Sunday, June 29, 2008

O Mother of Suffering Humanity

O MY MOTHER MARY, I love you.
recall me to yourself today
under your most glorious service
as Queen of heaven and earth
and Queen of my heart with Jesus.
Grant me the strength of will
to serve you under your banner
with a heart that loves God alone
that perseveres in the way of virtue
and add to the good of the world.
Please help me deny myself today
enduring temptations bravely
and bearing trials for Jesus
denying evil an entrance
in my heart and in our world.
O that I may please Almighty God
and prosper God's own peace
in my heart and in our world
for love of all thy children
O Mother of suffering humanity.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.
Blessed Jacinta Marto of Fatima, pray for us.

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

Monday, June 23, 2008

The Human Family

THE HUMAN FAMILY is a divine institution. It is for the singular purpose of family that the sacramental grace of the wedlock union signified by the vows of one man and one woman and witnessed by God and His whole Church is dedicated by the will of God as a living institution within His Church established through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Capital Grace and the Author of Human Salvation.

This institution is entrusted by God with no less than the procreative act that ensure the continuity and Providential order of the lineages of human generations and conduct in their succession the transmission of the faith that universally preserve the one lineage of our common human hope.

For it is not religion that the family is entrusted to safeguard in the hearts of our young, it is reality and the ethical shaping of reality, the basic moral foundations of human experience that enable honorable religion and it's sacred doctrines of unseen eternal possibilities to be embraced wholly and completely, bearing life fruitful in the service of life and completing the necessary cycles of the one whole mission upon which the cause of every particular human family is supernaturally founded.

What is sacred and universal in the family is what exactly guarantees the continuity of both the one race and the one spirit of humanity.

It is for us the Domestic Church, the one source of the life blood that flow into the one heart of our Militant Church, the Church of our exile hope shared in common charity with the Church Triumphant, the invisible Church of our most beloved Saints, and in common trust with the necessitate Church of final purification, the Church Suffering, and the merciful sojourn of our Holy Souls, these three manifest realities, two of them unseen and the one seen when perceived by eyes of our heart in the illumination of our faith form the one great reality of the New Covenant Christian communion of our Holy Mother Church, the Roman Catholic Church.

Profanation of the family and the secular uprooting of it's established institution serve to break not only the good order of our generations but also the entire lineages of hope that reaches out through time to bring continuity to the faith that serve the very soul of honorable religion and the sacred traditions of specific revelations of common values of truth and benevolence born of wisdom eternal and meaningful to all human life brought to the universal service of all sacred life.

Weakening the strength of family, the distortion of it's elements, the division of it's central truth of union, the dilution of it's sacred values, the dissolution of it's holy witness, and the destruction of it's right cause to exist is both an imminent threat and an inhuman catastrophe of terrible unseen proportions.

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

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Our One Peace

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 highest
Adoration to Jesus Christ
Peace to men of good will.

The Maiden of the Sea

How fare thee, dear nation,
my Pearl of the Orient Seas
standing at the threshold
of another thousand years?

O dear island nation,
how came we to know thee?
O Sanctuary of my people,
a love 7,107 islands strong
emerging now from thy sleep,
awaiting the dawn.

Thy past is a mystery,
a deep longing for answers,
who were thee, O nation?
What was our name
from before the Crown
and the sword of Spain?

O dear Country,
our home away from Home
beautiful for thy people
and for thy bay side sunsets
blessed with great riches
and fruits of earth and sea.

O Land of the Morning,
my hope and my patrimony.
O how I love thy sweetness,
all our dreaming together
those days of my childhood,
twas long as forever
fond for friends and family,
for love of God and country
I shall soon remember -

O strong Republic,
be faithful for people
prosper thy peace together
strong for for thy faithfulness
and faithful for thy togetherness
now hearken to thy courage,
and aright to thy self!

Arise brave Republic,
become present for our hope
For God has kept thy secrets,
thy lost memory of times before:

Thou loved the maiden
embraced by the sea!
So young and vibrant,
and promised to thee.
Thy nation to wed thee,
O for beautiful Country!
The people adored thee,
for thy spirit was free;
all the other nations
were so happy for thee.

Have thou now forgotten
that promise long ago?
Return now to the wonder
and never let go.


