Happy Easter 2008

AFTER THIS, Jesus revealed himself again to his disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. He revealed himself in this way.

Together were Simon Peter, Thomas called Didymus, Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, Zebedee's sons, and two others of his disciples.

Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing." They said to him, "We also will come with you." So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore; but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to them, "Children, have you caught anything to eat?" They answered him, "No."

So he said to them, "Cast the net over the right side of the boat and you will find something." So they cast it, and were not able to pull it in because of the number of fish.

So the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord." When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he tucked in his garment, for he was lightly clad, and jumped into the sea.

The other disciples came in the boat, for they were not far from shore, only about a hundred yards, dragging the net with the fish.

When they climbed out on shore, they saw a charcoal fire with fish on it and bread.

Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish you just caught."

So Simon Peter went over and dragged the net ashore full of one hundred fifty-three large fish. Even though there were so many, the net was not torn.

Jesus said to them, "Come, have breakfast." And none of the disciples dared to ask him, "Who are you?" because they realized it was the Lord.

- John 21: 1-10

"Come, Have Breakfast."

This is one of my most favorite passages in the Gospel. My love and admiration for the Risen Christ grows in leaps and bounds whenever I ponder on the simplicity and the humility by which Our Lord have chosen to reveal Himself to His Apostles in this reading from the Gospel of John.

After undeniably proving everybody wrong, after His most glorious triumph over sin and death, after accomplishing perfectly the mission for which He was born into our world, after assuming absolute power over heaven and earth, instead of a long sermon about the many things wanting in us, His needful creatures, our most loving Lord Jesus Christ prepares a simple breakfast for us today, Easter Sunday.

"This is MY Lord and MY God", I affirm to myself in sweetest admiration, my heart warmed all gently aglow by waves of great affection.

This story shows us very clearly the greatness of the sacred humanity of our Lord. Because He is true God and true man, our Lord knows each of us very, very well. I can even say that our Savior, Jesus Christ, knows each of us more than we know ourselves. He knows both our most basic human needs as well as our most deepest spiritual requirements and how to perfectly balance them according to our advantage.

In simple contrast, there are many, many people in the world who would take selfish advantage of this unique position of supreme knowledge and absolute power according to their own personal interests. The temptation to do so must be enormously overpowering for anybody.

But we are not our Savior and thankfully so. We will never reach the absolute perfection of Jesus Christ our Lord, not in this life nor in eternity. We can become like Him out of our love for Him wherefore He will unite us to Himself according to the power of His grace. But none of us can ever be Him. God is God and man is man; that is the order of things and thankfully so for indeed, as shown by the simple words of our Risen Savior, "come, have breakfast", our God is a God we can put all our trust and rest.

In my own mind the message of this Gospel passage is this:

Let us each be free to become true Christians to the core, let us all be free to become closely united to our Lord in our heart of hearts and brave with Jesus and each other, the mountain of Christian perfection but in the same spirit of charity, the further out to our neighbors we should extend our Lord's open hand of Peace, the less particular we must become as Christians and the more common we are required to become as human beings like them not for our sake but for their own sake.

Therefore, any kind of open or secret discrimination whether it be by race, creed, class, age, sex, ethnicity, or anything besides proven character and adequate capability, is absolutely ruled out for those who sincerely intend to serve the Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

There is no harmony to be found in similar things, there is no music in rote monotony. Only from our differences can harmony become possible and only from our harmony must we soon arrive at our peaceful coming together; to that one final hymn of taps, the undying salute to our last fading away; that solemn prelude to the new reveille of the bright and glorious morning from on high - towards a better, kinder, more peaceful world for all men, women and children of every nation of the one family of the nations of mankind.

The One Peace is possible only if it begins with the self.

Do we sincerely want peace?

Then let us begin to learn about peace. Let us begin to love the peace knowing that it will not come without much sacrifice from everybody without exception. Every Christian knows that the way of love is sacrifice. Therefore, let us also know that what love we sow in war, we reap in tears but what love we sow in peace, we reap in hope. O nation, once again I ask thee, how long are we going to struggle in tears before we begin to struggle in hope? The hope of our last fading away, the final martyr of our militant church on earth, the last sword to fall in battle in the name of peace, the last tear to fall shortly before the summertime reign of our Lord. One full cycle of the seasons of heaven.

Let us take seriously our own civic responsibilities as good and loyal citizens of our faithful Republic thereby doing honor to our Mother Protectress, giving back her strength and restoring dignity to her offices. If we can not trust to our leaders - imperfect as they are much like the rest of us, short of complete absolutism and outright tyranny and the forces of war that work to defeat our Democracy and murder the spirit of our people, let us trust also in each other and to our Good God by whose infinitely wise Providence the authority of those incorruptible seals of those particular sovereign offices are ultimately derived.

The offices, executive, legislative and juridical, under whose seals our government may legally govern us, the people - by our own electoral mandate, therefore, through our own responsibility as well - under the eternal vigilance of Almighty God, may we never, ever forget, are vital lineages of rightful continuation of the necessary governance that have been dutifully commissioned and required ad infinitum - from eternity - by the people, for the people, of the people to serve and defend the ideal of the common good of the common citizenry under the unitive, sheltering wings of the peace of our one faithful Republic. There is always, always a certain sense of shame and dishonor in disobedience. It might be high time to accept the fact that we are all in this together, that God is our first defender, and that we will live and die by the strength of our resolve to endure with our hopes, this longest night of our poor world.

Do we want to be devoured by the beast of war? Do we want our posterity to inherit the desolation of war? Where is our faith in God and in each other as a people? Then, let us each do our duty, from the least to the greatest, knowing that we shall rise and fall as one people and one nation by the strength of our peace. Who else but us, my fellow Filipinos, who else but us. Who else but us can carry in our hearts the cherished remebrances of our heroes, our loved ones and our friends? Who else can ever love this one Filipino Republic the way we can? Have we ever really tried? Shall the citizens of foreign lands ever truly appreciate what great promise we have in Country, in a free Republic state we have uniquely merited from the Providence of God by much bloodshed sacrifice, sweat and the shedding of tears? Who else but us! For the peace of every nation is built like the pyramids of old. It can never be built from the top down. Our peace can not be transmitted from our leaders, it can only be enforced from the top down. Because for peace to really take root in our homeland, it must first begin to grow in the fertile ground of our hearts, as Christians and as common Filipinos, united to our Muslim brothers and sisters, as one nation together.

