Editors’ Note: The author delivered this speech as guest speaker during the RMT-CEFAM graduation in Ateneo de Manila University last June 4, 2023. Founded by Fr. Ruben M. Tanseco, SJ, RMT-CEFAM is a ministry undertaken by the Society of Jesus and its lay partners. It seeks to promote family well-being, healing, and growth. It also provides the resources to empower the family to become a community of love, justice, and peace (Learn more: cefam.ph)
Congratulations to our latest batch of lifesavers and joy-givers from the Center for Family Ministries.
The path that you have chosen to serve those who feel less loved can only come from a heart full of love. You are like my dear friend Fr. Ruben Tanseco, SJ, who dedicated his life to heal broken marriages, broken families and broken communities.
In a world of sadness where many despair due to unfortunate circumstances that happen to them, you play a vital role in helping many embrace their grief today by believing that we have a God who wants them to be happy tomorrow.
In our desire to reach out to others in this noble ministry of service we have chosen, first we must look inside ourselves.
How can we mend the broken when we ourselves are broken? We need to address the areas within us that need fixing.
My personal life, despite the iconic public image, has been a long journey of falling and rising, of failing and succeeding, of grieving and laughing. The movements I helped grow worldwide are not just a result of the right things I did but mostly from the mistakes I learned from. I simply did stop or give up when the going got tough.
Our calling is to care, to serve, and to help those suffering poverty in its many expressions – material, spiritual, social, and for me lately, the poverty of old age.
We need to address our own poverty to effectively help those in greater need and deeper pain.
My life is a long history of poverty in various forms that I had to address. I had a choice to be comfortable with a poverty mentality like many Filipinos from the grassroots where I came from – “sumama sa samahan ng mga hindi pagod” – or to fight a formidable enemy with the limited resources and confidence I had simply with sheer determination, hard work and hope.
1. Education and ambition were my doorway out of Material Poverty.
Graduation from high school in California and College from Ateneo de Manila gave me the courage to confront my insecurities and frustrations that those like me who are often deprived of means and breaks often face.
2. Couples for Christ was the light to my Spiritual Poverty. Community with a culture of caring is needed to enrich our shared humanity.
Many people that we will comfort and counsel come with unimaginable life frustrations and complications that we ourselves who want to help are not spared. We need to find our light.
We need to reach in to reach out.
The healers need healing themselves.
We must face our challenges, confront our fears and accept our brokenness. And when necessary, seek help ourselves. The menders need mending themselves.
The art of healing starts with an act of humility – that those who are called to help with the inadequacy of others are inadequate themselves.
My wife Lyn and I devoted the early years of our marriage helping save many marriages as full-time missionaries for Couples for Christ. It was not just a noble act of service to couples in need – it was also to help save our own imperfect marriage.
When we helped create in 1993 the Family Ministries of Couples for Christ, it was basically a recognition of our inadequacy as parents to raise five children in a highly secularized world. We needed to surround them with a new generation of believers who were excited to embrace Christian values in their love and life choices.
God’s faithfulness was clearly evident in the life of our children when it was time for them to start their family. They chose partners who love God, our country and the poor – and to build their business and raise our twelve happy grandchildren in the Philippines. They grew Human Nature as a proudly world-class Filipino brand, though it started out as an initiative to create livelihood to many of our Gawad Kalinga beneficiaries in Payatas. It gained global recognition as the Global Brand Pioneer winner in Cosmetics in Paris in 2016.
When my mother was widowed in 1993 at the age of eighty, it was a dilemma for me to care for her because she chose to live in Bacolod City while my family was based in Metro Manila. I did not have the answers. God did. It was the year that Handmaids of the Lord started as a CFC Ministry for widows and single women. My mother was easily assimilated and cared for by her household of elderly women who became her weekly prayer companion until she passed away at 100 years old in 2013.
God completes us when we accept that we are incomplete.
3. Then there is the Social Poverty that is the cause of massive anxiety around us.
Gawad Kalinga was the path I chose to address the wide social gap that we have failed to bridge effectively.
I was jolted to act on the scandalous social inequity in our country when the safety of my family was threatened.
One night in 1995, our home was broken into by two “akyat bahay” men. Providentially, we woke up in time, locked our room, turned on the lights, called the police while the intruders scampered to escape.
The police investigation pointed to the nearby slum as the place where the housebreakers came from. It was a poor community of shanties that we had neglected to help over the years. Somehow the high walls of our gated community gave us a false sense of security and indifference.
It was a wake-up call for me to start Gawad Kalinga with the gang leaders of Bagong Silang, the biggest slum in the country.
To be effective in serving the less served, we need to cultivate a grateful and hopeful heart.
With all its dark clouds and days of gloom, life is a gift with bright blue skies and many sunny days. Let us count our blessings and remember always that our peace is anchored on the one who walked on water and calmed the rough seas.
Our positive spirit will calm those we serve who are going through tough times.
We need to find our strength in the common good. The good we do to others will come back to us ten-fold.
Gawad Kalinga captures this clearly in the twin values that we chisel in the heart of volunteers and our 3,000 communities.
“Una sa serbisyo, huli sa benepisyo.”
“Less for self, more for others, enough for all.”
Finally at 73, I found a new sense of purpose by helping the depressed and lonely elderly in Batangas fight the poverty of old age. Every Sunday from 2:00-5:00PM, they come to Paraiso Village Farm to pray, play and party. Our goal is simple: make the elderly happy every Sunday in the remaining years of their life.
As a farmer now, I have discovered that when you plant kindness, you harvest peace.
Let me end by sharing with you some commonsense nuggets from the heart:
- A good farmer heals the land. A good counselor heals the heart.
- Encourage the silent to talk. They will talk if you listen. Listening is healing.
- See the good in people, help them see the good in themselves.
- Help them feel that they are not alone – because you are there.
- Most importantly, show them your joy in caring, for them to care to find joy.
Featured image: Graduates of the Professional Diploma in Family Ministries, June 4, 2023 (RMT-CEFAM Facebook page)
About the author: ANTONIO “TONY” MELOTO is the founder of Gawad Kalinga, a poverty alleviation movement. He was named 2006 “Filipino of the Year” by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Born in Bacolod, Negros Occidental, he took his senior high school year at De Anza High School in Richmond, California as an American Field Service scholar. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics degree from Ateneo de Manila University and was a full academic scholar. He took a job as a purchasing manager for Procter and Gamble. Meloto became an active member of Couples for Christ in 1985 and rose to leadership, playing a key role in establishing CFC Family Ministries in 1993. In 1995 he began a youth development program for juvenile delinquents in Caloocan. The program evolved into Gawad Kalinga, now a global movement for building sustainable communities within poverty-stricken areas. In 2006 he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership.