Astrid S. Tuminez: A Sacred Yes: Hope in the Gospel of Jesus Christ

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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A Foundation

God and ghosts inhabited my childhood. The ghosts came first, running rampant across my parents’ villages in the Philippines. I was born in my father’s village of Tigbauan, where spirits seen and unseen inhabited our fields and homes. Three men dressed in white once followed my father as he walked across rice paddies in the middle of the night. Then the shadow of a big mango tree tracked his steps as he walked home after a temporary shift as a policeman in town. My oldest sister, atop a serisa tree in our cousin’s yard, picking tiny, sweet berries, suddenly felt an ice-cold hand wrap itself around her wrist. We took for granted the reality of things we didn’t understand—hairy growling creatures coming down from the hills and sticking coconut frond spines up the slats of my aunt’s bamboo floor, my uncle running away from a witch disguised as a cat that incessantly bounced up through his grass roof and down through his bamboo floor and back up again, and an angry wild boar jumping on my Chinese uncle-in-law’s breakfast table (after he had killed some animals while hunting), staring him down with a curse, and causing him to die the next day.

When I was two my family left the rice fields for the city, where my life took a decidedly different turn. We built a hut on stilts in the slums on a beach that looked across to my mother’s hulking home island called Guimaras. Along the beach a short distance from our hut stood the walls of a beautiful Catholic school founded in the late 1800s and run by the Daughters of Charity. Every year, young nuns visited the slums, bringing clothes, canned goods, and catechism to poor families like mine. That’s how Sister Elvira Correa, a cherubic-faced nun with a heart to match, came to knock on my hut. After speaking with my mother and older sisters, she determined that we were smart enough to be invited to attend school for free. The nuns ran one of the most exclusive and expensive schools in the city, but had started a “free department” for poor girls, whose studies would be subsidized by the tuition-paying children in the main building across the street. I was five years old.

On the first day of Catholic school, I asked my aunt to accompany me to the registrar’s office. The officer behind the glass window asked me to write my name on a form. My aunt and I looked at each other, realizing we didn’t know how to spell my name. “Astrid” was a Scandinavian name, picked by my mom from a stray magazine that featured Queen Marie-Astrid of Belgium, and gifted to me. We wrote down “A-S-T-R-E-D.”

I soon learned to spell my name correctly. The school—Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus (College of the Sacred Heart of Jesus)—was my equivalent of the wardrobe that led C.S. Lewis’s kids into Narnia. I entered a magical—if daunting—new world of numbers and letters, classrooms with electric lighting, nail inspections on Monday mornings, uniforms, book-borrowing privileges, and weekly mass and confession. I also learned more about God (less about ghosts) in one of the strictest settings for that kind of learning.

We called our school Sagrado for short. Religion (later renamed as “Christian Living”) was permanently part of the curriculum. A senior nun, known as Mother Superior, ran the institution. Other nuns served alongside lay employees as teachers and administrators. I looked to the nuns as authorized and authoritative servants of God. They floated ethereally along the Spanish-tiled corridors in their perfectly pressed white habits, blue wimples, and black rosary beads dangling on the front of their floor-length skirts. In class, they showed glossy colored pictures that made me stare in endless awe: heaven and hell, the devil with his pitchfork, angels behind a fair-skinned lady listening in rapt attention to a church sermon, a suffering Jesus (with a crown of thorns wrapped around his flaming heart), and an all-powerful, stern God sitting on a throne in heaven. This early religion made me fear God and think of him as a punisher. But the narrative had a mitigating figure: the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was everywhere—in the chapel, in books, on medallions, in calendars, and in all the churches and cathedrals of the city. We prayed to her more than to God the Father. In the rosary, we recited “Our Father” only once for every ten “Hail Marys.” Mary interceded with love and mercy between me and the Father, and between me and Christ. She was understanding and kind. We sang the beautiful “Magnificat,” which told of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, the revelation that she would become the mother of God, and, because I loved her, that she was my mother, too. My own mother had left my family at that point, her relationship with my father having become too hard to endure. As a result, the phrase in the song that “Mary is my mother, too” meant the world to me.

As a child, I wanted to know good from evil. I wanted to please God and repent of my sins. Every week at mass and in the confessional box, I acknowledged my stumbling and failures, and humbly accepted penance. I prayed many times a day. I obeyed. I wanted to do well on the checklist of faith that the nuns taught me.

One day, I had a brief but life-changing conversation with Sister Susana Palces, the bright, young nun who taught my Christian Living class. We were doing a reflection—just a small group of girls who were 9 or 10 years old—and she looked at me and said, “You know, Astrid, to follow Christ means you need to see God in every person.” That phrase struck my very soul. Up to that point, I had thought of religion as a points system with rewards and punishment. I did things for points, in return for which the punitive God wouldn’t punish me and I would not have to burn in hell. I had also judged others as hapless souls who were doing more poorly than I in the points system. Sister Susana’s counsel made me pause and reflect. Perhaps religion was something else. Perhaps it was less about points for going to mass or confession or saying novenas (long, special prayers) or rosaries or engaging in self-flagellation (which many Filipinos literally enacted each year on Good Friday). Perhaps it was more about whether, in my thoughts, words, and actions, I could truly see God in others and treat them with kindness, respect, and reverence. It seemed like slow, hard, lifetime work.

Sister Susana’s counsel led me to begin trying to see others truly as divine beings. I continued to believe fervently in God. Prayer buoyed and comforted me. When I was remorseful, I felt forgiven. In my poor, perilous, and sometimes frightening neighborhood, I felt angels nearby, witnessing the efforts and suffering of many souls. I turned for solace and kindness to Mary as my mother. My childhood belief in the world of spirits made it easy for me to have faith, the “evidence of things not seen.” But I had evidence, too.

I was walking to school one day and about to cross an intersection when I distinctly heard a voice, “Unbuckle your shoe.” Sagrado required black shoes and white socks as part of our uniform. I bent down to unbuckle my shoe. At the precise moment I crossed the street—perhaps due to my or the driver’s inattention—a jeepney (one of those elongated jeep contraptions that ferry people everywhere in the Philippines) ran over half my right foot. Because the shoe was unbuckled, I managed to yank my foot out just in time. I arrived in second grade class that day with my heart pounding but my mind calm, knowing that God somehow saw me and wanted me to know it.

Absolute Certainty