PARADOXICAL

The faith chronicles

Friday, February 20, 2026

An accurate summary of the Rodrigo 'Digong' Duterte Presidency

Former President Duterte earned global infamy, praise at home

Story by Agence France Presse

MANILA, Philippines — Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte earned global infamy for the deadly drug crackdown that led to his arrest over crimes against humanity charges, despite his huge popularity at home.

A profane-lipped populist and self-professed killer, Duterte’s anti-crime campaign resulted in the deaths of thousands of alleged dealers and addicts. Rights groups say many of those killed were poor men, often without any proof they were linked to drugs.

Yet while drawing condemnation abroad, tens of millions of Filipinos backed his swift brand of justice — even as he joked about rape in his rambling speeches, locked up his critics and failed to root out entrenched corruption.

Trust on Duterte dented by pandemic

That trust was dented by the coronavirus pandemic, which plunged the country into its worst economic crisis in decades, leaving tens of thousands dead and millions jobless with a slow-paced vaccine rollout.

Duterte’s woes deepened in 2021, when the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) sought an investigation into crimes against humanity during his crackdown between 2013 and 2018.

He served out his six-year term, leaving office in 2022.

Arrested before his 80th birthday

On March 11, 2025, just weeks before his 80th birthday, Duterte was arrested and flown to the Netherlands, seat of the ICC, where he has been in detention since.

Duterte, who turns 81 next month, has repeatedly said there was no official campaign to kill addicts and dealers.

But his speeches included calls for violence, and he did tell police to use lethal force if their lives were in danger.

‘Kill them’

“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” Duterte said hours after being sworn in as president in June 2016.

Months later, he would liken the deadly crackdown to the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews, while vastly underestimating the number of people killed in the Holocaust.

“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts (in the Philippines). I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

His unfiltered comments are part of his self-styled image as a maverick, which found traction in a nation where corruption, red tape and institutional dysfunction impact people’s lives at every level.

Major figure in politics

While unable to run for president again and despite his detention, Duterte remains a major figure in politics.

He was elected to his old job as mayor of his southern stronghold of Davao in midterm elections held in May last year, though jail stopped him serving.

A one-time ally of the Marcos family, the dynasties have grown apart. Duterte and his vice president daughter, Sara Duterte, are engaged in a feud with current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

‘I simply love Xi’

Rodrigo Duterte, a former lawyer and prosecutor, was born into a political family. His father served as a cabinet secretary before the nation plunged into a Marcos dictatorship in 1972.

During his long tenure as Davao mayor, Duterte was accused of links to vigilante death squads that rights groups say killed more than 1,000 people — accusations he has both accepted and denied, and which form part of the ICC charges.

His presidency was also marked by a swing away from the nation’s former colonial master, the United States, in favour of China.

“I simply love Xi Jinping,” Duterte said of the Chinese president in 2018.

“He understands my problem and is willing to help, so I would say ‘thank you, China’.”

As part of that rapprochement, he set aside rivalry with Beijing over the resource-rich South China Sea, opting to court Chinese business instead.

He claimed this friendship helped secure millions of doses of a Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccine, but supplies still fell far short.

Billions of dollars of promised trade and investment also failed to materialize.

Duterte now faces his second court date on Monday, when judges will decide whether the prosecution’s allegations are strong enough to proceed to trial.

posted by Resty Odon # 11:38 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Cooking is Chemistry

(If we look at cooking as essentially a laboratory experiment, food ingredients become chemical reagents that promise nuclear explosions and other such mini-disasters in the kitchen.)

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Forced by life's unexpected circumstances, I had to learn how to cook. If I didn't, I wouldn't eat, or just content myself with pre-cooked fare, or worse, fast food, or worst of all, canned goods. The experimental period -- which is still ongoing -- has brought me a heap of kitchen disaster stories.

