my church is cool.

Every time I attend the morning service in our Church, there's always something amazing to look forward to. Mind you, it's not limited to the scripture or anything holy. It's almost like watching a rock concert and  and listening to a TED talk with matching kick-ass videos or presentations after. The talk is always accompanied by a thoughtfully-designed powerpoint, so I pick up a lesson or two about typography every week. But more than that, the content of the talks is, more often than not, relevant to people in my age. No yawn-inducing, self-righteous talks there (or at least, none yet).

This week, it's the third part of a series they call "Original Pinoy Mindsets 2", or simply OPM2, which highlights somewhat negative aspects of the Filipino culture then relates it to the scripture. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't attended the service last week, and the week before that as well, but my family members told me that the talks were about "Lagay, Lusot, Lakad: The Trilogy of Maneuvers" and "Kanya-Kanya."

So anyway, this week's talk is wittily titled "Machonurin", which is of course, a combination of two words related to two conflicting ideas, namely, submission and subjugation. By all means, our society is a matriarchal one. Men may hold the seat of the authority in the house, but most of the time, they are more of figureheads and it's usually the women who are in charge of running the household.

There are two extreme leadership patterns in the family – one is the militaristic style, wherein men take pride in being the "padre de familia" and the sole arbiter in all the decision-making in the house. Women in the first case have little or no role except doing household chores and bearing children. The other one is the "ander da saya" syndrome, wherein females but do not only control house matters but the lives of their husbands as well.

The speaker cited one book (I can't remember the title) which provides an explanation of this persisting condition. In our society, people place double standards since childhood – boys can freely play in the streets, while girls are expected to help their mothers in the household chores. As a result, girls tend to mature earlier than their male counterparts. Also, In the process of, as I like to call it, early domestic internship, girls develop useful qualities such as insightfulness, ingenuity and resourcefulness.

The problem begins when women abuse these traits in a way that their husbands feel overshadowed and not as important as they should think they are. Some passive men prefer to pass the authority to their wives thinking that they could handle things anyway, and their wives in turn, get annoyed that their husbands are not being responsible in letting them take the lead ALL THE TIME. This may be caused by lack of effective communication between partners.

At that point, the speaker started relating the topic to a similar concept in the bible. Certain lines were mentioned here and there, but I won't mention them here anymore. They're kinda lengthy, plus no one would bother to read them anyway.

The talk also touched on relationships, and our pastor talked about establishing qualifications firsthand before starting the search. He then started the cheesy stories about him and his wife. Well, as for me, faithfulness is the first on my list. Even if I meet the perfect guy, I'll gladly kick him in the ass and leave if he's pissing me off with all the flirting. 

Bow.