The night's almost over,
daybreak twilight draws near.
Aright my dear people,
the dawn will soon break.
Our Republic awaits us,
O nation most dear -
Our Land of the Morning
is soon to appear!

O dear Filipino nation,
we are who we are
long have the years
kept our dear Country away
through trial and sorrow,
through fear and strife
through furious battle
through bloodshed tears
how long the struggle,
we fought to remain
through every opponent,
our hope overcame
night has not claimed us,
we are the same.
---<--@

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The Craft of Giving Alms

WHEN you sow a thought, you reap an act. When you sow an act, you reap a habit. When you sow a habit, you reap a character. When you sow a character, you reap a destiny.
---<--@

MY DEAREST FRIEND,


I challenge you to a little exercise in piety. Please bear with me as I try to explain how it works. I promise it will make sense in the end.

Let's begin:

Hope is unlike faith because Hope is something that must be shared. Faith can not be shared because it is a virtue exclusive of everything else but God and God's illumination in the heart of the person, faith perceives God because God initiated the action of faith. It is not the other way around.

The most excellent degrees of faith will come to nothing if God did not favor the heart with His illumination. It is not because we pray that we are answered, it is because God is pleased to answer us. This is why those who want to believe will never be able to unless God turns them in their hearts to Him. Faith is a very personal affair. It is the evidence of things unseen.

Hope is like faith only in reverse. It is my faith when perceived from the object of my faith. If I told a person that I will put my faith in him, that person would perceive that I am being hopeful. Of course, that's natural human faith, supernatural faith has as it's object God alone. But you see, hope can be perceived by the loving heart and the believing mind.

Hope is something that is given to us. It we have hope, you can be sure it was something that was not there before. Because it is the Giver of hope that will ultimately fulfill the promise contained in it. We can not hope in our own selves because that would be like a closed loop, nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Hope is also evidence of things unseen but unlike faith, hope is meant to be shared with others.

Now, we can put hope in the hearts of others who did not have hope before and we can also redeem the promise of hope that other's keep in their hearts.

Hope is also the space where mercy acts. Try to see it in the faces of the Lord's Poor the exact moment when their hope is realized by your acts of mercy and you will be satisfied in your heart for the rest of the day. But if you do a lot, then you would have collected a lovely bouquet for our Lord. Hope is those little white flowers that grow in God's Kingdom and they are born from the comings and goings of life. You'll find a whole meadow of these over there, there are some that are hard to get because they grow high on the hilltops, some are easy, but they all please our Lord just the same. They're His one of His most favorite flowers. So next time you do your acts of mercy, say to yourself, "I'm picking little white flowers for Jesus today, I think I'll give my dear Savior, a lovely bouquet". Then imagine His big, warm smile.

Our Lord's poor are not greedy people. Some of them have hearts purer than the cleanest person on earth. I see people shun them like the plague and I think to myself, you snooze, you lose. God gave you a big, fat opportunity and you missed out on it, it's really your loss.

Sometimes I gave to one of our Lord's poor what seems to me was too little and he loved me for it, I saw it in his eyes. I say to myself, I can go to places where they can not go like inside shopping malls and restaurants, sometimes I just say, I'll go for them and buy something from there to keep in my pouch until God sends one of them again to me.

ADDED 20080809: Also, it's not all the time that you get something back from our Lord's poor, mind you. Sometimes, you get nothing back. Sometimes, you also get hurt. However, always bear in mind, my precious friend, that this the genuine way that our God operates, He gives that we may give Him thanks, He takes away that we may learn to release ourselves from the grip of past things, by our crosses He allows us to be wounded so that He may show us the true glory of His Love. Hope for nothing back when you give and you will surely receive.

I have just one rule. [UPDATE 20080802: They have to be in need - refer to entry: #06 A System of Common Needs (primarily conceived to exactly define the social missions of the one Solidarity but is adaptable also to other similar purposes outside our community) as well as all the Acts of Mercy both corporal and spiritual. This IS the one rule: They have to be in need. There is a canonical precept that obliges us to respond to these common needs with common alms. A precept carries the weight of an obligation as opposed to a counsel which is a persuasion. Thus, whether you approach them or they approach you, with regards to our Lord's Poor, we who are forever baptized have a sacred Christian duty on behalf of our Lord to do as much as we can to care for and respond to their needs. At the very least, we should never fail to help those of our Lord's Poor who approach us. Please disregard any previous statements made irrelevant by this update.] I let them approach me, it wouldn't be alms if it were I that came to them. They have ask for it. I know it must be hard for us to do something like, I mean, why not just make it easy and just hand it over. Well, that precludes charity, first of all. It really wouldn't be helping them when we rush to dump our garbage out to them just to get rid of them. And I've seen other people do this and I think, they could have made it all easier and just tossed themselves out with it, too.

Observe our Lord's poor asking for our help and realize how God is likewise requiring His poor to learn to trust Him. Remember, you have to aim for their hope. Try to perfect your acts of mercy by putting it where it counts or you'll never open up to it. This is how God forges heavenly character, refining worthy men and women in the furnace of humiliation that burns with intense fires of affliction. For crosses are God's trademark, not His curse. Crosses only become curses to those who do not wish to carry them with us as we bear our burdens one with another in union with our Lord Christ for in their own willfulness and refusal, they curse themselves some even persisting unto final damnation.

Remember always, charity must always be present or it's a miss. Mercy must connect with hope or it will be just plain awkwardness. What if that person wasn't really asking for anything? You do that little dance with him, and say, "OK, see ya".

But if you get it right, not only do you get a flower for Jesus, the satisfaction you get in your heart from the moments where these things connect is tremendous. Maybe, you'll learn to love our Lord's poor and realize what our Lord meant by "storing up treasures in heaven" when they give back to you something precious you'll remember forever. Something that the richest, most wealthiest person on this planet can never buy, he just can't afford something like that.

The Badjao people, all the dispossessed, the luckless and the street kids out there, all our Lord's poor, they are really our masters, you know. They are the most loved of all of God's children. I'm just so lucky that I am able to help them where I can for I know how much my Jesus would really appreciate something like that. I hope you will find yourself blessed by this little exercise.

There is a craft to giving alms and you will learn this also when you come a "picking those little white flowers for our Lord". Give our Lord a bouquet everyday and your heart will always feel easy and light.

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

Please refer to entry: A Meditation on Hope

Peace and God bless you!

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

Independence

INDEPENDENCE does not imply impunity from justice, for to exceed in this regard is to transgress the good order of moral society. One can not be above nor below the rights of another just as one can not be to the left or to the right of Almighty God but always at the heart, and one is always shoulder to shoulder with the other bearing equally the necessary burden of obedience to law and the onus of taxation with an adequate expectation of return from the state in the form of institutes of national peace and community policing, public health, adult learning and affordable public education, civic services, roads and highways, everything that is meant to empower the people and transmit the authority that is derived by the government from Almighty God through the people with the aim to empower even the very least of the people, making us decent and useful citizens, capable of the labor of lifting from poverty at least the next of our generations. It is the empowering of one generation after another that grants that every generation of it's present time is truly independent for the struggle for independence does not end with a victory in the battlefield, but with a life well-lived in the genuine service of authentic freedom.

The authority to govern in a Republic is never possessed for to hold on to this authority is to instantly lose one's rightful claim to it but to persist in dishonor by holding on to this power corrupts and this greed will ensure that it corrupts absolutely. For this authority is derived from Almighty God and therefore, must be transmitted down the line to touch and to empower even the very least of our citizens, and most especially the very least, our Lord's poor.

Law serves life. The reverse is untrue for God instituted the order of law not to bind the already oppressed but to elevate them and to make ready their hearts for freedom because law is what will, in due time, give birth to peace and an understanding of peace. Without law, reason will flounder in time, but law gives certain shape and guidance to reason so that reason holds it's form long enough for the purposes of human civilizations to be achieved bridging great spans of decades and centuries.

O my Mother with Jesus x

O my Mother with Jesus
and Glorious Queen of my heart,
I call with my heart upon you, dear Mother
Recall me again to your most certain reality
Bring me to where you are present in my life

O dear Mother, be here with me in my heart
For I am in need of your care and protection
I am but a child in my heart with dear Jesus
and delighted for my God to dwell in my heart
yet I am frailest of all against His enemies
and I want to keep His Love so very much

So I harken to you, dearest Lady
O Immaculata, chief terror of hell,
give me strength against your enemies
and allow me to praise and to honor you
arouse me to the truths that endure forever
recollect me to the presence of all my friends
bring me back to the foot of the Cross with you
when the tide of all things have turned
and the serpent of this world was defeated
his dominion of evil over humanity overthrown
O bring me back to where it all began anew
at the greatest moment of God's triumph over evil
and the awesome price He paid for our liberation
to awaken needful souls to the terrible evil of sin

Ascend with me to the unity of His peace
awaken in me a hatred of all that is false
and the countless evils that has been afflicted
not only to my own soul, wounding me so deeply
but also to all the souls of suffering humanity
who are all victims in the first principle
to that one lie that have wrought so much pain
born from that one sin that gave birth to war
a war that now rages within every human heart
waged against life, against the God of life
to overthrow God's dominion over this world
upon a Kingdom founded in the hearts of men.

O dear Mother, bring me to the love of my Savior,
All things that begin in love begin with my Jesus
for no evil in this world can ever convince me
no sin in this world can ever bear false claim
to what reality God's love has wrought in my life
as He hung dying on a Cross two thousand years ago
for the blade of His truth reached far across time
to cut me loose from the bonds that held my heart
that I may work out the fruits of my repentance
in loving gratitude and willing obedience to Him.
I want to keep His Love, dear Blessed Virgin Mary
I want to keep His Love and ascend to His one peace
in prayer and in truth, in peace and in temptation
to serve God faithfully all the rest of my days.

AMEN.

The Peace of Jesus Christ

THE PEACE OF JESUS CHRIST, to me, is an unspoken promise between me and my Lord, it is a promise He made with all Christians, and a Christian obligation - a sacred duty - between me and my fellow Christians to uphold and safeguard the peace in the Name of Jesus Christ and on behalf of our fellow human beings. Peace is a sacred duty to sacred life most especially binding to Holy Mother Church, to all of blessed Christendom and to all of who have claim to the peace and the promise of the one, great Abrahamic hope, that we shall be as countless as the stars shining so brightly for our one common hope, a one common longing for a peace that only our one God can give us - all of us, and this one common hope regardless of all our marked differences, will clear for us a way out of the death grip of a war that have lasted too long like an unwanted, feral beast that have caused us too much and still desires to do to our unborn generations so much more ill.

One common respect is what we all owe to the one common human dignity bestowed upon us by our one common Creator. To rejoice where we should rejoice and to mourn together where we should shed our tears, this is what it means to say peace. Why does this escape our common humanity? Why does one rejoice where another one mourns? A peace that is divisible is not peace but war in the guise of peace, as a lie within a lie within a lie. Why does one rejoice where another one mourns? Where is the peace where human comfort is lacking and arbitrarily given, embracing only a few and excluding much. No, peace is, among other things an assurance, an assurance of human respect given by those who recognize our God given human dignity. So where human dignity is wanting, wanting what we all owe by sacred rights to each other to appreciate what God has gifted to us, immortal souls crafted in His own image and likenss, souls infinitely capable of loving and of receiving love, souls with the power to create with God new, better and much more beautiful realities than these ugly, evil days we have all gotten so used to, we have laid down with war's ugliness for so long, we have forgotten in this midnight world even the most basic of image of beauty and have trampled on our own human dignity, forgetting what it is and what it is for, affecting not only the natural course of individual lives but also the course of entire nations.

Nations that rise and fall by the truth of it's peace. Peace that is empty of it's essential substance will never serve human civilization nor will a divisible peace that clearly serves the will of war ever bring back what is wanting in our world, real peace, an indivisible, ascendant motion of a virtue that serve and defend sacred life, all of life, even trees and animals, excluding nothing and embracing everything into itself, rising to the unity of it's own most certain truth, as a motion not against war but away from it into the oneness of the God from Whose Sanctuary we have always derived the truth and validity of our peace, safeguarding it's potency within our own selves and also with others.

Without real peace, where will another 1000 years take us? I cringe at the thought of what the beast of war and it's evil would have evolved into after another millennia of feeding on our world, wantonly devouring not only our generations but also the means to sustain the future of life itself on our world. For evil desires our complete annihilation and will not regard neither our dignity nor our difference in it's relentless yet futile drive to complete the lie that make void the will and the purpose of God in His creation.

Separation of Church and State

HOW DO WE IMPLEMENT the inviolable separation of Church and State without impugning on the divine mandate of Almighty God to deliver our people as one sovereign nation distinct among the other nations of the one family of the nations of mankind?

Indeed, the divine mandate is to deliver all of the nations of our one family, to guide us, in the long march of the generations of our peoples, through safe paths of peace across the wilderness of this midnight world as one whole nations together within a one whole brotherhood of nations. Let us not make the unhappy mistake of the first world and associate our God with religion, thus making our Lord as a figment of an obsolescent idea that needs to be conveniently withdrawn from the so-called modern world. There is so much sadness prevalent in those places as stark and as real as the visible poverty we are used to see here in our country.

My dear Filipinos, our Almighty God is directly associated with reality, He is the cause of all that is real and no religion need give birth to the One Who gave substance to all things created, seen and unseen. All religion is a response and a testament to His enduring Reality. O my dear nation, there is no other foundation as firm and an anchor as steadfast against the buffeting winds and stormy temper of this tumultuous and uncertain world than the unchanging Light of the One Light Who is without equal or comparison, our one Almighty God.

I am very, devout Catholic and I will not impose my religion on anyone unwilling to listen but I will relentlessly defend by my life or by my death God's constant reality and God's unity from all who will rob my Lord of the truth of His existence. Those who would make Him a fantasy of little children to be shed like an embarrassment when the heart hardens and mind of the man can no longer understand what little children can so easily understand.

I am no one but a common person with faults as numerous as the hairs on my head, a suffering sinner struggling against his sins, therefore to deny me or my dear ones both our means and our ends in our common human pursuit of true liberation and happiness by alienating me or my community to the reality of the one Almighty God by banishing God, God's mention and God's vital participation in our shared national dialogue is also to deny me of my natural human freedom and as a citizen of this free Republic, I will consider this an brute act of tyranny, an act for which I am duty bound by sacred trust to my God, to myself, to all my fellow citizens and to our common posterity to resist with armed force.

Freedom

FREEDOM IS NOT LICENSE. The ability to choose between good and evil is not the ability of human beings but is a divine right possessed by God alone. We can only falter and fail at our inability to possess what God alone possesses. What is good and what is evil? Did not our first parents fail at this same temptation? A temptation wrought by the serpent of Eden that turned our patrimony of light and life into one of darkness and death. There is much evil in the world because of it.

Now, the knowledge of what is good and what is evil has become for us a kind of punishment because our very beings rebel against us at what we know to be good and delight secretly behind our backs at what we know to be evil. The only consolation to be had is a return to an innocence we have already lost, something that Jewish observance, Christian baptism, and Islamic submission restores to the hearts of those who are true to their own Lord, to their own souls, to their own community, and to our own common humanity. Real happiness is not a pretense and so it can never be sustained by lies. Those who are truly happy know it and so they are happy not because we are we but because God is God and we may only live in the common hope that perceives for us what happiness truly is by first believing what it is not.

Freedom is an essential requirement of happiness. Freedom is the ability to choose to be happy. Freedom will resist the choice to be unhappy but it can not distinguish between the illusion of happiness and the form of true happiness because it relies also on the allied strength of other virtues to combat evil and to help us persevere in the good. The truest expression of Freedom is not a secular ideal, it is a divine provision intended as a guarantee of happiness and exists in the context of all the other gifts, virtues and fruits of God given to men who are of God. To take freedom away from it's original context and make it into a tool of blind choice is consequentially very dangerous, indeed. It will soon blunt the will of nations. For no choice either right or wrong will allow freedom itself to fulfill the hope that itself does not possess, and the soul of men know this, because where the pursuit to become happy become futile, many are afflicted by a strange unhappiness even while possessing the wealth of the earth, yea even the wealth of the universe entire, for they were all, in truth, really denied the inesteemable value of God's gift of true freedom.

A freedom which, like all God's gifts, may never be used for anything more or less that what the Divine Giver has intended to give, and who is to doubt the unsurpassed generosity of this Divine Giver from Whom all men have received everything they are and have and will be, truly one must have to willingly and openly tell a boldface lie to be able to stand in front of many and say that one have received from God nothing, that person might as well cease to exist and take his lie with him.

Mother Asia

EVERY NATION that fits into a place in Mother Asia form together a picture of her. But because every nation is not the same, the image of our Asia may only become clearer to us when every Asian nation finds it's own place among all the others and when all the Asian nations have agreed, the complete mosaic that highlight the richness and the bounty of the great Asian continent will show that our Mother Asia have always relied on a unity of our differences to make things harmonious and understood in the hearts and minds of all Asians. For Asia herself is a diverse mosaic of differences.

How to recognize our one Mother Asia:

1. We must desire to know her.

What promise can there be had from our rising together? Knowledge and understanding of each other, mutual security and greater prosperity for all Asian nations, many things that are good for our own particular national endeavors which we can not obtain as individual nations will only be realized by our coming together than by our keeping
apart.

2. We must tell her our desire.

How do we propose unity to other Asian nations? Not without being truthful, reassurances of peace, sincere concern and acceptance for each and every Asian nation as she is - status quo - can Asia know of our hope see her. A hope that accepts her for who she is now with the promise to make her better and a timetable for each Asian nation to move toward unity with the particular requirements that create a medium of universality across the continent. This medium of universality must be a value that can be shared, appreciated and honored by all Asians and this value is peace and the great promise of peace that would grow with time to calm restless Asia.

3. She must agree to our request.

As respect must exist between two individuals, the same respect must also exist between two nations. All the nations of Asia deserve her and so can not be excluded from her. Truth as the mother tongue of Asia must begin to take the place of deception as peace become ascendant over war.

Our honesty and sincerity opens the way to open dialogue and the mutual understanding that form the basis of agreements that move forward toward a consensus of Asian nations that validates the will of Asia to move toward unity.

4. We must accept her as she is.

Will we reject her now that we have come this far?

Asia is a continent wounded by much war. A lot of people here are hurt. And with this much adversity in Asia there is also the prevalence of much hope. We will realize there will be a much to do to obtain to her true beauty after the horrible scarring that war has inflicted upon her.But wee must not ignore her hope, for her hope carry the weight of centuries that once added to the momentum of our present hopes become a force of human spirit potent enough to restore her to her beauty.

Prologue: Shall we now tell Asia our name?

To discover ourselves, we must look to others and now that we know Asia, we have also found our proper place with her and being content among all the other nations of Asia in the knowledge that we are who we are meant o be not in comparison to other Asian nations, but simply because we know, we are as a nation content.

Asia moves to unity and becomes Asia Caelistis, the Celestial Asia, , a place of harmony in our diversity, a unity of diffirences where wars are less because peace is much more known, valued and practiced.

Where wars are less, there is more length added to to our days, and our beloved peoples receive more time to find their own true happiness.

Monday, June 02, 2008

Old Defiant, Our Valiant Colors

PRESENT SALUTATIONS of Christian peace and common good will to all of you, O my honored and beloved Filipino people, may God prosper our hearts with His peace, opening the universal spirit of our people to the sobering hope of these festive days leading up to our Independence Day commemorations on June 12.

Independence. What does it mean? It is a word much like freedom and love, taken out of context and twisted, it's meaning made to suit the false fashions of this fleeting and fickle world. For so few now know exactly how relevant this word, "independence", is to today's world and fewer still can relate the intended meaning of this word within the right context of a nation's just struggle for freedom. Independence from what? Certainly not from law or necessary, legal government. Independence from who? Certainly not from each other or from Almighty God.

Let us sit down and think past the hype and the fanfare to the essential reasons why the generation of our great grandfathers undertook into their own hands the formal struggle to realize the desire of all our generations past, a one common hope that has been gathering like a storm since 1521 and stirring quietly in the hearts of generations of our people, the fierceness of will necessary to openly defy the unwanted oppression that made us helots to the Spartan order of Spanish colonial rule. Is it not independence from tyranny and oppression, from fear and injustice that our elder generations wanted for us? Is it not the hope of our present liberation their great hope? And is not the realization of this great hope the desired fruit thereof of the battles they have won for us as well as the battles we still fight today at so great a price to our people the primary reason why we celebrate the acheivements of their great revolution? Did not all our heroes of their own time, known and known to God alone, desire fervently to deliver our people from bondage to freedom and our nation from colonial oppression to independence and self-determination? And finally, have we achieved all of this today, have we realized the hope idealized in the word "independence" in this so-called modern times? Is the Filipino truly free?