One time while debating with myself in the kitchen, I insisted on including mature luffa into the smoldering misua (Chinese noodle) soup I was making. When lunchtime came, I was rewarded with the experience very much similar to chewing sliced bath towels. I was reminded that human beings, unlike cows, don’t have the enzymes needed to digest cellulose in a four-chambered stomach (i.e., reticulum, rumen, omasum and abomasum).

Cooking, I learned, is common sense or instinctive. There are certain ingredients that naturally go together, as though by synergy, like strawberries and cream. So you don't want to combine chemicals invented by man and Mother Nature that should never go together, like banana fruit with coffee or Coke, or you accidentally invent poison. One time, I was laughing my head off at this extreme example forwarded by Stef: pear and arugula smoothie with ginger and walnuts. Yes, some genius in the kitchen actually tried making it.

Okay, cooking is not really common sense, but actually chemistry. Filipino cuisine, in particular, is a lot of balancing act between acidity, saltiness, sweetness, and sometimes bitterness, so the equation always results in A x NaCl x S x B = umami.

But don't treat the kitchen too much as a laboratory -- the saucer as petri dish, the boiler as beaker, and the pots and pans as Erlenmeyer flask. People might mistake you for a mad scientist. I recall a departed aunt's story of how a homemaker in Pandacan, Manila, eagerly planned and prepared then elaborately presented a new dish of sweetish pork stew in milk for a buffet spread. Her dish came off as too exotic that not even one guest dared touch it. Of course, that one dish became the talk of the town in a place where people never associated milk with pork.

I have had my own lessons to learn in terms of experimentation. One time, out of love for cilantro, which I know a lot of people hate with a passion, I decided to use an extravagant amount for a dish I was cooking. I never expected that the exotic Chinese aroma would waft like a cloud from the house, invading neighborhood territory. Pretty soon, the neighbors started dialing the police's Narcotics Division, after sensing something was amiss.

Another time, I eagerly threw a whole bunch of basil leaves into a mung bean sprout Vietnamese recipe I was trying to copy. The entire house smelled like Colgate for three days.

Now, without exaggeration, this really happened to my grandmother, not out of the desire to experiment but in terms of making a new scientific discovery without intending it. One time, she said, she unknowingly mistook the kitchen rag for an ingredient in pinakbet (local vegetable stew). The soot-encrusted cloth revealed itself only at the bottom of the pot when everybody was already burping. Kitchen rags should be considered in the future as essential flavor-enhancer, going by the evidence, a good MSG substitute.

In a similar vein, there was a time I reheated a dish that unknowingly had turned sour. The discovery was made just a split second before shoveling the trash into my mouth. I sure was glad my nostrils were able to detect in time that something was wrong in the sourness -- not the usual pleasurable sourness of, say, sinigang, or I would have dealt with allergic attacks. There is a subtle difference, I have discovered, between acidity, fermentation, and spoilage.

Then there was also a time I fell in love with the flavor of ground pepper, so I indulged on it the first chance I got: I drizzled ground pepper generously on top of a piping hot rice porridge (lugaw). I couldn't count how many times I sneezed right after. The discovery? Not everything edible invented by God is good for you.

Disaster stories of other nature are a dime a dozen. During a house renovation, someone I won't name here (clue: a cousin's aunt) mistook the mound of white cement powder lying near the kitchen for the flour reserved for the sweet-and-sour pork balls. By the time everyone was hungry at lunch, we had to deal with the appalling scene of throwing out cemented minced pork balls from our mouths.

Nobody at home likes steamed veggies. I learned this lesson early, so to tempt people to eat healthy, I decided one day to brown assorted veggies on the pan after reading about how Maillard reaction (or the caramelization of sugars) is responsible for making food more delicious. The problem is I forgot the whole thing; I ended up broiling them to blackened state. Nobody likes charred food as well, I learned the hard way. I was also reminded that people might know by instinct that burnt protein is cancerous.