Verily, my precious friend, peace begins within the soul of individual citizens like us. If enough souls make an absolute choice to earnestly pursue the ascendant way of the One Peace in common - or the unitive Light of Christ, our Eternal Daystar in particular; if enough of a foundation is built from the web of relationships we have collectively made a conscious effort to touch with the reality of our One Peace with Jesus Christ and with each other, then the slow transformation of our entire society become possible as peace is transmitted from the fertile ground of our own hearts as individuals, gaining momentum as it ascends from the level of the self into the level of our families, from our families into our barangays, from our barangays into our towns and cities, from our town and cities into our provinces and regions, and from our provinces and regions into our poor nation, from our nation into the one family of the nations of suffering mankind so that everything noble, good and true as peace that serve life ascends in praises of unity and fraternal sibling hood to the great glory of the one God of life and truth.

If war forever reigns, then why are we Christians celebrating Easter today?

Pax Pilipinas, Mabuhay!

"Peace is a promise.
A promise I make to you,
My precious child.
A promise to see you through
right to the bitter end."

A happy and meaningful Easter 2008 to all of blessed Christendom.

Glory to God in the highest
Adoration to Jesus Christ
Peace to all men of good will.

Time is a Nearness x

WHEN I SIT DOWN TO VISUALIZE TIME, I see it as an infinitesimally minute point upon the infinite surface of an eternal ocean.

For me, there is something intrinsically wrong about the thinking that time is anything linear, like it is somehow a measure of distance - the past, forever growing dimmer and dimmer, colder and colder, the further and further away the present inundates our forgetful minds and hearts with the rush of those realities coming to be as we journey headlong into the void of the future.

In my mind, time is not a measure of distance. Time does not become for me, a kind of coldness. For me, time is a measure of our closeness. To embrace it is a certain warmth.

It is not a moving away from the past but a merging together.

It is a gathering sense.

It is not a blind rush into a chaotic, frenzied future. Nor is it an inescapable, falling down into a dictated, ordered array of molds but a series of free acceptances in the timeless Now.

Like the image of Jacob's ladder, time itself ascends and descends according to the free and human choices we each make as individuals. It is the common fabric of everything we bring out of these choices for good or for ill.

Like every realization within the sacred silence, each moment in time is one blink, one twinkle, one timeless point on the eternal sea. L

ike a myriad shining stars, beautiful, patient, forbearing in light, time is a twinkling from grace to grace, hope to hope and truth to truth. As

stars

adrift upon a boundless ocean of Love, time is all that gathers from the darkness, like a coming Home together, the love that lives in the longing in you and in the longing in me.

Hence, one may not look back at the past, one may only look into the past but never back.

For the past is what imparts motion to the present.

Therefore, n

ever with a sense of distance or coldness must one perceive time and its precious contents but with a very near sense of eternity as something entrusted to our living memory.

Time is not an illusion, nor does time exist for evil purposes.

It is the evil in all evil things that proposes to the heart of Man that all of time were but a drifting away,

like it were a faded distance, like the truth were in full retreat, like all human hope were a backward flow, like

the victory of the incomparable goodness and unfathomable mercy of God is but a slow sunset

receding comfortably in the horizon, w

hat a lie!

Lo, it is far easier to hide inside the solid rock of a granite mountain than it is to hide from within the billowing folds of the gossamer veil of time! Where will evil men hide from God?

What lies

behind the veil of time but the everlasting abode of Justice?

Men forget but time does not.

So must one use what time is given him or her on this earth well, my beloved friends, avoiding evil and doing good, loving virtue and forsaking vice.

Because time flows from purposes noble and Divine. It exists for Sacred Life and flows for all of life's fruition. It is not a coming apart, it is a coming together of all of life's longing for itself.

All our nations are embraced by the one LORD of all the living and the everliving lights that we really are in time and through it we are constantly called in every present generation to returnagain and again to an Eden rebuilt unto the promised restoration of all things new.

So when you shall now perceive history - your particular national as well as regional or even all of human history entire - you must view it also with a subtle sense of timelessness and therefore closeness and affinity,

hinting at a Heart at the heart of all of time; that all of this is not random, blind chance, but a certain part of a grand design that exists, no matter how deep the maddening darkness, for the good of each and every nation of the one family of the nations of Mankind.

Honoring your most basic of citizenships requires you to be as thus, my honorable compatriots, a citizen of all humanity and therefore, a human being and citizen of all creation, seen and unseen- a natural laborer with the Holy Angels, undivided in your heart before God.

Lest we forget. Lest we forget.

---<--@

Glory to God in creation
Adoration to Jesus Christ
Peace to all men of good will.

The Beast of War

Please refer to a CLARIFICATION on this previous entry: The Beast of War

The title of this particular entry should read, "The Beast".

THIS IS OUR SWORN ENEMY.

My precious friend, right from the very beginning, this enemy has imposed itself upon our One Peace. Having destroyed our Original Peace in faded Eden, this enemy has evolved and gathered much strength.

Today we now find ourselves fighting the final line of our defense here at the longest night of our midnight world in a battle deep within our hearts and minds that will determine for us and our posterity the nature of the next 1000 years. Right from the very beginning, we never chose to fight against it, we are obliged to fight against it. For we must fight to defend ourselves against this terrible desolation that constantly pose a threat to our rightful custodianship of our world, each other and our very own souls.

We must fight the defense not out of lust for fighting or affinity to war but out of love of God and affinity to all true things in God as our true selves, our neighbors on account of God and all of God's living creation. Let us never forget this gratuitous debt of native life sown upon our world and lovingly entrusted by our Creator to the one lineage of our first parents, a lineage from which each and every human being that constitute our humanity have arisen in exile time to form the synergistic whole of the one race of mankind. For this beast threatens not only our one humanity, but all of life - plants and animals - as well. It has done its terrible turn in the angelic realms and now it is hell bent upon the absolute annihilation of all life here in the realms of man.

The beast of war is the synergistic whole of sin, its agents and its allures. It is the ancient enemy of God, angels and men. This wicked beast is fed by the unholy substance of sin, drawing all the diverse forms of evil born from the darkest fire of an immortal hatred of God into the intense gravity of itself. Every sin of every kind, un-repented and unaccounted for, from the gravest to the most venial, gives this, our most vicious enemy its strength. This beast lives for one thing and one thing only, the complete and absolute destruction of each and every one of our souls and the utter annihilation of all of our humanity. From the defeat of our humanity this treasonous beast proceeds to overthrow the sovereign rule of our most loving God in His own realm, here in His own living creation on earth.

This raging beast has the body of a dragon, three monstrous, devouring heads with seven proud horns, two enormous, dark reptilian wings, four powerful legs and the tail of a serpent that leaves only death, destruction, anarchy, tears and confusion in its terrible wake.

The three monstrous, devouring heads are - the malice of the Devil, the Lord of the hosts of hell, the Father of lies, the accuser and the murderer, the proud prince of this world, and all his fallen angels with him; the evil fashions of the world - the vanities born of the collective sins of all mankind carried over through time, and the concupiscence of the flesh - the effects of Original Sin, our own weakened and wounded nature.

The three mouths of the beast whisper poisonous blashpemies and utter obscene, scandalous maledictions against our good God, day and night, secretly fomenting discord and a deepening hatred among the many communities of men and usurping the truth with insidious lies that lead to war and division, desolation and despair among individuals, families, peoples and nations.

The menacing eyes of this beast are pitiless sunken black pits looking out at us from a pitch black heart of pure hatred of life. This beast sees us, in our common humanity, the exact opposite way that our most loving Lord sees us for it sees us as faceless, identical, worthless, hopeless, unloving, uncaring, undreaming, unfeeling, repeatable, replaceable, spiritless, nameless masses unfit for human living and therefore, fit only for every kind of slavery, atrocious exploitation, wholesale slaughter and complete annihilation precisely because we are unique, because we are different.

Its listens intently to all our murmurings against the Holy Spirit of God, all our greatest lies, all our malicious backbiting, all our blasphemous slanders and betrayals against our one triune God, His Holy Mother, His angels, His saints, His holy souls in purgatory and his faithful militant Church on earth, all our reckless gossiping and all our hearts lying in wait against one another like a terrible, evil presence that draw very near to our souls because of our lack of love for the truth and quiet self-discipline, ever attracted by our attachment to vain arguments and empty, loose words.

This devouring beast knows its own stink and is drawn to the sinister odor of sin. It relishes with great delicacy the festering stench of proud rebellion, wicked agendas, hidden perversity, deliberate faithlessness, hatred of life, willful denial of the truth and all manner of secret sins that reeks from a proud and unforgiving heart; an abominable stench that rises up to the heavens.

The seven proud horns are the seven capital vices that lead to sin: Pride, Anger, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony.

The two enormous, dark reptilian wings are the means by which this beast relentlessly pursues our immortal souls waging war with our hearts from within and then spilling out into the darkness and violence of the sins that pursue and harass us from our world without.

The body of the beast is a dark, convulsive mass of pure, raging evil; the unholy substance of sin that draws all evil things into the immense crush of the descendant gravity of itself.

It reeks of the treacherous scent of perfumed lies, the deadly odor of temptation and is a great abomination in the face of the Lord.

It is ever pregnant and expecting the birth of even greater evils to curse and afflict our poor humanity and having given birth to many terrible wars and great inhuman acts that have severely wounded the collective, noble spirit of our common humanity in the past, it has now started giving birth to genocide in our present time. Its last spawn will be evil incarnate itself.

The four legs are - heretical materialism, that both the goal and the substance of life is purely material because the physical universe is all there is, atheistic secularism, that there is no God because man is independent and self-sufficient by himself alone, moral relativism, that justice is arbitrary because there are no moral absolutes as both good and evil come in convenient shades of gray, and social Darwinism, that brute force is the singular social requirement, in the absence of virtue and truth, that measure the excellence of nations or individuals.

My most precious friend, this beast spares no one, harbors no mercy and has only grown in size and strength as manifest by the manner and scope of the evils that we face at this present time.

From this beast and its breathing our own native air is come this strange, polluting darkness that we call the culture of death that has been slowly engulfing our midnight world in a poisonous fog of war.

Where shall we draw the line, Beloved of God? Do we resort to sin and feed the beast that threatens to devour us, our kith and kin and destroy our nations and the nations of the one family of the nations of mankind in a fiery conflagration of unremitting hatred and violence? Do we idolize this maleficent beast as a god in place of our most loving Lord? Or do we draw the line here at the threshold of our own hearts and commit, as much as we can in spite of ourselves, by grace of our Lord never to add anymore to the evils of this present time?

Our Lord judges us as particular souls at the culmination of our lives at Particular Judgment but our salvation is always to be worked out together in community with all of common humanity as evidenced by General Judgment at the resurrection of the body. For no one can stand alone in the face of this overwhelming evil.

To the extent that we become aware, we slowly emerge from deep cover of shadow; moment by moment, truth upon truth, hope upon hope, and grace upon grace, ever plunging easily into the darkness of the beast or attempting bravely to fly into the Light. What will ultimately win out in the end is neither the darkness nor the Light but what fullness of the truth our love will forever confess. For we will indeed become like to what we love according to the measure of our love. But in the order of grace, where - we - all of the baptized dwell, it is more true to say that we will absolutely become what we love absolutely because the measure of God's love for us is absolutely beyond measure.

So lets make a choice, my precious friend, lets make an absolute choice. Let us cling to Jesus, let us cling to Him in humble, living repentance and promise each other no matter how many times one should fall, never, ever to let go of our love of God knowing that, as long as our grip is strong and secure - as long as our choice is one and absolute - our Lord will never ever let us go, He never has, He never will.

Where will the quickening time of our midnight world lead us?

How will this longest night end?

Peace to all men of good will
Adoration to Jesus Christ
And Glory to God in creation.

Lex Orendi Lex Credendi

THE LAW OF PRAYER is the law of belief.

The wisdom of prayer is found in the conviction not in our ability to ask but in the ability of the Divine Giver to provide. We must believe in the Giver and believe joyously for the Giver and His
Goodness is real and at all times able to respond. Most of the time in prayer, one does not know what to ask or what to say. It is in those times we should just plainly and simply and quietly believe in the Giver and His goodness being thankful for the opportunity to quietly appreciate His gift of Himself. So many times in prayer, the presence of God and the reality of His most intimate Truth is always reward enough that to ask for anything more seem naturally redundant and unnecessary. Therefore, believe when you ask in prayer that what you ask shall be provided for you trusting in the obedience of your faith in the love, mercy and loving-kindness of the Divine Giver Whose beneficent generosity is a mark of the greatness of His giving and you shall always be happy with what you get because what you always get is the Giver above His gifts.

It is never futile to practice how to pray knowing that God is God and man is man and so one is more or less always a beginner at prayer. But prayer without faith is futile and prayer that believes in the power of its own self is sinful, it is not prayer, it is pride. God knows when and how to deliver us. God reveals Himself in prayer as an answer to those who love Him by degrees that He has become for them their All and their Everything and to themselves in relation to Him, an utter nothing, and is joyously and willingly and thankfully content to being an utter nothing forever, knowing that this is but the way things ought to be, casting out everything and anything that can be cast out in the face of an infinitely lovable God.

So when one of our blessed confessors gives us a regimen of vocal prayers to say as our penance after confession, we should never again think of it - or any other good things of the faith - so ordinary as to overlook what is truly extraordinary in the quite ordinary things we do when it is touched by the invisible and enduring reality of the grace of our Lord.

Peace and Godspeed!

A Meditation on Hope

FAITH is the life of Christian community.
LOVE is the heart of Christian community.

HOPE is the atmosphere of Christian community.
It is both our breath and our breathing together.

Hope is the eternal spaces between our souls
that distinguish us from love to Love.

It is our faith reversed from the view of the Divine
and our faith received into the welcome hearts of others.

It is a thing that awaits our embrace
existing not in the past nor the future
but always in the present moment.

Hope floats from the deep of God's mystery
Those timeless little white flowers that grow
upon those wide, open plains and rolling hills
those evergreen valleys and high mountaintops
of the Eternal Kingdom of our Lord Christ
born from seasons of life's comings and goings
anchored firmly upon the Rock of Ages

Hope is a promise of something good
and a reality that awaits unredeemed
to be perceived by the eyes of our faith
and received by arms of our souls
into the embrace of the love of Jesus Christ
living by the grace of God in our heart of hearts.

It is the unseen substance of the faith
of individuals and families, tribes and nations,
the vital heritage of entire civilizations
of the numberless promises of lives left behind
suspended in time between heaven and earth
living in the ether of our sacred silence
as something for our hearts to embrace
hopes awaiting the community of other hopes
like the past awaiting the quickening of the present
within the eternal remembrance of God.

My precious friend
from always to always
Our faith is ever always our own
it is something we allow
it is something we nourish
like a sacred union professed
one love alone with the One Love
ever longing for Itself
it is something personal and private
and bears its fruits for the Beloved.

But our hope for it to become
is always the promise of something received
of a good that we can share with another
It is something that awaits us
like a herald of the benevolent Prince
that bid us to come into His Eternal Kingdom
Hope is something to be fulfilled
not by the bearer to whom it is promised
but by the beneficent reality of its Provider
and bears its fruits for the one possessed
For how can one hope in one's own self
without killing the faith that enable us to see?

Indeed, our hope is in Jesus Christ!
It is our Lord's hope that we share
It is God's promise for you and me
that matters very, very much.

It is His promise that we must hold on to
through our love and faith in Him
for it is to our God that we must trust.

Hope is what keeps us together.
It is our quite common longing as human beings.
It is always something to be shared
and lends warmth to our being human.
It feeds our hearts with goodwill
and keeps our souls good company.

It is the rarefied space where mercy acts
in the timeless moment of the now
to redeem from despair the truth
that live in other peoples lives.

It fills the sails that advance our common humanity.
It is the unselfish pride and excitement we feel
when we honor something true and worthy of praise
in the excellence within the person of another.

It feeds the fire that keeps us Christian
keeping us ever ready and agile
to serve all souls without distinction.

Glory to the God of heaven and earth,

Adoration to Jesus Christ, our Lord!

Peace and Godspeed to our Holy Father,

Pope Benedict XVI,

and all Bishops in communion
with the successor of Saint Peter.

Peace and Godspeed to our Holy Mother Church!
With much prayers for our Church Suffering
all our beloved Holy Souls
of family and friends forever
transformed by their final encounter with God
who lived so bravely
and loved us so tenderly
and whose final hopes on earth
they have all lovingly entrusted to us.

Much prayers and loving support
to all our clergy, our religious and
to each other as Christian laity -
all who live to serve the one God of life
in spirit and in truth.

Peace and Godspeed to all of blessed Christendom
and to all the just who walk this world with us.

God be with all of us now and forever.

So lets pick those little white flowers for Jesus,
and give each day our Savior a lovely bouquet -
joyously extend the Love of God to those in need
these make our Savior's Heart very glad, indeed!

---<--@

Further Reading - Spe Salvi

Asia Caelestis

To my brother and sister Christians in Asia
The Beloved of God in Jesus Christ
among all the Beloved of God in Jesus Christ
of the one universal Roman Church
living in the same Love of the Holy Spirit
in full communion with one another
and the successor of Saint Peter, Benedict XVI
and all Bishops in communion with our Holy Father
as the Sacrament of unity for mankind.

All of my precious friends,
Companions from always to always.

Our beloved native continent is fallen
with all the autumnal lands of the earth
far beyond our faded Eden
under these unconscious Eastern skies;
skies that are nearest the morrow,
skies that embrace our hearts,
hearts that are nearest the dawn,
the dawn being an awakening
to the Light
here in the East,
here in mother Asia -
a place nearest the morning
that is to come from on high,
reborn from the unforgotten promise
of the everlasting Peace
and a better world for all mankind.

JESUS CHRIST
is God's greatest gift to humanity.
He is our Eternal Daystar -
The Light of the human race
And the Splendor of the Truth.

As the Great Dawn Star of the East -
The Prince of Peace
calls out to His Church in Asia
for humble laborers in His vineyard of life -
faithful Christian souls who are willing to walk with Him
towards the Promise of a New Morning from on high
a world reborn from a Peace that only God can give
into a new age of life and renewal for all mankind

Let us each remember
my precious friend
Our Lord was born in Asia
And the Salvation He purchased
For all souls without distinction
Past, present and future
At the terrible cost of His Passion and death
Was a Promise wrought for the whole world
here on our native Asian continent.

The Christian hope that was kindled
By His Resurrection into everlasting glory
In God's plan for peace and reconciliation
For all mankind without exception
Was proclaimed in the Name of Jesus Christ
As the Gospel of everlasting life and Salvation
From our native Asia and outward
Into the tremendous world of our common hopes.

Now after 2000 years,
A twinkle in the eye of God,
That one universal Love of God;
That Christian Love immortal and divine;
That sanctify our Hope;
Make mighty our Peace;
And make holy our nations
Is come calling in our midst once again.

