In April of 2025 Columban Fr. Brian Gore died on the Island of Negros in the Philippines. For over 50 years Brian worked with families of substance farmers. During his wake I watched the calloused hands of those farmers softly touch his coffin. Some farming families had members with hearing disabilities. They learned sign language through the “Welcome Home Foundation” started by Columban Fr. Joe Coyle. They prayed by his coffin with their hands.
Also attending Brian’s funeral were Columban Missionaries and Columban Sisters who have been working for decades in the mountains of Mindanao with the Subanen People. The hands of Subanen parents are coarsened from cultivating root-crops on hardened hillside soil. Their calloused hands are equally adept at threading strands of bamboo and rattan into beautiful works of art disguised as ordinary baskets.
Columban Sisters have been working with the Subanen people for more than 40 years in a ministry that honors their language and culture, and values their sacred bond with their ancestral land. In line with the work and vision of the Columban Sisters, I have been working with a group of Subanen crafters and have created with them a livelihood ministry that honors their culture, helps support their families, and celebrates their deep bond with their habitat.
As part of our craft ministry, we make Christmas cards whose images link the Nativity story with the lives of Subanen families. This year our cards feature a star shining on the hands of Mary and Joseph doing things that Subanen parents do to care for each other and their children.
Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus who came into the world to make God’s love visible and He did so by touching the lives of ordinary people in ways that left them seeing themselves and others as works of art woven and loved by God. And so, in making our cards, we cut, colour, and fold ordinary paper into works of art, works of art that spotlight the calloused hands of Joseph and Mary doing ordinary activities that make love visible in our daily lives.
For nearly a century, Columbans throughout the Philippines have served people with calloused hands and, together with them, have built communities that care for each other and their land. The Holy Spirit calls and guides all followers of Jesus to foster communities whose members love and relate to each other and, indeed, to all God’s creation, in the way Jesus loved and related to the people he met every day and to the earth he walked on. Columbans in the Philippines have been blessed to be part of such Spirit-led communities.