Out of sheer excitement, I once cooked a tomato-ey pork stew large enough for a family of ten, even though there were only three of us at the time. We ended up having the darned stew for two days of breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner -- plus of course, the reward of hyperacidity. Nobody had taught me that using baking soda would do the trick of counteracting the acidity.

On another fine day, I fell so in love with turmeric that I put turmeric in everything I cooked apart from curry. I put turmeric in fried egg, in stewed vegetables, in sautéed beans, etc. It's like there's an ongoing week-long Turmeric Festival. The results were varied: I discovered exotic new dishes, and I came up with something downright inedible.

But the turmeric fume, I found, is addictive. To be edible, I learned that turmeric must be chopped finely, if not ground finely into sprayable consistency. It is probably better than illegal recreational drugs. No other rival edibles come close as aromatherapy or as potpourri, save for lavender, lemon, apple, and orange scents.

After reading an article online about the virtues of eating at least 15 kinds of raw food every day, I went to a Mongolian hot bowl restaurant at the Mall of Asia in Pasay to try an old meal that I used to have there. I was sure it would give me my RDI (recommended daily intake) of 15 live enzymes from 15 half-cooked species into my bowl, so I threw the following plants into my DIY Mongolian mix:

15. carrot
14. cabbage
13. Chinese pechay
12. mongo sprouts
11. turnip strips
10. cucumber
9. tomato
8. leeks
7. young corn
6. peanuts
5. pineapple tidbits
4. onion
3. garlic
2. obviously since I can't eat rice raw, there should be celery too

Since one more raw food was missing, I scrounged around for an addition until I found a stand of freshly squeezed sugarcane juice somewhere in the mall's food court. That rounded out the list for the day. But nobody told me you could get dizzy with sugarcane juice due to the compound called policosanol combined with the shooting up of blood sugar levels.

My immune system was happy now. There was one major hitch, however: with everything half-cooked, the beef and pork strips I added as protein were stringy. (The chicken, squid rings, squid balls and fish balls I added on the side were fine.)

The biggest disappointment? This exercise in culinary titration hardly guaranteed a delicious meal. The slop tasted more like medicine, the way different perfumes mixed up together end up smelling foul, like urine. Even the Szechuan sauce failed to hold everything together. There must have been some redox reactions involved there, some proton exchanges that shouldn't have happened. What did I expect? Maybe I shouldn't have put in those cucumbers and pineapples so near each other.

In my excitement, I forgot that cooking involves chemicals, and there might be nature-identical reactants that, like I already said, don't like each other being paired together, unlike, say, tomato and broccoli, which reportedly go together fine. Apparently among certain biochemicals, there is some sort of cooperation or drug interaction at work. Quercetin in red onion and apple skin, bromelain in pineapple, and vitamin C reportedly work together as a natural antihistamine (to combat allergy), and there are other emerging studies like this. But I bet Filipinos have always known this by instinct with their endless riffs on dips (sawsawan), to bring all disparate elements together. The ingredients are not really standardized because, to suit one's taste, each bit is calibrated and re-calibrated to the angstrom and micron scales until one gets all the valence electrons cancelling out each other.

There are also other rules at play, like certain vitamins are water-soluble and some are fat-soluble, while some easily get destroyed by heat and some are not absorbed by the body if the food they come in are eaten raw. A study has shown that the fat in avocado, or olive oil, for example, in your tomato or vegetable salad will make the lycopene and other fat-soluble nutrients bioavailable; they would go down the drain otherwise.

Then then are what they call anti-nutrients. The phytate, phytic acid, and polyphenols in rice and beans, for instance, prevent our body from absorbing iron. Furthermore, soaking beans before cooking them, research says, "can help remove some of the oligosaccharides and make it easier for your body to break down the beans, making it less likely for you to have gas after eating them." Fruits and vegetables are similarly advised against as part of evening meal, as they result in gas.

