Eighty-three-year-old Florchita Bautista has something of a travel bug. The Filipino native moved to Canada in 1980 and has since gone back to visit her homeland, travelled across the United States, and explored several other countries.
But it was her most recent adventure following the steps of St. Paul that left her so excited, she returned home to Vancouver determined to put pen to paper.
“After the trip that I made to Greece and Turkey, there was an urge inside of me: write something,” the former nun told The B.C. Catholic from her small apartment in Vancouver’s Killarney neighbourhood.
Although Bautista is a writer whose autobiography Leaping into the Unknown was published in 2006, she wasn’t sure what she was being called to write this time following the pilgrimage. “I thought: what about? I’m not going to write about the trip itself, because it will be very interesting only to our companions.”
It was a conversation with a friend who had recently taken a pilgrimage to the Holy Land that gave her the idea of writing another book. During their conversation, her friend mentioned being asked for an interview about her trip. The word “interview” lodged itself in Bautista’s mind.
She began to imagine herself sitting down for conversations with saints who once walked the plains of Egypt or gazed out at the Mediterranean Sea.
She wondered what it would be like to ask the prophets Amos and Micah how they recognized God’s voice. Or to ask Joseph in the Old Testament what it was like to be thrown down a well by his brothers – only to be pulled back up again and sold into slavery.
The result was her latest book, Interviews Across Time and Space, something of a time-travel story in which she takes readers as far back as the Old Testament to question and learn from figures of the distant past.
Considering their struggles for justice, their searches for the truth, and their surprising interactions with God, “they have so much in common with our lives,” Bautista said.
“What does that mean? That we can become saints like them. We can become prophets when we stand for justice and tell the truth despite the consequences.”
Bautista knows a thing or two about the consequences of standing up for truth and justice, as a survivor of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War and the oppressive Marcos dictatorship.
As a young child, she fled bombings and grieved the death of her father, a former governor of the Camarines Norte province, who was tortured and imprisoned for not co-operating with occupiers.
Three years after finishing her foreign service degree, Bautista decided to become a nun with the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, following God’s call in her heart and a lifelong desire to serve the poor.
That episode in her life was fraught with challenges: during a trip with catechists, she narrowly escaped a clash between the Philippines military and the Muslim National Liberation Front; her superiors effectively forced her out of religious life for attending her brother’s funeral against their wishes.
She let her love for the poor lead her to live like the poor, in huts of thin plywood and rusty corrugated metal. She ate like the poor; she stood on picket lines with them; she protested human rights violations with them.
Living under an oppressive government, Bautista risked imprisonment and worse, but she survived these ordeals, with or without a habit on. “Maybe I’m not supposed to be a martyr,” she remembers thinking.
Her autobiography, Leaping Into the Unknown, recounted a life full of adventures, and 13 years later in Interviews Across Time and Space she relives some of these experiences in fictionalized conversations with biblical figures.
She dedicates this, her second book, to readers searching for meaning in their lives.
“I do believe that all of us were created by God with a mission,” she said. “By reading this book, I hope they will be able to discover that mission maybe that they have not yet discovered. That they will be able to discover in between the lines or in a word that the pearl of great value that can really change their lives and be the turning point.”
Father Gabriel de Chadarevian, OP, assistant pastor at St. Mary’s, Vancouver, penned the introduction to Bautista’s book and helped edit its chapters.
“At a time where there is a crying need for prophets and saints, those revolutionaries of love, justice, and peace, the author draws from salvation history and her own rich experience, the inspiration to this timely narrative, a balm of hope for our day and age,” he wrote.
Bautista’s book “is a deep and renewed profession of faith in God, a hymn of praise and worship to the Father of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger, the one ‘who chooses and calls what is low and foolish in the world to shame the wise, who calls the weak to shame the strong.’”
Bautista sold 270 copies of Interviews Across Time and Space the day of its official launch at St. Mary’s last month. Her books can be purchased by contacting the parish at 604-435-9611 or emailing parish.smarv@rcav.org. All proceeds are being donated to St. Mary’s Building Fund.
