A Sunday in Oahu

The Hawaiians call it the gathering place, O’ahu. It is a place of festivals and celebrations—the hula and the lei, and definitely, the Aloha! It remains a gathering place of a diverse population short of a million people. They are no longer just the descendants, however, of the brave navigators who sailed eastward from the Marquesas to the islands they would call Hawai’i. Into the culture and bloodstream of the Polynesians have been added the DNA of the rest of Asia Pacifica.

Five times the number of residents are the annual visitors, primarily from North American and Japan, who come to try the poi, get lei’d and Maui’d on the islands. North American and Asia-Pacific demographics populate the pews before the numerous Christian sanctuaries that dot the landscape. A south Pacific Island group even managed to put some trailers together under the elevated Interstate highway and made sacred space of one normally hosting graffiti and unofficial murals.

The public schools also allow its buildings to be leased for religious services. Churches have become the institution of choice to transmit cultural practices from one generation to another. There is a sense that MLK Jr.’s observation is accurate: the 10th hour on Sunday is the most segregated time in the country. The ethnic congregations gel and unite by virtue of their racial uniformity. This is often a community asset, though it can get ugly when the strong ethnic identity but weak confidence turns into an “attitude” that denigrates the character of other groups.

That danger of ingrown ethnic superiority is abated by an understanding of life that has also gotten lopsided. The Cathedral by the Sea in Waikiki is an old gathering place of the old New Englanders and their European cousins, then the native Hawaiians, and now, the Filipinos. Named after Augustine of Hippo of the City of God, City of Man fame, a serious thinker but a deeply guilt-ridden theologian who popularized the notion that “all persons are born losers, flawed and depraved, and therefore, need to be saved,” the Cathedral by the Sea vies for the efficacy of the means of salvation. This becomes problematic when each religious group claims to have the only means to attain this path of salvation!

For more than 1,500 years, Western civilization had journeyed with this powerful notion, a psychological insight expressed by Paul of Tarsus who confessed that he did what he knew he should not do, and not do what he knew he needed to do. Never mind that alongside this insight is the notion that with original sin also comes original blessings. Promoted in our time by Dominican priest Matthew Fox who would incur the wrath of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, culminating in his excommunication from the communion, a parallel movement in the resurgence of spirituality rather than its perpetual despair would emerge. But alas, they constitute an insignificant minority.

This Sunday morning in June, in Oahu, the followers of original sin are in full control of the gathered congregations that evolved from Constantine’s triumphant vision of the salvific cross. They feed into the current ethos of fear and suspicion generated by the post-9/11 trauma, and the current preeminence of the Department of Homeland Security.

My 87-year old mother, a normally genial and trusting woman, has nothing but tales of suspicion and fear in her repertoire of stories about people who now in her mind mean harm to her person and property. The neighbor who comes to her door because her telephone was ringing incessantly while Mom was in the shower is suspected of plotting to divest my Mom of assets. Mom will not consider the possibility that the neighbor may just be concerned about her welfare if the neighbor thought that my man’amko Mom failed to answer her phone because she needed assistance.

There is the widely expressed admonition given to children on Halloween night “not to trust strangers,” now expressed in the propensity of law enforcement personnel to presume guilt until proven innocent on those who fit the profile of suspicion-laden strangers, particularly those whose heritage leads to a prophet that once dominated the Levant and the Fertile Crescent.

Frank Schaeffer, who traveled with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Dr. Dobson and the other “founding fathers” of the religious right, recently characterized George W. Bush’s administration as one that has fostered a “paranoid distrust of the ‘other.’” He warns his former colleagues in the GOP that the tactics of innuendoes about the Obamas’ loyalty and patriotism will define the GOP of the future and render the same worthless to be a loyal opposition to the impending ascendancy of Obama to the White House.

This distrust of the other pretty much describes the impression I had upon walking into the Honolulu International Airport. I recently parodied the Aquino International Airport in Manila as having more personnel than passengers at its airport. A revision is in order; it is second to the Honolulu airport. The Homeland Security personnel in Alohaland seem to have multiplied since I was here in July last year.

The predominance of a culture of fear and suspicion is clear. Three friends, all currently employed by separate law enforcement agencies—local, state and national, all concur that there is a heightened sense of paranoia in the pursuit of the elusive certitude of security, leading to the observation that there are at least four oversight personnel for every single law enforcement officer providing public safety service. They have all become careful about their telephone conversations!

Sunday in O’ahu did not feel like a day of celebration. Rather, it was a day of solemn contemplation over the direction of an island paradise, and that of a nation in the serious grip of an artificially induced sense of insecurity foisted by a White House whose agenda of religious Armageddon before the Apocalypse, once dismissed as frivolity from a religious fringe, is now becoming more apparent to have been a guiding policy.

Yet personally, this Sunday was a day of celebration for me. Rotund in shape on Saipan, I look fit and slim among the Hawaiian brethren and sistern in Honolulu. And of that, even the Amen corner concurs! Alo-o-o-oha!