The resounding, universal Call of the Spirit of God
that quicken the Truth in hearts of all the faithful -
the flock of Jesus Christ from all the lands of earth -
is calling for a harvest of believing hearts here in Asia
Where the journey of our common human Salvation
Was begun by Jesus Christ the same,
Yesterday, today and forever -
Here on our native Asian soil,
Here in our native Asian soul -
for all mankind from the least to the greatest.

Once, twice and a choice
Here at the threshold
Of the third Christian millennium
At the longest night of our poor world
From Europe, to the Americas,
From Australia and Oceania, to Africa
and from Asia and back
outward and onward once again,
My precious friend and beloved Christian,
from love to love, life to life and hope to hope
the joyful work of our Lord's Hands!

God's most eloquent message left unspoken
lived through the life and death of our Savior
and written in the truths of Sacred Scripture
Is the essential will of God for man in creation
That one universal Defense of Sacred Life
that uphold the sanctity and dignity
of our common humanity
God's Promise is Life,
lived forever abundant and complete.
This Life is that One Light of the Christian People
The Life which is found in Jesus Christ our Savior
In the Salvation that is wrought for all mankind
And the Promise of Peace that abide in our souls
The Cause of our Roman Catholic Church

Lo behold our Blessed Christendom!
All of us who walk among the nations
One Church divided and weakened
One People wounded by the beast of war
yet united in our greatest of hopes
our past and present being of one accord
and filled with an undying Love of God
Marching with one heart of Peace
For the universal defense of Sacred Life
Advancing the Cause of Jesus Christ
Across the longest night of our poor world.

One Universal Defense of Sacred Life:
To Sanctify the Hopes of our nations
To make mighty the One Peace,
Turning every tear into gladness,
And all swords into plowshares
To give ALL OF LIFE a chance to be beautiful.
Ever unto that New Morning from on high -
And a new age of peace and renewal
For all men, women and children
Of the one family of the nations of mankind
at the daybreak of the Daystar of peace
an end of the longest night of our poor world.

Glory to God in the highest!
Adoration to Jesus Christ -
Peace to all men of goodwill.

Asia Caelestis,
An Asia of peace and love
risen from the old world
of war and discord
A harmony of differences
united like a hymn
of our common love for God
as a new culture of life
is realized from lives past
by lives lived in faith of tomorrow
An imperfect place
in an imperfect world
of imperfect lives
lived with less tears
laboring with much hope
casting our deepest longings
far away from the war
that has hurt us so much
and is still so determined
to do us terrible ill.

Once, twice and a choice.

Further Reading: Ecclesia In Asia

Our Exemplar

JESUS CHRIST is our Exemplar:
Our Path and our Destiny.
He is the Second Person
Of the one Triune Perfection -
The true and everliving God -
Most to be adored
Yet so little known
By needful men.
He is the Eternal Word of God,
Beloved Son of the Father,
Eternally begotten, not made;
True God from True God,
Infinite Truth from Infinite Truth -
One with the Father and the Holy Spirit -
Through Him all things came to be,
The Splendor of all living creation,
The Light of the human race,
And this Light shines in the darkness
And the darkness has not overcome it.
Though immortal and invulnerable
Out of love for suffering mankind
He went down from heaven
Through the obedience of our Lady
And the love in her Immaculate Heart
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit
And was born of the Virgin Mary.
He is True God and True Man.
In His Sacred Humanity
He is True Man
Like us in every manner
Save for sin.
In His Eternal Divinity
He is True God
Unlike us in all truth
Save for grace.
He constantly yearned over us
Living in solidarity with sinners.
He lived to serve the least of men
Desiring that all men be saved.
He lived and walked among us
Examining our hearts and our ways.
He called each of us by our name
And made Himself available to all.
He called us to live a life of repentance,
To worship God in spirit and in truth,
And he gave our hearts, our hope -
And he gave our hopes, His Heart -
With the courage to overcome
The darkness within ourselves.
By our common Christian baptism:
He rekindled in our hearts
The sanctifying fire of Divine Love.
And called us out of this world
To belong forever with Him
As one covenant family of God.
He illumined the darkness of our minds
By the Light of His own perfect human life.
And taught us His timeless counsels -
To be meek, humble, and contrite,
To be chaste, holy and upright,
To be like God, our Father in heaven,
Giving us His new commandment of love
By which heaven and earth shall know
That we are His disciples.
He grieved much for our sakes
And prayed assiduously for us.
He lovingly offered for us
His own Body and Blood
And instituted for us
Our common Eucharistic meal
That would feed our souls,
As our new manna from heaven,
And sustain us for the journey
Across the void of exile time
Through the bitter portal of our death
Into the promised Kingdom of God,
Our one, true Country.
His Peace is a promise
That He will be with us for always -
His Light will see us through this darkness,
His Truth being both our Path and our Destiny,
And His Love will not let us perish in the end,
For His Peace is a promise indeed -
That He will see us through to better days -
Into a place without war and tears,
Into a better world without sin and suffering,
Into a time of everlasting life and of joyous peace
Lived in the timeless embrace of the vision of our God.
He sent us His Holy Spirit
To guide and to fortify,
To serve and to strengthen,
To shape and to sanctify,
And protect from the gates of hell
His Militant Church on earth,
And illumine for all of us the way
Along the hard and narrow road,
Up the difficult, high mountain path
Of universal truth and Christian virtue.
He lived for the truth,
He spoke nothing but the truth,
He is nothing but the truth,
And died instead of mouthing the lie
That would deny Him His Divinity.
He became vulnerable
To suffer with our suffering
And embrace our human condition
Giving true meaning to our living.
He became mortal
To die with our death
And transform our fallen nature
Giving true meaning to our dying.
He was betrayed and abandoned by all His friends,
and suffered under Pontius Pilate.
He was rejected, slapped, spat at, mocked and scourged,
Punched, tortured, crowned with thorns and beaten with reeds.
He was made an object of contempt
And though innocent
Was treated more guilty than a murderer.
He was unjustly condemned to die
A horrible and ignominious,
Slow and lingering death by crucifixion.
He was made to carry His heavy, wooden Cross
And amidst a jeering, shouting crowd
Was dragged violently through the streets of Jerusalem.
He was stripped naked and was nailed to the wood of His Cross.
He was raised up and made to hang in unthinkable agony,
Upon that lonely mount of Calvary
An object of scorn and ridicule to His own creatures,
Suspended between heaven and earth
Like a bridge between the world of God and the world of men.
His sacred humanity, bloodied and bruised beyond recognition,
He did reveal to us the depth of his hunger for us.
He did thirst for our love.
He wept out of sheer loneliness
And looked down in sorrow
Upon the grieving faces of His Mother, Mary,
And his beloved disciple, Saint John.
Out of love for His Mother
And out of mercy for us,
He entrusted us to Mary
And Mary to us through Saint John
At the foot of His Cross.
His most loving and Sacred Heart,
A most loving Heart that has loved us so much
Yet in return is loved so little,
Was emptied out for us.
He bore for all mankind the terrible wrath
Gathered up for all our sins past, present and future.
He bled all His Sacred Blood in profuse torrents
To wash away all our iniquities
Until finally
He cried out in abject grief
And utter desolation
To His Father in Heaven,
Commended to God, His Spirit
And died of a broken Heart.
His broken Heart was then pierced
With a lance
And It flowed with the water and the blood
That sealed forever the new and everlasting Covenant
Between God and man.
It is said that our Holy Mother Church,
As Christ's new covenant people,
Sprang from His wounded side.
Alleluia, O my soul, Christ our Savior
Has paid the ransom
For the sins of all mankind!

