I'm Loving Angels Instead

Faith is the positive result of good marketing. I can have faith in my organization, in a product or service, even in my religion. As with all marketing endeavors, the marketing of faith rests on the concept of benefit. My organization can make me feel wanted, needed, and accepted. A product can make my life easier. Religion will make me happier. And so on and so forth.

A moment of need or crisis is faith’s best promotional period. This particular juncture in time is an opportunity to sell the benefit and, thus, strengthen faith. Marketers always think that there are three groups of people: the gullible, the hypocrite, and the shrewd. And with all these three categories, the generic word ‘good’ can very well apply.

As with all things that thrive on faith of its believers, however, the product is the message. Thus, one can only endow faith on something that is verifiable. Religion, for instance, has been very difficult to verify. No one has seen God. Thus, wars ensue. Ugly phenomena result such as Islamophobia – a modern day quandary as to the limits of marketing efforts targeted at faith.

There’s nothing mystical with faith. It is all humanly possible to explain.

If the product is a lemon, blind faith is what’s needed. The blinder the faith, the better. And with this, henceforth, the emotional tug-of-war ensues. Blind faith is fed by the greatest form of advertising: word of mouth.

Marketing blind faith is a curious thing. The results are quite appalling. Some become suicide bombers, others become evangelists with their own television shows, some become multi-millionaire gurus, a few become madmen that serve cynanide-laced grape-flavored Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool Aid), while still others are madder men by willfully drinking what they knew for a fact was poison-spiked drink. In some cases, pilgrims die at stampedes. At some point, we start to believe in superheroes.

It’s all a difference in the level of epiphany.

Over on the other side, the true saint is the one that has led his or her fellowmen to action for the good of the greater many. But look closely, what this saint is doing is merely being a good human. He or she is not endowed with superhuman powers. He or she is endowed only with super humane powers.

The world has gone down the abyss of immorality and inhumanity, that when one person does good, he or she automatically becomes a figure of God. That’s how far overstretched our premium on faith has become.

And we succumb – blindly.

However, if it’s impossible to disprove the tooth fairy, then I can understand why over 70,000 Australians in 2001 officially declared themselves Jedi Knights and their religion the Jedi faith.

Above is the image of an angel that was caught by a camera. It was hovering above the heads of people attending the mass at the Vatican. Some say the photo is digitally-manipulated. The others say it is unretouched. I don’t offer any opinion here. I shall just take it as it is – an image.

Does it offer me a sign of hope? I can’t say, though I come from a place where the prevalent emotions are anger and hope, not happiness or sadness. In my moments of stillness, I drift to life-altering questions such as: have I lost faith because of all the ugliness I’ve seen?

Bear me this indulgence. I take to this chap like an ant does to muscovado sugar. If you’re not into Robbie Williams, however, you can skip this entirely and that won’t hurt me. No matter, I will still have great faith in you.

The marketers of blind faith have been crafty in creating myths. And when there are myths, we start believing in miracles.

A Rose Upon a Hard Rock

Her name is a vernacular derivative of the word rose. Rosing was beautiful, all right, and her life was not lacking in thorns. But the woman was a fighter long before women of her generation knew how to fight.

Our common knowledge about her starts only from around circa WWII. It’s as if her story came to be told from this time onward. She lost her only brother during that world war, and fiercely protected her mother and young daughter from the abuses of the Japanese imperial forces that had occupied the Philippines at that time. They would hide in caves in the mountainous regions of northern Philippines whenever the Japanese would conduct carpet bombing over the areas. On quieter days, she would haul an entire carabao that had lost its way, bring the animal to her family’s hiding place, butcher it, cut it up, and sun dry the meat for hungrier days to add to the staple root crops that she dug on mountainsides.

Much to her mother’s alarm, she would leave their “home” – wherever they would be holing up for the moment – and buy a pineapple or two, slice up the fruits and sell them at retail to other families in hiding. These business ventures would have her walking around. Stubborn and fearless that she was, she would refuse to curtsy and bow to the Japanese soldiers at military sentries, a mandated gesture known as “kumbawa,” another local etymological derivative of the Japanese custom of greeting called konbanwa. This predictably earned the ire of the incomprehensible soldiers who were widely known for their irrational bursts of anger.

Still, she fought back in her own little way and stood her ground. She knew too well that under the Japanese rule, the performance of the bow was a sign of complete subservience to the colonizers and total recognition of their ownership of the Philippines. Her charm must have eventually captivated the soldiers. It was said that missing or skipping this perfunctory bow would cost someone his head by the ever-polished bayonet.

In the swinging 1950s, when the Philippines was enjoying a post-Liberation business boom, she hauled her mother and daughter to the capital city of Manila and single-handedly opened what would be the biggest fruit distributorship outlet in one of the major public markets in the city. Her incomes grew exponentially as she fearlessly augmented her products to include black market American brand cigarettes. In a time when the police was considered an indubitable force to reckon with, she defied all threats that sprang from her not willing to be a victim of police extortion.

With her mother gone and her daughter married in the 1980s, she decided to retire from the harried life of tending to business everyday. She was getting old. Her strength and energy became directly proportional to what was left of her waning business.

She bought herself a small piece of land in the far outskirts of the city where the sharp-edged cogon grass was taller than humans. She saw what remained of her future in a place that was not even fit for humans. During the following months, she single-handedly hewed the tall grass till only the moist reddish earth was visible. Every morning, she walked around on the hillsides, lugging two large empty bags, and proceeded to pick up huge stones. In no time at all, she was able to fill up her small patch of land with a landfill of those stones. A small nipa hut soon stood on the land. Several fruit trees and flowering bushes started to grow, too. The nipa hut would later turn into a small concrete structure that she called her spanking new home.

There she would spend the last years of her life, fighting the chill from the nearby mountains, fighting the greedy government agencies that saw the potential of the erstwhile uninhabitable lands on the hills, and fighting the thought that, in the end, she is really left all by her lonesome. Her daughter’s father was in a faraway city, with his real family.

She simply played the cards that were dealt her – and played them marvelously.

Till her last dying breath, she fought back. All within a span of thirty minutes, she died twice before the third and fatal cardiac arrest, brain dead on the second. On the evening of June 3, she passed away at 93 – still a rose upon a hard rock.

An Open Field for Open Possibilities

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.-