OUR MOTHER ASIA is restless. All her long years, years much longer than the fleeting years of mankind, our Asia is victim to both war and the scandalous will of war. Her universal spirit of benevolent wisdom, common human kindness and social harmony amidst rich diversity have been deeply wounded. Her most common doctrine of hope, the unity of heaven and earth, have been mostly forsaken. Her lands that stretch from sunrise to sundown overrun by war. Her warm maternal countenance eclipsed by the will of war. Her most beloved nations embittered and despairing for life. The heart of our Mother Asia is sorrowful. For War is a beast.
The beast of war is the one whole system of war. The motions of war in time is a powerful descendant force of unseen gravity that pulls whole hearts filled with good will and common humanity downward into a spiraling darkness of deceit, disobedience, corruption and malice and whole nations filled with good order and common hope into social fragmentation, division, dilution and dissolution.
The heart of the beast burns with a relentless hatred of human life in particular and all of life in this world in general. The goal of war in the most absolute sense is not peace, it is the complete annihilation of life as a whole in our world.
The colonial past that our Filipino nation share with Mother Asia has made us weary of the many guises that war takes to bring it's inhuman will of domination into our hearts and into our times. This plague of despair and confusion in the hearts of her most beloved nations is lasting evidence of those times when our Mother Asia was confronted by the greed of men who belong to no other human nation for their adulterous souls have left their humanity to serve with their sins openly under the beast of war.
War is not native to our Filipino nation nor to Mother Asia nor to the other nations of the one family of the nations of mankind, this beast is feral and have plagued our generations and our civilization for too long.
The one greatest and most lasting effect of our colonial past is this scandalous will of descendant gravity that sums up in darkness what our many most beloved nations of Mother Asia pine for in light. This most unwelcome beast must find no more place in Mother Asia.
No Asian must harbor war in their hearts to deny war entry into our times and into our Mother Asia. For war is a beast that demand an absolute form of allegiance. One either serves the will of war or one does not serve the will of war. And war is an ungrateful beast often turning on it's own self. Our human heart the same with all of suffering humanity may have only one of these absolute forms of allegiances for a lifetime.
Christianity is not an effect of colonialism. The Providence of God that governs all things allow only for evil to endure because the will of God means to bring something good out of it. This is a basic principle of the Divine reality and understood for the same reason by which we say that God punishes evil and rewards the good. God is good and this is truth apparent to the most basic of Christian sense. One does not need an act of faith to determine by human reason alone the empirical goodness inherent in God's Being.
The unfathomable design of Divine Providence has concealed the noble labor of the many persons of good will whose Christian natures have brought the one Christian faith back into our Mother Asia. By any other measure, these men of good will whose human natures sanctified by baptism are possessed with souls that have taken on the character of Jesus Christ belong to all human nations. For one who is Christian become more human for it is our common humanity that the religion of Jesus Christ means to perfect.
Christianity is a monotheistic faith and the Christian religion is no more foreign to Mother Asia than her own most faithful sons and daughters. The monotheistic faith of Christianity affirms the truth of God's ascendant unity. Our Blessed Lord Himself says in the Gospels that there is but one, true and living God.
The faith of Christians in the ascendant unity of God is a requirement for Christian unity but the
inclusivity of the oneness of God in the Christian sense allow for transcendence into higher truths that include and embrace all of common humanity. God's oneness is not a means for exclusivity for nothing, not one particle, can be excluded in the one awesome totality of the sovereign reality of God and the revelation that God is one.
Faith is an act of the human will that is independent of human reason. Human reason is not prevented but is
pre-supposed by faith. Reason itself intrinsically understands it is broken unless it accepts what in faith is veiled. Faith is an act of profound silence that seeks the deep reality of the unseen supernatural order for the substance of an evident Divinity.
The object of faith is God and the substance of faith is God's illumination or light. This light is the illumination of the truth that perfects human reason by degrees of willing surrender to the perfection of the Divine will. As opposed to religion, faith is a common act of common humanity and it is this faith applied to the evident reality of God's manifest unity that is the shared patrimony of the great
Abrahamic lineages of hope.
Religion is an the act of Justice. It is the virtue that accords the proper worship and reverence to the reality of the Divine. Faith is an act of God, a supernatural virtue, it requires the human will to extend outside of itself into great uncertainty and without prior acts of reason holding only to either unproven belief or to genuine Christian hope in the Divine reality. Faith leads naturally into acts of religion but the reality of religion require faith to be meritorious. This is why our Blessed Lord Himself says in the Gospels that He has chosen us and not the other way around. We have not chosen our most loving Jesus for no act of man can ever make real the transcendental and unseen reality of the Divine without the positive action of God's will. This is also why our Blessed Lord says in the Gospels that we must be drawn to Him by the Father and that no one can come to Him unless the Father draw him.
Christian religion depends on Christian faith which is why it must be made clear that prayer is vital to every Christian. Christian monotheism affirms God's goodness. All Christians profess that God created all things and that He saw that they were all good. Therefore, good is an absolute truth in reality and is the bedrock foundation for all Christian morality. As Christians, we affirm that all that is real is good in it's natural meaning and form.
Evil, specifically moral evil, is a corruption of the good, goodness being essentially in the natures of everything that is real. Physical evil is also the destruction of something real but it is essentially different from the evil that drive the mystery of iniquity. Physical evil is an instrument of Divine Providence. Moral evil is an effect of those angels and men whose hearts have willingly made unholy gods out of created things and succumbed to the wicked illusion of sinful truths founded on diverse lies and lies born of the one mother of all lies.
Manicheanism supposes that evil is constantly engaged in battle against good but the heretical nature of this doctrine supposes also that evil is on an equal footing with the good making evil a god on par with the one God Who has neither equal nor comparison and affords evil an unacceptable sense of legitimacy in the logical premise that evil has, the same with the good, an equal chance of prevailing.
Christian monotheism affirms the absolute nature of the good. Therefore, evil is both discriminate and
particular and never absolute in the sense that it is neither universal or whole or catholic in time and in nature. Evil has to labor where good is already a manifest existence. Thus, evil corrupts the extant reality of something of a particular good for evil itself neither has the will nor the wherewithal, neither has the reach nor scope to afflict and corrupt the absolute whole of the good which is a truth that is eternal. In stark contrast, evil itself being only an aberration in creation is only evidently ephemeral. "Only" being in the context of the absolute for I know how much hurt evil is able and has already inflicted in numberless, nameless lives who are for all times and places, my fellow human beings.
War is a unique evil. Were we to account the sum of all the evil in this world with only the wounded nature of the human being in mind, we will utterly fail to make a full account of the totality of evil. This is the mystery of iniquity, for besides the inherent potential of our spiritual patrimony that inclines the heart of mankind to evil, there is evil here that can not be accounted for by the
woundedness of our humanity alone.
For we are all by Satan deceived and because of this, all of humanity is by first principles a victim to the evil that have robbed us of our, true spiritual heritage.
War is the first act of the first sin. It is pride and rebellion that together did open the way for an immortal hatred to burn down one third of the numberless stars of the angelic realms. It has begun it's assault on our human world the moment our first parents closed their hearts to God and opened the way for sin. I lay this down to emphasize the deep nature of war and the roots of conflict that begin not in the past but in the moment, in the eternal now. For war is first and foremost a spiritual reality, an unseen beast no less potent than the unsung dreams of entire nations born from the unborn hopes of every human being.
Our Mother Asia is restless because of this war and what is hurting our Filipino nation is also this same beast. Sun
Tzu in his Art of War speaks the truth when he stated that to understand the enemy is half the battle won.
Given the nature of this struggle, it must first be admitted that only God has the unchangeable will as well as the omnipotent ability to completely liberate our humanity from the scourge of war. But this does not preclude any of us from hope nor does God's mystery prevent us from taking measures to qualitatively limit evil and alleviate the quantitative suffering of our common humanity.
In the Christian faith, to even begin to understand ourselves, we must first understand the nature of the Person of Jesus Christ. I must relent now from referring to Christianity as a religion. For the meaningfulness of Christianity is not properly served by limits of religion alone, for the Christian faith is a unique response of the human heart to the New Covenant reality that Jesus Christ Himself sealed in testament by His own Most Precious Blood on the Cross at Calvary, outside of Jerusalem. This new and everlasting Covenant and the Christian revelation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is the most powerful elucidation of God's love that has ever broken ground in the whole history of our poor world. It is a Love so powerful it's reality elicits a most peculiar response that begin for man who was once an enemy of God, a living relationship in his heart with God in Jesus Christ. Love and not religion sums up what Christianity essentially and correctly is in all it's great depth and sacred reality.