Our Blessed Lord gave to us the gift of Himself
out of His perfect obedience
to the tender mercies
of the Father of all mercy
and His infinite love for us,
miserable and wretched sinners that we are,
until He was so completely
and utterly spent
that even though He was God
and He is God
and God being infinitely rich
and powerful beyond measure,
As Saint Augustine said -
He gave until He had nothing left to give.

Indeed, He loved us all without exception
and cherished us each without measure
right to the bitter end.
He forgave His tormentors
for He loved both His enemies
as well as His friends.

In so doing, our Blessed Lord
and Holy Redeemer
completely transformed
our common heritage
by His life, Passion, death and Resurrection
from one of everlasting death
into one of resurrection unto everlasting life.

Glory to God in the highest!
Peace to all men of goodwill -
Adoration to Jesus Christ -
Our Beloved Lord and Omnipotent God;
Our Blessed Savior and Loyal Friend;
Our Divine Master and Celestial King;
Our Eldest Brother and Faithful Helper;
Our Light and our Truth;
Our Resurrection and Life;
Our one true Shepherd,
Our Pledge of Victory;
Our Prince of Peace;
Our Hope Everlasting;
Our Eternal Daystar;
The True Morning Star;
The First of our First Magnitudes
Our Everything and our All.

He is Jesus Christ, our Exemplar:
Our Path and our Destiny -
True God and True Man,
Son of God and Son of Mary.

And this I most solemnly confess
with all the Christian truths
of my Roman Catholic faith
As most sincerely mine own
Ever beloved and abiding
For always to always
With me and within me
In heart and in soul
In silence and in words
Alone or with others
In thought and in deed
In time and in eternity
By the blessed
And thrice-holy Name
Of the one, great Triune Perfection,
The Father,
The Son,
And the Holy Spirit.

AMEN.

We Cannot Deceive You

- My precious friend, here is one of my favorite vocal prayers on repentance. Vocal prayers most especially our Lord's own prayer, those of our Saints, the Liturgies of our Mother Church, the Canticles of the New Testament (the Magnificat of our Lady, the Benedictus of Zechariah, and the Nunc Dimmitis of Simeon), the Canticle of Moses and other Canticles of the Old Testament, the Psalms and other works of prayers by various holy people are, in my own experience, very good points for deeper reflection, it reflects the interior dispositions of those who have been able to put down to actual words what in their hearts must be the most profound expression of a Love beyond words.

PARDON US, O LORD, PARDON US. We beg to shift the blame of our sins; we make excuses. But no one can hide himself from the light of your truth, which both enlightens those who turn to it, and exposes those who turn away. Even our blood and our bones are visible to you, who created us out of dust. How foolish we are to think that we can rule our lives, satisfying our own desires, without thought of you. How stupid we are to imagine that we can keep our sins hidden. But although we may deceive other people, we cannot deceive you. And since you see into our hearts, we cannot deceive ourselves, for your light reveals to us our own spiritual corruption. Let us, therefore, fall down before you, weeping with tears of shame. May your judgment give new shape to our souls. May your power mold our hearts to reflect your love. May your grace infuse our minds, so that our thoughts reflect your will.

Pontifical North American College, Rome
Manual of Prayers, p. 50
- William of Saint Thierry (1085-1148)
(Available at the EWTN Religious Catalogue)

Pax Pilipinas

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid."

- John 14: 27

AS A NATION, I BELIEVE we are still quite capable enough to forgive ourselves.

Forgiveness is an essential human art, mercy being a formal obligation to us Christians, and a necessary means to achieve the most beautiful expressions of what being truly alive in God and humanly in love in Jesus Christ really is. Failure to comply with this Christian obligation carries with it the supreme penalty of eternal damnation as in Matthew 25: 41.

Mercy is a virtue that inspire us in our will to be compassionate and this compassion favorably inclines our mind and our hearts toward the necessary work of the alleviation of the sufferings of others. It is a special virtue; a spontaneous kind of charity that tempers justice. Our Holy Mother Church outlines for us seven corporeal and seven spiritual works of mercy.

The forgiveness that we should practice as a nation is not a surrender born out of frustration. Let us commit to our national awareness that we, and only we, are responsible for each of ourselves as Filipinos. We must be faithful and loyal to God and to each other. No matter what labels or stereotypes the unseeing world may use to tag and identify us as a people, it matters not, when we stand firmly on our own truth. The lies of the world and the illusions that this world allows to maintain its strangle hold on our birthright humanity shall never harm us if we do not allow it to enter into our hearts. Outside of our souls, these lies have no power over us and their evil will inevitably dissipate in time but the truth of all the things we hold dear shall forever stand firm. So worry not, my beloved Filipino, we only need to remember, as a people and as a nation, what truth there is in ourselves and, I assure you, we will be certain to outlast the emptiness and the despair that bring to life the collective sins that plague us as individual citizens and therefore, give rise to the evils that we face as a nation.

My precious friend, no matter how long we have endured - and have yet to endure - our colonial image of inferiority, this narrow-minded master and servant identity that have enslaved our cultural awareness, destroyed our native lines of ancestral descent, felled our original lines of birthright rulers and distanced us from the noble truths that are the necessary substance of our civilization, no matter how obscure it has become, there is hope.

