- 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
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