Christian Love and it's most profound spiritual dimensions is a treasure unique to the Christian faith. For the Christian faith is a living and lifelong relationship of God's own Love for man and to understand God's Love in the Christian context is to understand also the interior mystery of God in the Holy Trinity. It is this
triune nature of God that is the principal cause for God's unity and this sacred reality of the Divine is at peace with Itself bringing neither conflict nor confusion to both faith and reason. That the Lord is one and that within this oneness and simplicity of the Divine reality there exists three separate and distinct eternal consciousness that draw from their one will of Divinity the manifest distinctions of the three most holy Persons in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit that at once is the omnipotent synergy of the Divine unity that created, sustains, preserves, liberates, sanctifies, fulfills the one Divine purpose for all creation and at once is present in the Divinity and Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and our most Blessed Lord and the one Savior of mankind.
The
Trinitarian nature of the one, true God reveal that all the actions of God are the actions of Love, so much so in fact, that Sacred Scripture declares that God is Love. For the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and their Love together is the Person of the Holy Spirit Who redounds to the Father and the Son their own limitless Love in an infinity of Christian charity. To fathom the unfathomable depths of the one unimaginable whole of God's Love is to plumb at the truth of uncreated grace.
I lay down only what is necessary to make clear the principal truths of vital Christianity first and foremost so that God may be more known and better loved and secondly so that God's Love may bring down the climate of Jesus Christ to return calm and order to these, our most turbulent times for the benefit of all of suffering humanity.
The climate of Jesus Christ is Peace. Vital Christianity has always had an inherent potential as a benevolent force for peace and common humanity.
But war has wounded the Christian Church as well. She is a House divided upon herself lingering in defiance to the will of Christ that all may be one. But the bedrock foundations of true Christian potency never did rest on human weakness and inconstancy, they have rested as they always have in the sacred reality of the one
triune Perfection and most meaningfully in the Person of the Holy Spirit Who safeguards the deposit of faith and is the Spirit that guides, animates, shapes and preserves the marks of unity, sanctity, catholicity and
apostolicity which are the distinctive marks of our Holy Mother
Church. For it is the one, same Spirit that embraces our one Christian communion of the Roman Catholic Church and the Spirit that makes us one Christian people under the apostolic lineage founded on the indefatigable and unshakable rock of Saint Peter and all his successors.
Where then do Christian loyalty lie? If we were to look exclusively at the necessary structures of the
ecclesial hierarchy, one would say that the answer would be the pope and the papacy. If we were to look also at the dogmatic foundations that frame and preserve the body of sacred doctrine of Christian truths, one would say that the answer would be Jesus Christ. If one were to look deeply into the essential nature of the labor of our Lord to make saints out of sinners, one would also realize the functional reality that powerfully underlie Christian leadership and the Messianic nature of the first advent truth of Jesus Christ for the highest goal of Christianity is evidently the achievement of true human liberation. It is from this truth that is founded all of our Christian hope for it is unto this one, same truth that all Christians are bound by common baptism and sacred brotherhood to become as ready instruments being at one with the Divine will to save and Love's imperative to serve.
It is toward the realization of true and lasting human happiness in the service of God, true self and others in God Who is our absolute Good where our functional and most fundamental Christian loyalties lie. For vital Christianity holds to no limits of time or space, superficial or artificial differences for God's Love is transcendent of temporal particularity. Sacred Scriptures attests to this truth stating that God is no respecter of persons. This means that God's Love is infinitely great enough to include all of the generations of our suffering humanity from the very first right down to the very last one.
This goal of true and lasting human liberation is summed up and proposed to our Christian faith in the most profound doctrine of the Incarnation.
From here we shall now take a parallel road that departs from the path of the individual and returns us once more at the path of common Country. But in order to be meaningful, I must first lay down the principal truths that underpin the most common of human endeavors, human civilization.
Pax Romana. Roman Peace. Historically, the peace of Rome sums up in one word the blessings of Roman civilization which is by any other label the boon of peace. Indeed, every endeavor of human civilization is founded on the underlying strength of that particular human nation's peace. Suffice to say, so much of the rise and fall of human civilization have been the
cumulative result of both the invisible and visible motions of both war and peace. As we have treated war sufficiently beforehand, we shall now turn to the subject of peace.
Let us begin by eliminating what peace is not. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is not the object of war. Peace is not an opposition to war. Peace is neither the appeasement nor the toleration of war. Verily, peace has nothing to do whatsoever with war and the scandalous will of war.
Peace is a good and therefore an absolute whole of truth. This means that peace is a whole by itself and is both independent of everything and is inclusive of all things. War has no place in peace. Peace therefore, is not an opposition to war but a release from it. Peace goes by a road that is completely apart both in causal
space time trajectory as well as potent spirituality from the descendant path of war.