Notwithstanding the misgivings of Christian Spain, with the evils of the colonial past now enculturated into our social awareness, I must in justice also emphasize for our nation never to overlook the hard missionary work of those valiant men and women of their respective orders within our Holy Mother Church who by their selfless sacrifice have given to God everything to transmit to our people the inestimable gift of our living Roman Catholic Faith.

Beloved nation, our Catholic Faith and the hope of Peace that it brings is a heritage not of colonialism but a manifest work of the Holy Spirit of God acting through the love and zeal of these, now mostly nameless, honest and true servants of our Blessed Lord, Jesus Christ. These noble souls have worked hard and sacrificed everything in the past - and is still doing so in the present, humble missioners from Sister Spain and other Sister nations - engaged in the ongoing labor to return to our Asian soil the native Peace of our Blessed Lord, Jesus Christ, the great dawn star of the East, our one, true, bright Morning Star and God's greatest gift to Asia and from Asia outward once again into the tremendous world of our common hopes for all mankind.

It is an outright injustice not to be forever grateful to these holy souls for establishing here in our beloved Philippines, an enduring citadel of Christian hope - our one and only hope of God's Peace in Jesus Christ - the hope of the sheltering wings of God's Peace, the one essential strength of every nation that serve and defend the one common hope of humanity, the hope for a better world for all men, women and children. The hope of Asia Caelestis, an Asia of God's Peace, a continent reborn from the imperfect union of the will of heaven and earth, an entire continental family of the nations of the regions of the peace whose particular peoples live far away from war, an imperfect place on earth where human beings struggle not anymore in tears but in hope, a hope that springs as living water from a Love that serve all souls without distinction.

There is essentially always hope in our identity because there is Peace in Jesus Christ and this Peace is not a peace that the world can ever give us. This Peace is a promise. A promise to keep that no matter how evil and dark the times may become, there will always be this Light of God's Peace that ever goes before us, a kindly Light to lead us out of the desert as a nation and a warm, loving glow to give us comfort in our hearts as individuals as our generations march through time to advance the cause of our togetherness, as a nation decreed by the will of God in eternity, into the morning of the new dawn from on high. Indeed, this is essentially who we are - the sons and daughters of the new morning, heirs to this now awakening nation - the Pearl of the Orient Seas and our brave Land of the Morning.

We are a poor nation and because of this we have been preserved from much of the corruption that has been eating away at the social fabric of other, more industrialized states. The battles that our Holy Mother Church is waging, in the Name of Jesus Christ and on behalf of suffering humanity, is different in Europe and North America than the evils that we, as Christians in Asia, must combat in the same Holy Spirit of Christ that unites us in blessed communion with God, that one Triune Perfection, most to be adored and yet little known by needful men, and all of the faithful Churches of the one universal Christian Church - the Roman Catholic Church.

Let us remember that the Christian faith was born, just over two millennia ago, with the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, here in Asia. It is somehow a mystery to me - and to our Holy Mother Church, why our Blessed Lord and His promise of Peace is so little known and little loved in a continent that is in much need of the sheltering wings of God's Peace. We have seen, along with the rest of our one world, our own share in Asia in general and here in our native Philippines in particular of thousands of years worth of violence and bloodshed. When I think about the God of life and our common creation and the hurt and the sorrow that it must cause Him to see us suffer so helplessly as sinners mired in our own iniquities, I am filled with an everlasting gratitude for the tender mercies of our Heavenly Father Who sent His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word to restore by His life, Passion, death and Resurrection, the Light of the infinite Love of the one Triune Perfection to our world so full of sorrow and darkness. Through the Holy Spirit of Christ and the instrumentality of God's one universal Christian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, our Heavenly Father offers to every human being this Light yesterday, today and forever, the same in Jesus Christ as God's everlasting plan of Peace and reconciliation with all of mankind. Only this plan of Peace can shed true Light to the unseen, spiritual realities that reveal our human weaknesses, transform our sufferings, enable our will for good and virtue, illumine for our minds a safe and certain path out of spiritual poverty and despair, bring order and peace into our interior lives so important to us as Filipinos and as Asians and help bring joy and a fullness of meaning to an otherwise bleak existence.

I personally feel that the mind and heart of our common humanity is so very much exhausted from lack of peace within the soul of the individual. This unfettered warfare from within that can not long endure virtue therefore, spills out into our external, common world in furious cycles of hatred and violence that consumes all that it touches in scandalous conflagrations of sin and bloodshed that leave only desolation in its wake. This beast of war, being the collective whole of sin, all its evil allure and all the agents that lead to sin, is an abomination in the sight of God. It is the ancient enemy of God, our Lady, God's Angels and Saints, and the peoples of all mankind.

This is why the decree that established the order of the one family of the nations of all mankind was conceived in the eternal Mind of God - because the evils of the present require the cohesion of nations in order to positively guarantee the strength of the spirit of the state, founded on the peace of its hopeful citizenry, shall come to the service and the defense of sacred life against the beast that seek its complete and utter annihilation. A beast of evil in high spiritual places that by relentless assaults against the infinite worlds within the soul of each person work its malice outward laboring insidiously toward the complete destruction of all of living creation, all the good in life that bring pleasure and glory to the one true God of our common creation as common creatures.

My precious friend, if it were not the will of God for us to be as we are today - as states and as individual citizens to our own particular nations - then this reality should never have come to pass; you and I would be living in another set of realities determined by God's eternal Wisdom and His Providential will and divine purpose for all of His living creation.

But since we are here, and we can't contradict our own existence, let us stand together and plant our wills obediently into the eternal will of God's command that summoned for us the spirit of our young Mother Protectress and draw the line of our individual peace at the threshold of each of our hearts. Let us each make a national compact now, our Pax Pilipinas, one with another, here in the solitude of our silence and the vigilance of our own hearts, alone with the Alone, that we shall forever embrace the Peace of Jesus Christ because we are a needful people, humble and contrite, we now and forever ally ourselves in repentance to God, our Lady, God's Angels, Saints and all of suffering humanity and declare formal secession from war and the systems of war in our world that enslave our nations, mire us in poverty and threaten the peoples of our planet: I am my brother's keeper.

Let us make a commitment to the Holy Mother of God not to add anymore to the descendant gravity of the evils we face here in our present time and meet with faith and fortitude the assaults of sin and its temptations that lurk at the very door of our hearts and, in the Name of the one Triune Perfection, forbid our true enemies entry into the holy ground of our souls - our dwelling place with Divine Love - Christian souls forever marked with the mark of the baptized, Christian souls who forever belong to the Covenant family of Jesus Christ and made accountable to God because of the new life that we live in God's grace.

