Find yourself

Since I started writing my columns on Rizal’s family, I have been inundated with requests from students for interviews. I have given in and so now my dining table is full of roses in vases and my office staff and I are filled with cake and pastries and fruits. I have also been receiving many texts, some of which just drive me wild.

This one, for example: “Hi poh gud afternun comments: why po isinulat sa noli me tangere yung characteristic or attetude ng mga obispo or priest ay indi makatao or makadiyos or naging malupit ang mga priest. meron po bang kinalaman ang background ni rizal kaya niya i2 isinulat yung bastardo dw? dinamdam b i2 ni rizal yung familybackground? what do you feel kung pgusapan kayo ng mga tao na indi maganda ang pamilya nyo kc dugong brokenfamily? at how do u overcome yung da truth na ang brokenfamily ay indi maganda pakinggan at ang tingin ng iba.”

So now I don’t quite know (1) how to understand this entire text, (2) how to translate it, (3) how to answer it. In the end, I decided to write about it, at the very least to discourage this person from texting and confusing me, at most, to teach people like her to please think clearly before you text so you can type in your thoughts more clearly, so the reader, in this case I, can understand exactly what you want. You know, ordinarily, I am a patient columnist who responds to almost every text received. But that also means every text that I can understand. And I did not understand this one. I don’t know if that’s because I think I can speak straight English and straight Tagalog but I cannot speak or understand crooked Taglish. Or maybe this person is just really confused. So let me make an attempt at translation. I think this is what she should have written:

Good afternoon. I have a few questions. Why did Rizal portray bishops and priests as being anti-people and anti-God — sometimes they were very cruel — in Noli Me Tangere? Is there something in Rizal’s background that makes him write about bastards? (I imagine this to mean the character of Maria Clara, who was the daughter of a friar in Noli Me Tangere.) How did Rizal feel about family background? What would you feel if people talked about you criticizing your background, saying you have the blood of a broken family? And how do you overcome the truth that “broken” family does not sound nice nor does it look nice in the eyes of others?

Wow, that was tough to translate!

I think your questions really had more to do with broken families than with Jose Rizal, but I shall respond. Jose Rizal wrote Noli Me Tangere in the late 1800s about life in the Philippines. He wrote the way things were. Then the country was under Spanish rule. The friars had the upper hand. In those days, sons of families had three prestigious careers to choose from — law, medicine, or church. So in Spanish families, if you had a brother who was a doctor and another who was a lawyer, you were almost forced to become a priest. Now, priests took a vow of celibacy. If you were not inclined, then you would be tempted, give in and consequently have a child, declared illegitimate by the Catholic Church then. There was then a union of church and state. An illegitimate child was rudely called a bastard. When Rizal cast Maria Clara in that role — as a friar’s secret child — he was writing about the times.

My name is Barbara Cruz Gonzalez. I am related to Rizal on the Cruz (who married Maria Mercado) side. On my Gonzalez side my great-great-grandfather was a Spanish friar. His surname was Lopez but he had a relationship with an Amparo Gonzalez. Under the law then (and now) illegitimate children were supposed to carry their mother’s surname. I thought they had only one child — my great-grandfather. It turns out they had six children, so they must have lived like man and wife. Am I embarrassed that my great-great-grandfather was a Spanish friar? NO! Why not? I had nothing to do with that. I was not around to encourage or stop them. I am actually quite amused by it and talk about it freely. Was that a broken home? If you consider that he was a priest and could not marry her, then maybe it just wasn’t an ordinary Catholic home but was it a Catholic home? They were both Catholics and I’m sure their children were baptized. Was it a broken home? I don’t know. But it was not the standard home.

Of course, Rizal was proud of his family background. Everybody must be proud of his or her family background. If you are a single mother, you should be proud that you had the courage to have your child and to raise your child or children alone. And your children should be proud of you. It takes so much courage to live in a country that suffers from a hangover of colonization by the cross. We hold primitive Catholic values. I am sure that if you compared our Catholic values here and the values of Spain today, you would see a difference. There is now divorce in Spain but no divorce in the Philippines. Does having no divorce bill keep families together? No. Here, many people separate without a divorce bill. What a divorce bill does is it sees to it that the children are adequately supported by alimony and visiting hours between the parents are legally regulated.

Insofar as caring about how coming from a broken home sounds and/or looks, you should be ashamed of yourself. Who are they to say that a home is broken because only one parent lives in it? That parent does the work of two and supports the family alone. One should be very proud of that. My children come from a broken home, but we never felt our home was broken. We felt it was different, but it was a lot of fun. In our home, laughter almost always rang. Sure there were tough times, too, but we are proud that our home was what it was. It taught us to be flexible, not judgmental. This business of broken homes running in the blood is not true. It is a woven truth, not worth paying too much attention to. You have to believe in yourself and how you look at things.

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If you need help in looking into yourself, knowing yourself better, broadening your mind and laughing more, please, please, please enroll in the forthcoming Jung class on “Exploring the Self.” It will run from March 4 to 5, then March 11 to 12. For information, call Chato at 0917-8317773. Do it instead of texting me with confusing and ridiculously old-fashioned questions.

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Please text your comments to 0917-8155570.