There's also this new trick I've learned when dealing with carbs and sugar, which are alleged to be the top health culprit of all. As one nutritionist advised to those who refuse to go on a no-carbs or no-sugar diet, to observe not just portion control but also eating sugar together with fats and proteins to slow down the digestion and absorption. Another strategy in dealing with carbs is turning them into resistant starch by letting them cool first until they literally turn cold before reheating them prior to eating.

There are times when Einsteins in the kitchen need a break too from all that experimentation. One day, I found myself cursed by both laziness and penury, so I had not much choice. I subsisted on instant noodles and canned goods for days. I rendered much of the kitchen an irrelevant part of the house. In times like that, I discovered that the can opener is the only valuable laboratory tool.

posted by Resty Odon # 5:32 PM 0 Comments

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

February 2026 Recap / Notes to Self

Got so busy with my romantic life this month that everything went in a haze.

It's a prank! Of course I am always occupied with something, precisely because of my nonexistent love life. But strangely this month, all I picked up are either oddities of the highest order or utter ridiculousness, with mostly nothing in between. Is it just me, or the world has really gone crazy?

***

Actress Catherine O'Hara, the famed mother in Home Alone, died.

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Justin Bieber performed at the Grammy Awards with just his boxers on (and socks too just in case he felt cold) -- reportedly to promote his brand of boxer shorts.

***

The issue of mass student promotion became a hot issue in DepEd, with the convening of EDCOM II (Second Congressional Commission on Education).

***

"The song “Ale” became an instant hit again after a TikToker named @imfunnyirl, who had only around a thousand followers, went viral with her unpolished, unstaged dance to the song uploaded on December 19, 2025. Soon after, many other TikTok users recreated and refined the dance steps, further boosting the song’s popularity, which continued to surge up until February 2026."

"The viral version used in the trend was the third version of “Ale,” recorded by the Bloomfields band in 2007. The original song was written and performed by Bodjie Dasig in 1989, and it became part of his first album released in 1990. Later on, the song was also covered and re-recorded by Richard Reynoso, introducing it to a new generation of listeners."

***

A guy named Jeffrey Epstein was all over the news, and the details were barf-level grisly (sex with kids, eating kids? what is that?). Truth be told, we've been hearing of such bizarrezeries about the very rich and famous and their grand conspiracies and strange religion for so long, yet the reports we are receiving are still shocking.

***

Wow! > "The Northern Aral Sea is making a historic comeback — with water volumes surging by 42%!"

***

A clueless, naive, or trying-to-sound-cool-and-hoity-toity person on social media called palitaw "coconut mochi," and all hell broke loose. Of course, because palitaw is palitaw, not coconut mochi. Hahaha. Rawr! But I too was guilty of parroting other writers who say "kinilaw is like the Filipino version of ceviche" and so on, not knowing any better.

***

Many people rode on the AI caricature trend on ChatGPT, with the prompt, "Create a caricature of myself based on everything you know about me." Not happy with mine because I recognized the result as someone else. I think it's my fault for uploading the wrong photo.

***

Former House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. passed on to the great beyond.

I have no strong recollections of De Venezia who is now being extolled as a "consensus builder" in a world where fractiousness is the norm, and being credited for forming political supergroups such as Rainbow Coalition and Sunshine Coalition. It must have been because I have been biased right from the start: he was a fellow Pangasinense like PGMA and PFVR (Fidel Ramos) who likewise reached the summit of his political career, and naturally I rooted for them just because "they were our guys" (haha). ...Except when GMA got involved in that you-know-what with what's-his-name COMELEC commissioner, which the public got wind of through an illegal move (wiretapping) by who knew who.

***

There was something about a gold medalist that I failed to catch.

***

Someone creative (and naughty) invented the term Tsinador to refer to Sen. Marcoleta (et al.?). Another one renamed him Rodent and another reworded his surname to Mark*beta. This tells you know how much he is hated by many. But take note that he won as senator in the first place. There is a reason for that, too, that those on the opposite side of the fence fail to grasp -- at their own risk!

***

An old slang term, "bonjing," gained traction for some reason.

