hand and said, “Yes, I would gladly include you in my Mass intentions. No need for you to give me a stipend for it; you need it more than I do. You said you wanted to offer thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for what?” I asked, because he had just told me how Pinatubo had destroyed all his properties.

“Thanksgiving for life, Father,” he said. Then he added, “How blessed we are, we all survived the disaster. I didn’t lose a single member of my family. Isn’t that a blessing?” I was silent in the bus on our way back, because his words continued to ring in my ears: “Isn’t that a blessing?” I was both moved and still having mixed feelings about his declaration.

Today’s Gospel is about blessings, about people who live a blessed life. We call them Beatitudes—they are the introduction to Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount discourse in Matthew chapters 5 to 7. Some of the lines are hard to swallow: like “Blessed are the sorrowful, those who are insulted and persecuted and slandered. “ Really? The others are a bit easier to take. But how do we take them as a whole package of wisdom from Jesus?

In Hebrew, the image of blessing is the ‘ASHUR, the sole of the foot, which,some scholars claim, is the singular form of the plural ‘ASHERIM, which means wealth, fortunes, blessings. I have always found this strange, but they seem to find it perfectly logical. They say your footsteps symbolize your life’s direction. No wonder the prophet Isaiah has this line extolling the feet of the messenger of good news. He says, “How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of the one who brings good news.” A foot in a basin has become an image of servant leadership for Christianity.

Such is the Hebrew worldview. But we Filipinos seem to operate differently. Our image for blessing is not the foot but the hand. Specifically, the palm of the hand: “palad”, meaning, an open hand. And we call a blessed person “MAPALAD“ (open-handed). I used to joke about this because the beggars with open hands seated in front of the Quiapo Church do not seem to project an image of luck or fortune. But that’s how it seems to go with our Pinoy mindset.

We open our hands to give, but we must also be ready to open our hands to receive, if we wish to live a blessed life. Sometimes, we have to have the humility to admit that we are in need, if we want to get by in a situation of want or adversity. People who are too proud will find it hard to receive a blessing.

We open our hands to welcome people, but also to wave goodbye to them. The parting is as much a blessing as the welcoming. We open our hands to offer an embrace or a pat on someone’s back; but the open hand can sometimes also come as a slap on our face. We open our hands and lift them in the air to express surrender, or we stretch them to another person as an offer of reconciliation. We refer to generous people as “open-handed”. For us it means they don’t keep the blessing to themselves; it merely flows through their hands.

I therefore suggest that maybe, the Filipino worldview captures well what Jesus says in these beatitudes. Blessing is an attitude—a positive attitude, of course. Or better yet, a disposition. Matthew describes it as a poverty of spirit, humility, readiness for obedience, lowliness, never haughtiness. And why is grieving also a blessing? Because only those who have loved can grieve.

Blessing is a disposition of openness to grace; how can a bucket be filled up with water if it is closed, or full of trash? Blessing is also the capacity to be moved by the sufferings of others. It is the refusal to be mastered by hatred or anger, or resentments. It is the stubborn choice for the path of peace and nonviolence. It is the readiness to participate in the redemptive suffering and death of him who desires the salvation even of sinners. It is the choice not to wait for the hereafter to experience heaven, but to start it already in the here and now. It is to believe with Jesus that we can live life “ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.”

I started with a story and wish to end now with a story. I remember a father and a mother asking me to bless their child who had Down Syndrome. The boy was giggling all the time. The father said, “You know, Father, this boy is our blessing.” I wonder if other parents would agree, I thought to myself. But these parents claim that their fortunes grew after they welcomed this boy into their lives.

I do not take that to be a superstitious claim. You welcome a child with disability as a blessing. You learn to be more patient, more understanding, more kind, more hardworking. You learn to anticipate his needs, to shield him from bullies, to be lavish in your affection. You double your time in your effort to give him a good future. You do the impossible to make him live a meaningful life. Isn’t that indeed a blessing? So why would you be surprised that his fortunes had multiplied?