In my three-day stay in Bataan, I will not lie that there were times that I felt so uncomfortable that I was starting to doubt whether I could make it. Three days is short, I know, but it felt like a week. With no social media nor reception, I had no idea what I would do. But in retrospect, life should never be too comfortable and we need to come to terms with that. It was during immersion that I realized how alienated I was to just pure human interaction and that there were so many things nature and the relationship of human and nature can teach us. The harmonious, symbiotic relationship of people and nature in Bataan really struck me as I realized this was the most holy way to live. It gave me so much happiness to see their respect towards one another. As true as I have come to know the Gospel of life, by John Paul II – in its preaching as it affirms God’s gift of divine light inside of each of us and how he has blessed us with a light so bright with the responsibility of making known this life to all forms of life on earth. 

“After all, life on earth is not an “ultimate” but a “penultimate” reality; even so, it remains a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.” – Gospel of life, Pope John Paul II

I remember nanay feeding three stray cats because they came inside the house and despite having limited food, she still gave them food. The cats, in turn, also treated the house as their home as well. When their mother goat would not feed her kid, as much as they complained about it, nanay and tatay tried their best to find a way to feed him. They mixed formula and literally were up almost all-night to feed him. Tatay also had a chicken whom he would call before dark to put in the cage to ensure its safety in the night. Simple things like this, made me feel the goodness in their hearts and see how much they loved to love. I think this says so much as to how God created us. Just as He created us out of love, being in His image and likeness, we are love and we are privileged to have the capacity to love. To love is God’s gift and calling. All of God’s creation is beautifully made and we always have to remind others that. 

Another thing my immersion enlightened me is that always and in all ways, God will provide. This is the sentence that kept ringing in my head as my nanay told me of the scarcity of fruits and vegetables at that time. As much as they would like to feed my foster sister and me more variety of food, they could not. Yet they do not pity themselves. They entrust it to time and their fate, not just in food, but to every aspect of their lives, to God. “Eh, kung eto talaga ang kapalaran namin, tatanggapin namin” (If this really is our fate, we will accept it). I was moved by this sentence of great faith and humility. I was aghast by how much they knew they depended on what God gave them. It was interesting how calm they were about it. It gave them peace and peace was more than enough. 

It is easy to feel abandoned by God in times of despair, confusion, and loneliness. We can see that even Jesus in His last hours even felt this way. In His last words, it included: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”. From former experiences and now this immersion, I have realized that in order to appease this feeling, we must first know where we stand. We are finite creations of a divine transcendence and that to question is not really our call to make. We must humble ourselves to understand His plan. We must never lose faith in God no matter what because faith will give us peace as we see His plan unfold. One may not know peace too if he has not experienced distress. Just hold on to faith and God will nurture you. Trust that He will provide. God will provide.

The experience has also taught me to see how to “be with others” matters more than being charitable. To be charitable is a virtue but to actually “be with others” is the action that precedes that. The presence of the latter allows us to see beyond what these people need. Being with others fosters a deeper relationship with them. In my opinion, charity highlights what someone has none or is scarce of, and the difference of myself to another’s whilst to be with others is to join them in their happiness and in their suffering. It is about empathy. As in Donald Korr’s “A Balanced Spirituality”, we have to be morally-charged. And as in Micah 6:8 – We need to love tenderly. This is what God asks of us. 

Being with my foster family was a rare opportunity to strip myself of my vanity; in the materiality of my life and the layers of pretentiousness I have come to adapt. Just being with animals already made me happy. Spending time listening quietly to the trees has healed me. It taught me that to share your life and your time with others and to actually get to know them, we see more similarities than differences; we are all human. And as for them, to share their home, resources, and lives to us just shows how humanity must exist. We need to live by heart. 

In Charlie Chaplin’s speech from “The Great Dictator” he said, “We think too much and feel too little”. I absolutely agree with this. We have been rigidly destroying our environment creating so many things that we think will make us happy but we are doing the opposite. We are killing what will make us truly happy. As in Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si”, he iterates that “Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity.” We need to regulate the change we inflict to the natural world. How can we find true peace when we do not do what we are called to do.