***

Hahha! > "Punches fly in Turkish Parliament as Erdogan’s justice minister nominee sparks a fierce brawl" among legislators in suits, that is!

***

LOL > "During New York Fashion Week, an unexpected moment turned into a viral story when a man confidently walked the runway wearing what looked like a garbage bag. For a brief moment, many in the audience assumed it was part of the show, as bold and unusual outfits are common at fashion events. His calm walk and confident attitude helped him blend in, proving how much confidence can influence perception. Soon, security realized that the man was not an official model and escorted him off the runway. The incident amused viewers online and sparked conversations about modern fashion, where even the most unconventional looks can sometimes pass as high style. While the man was not part of the event, his brief appearance highlighted how easily confidence and presentation can blur the line between art and reality. The clip quickly went viral, serving as a humorous reminder that in the world of fashion, confidence can sometimes be mistaken for creativity."

***

Viral ngayon sa San Jacinto, Pangasinan, ang isang tindahan na pinangalanang “ELLEN ELEVEN,” na mas lalong ikinatuwa ng netizens dahil eksaktong katapat pa ito ng sikat na convenience store na 7-Eleven. Dahil sa kakaibang pangalan at witty na puwesto, mabilis itong naging usap-usapan online at patunay na talagang hindi matatawaran ang Pinoy creativity at sense of humor."

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In a live newscast, news anchor Karen Davila mistakenly called another reporter named Karen as "Karen Davila," thus adding another amusing incident in the lengthening list of local newsroom boo-boos. But the gold medal still belongs to Michael Fajatin, with the silver going to Jiggy Manicad, and the bronze to maybe Mike Enriquez? ("Ang sarap mo, Pia!").

Alternately, even the best of them commits embarrassing mistakes. A great consolation for all of us distant observers and 'lesser mortals.'

***

News about a student who jumped (other news items used "fell") from the LRT went viral. After falling onto the road, the student was hit by a vehicle and was even dragged along. The student died. The driver of the car was reportedly going to be charged with reckless imprudence resulting in homicide. But good thing the parents of the student decided not to press charges, which would have been unfair to an innocent driver of a randomly passing car.

***

Ian Kyle Tablon, a 4th year veterinary student in Central Mindanao and known snake rescuer, died after he was bitten by a king cobra while rescuing it from a residential area. He was known for bravely responding to reports of cobras in communities to protect both residents and the animals he cared for.

***

Kids nowadays are weak (that is why they are prone to suicide), said Sen. Robinhood Padilla. The backlash was quite strong.

***

I learned two new expressions from young people lately: "thirst trap" and "it's giving ____" (2016, e.g.). I don't feel like explaining the meanings for now.

***

A new Latino music artist, the rapper named Bad Bunny, created buzz due to his unusual rise to fame from being a bagger at the grocer or something. I checked out his performance at the Superbowl, but I didn't particularly like it for now, but wow, the people's reaction to the 'novel' music is something. I take his newfound popularity as a signal of the Hispanization of the USA, a great pivot to, er, Hispanic culture or at least Latin America.

***

A mukbang vlogger died allegedly after eating too much.

***

ICC named Dela Rosa, Bong Go as co-perpetrators in Duterte drug war. The other ones are equally interesting.

***

Iconic Philtranco bus line ceased operations after 111 years, due to inability to keep the cash flow going.

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Artworks inspired by and dedicated to National Artist Kidlat Tahimik were displayed at the Metropolitan Theater in celebration of National Arts Month 2026. The exhibit is titled “Portraits of a National Artist as Kultur Warrior.”

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"A 13-year-boy swam for more than two miles in 'rough conditions' to get help for his family who were stranded out at sea. Austin Appelbee reportedly said that he "focused on happy things to keep him going."

***

I had fun viewing this tribal art exhibit online: 'Tijd voor Papoea' (Time for Papua New Guinea) exhibition in the Wereld museum Leiden.

