Finding joy (and pancit bihon) in unexpected places

It’s a warm Friday evening in early June, and having logged off from Microsoft Teams for the week and scrambled out of the house to catch the Tube, I’ve just about made it on time to St Dominic’s Church, the Rosary Shrine on Haverstock Hill.

I often think that Churches around central London are often quite incongruously located; opposite busy pubs and next to PRET’s, tucked away on side streets, their entrances hidden round the back of buildings and down stairways. The Rosary Shrine is admittedly much harder to miss, given its imposing facade and impressive size, which places it among the larger Catholic Churches in London. The contrast between the spiritual oasis offered by the Church and its worship and the urban landscape within which it is situated is striking.

I always find it strangely beautiful to be able to rush from the clatter of the Northern Line into the quiet sacred rites of the Mass, to find the ancient traditions of the faith nestled amidst the business of the streets of London. As one who often hops between Teams and the transcendental at the end of a work day, I often forget how striking this difference is too.

I once lunched with a Dominican friar at a nearby trendy community café, Mother Canteen, and could see fellow diners giving his long white habit and rosary beads a puzzled look. Was this perhaps the latest fashion trend to hit the streets of Camden?

I also went there for coffee with a friend who gave the name ‘Hildegard’ to her order (no comment), which led to an incredible conversation where we later realised the barista had been talking about the German actress and singer Hildegard Knef, not the 12th Century Benedictine abbess and mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, as we had presumed. Obviously.

The trip to the Rosary Shrine in question is striking for another reason, for it feels like I have suddenly stepped off the Tube and into a church in Manila.

Friendly Filipino faces fill the church pews, the choir is dressed in traditional barongs – garments sewn with pineapple fibres, and the priest is wielding the Tagalog phrase ‘bahala ka’ (‘it’s up to you’) in his homily – enough to make anyone brought up by a Filipino mother tremble in fear. In the Church Hall, mountains of rice and pancit bihon await, as does a YouTube karaoke playlist flickering on the projector screen. The cause for the fiesta – if one is even ever needed - is a fundraising evening for the Catholic Radio Maria Philippines, helping to raise funds to reach more listeners across the archipelago’s 7641 islands.

My mother’s Filipino heritage is very much an important part of my identity and upbringing, and although I have grown up thousands of miles away from the sprawling clan of cousins, I hold my Filipino family very dear. I also have an incredible tendency to find loosely related cousins wherever I go: a Filipino university friend once joked we were probably related, only to realise shortly after that we did indeed share second cousins. I might not look obviously mixed-race, or ‘wasian’ (White-Asian) as I gather it is described on TikTok these days, but my ears always prick up when I hear Tagalog being spoken on the bus and my stomach always rumbles in delight when presented with a steaming pot of chicken adobo.

The atmosphere in the Rosary Shrine Church Hall that evening is reminiscent of those Filipino family reunions I so very miss; there are the Tita’s (‘aunts’, likely unrelated) piling spring rolls onto your paper plate, the seemingly industrial quantities of sticky gelatinous rice desserts in foil trays, the Manang’s (a term of respect for older women) who have appeared out of nowhere and are now grooving on the dancefloor, and the bewildered but bemused European who is not quite sure what is going on or why they are there (in this case, my father).

I recently came across a wonderful essay by Carla Montemayor in the essay collection London feeds itself by Jonathan Nunn, exploring the relationship between faith, heritage, and food. She writes,

“Of course, all the best Catholic food in London is found at the church halls after mass, made by aunties who channel all that Catholic guilt away from their cooking”.

With startling accuracy Montemayor notes,

“Catholics understand that pleasure must necessitate some pain, some fasting even, but they would never go as far as to cut out any food groups. No one would ever describe a Filipino church hall spread as ‘serene’.”

Montemayor captures so well the essence of the Filipino gathering; one which is centred around food, and one where the preparation and sharing of this food is an expression of the family or community’s love for the other and delight in them. A great paradox of the Filipino gathering are the Tita’s who comment that you have put on weight (factually true, given the infrequency of your visits to Manila) and then immediately follow their remarks on your appearance with an invitation to eat.

The abundance of food encapsulates the generosity and hospitality at the heart of the Filipino spirit, in such a way which I feel canapes and nibbles never quite do (although I am not impartial to a smoked salmon and cream cheese blini). 

Indeed, the Filipino half of me was horrified at a recent London gathering where the host expressed her pleasure at all the prepared food being eaten; a tale of a cousin’s wedding decades ago where the locals carried off the trays of food to the local fiesta is brought up with alarming regularity in our family, a solemn warning to never underestimate the number of people you will be feeding.

I leave the Church Hall and head back home that night in some sort of daze, likely induced by the copious amounts of pork and rice consumed, but perhaps too brought about by the sense of having spent the past few hours far from the concerns and the chaos of my London life and caught by the contagious joy of the Filipino’s.

I reflect on the joy of the universality of the Church, the sharing of the Eucharist – and too of chicken adobo – uniting us with our relatives and friends back in the Philippines. I reflect too (admittedly with slightly less wonder) on the versatility of the Church Hall, likening it to the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter – transforming as it does from wedding reception venue, to community lunch hall, to Filipino fiesta - and all in the space of a week.

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A few Sundays later at Mass we hear the Gospel reading of the story of the feeding of the crowd of five thousand with two loaves and two fish. It is the one biblical story my brother and I struggle to comprehend, even now as adults discussing it each year when it is read at Church. Walking on water, healing the blind, even Jonah hanging out inside a whale – we seemed to accept these without a question. But the feeding of the five thousand? Really?

As we joked about it again this year, I found myself wondering if our experience of the Filipino gathering had truly meddled with us; seeming to end a gathering with more leftovers than you started with isn’t a miracle, but regular Filipino behaviour.

Are we sure there weren’t just some Filipino Tita’s cooking for the crowds?

As part of Radio Maria's fundraising campaign for Radio Maria Philippines, I joined Fr Toby Lees OP, Priest Director at Radio Maria England, to share my experiences as a half-Filipino Catholic in London. Listen to the episode below and find out more about Radio Maria's mission on their website:
Home - Radio Maria England