Work

There’s actually nothing wrong with having an opinion, with having a point of view, and with letting other people know what it is and I still struggle with that often because I do want to be a people pleaser and that stems from like, middle child syndrome, therapist syndrome, wanting to just fix everything and make it better and if you can sort of, in some way lose yourself to save the rest of the world you’ll do it, which is another very big danger of my job. But, that’s not really what we’re meant to do as people, we should be somehow contributing to our community, to our families, to our careers, to whatever it is that we’re doing, don’t sell yourselves short.  It’s just, with the whole glass ceiling thing and women get paid 76 cents on the dollar compared to men, blah blah blah, what it really comes down to is - listen - you could moan and complain about it or you could demand change.

When I was studying French at Barnard I was going to be a translator for the UN. But at the time, there were fewer options for women, and it’s so exciting to see how many options women have now. I remember going to the bank for a mortgage that my first husband and I bought in 1969. The only way that a woman could qualify on a mortgage…had any collateral weight, was as a nurse or a teacher. Otherwise nothing. And the way the mortgage was written. It was written in the husband’s name, Et. Ux. meaning “and wife.” So, I had no name even.

I went to school at a time in my country when we were under a dictatorship. We were under the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos at the time and I was studying at the Assumption High School and the Assumption College in Manila and the Assumption sisters were being very true to the charism of our foundress which was that our education and our faith had social consequences, that we couldn’t be living in a situation of great poverty and of great injustice without somehow doing something with our education to make that better and, and our faith also demanded that we do something to change the situation of the poor and of the unjust political system we were under, so I got very involved in social justice activities and when I was in my senior year in college, I got arrested by the military and I was put under military arrest for four months and I had to stop my schooling, clearly, [laughs] since I was under arrest and, and then afterwards when I was released, I had one more semester to go in college and I graduated, but my family requested that I leave the country for a while because they never knew when I left the house in the morning if I’d come back alive in the evening you know, with the fear that I’d just be picked up by the military again.

I really like my job. I think one of the most special things for me about my job is I get -- and in my church we have a very liturgical tradition -- so I get all dressed up in this alb with a stole and the whole deal, and … I'm a priest. And … they don’t even make priests’ clothes very well for women yet. And it's not like, it's certainly not like attractive anyways. And there are all these little girls in my congregation, just tons, who have probably never seen a woman dressed like that and standing up and presiding at the element and preaching a sermon, and preaching a sermon that I hope is relatively balanced between being emotional, and educational, and theological, and intellectual and all of those things. And that I think is really neat. I never saw that growing up, and now they can. Especially, in my own church setting.