***

A Philippine Coast Guard Spokesperson named Tarriela said something about China that earned the approval of the likes of Abp. Soc Villegas, so I had to do a double-take.

***

Now for something totally unexpected: actors -- superstars during their time -- Onemig Bondoc and Aiko Melendez are now in a romantic relationship.

***

Rigoberto Tiglao said Marcoleta was right and newspaper opinion-makers wrong on RP's EEZ (exclusive economic zone).

***

Sexbomb Dancers became popular once again. Their unexpected resurgence in Filipino pop culture apparently happened after a 2025 "reunion concert." A big surprise, considering their music is not something that can be considered to be bound for immortality, or fall under classic or excellent category. Their name alone is eyebrow-raising from the start, a name I would associate with a Tom Jones hit song. All I can remember from them are the lines, "Ispageting pataas, ispageting pababa" and "Get get aww!" It must be nostalgia that is at work then.

***

There was a lot of noise around an absentee member's husband disallowing his wife's participation for religious reasons. I learned his name to be Alvin Aragon, who turns out to be an actor, a Starstruck alumnus, and his wife's name to be Izzy Trazona, and she had a trans child who are at odds with her -- again on religious grounds.

Izzy's and her husband's public pronouncements that his wife was "pinagresign ni God sa Sexbonmb" and Izzy willingly left her profession to avoid giving men occasions for sin, let's just say, as expected, got them in trouble with those who don't share their religious convictions.

This shows many people have such strong feelings about these issues, to the extent that someone said such a staggering statement as this: If it means going to hell with them for it (homosexual lifestyle or trans life), then I will go to hell with them. I had to read her statement again just to be sure I understood what she really meant. Another poster wrote that the husband's statements border on illegal category. "It's illegal to even make such comments." An actor named IC Mendoza who says he is a son of pastors chimed in and roughly made the same comments. This new development can be seen as an alternate giant 'leap of faith' in terms of what people want to believe in, a great conviction that they are the ones being right, and 100% so. This is a sizeable mass downright rejecting traditional Christian teaching, or choose to have another reading.

Or it could be that the way the said man has delivered the message or chose his words was the thing that did him in, so to speak, or rubbed many people the wrong way. For speaking his mind, he is now being mocked as "St. Alvin" who has stipulated "the 11th commandment" of God.

Another Sexbomb dancer husband, who happens to be Bulacan Vice-Governor Alex Castro, reacted to the hullabaloo by saying, "May mga nagsabi, Bakit? Pinayagan ko ba? Siyempre di ba, dancer yan eh, syempre minsan seksi yung damit. Sabi ko, ok lang. Ganun ya eh. Yun sya. Ayokong baguhin yun. Ayokong baguhin kung sino sya. Ang ano lang, nadagdag lang ako. Nadagdag lang ako kasi ako yung asawa niya."

***

But a desultory reading of the comments section shows a 50:50 ratio in public opinion on the matter. A lot of people also wouldn't back down.

Whew, what a tempest in a teapot!

***

Oscar winner --- once Guinness dubbed the most versatile actor in the word -- Robert Duvall died at 95 y.o.

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What kind of stunt is this? It sounds basic fraud to me. > "Internet personality Jack Argota, known on Facebook as "Sir Jack Argota," admitted that the medical certificate he posted supposedly for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is fake."

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So sad! > 'Social media sensation,' street food vendor, 'Diwata' of Diwata Pares fame reportedly went bankrupt due to various reasons, chiefly business partners who didn't deliver payments. Its proprietor, whose real name is Deo Balbuena, is now an ambulant vendor. The great thing is he chose to keep on going on. How he manages to do that despite the great fall from the top is something for the books.

***

Another thing that made the rounds and made some noise: PGMN: "When Senator Bam Aquino argued that cases of alleged drug war killings should ideally be tried in Philippine courts rather than at the ICC, some of the sharpest backlash came from within the liberal movement his family helped shape. The Aquino name has long been tied to liberal politics and a human rights agenda, which made the criticism sting even more.