Peace as a virtue serves life and therefore give praise and glory to the God of life. For the actions of peace when infused by charity serve life, uphold all life - at all stages and without division or distinction - as sacred and if necessary will defend life from all untruths that deny it's God-given dignity and right to exist within itself. The virtue of peace, in all it's acts ascends to unity, accepts no division within itself, embraces all sides as one and excludes no one from itself. It abhors every kind of division and discord among men. It denies war a footing in the heart because it recognizes only the goodness of itself and speaks only in the tongue of the truth. It acts only to defend and never to offend. It is patient and steady being sure of it's own truth. It defends because it loves and is likewise defended because it is loved. Peace does not recognize war and never acts because of anger or hatred because the ways of war are foreign to her. For the actions of peace are always the actions of love being her divine love for life and for the God of all life that animates and informs her as a virtue.
Our most Blessed Lord at His Resurrection being sure of His own Truth gave Himself good time to roll up the bandages that was very carefully wrapped around the broken bread of His Sacred Humanity. Even in a cold, dark tomb, a few days after the trauma of His Crucifixion, our Lord's Peace never did waver nor has the Truth of His Divinity been diminished by the experience of corporal death. Even death on a Cross which is the most humiliating, lingering death of a criminal failed to put a shadow of a doubt to the nobility of the Heart that have yearned over mankind like a mother yearns for her children and gave for us His life for no other reason than love, so that we may live and live abundantly. If I am allowed to speak freely about my Jesus, it will surely take up all of our time and more. So let us return now to the relevant subject at hand.
Our Blessed Lord gave to us His Peace in John 14: 27 and it reads, "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."
I firmly believe that a deeper understanding of this most profound and very relevant statement of our Lord in the Gospels is very much required in the context of our present time and it's quite distinct form of evil.
However, as I understand it, for I now depart from proven ground, my most humble appreciation of this passage first asks the question why was the peace of our Lord shared and secondly why was the peace of our Lord shared in public.
Our Blessed Lord could have kept His joy to Himself. A peace that only His at oneness with the reality of His Divinity could ever truly bring even to His Sacred Humanity the same with all of suffering humanity. Our Lord gave to us His Peace as a promise that ushered away the last vestiges of evil's standing claim on the souls of all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve at the meridian of history. For our Lord has opened the way for grace to recreate anew our hearts and regenerate the new man in the image of the fullness of the age Jesus Christ, the Alter Christus. Peace that is only made possible by our Lord's at oneness with God in the hypostatic union is now also made possible for the Christian through unmerited grace.
There never should be any conflict between the old and the new for each is complimentary to the other being born from the same hope in the promise of God given to our Father Abraham. It has always been at oneness with God, our being at peace, alone with the Alone, that has been the promised goal of Christian spirituality.
Knowing now all of this, it must be squarely laid that the burden of much of our past grief is an affliction to our common humanity whose sole intelligent cause is war and the will of war. Everything that was alien to every honorable religious tradition that stands on the unchangeable ground of the Divine reality never was caused by anything human, or angelic or Divine. The whole of life can not be inimical to itself nor can the unsurpassed Wisdom of God be absent from any of His works, from the very least to the very greatest of all.
Why did our Blessed Lord give to us His Peace in public? Where our Lord could have equally chosen to give to us each His Peace in private, the significance of this public mention in the Gospels can not be overlooked. Public mention of our Lord's Peace binds us to each other by the greater peace that make us one Church and binds the Chruch to the service of our common humanity by the greatest of peace that make us all one in God Who is our all in all.
As I am always mindful that our Blessed Lord have in all His words and acts during the first advent made sure to extract for us the greatest possible spiritual advantages and being an observant student of human reality and Divine Providence, I am satisfied with the simple conclusion that John 14: 27 implies peace both as a promise of faith as well as a common Christian duty.
The requirements of this peace lay firstly in our hearts and then in our world. For it is time now for peace and today is the acceptable day for peace. Only the very young, the very simple and the very proud will not appreciate the relevance of peace to our most common human hope.
As a human being concerned for our common humanity, I can clearly see our lack of peace. As a Christian of the Roman Catholic Church, I have prayed much to be able to contribute towards the peace of our world. As a servant of our Lord and His Mother, I can not but bring to our table the richest promise of that Peace that only my Blessed Lord Jesus Christ can bring to our poor world.
And in the context of Country, it is peace that prospers so prosper the peace!
Peace in the heart, Peace in our times.
One Peace in Heaven, One Peace on Earth.
Pax Pilipinas - Asia Caelestis!
Glory to God in the highestAdoration to Jesus ChristPeace to men of good will.
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