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.