My precious friend and fellow Filipino citizen, as Christians it is never the destination that is the problem for us, it is always the load. You see we only follow where Christ, our Shepherd lead us. We know His voice because we are of His flock. What matters most certainly is the moment to moment carrying of our cross with our Savior and with one another because our Blessed Lord said so Himself in the Gospel - Love is all that really matters. But where this love is absent, rejected or ignored, then one is exclusively burdened with the oppressive weight of his or her sins and walks alone being without hope. For the unrepentant sinner treads a lonely, desperate and meaningless path indeed. Our hearts can be laden by many things but once we have shed the excessive weight of the festering lies arising from bitterness of past sins, unforgivingness of present sins and/or despair of sins imagined - right this very moment - and REPENT, being sincere, humble and contrite, asking God His forgiveness by taking on the easy yoke of Jesus Christ and having recourse to the sacraments of Holy Mother Church, then our hopes will be our only burden and our burden will prove light indeed.

If we learn to collectively follow, as one Church, that one illuminating Light of God's Peace that dispel the darkness of war and evil, sin and death, perseveringly - hard may the mountain path be - then all of our individual Christian hopes and the interconnected and interdependent nature of our collective common hopes as one people, from past to the present and from generation to generation, shall be revealed to us as one truth that ascend to the summit of one Truth - a one Republic cause - whereby we shall know the direction our nation should take that will lead us toward the dawn of the new morning from on high. For we are led ever onward by the Light of the one true star of the morning, our Blessed Lord, Jesus Christ, our beloved Exemplar.

Indeed, it is not the destination that we should be worried about at present for we shall all arrive there in God's time, alone or with others, but only together can we know what exact route that our nation should take across the void of the third Christian millennium. As a nation we are entrusted with a debt of life that extends to future generations, to ignore that we owe this debt is to ignore the great spiritual value and patrimony of our own lives. Mercy obligates us as a nation to extend the reach of our good will across spacetime to reach out to those future lives whose duty it is to inherit what present we shall build or destroy for them. Nations are meant to shelter their human populations from the assaults of the beast of war in a collective march across the void of exile time - most importantly here at the longest night of our poor world - unto the consummation of the age of mankind at the Last Day. If the present generation lack the spiritual will and wherewithal to preserve the sheltering wings of the Peace of the state, if none to a few come to the vital defense of Country, who shall be responsible for the sufferings of those who are yet to come? Are they not also as defenseless as our unborn and just as real? What a crime indeed in the eyes of Almighty God, our Lady, the Angels and Saints of God and of the peoples of this world to maliciously harm the good of a person, let alone the good of an entire nation ever always pregnant with its potent debt of life from the divine generosity of the Creditor of all life!

What can all the power and material riches of the world ever serve us if we do not use them for friendships one with another and one nation with another? Verily, temporal power and created things alone will not fulfill a man's desire for true and lasting happiness. For we live not on bread alone. When has love of power and riches ever brought the certitude of an inward peace - the Peace of Jesus Christ - into the restless heart of any man? In fact, they make things even less certain, they make our hearts more restless, because of what they really are - pure vanity, utter emptiness. This whole universe is pure vanity. All created things will end in emptiness unless they serve sacred life and glorify the God of life. For it is God alone that we must serve. The Buddhists are right indeed to say that greed is the only dirt. A Christian soul who believes in an afterlife and lives in dread of hell must guard against it. To knowingly and willingly steal from the state and continually and habitually betray our sacred trust, one must truly be foolish for only a fool says there is no God and repents not.

My precious friend and fellow Filipino, we know the proper times and seasons of earth not by constantly looking at the skies above us. In much the same way, the seasons of heaven are also discernible not by isolating ourselves from one another but by becoming familiar with the hopes and longings of the human heart. For the indwelling presence of the one Triune Perfection, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, command the seasons within those infinite, celestial universes - the Kingdom of God in the heart of every human being. The time is late but again, I feel it is not the destination but the load that we Christians should be worried about. And this require us to be merciful.

When do we start building from the foundation truth we now know about the systems of the peace those virtues that shall fulfill the good in ourselves, the good that will outlast the evils of our present time? My precious friend, here in our hearts, let us, in humble prayers to God, ask first and foremost for the virtue of mercy that will reconnect us to each other and allow us to share the load of the national burden of hope. Let us each do with love and promptitude the works of mercy both corporeal and spiritual, willingly, hopefully and with joy knowing that every little good thing that we do, openly or in secret, alone or with others, matters most certainly. For these are our alms which we must give for the sake of God's own mercy with much prayer and generosity to those who suffer, to the least of our brethren, especially in this season of Lent.

Finally, my precious friend and fellow Filipino, our Lord's Peace is a promise - to all men, women and children of all the peoples of the world - to our Asia, Asia Caelestis - the Asia of God's Peace, the native continental soil of our native Christian faith and the birthplace of Jesus Christ, our Blessed Lord, to the Philippines of God's Peace, Pax Pilipinas - and to all other nations of the one Peace of Christ, this Peace is a promise that fulfills the deepest longings of the human heart for a better world away from war and death, a better world for all men, women and children, a Peace that serve all souls without distinction.

For God's Peace is a promise that we hold in Jesus Christ and with one another in Christ; a promise that is kept because it is a promise that is true for all times and places and God always keep His promises - that no matter what suffering this life may bring, for as long as we persevere in obedience and charity, our Christian souls sustained by our Holy Mother Church, our Christian love fulfilled by our common endeavor of Country, our common endeavor of Country guided by our Christian hope and our common hopes united in time across all our generations, each our hearts will know for certain that God Himself shall see us through to better times in a better world without war and tears because God helps His friends and not His enemies - war and hatred, sin and death - their agents and their allures. For it has already been a decree in eternity (as written in the Book of Isaiah) that all of God's enemies shall find their place with Satan in hell, turning to dust and to ashes from within, collapsing upon themselves by the descendant gravity of their own evil - but God shall never let any of His friends perish in the end, for the death of His faithful ones are precious to the Lord our God.

"Peace is a promise.
A promise I make to you,
My precious child.
A promise to see you through
right to the bitter end."

Glory to God in the highest,
adoration to Jesus Christ -
Peace to all men of goodwill.

Further Reading - Ecclesia In Asia, Ut Unum Sint, Nostra Aetate, Catechism of the Catholic Church Section II - The Ten Commandments, Article V, III. Safeguarding Peace