What did colonialism do to us? This enormous question is fit enough for a doctoral dissertation but having not the scope of knowledge and broadness of understanding required for such a work, I shall be content to offer what humble fruit I may bear by the grace of our Lord toward the necessary and vital answers that we may begin to fill the missing spaces of that void of the future; that we may one day soon complete again in our hearts the great picture of our civilization, a dream so badly broken by the conditioning of our martyred past that it may perhaps exist today in it's entirety only in the eternal remembrance of Almighty God Who holds an eternal vigil over our people and all the peoples of the one family of humanity. For few today have hope in the great promise of our Republic and even fewer apply themselves wholly to our particular endeavor of Country for close to none now respond to that sacred oath that make individuals into proper citizens and patriots into heroes with the will to apply themselves all the same to that same sacred trust that make wandering peoples into great nations.

Let us remember who we are, indeed. Let us think during these days of anticipation about those things that complete us as a people who have merited from Almighty God, by our collective tears, patient suffering and noble bloodshed sacrifice, and nation who hold an honored place among the nations of the one family of the nations of mankind. Let us think for those of us who are too hungry and dispossessed to think for themselves. We have, across all our past generations, walked all this way across the long march of exile time here in this world of endless strife toward the light of our liberation to give up at being who we have always been, the sons and daughters of the morning. Is not our Pearl of the Orient Seas also our Land of the Morning?

Therefore, we are a people of hope and a defiant hope, indeed, I see clearly a vision of our hope symbolized by the valiant colors of "Old Defiant" a courageous symbol of our people flying high over our sovereign nation to remind us always of that welcome sunrise that we shall by our collective and particular labors of Country soon inherit; the promise of our one, free and faithful Filipino Republic - the very ideal embedded in the hope of the eternal Philippines.

How can anyone forget this who salutes the beautiful and most welcome Flag of our honored people? No, it is not us who forgets, O my Country, but the darkness of this midnight world for the darkness does not comprehend itself but we, my beloved Filipino, are not of the darkness, we are in God alive and therefore, we are of the light and if we should remain ever vigilant and alert to His beneficent graces, neither the darkness nor the gates of hell itself can overcome us as a nation, faithful and true. For even the smallest of lights endure with those who yet believe and also in our younger generations, lights shining brightly like stars amidst the darkness.

We must indeed, teach ourselves and our children well. For if we do not do so now, then when? If we no longer possess the unified will to rise as one people; if we can no longer assert that strength of national identity that distinguish us from the honored peoples of the one family of suffering humanity; if we can no longer reconcile ourselves to the great truths that bind us to our particular endeavor of Country, then I can assure all of you that ignorance and error shall in the absence of light make sure the day when it is no longer possible for our nation to heal from the sickness that is killing her; that this plague of despair and corruption will soon break the universal spirit of our people, preventing our Mother Protectress from warding off the evil that intends to completely devour our people the same with all the peoples of the one family of suffering humanity, turning our living worlds within and our present world without into an abomination of desolation, a place hostile to all sacred life.

I think and so I am and by extension, we think and so we are, but now we must learn also to love, my beloved and honored people, that we may be and by God's grace become. We must learn to love who we are and the promise of who we can become. We must love each other with the one true Love of our one true God that makes us effective as citizens, friends and believers of every honored religion. We must hope again the defiant and patient hope that allow us to believe in God and in each other as Country. We must trust again the steadfast and abiding trust that allows us to respect our fellow citizens as human beings knowing in our heart of hearts to do unto them what we would want them to do unto us. We must struggle fiercely indeed to become who we must now become, living in open defiance of sin and war in the Name of God in Jesus Christ on behalf of all our generations to come until that new morning from on high and the breaking of this midnight world at the end of the age of mankind; a people of the peace.

Mabuhay ang Bansang Pilipinas,
Mabuhay ang lahat ng Pilipino.

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