Aquino said he wants justice pursued in local courts, where the crimes happened and the victims’ families continue to seek redress. The intense reaction appeared to lay bare rifts within the liberal bloc over strategy, optics and the best path to accountability."

***

Vicente Rafael, a writer/author of such erudition that I have been reading through the years with admiration -- and patience because I found his highly nuanced ideas often quite hard to grasp -- died. Surprised to learn that Lila Ramos Shahani was his wife.

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"A UST grad from Malabon became Southeast Asia's highest-selling artist. His secret? He didn't pick one Filipino identity. He painted all of them Spanish colonial art, Japanese prints, American cartoons, street graffiti. The result? ₱275 million at Christie's Hong Kong." > Hey, this attitude is something I myself espoused: embrace everything as part of ourselves, so we get all the richer for it. Call it chop suey, halo-halo, or mongrel, but it's a rich, complicated kind of culture, and that's what the Filipino is all about that various disparate elements don't want to accept for the longest time.

***

A news reporter named Barbie Muhlach couldn't suppress her laughter when delivering a news report about the arrival of an NBA player named Bol Bol, and we all feel her. Who wouldn't with a name on the script like that?

posted by Resty Odon # 1:33 AM 0 Comments

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

"True wealth is holiness and true poverty is slavery to sin and status."

Copy-pasted homily:

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God's Disruptive Guest List: Rewriting Our Table of Power

17 January 2026 (Saturday)

Today, God’s word presents us with a divine paradox. In Samuel, we see God choosing Saul, a handsome young man from a good family, seemingly the natural choice for a king. Yet, we know this choice will later be troubled, a reminder that even the seemingly "fit" are chosen for service, not status. The Gospel, however, shatters this entirely. Jesus doesn’t call the "fit" from a human standpoint. He calls Levi, a tax collector, a man complicit with the Roman occupiers, seen as a traitor and a sinner. And then, Jesus does the unthinkable: he goes and dines with all the wrong people.

In a Philippine society obsessed with pedigree, socio-political clout, and the "maganda ang lahi" mentality, this is disruptive grace. We have built tables of power, in literal and social senses, that exclude. The poor are kept at the margins, the "different" are labeled basagulero or salot, and public trust is betrayed by those seated at society’s head tables. We judge who is worthy, who is clean, who deserves a seat.

But Christ, the Divine Physician, walks directly to our Levi’s, meaning, to the corrupt, the compromised, the addicted, the ostracized. He walks to the urban poor crowded in danger, to the farmer robbed of his harvest, to the youth disillusioned by a system that seems rigged. He says, "I did not come to call the righteous but sinners." His mission is not to affirm the comfortable at their gated banquets, but to heal the broken at the messy table of humanity.

Today, we remember St. Anthony Abbot, who heard this call radically. He gave up immense wealth to seek God in the desert, rejecting the entire societal script of status and accumulation. He reminds us that to follow Christ is to disrupt the world’s ordering of value and to see that true wealth is holiness and true poverty is slavery to sin and status.

Our call, then, is threefold:

1. To See as Christ Sees: To look past the titles, the surnames, the social media facades, and see the human heart in need of dignity and grace.

2. To Sit at New Tables: To have the courage to step away from tables of exclusive privilege and to deliberately sit in solidarity with those society scorns. This is both spiritual and profoundly social.

3. To Be Disrupted Ourselves: To allow Christ to call us, like Levi, away from our own complicity, that is, perhaps in gossip, in prejudice, in silent consent to injustice and to follow him on the path of humble service.

The Kingdom of God does not have a guest list based on padrino or pedigree. It has a healing call, issued from the Cross, for all. Let us leave this Eucharist, this holy table where all are welcome, ready to rewrite the guest lists at every table we influence. For we are all, in truth, sinners whom the Physician desperately desires to heal.

posted by Resty Odon # 12:25 AM 0 Comments