Christmas

Christmas is liberation: a God who sets his people free, brings glad tidings to the poor, heals the broken hearted, proclaims liberty to the captives, gives freedom to those who are imprisoned, comforts all who grieve. (cf. Is. 61:1-3)

In a country of widespread poverty, Christmas is a message of hope.

Lord Jesus, this I pray that you liberate our people.  Forgive our sinfulness.  We have been captives for so long.  Sin has deeply enslaved us.  Your coming is our redemption.  Our country is corrupt.  Our leaders have failed us.  Our poor are in pain.  And this is not your will.  You promised us light to dawn on our lives, for we have been walking in darkness.  You are our Great Light. (cf. Is. 9:1; Mt. 4:16).  You promised us through the prophet Isaiah that one day our burden will be lifted off our shoulders, our yoke lifted off our neck.  This yoke will one day be destroyed. (cf. Is. 10:27).

The Filipino people are poor.  It is a poverty not of their own choice.  It is caused by corruption.  Heartless individuals are in power - oppressors of our people.  But you are with us, Lord.  You have been our refuge, our haven in times of distress, our harbor in the storm, and our shade from heat. (cf. Is. 25:4)

And for our ruling elite who shamelessly continue to ravage our beloved country, a warning to you.  Christmas announces “the year of Yahweh’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God” (Is. 61:2).  God’s favor is with the oppressed.  Remember that he will destroy their oppressors, unless the latter heed his call and change.

Christmas is a call for a change of heart.  Corruption must stop.  A just society must be built.  But since building a just society is not easy, a collective effort is needed.  Repentance comes from the heart - from individual hearts.  We have to change ourselves and in doing so we change society.  O Lord, grant us the grace.  Our country is in need of a moral revolution.

We will never have peace, unless there is justice.  Our corrupt leaders will never live in peace and security, if injustice continues to abound.  Christmas liberates us.  It brings us justice that produces lasting peace and security. (cf. Is. 32:17) But it is for us to repent and change our ways… - Jose Conrado A. Estafia     

Manila

Pagkadaghan bang tawo sa Manila. Anywhere you go. It seems that people from everywhere are flocking here. I was in Baclaran yesterday. Oh God, the crowd! It was unimaginable, not to mention the “siksikan” in the LRT train on your way to Baclaran. From Baclaran I took the ride again to Edsa station. From there I took the MRT trip for Cubao. Upon arrival, I went immediately to the CR. And there again people were falling in line. Even the CR was overcrowded. And this is Manila.

And this is where our government has failed us. We were industrialized without first developing the agricultural. The poor farmer (or his children) could no longer get anything from the land. It was hopeless to stay there. No choice, he had to go to the city (Manila, particularly) to search for a better life. But the problem: too many poor people from the provinces were flocking here. The result: no more opportunities for work. With no place to call home, they just settled in the slum areas and many more in the sidewalks of the streets of Manila. How could they find work when they did not have the necessary qualifications. These poor creatures had not been to college.

How about the working people? The latter are the regular LRT/MRT commuters who suffer a lot during rush or peak hours. The train is too congested during these hours. I don’t have to mention the subhuman compensation they get from the company they work.

And I am angry. Many of our elected leaders live a kingly existence, building their mansions at Forbes Park. And back in the provinces, congressmen are wealthy. Unexplained wealth? No, I have a word to explain it: Corruption.

I don’t know now if they still feel the pain of our people. I am glad that we are Christians. Our churches are full of worshippers. Maybe this is the only treasure an ordinary Filipino has - his/her faith. Our churches are full of people, but I am certain, they are a people of empty stomach and pockets.

Back in the streets of Baclaran. How much a vendor gets from his sales? How long will he/she suffer? It is December. The cold wind. How will a poor infant endure it? That unfortunate creature sleeps without a bed, a shelter. No protection.

Where are our leaders? Don’t wait when we can no longer endure.

Novels

I bought novels for my students. The collection ranges from classic to contemporary ones. I want my students to learn more about life. I want them to see a world beyond their imagination. I want them to explore more about human nature.

These novels will transport them into a world of love (that never ends) and hate, of joy and sorrow, of hope and despair, of winning and losing, of hellos and goodbyes, of successes and failures, of the best and the worst in us, and of the physical and the metaphysical.

Certainly they will read a world from without. But soon, I am sure, they will see that it is actually a world from within. The stories they will read may also be their own.      

On the phenomenon we call “man”

I have read Teilhard de Chardin’s book The Phenomenon of Man. In it he has written these thought-provoking lines.

He says:

“Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.

“Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage.

“The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human–these are not thrown open to a few o the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer.”

Few pages further he continues saying:

“In trying to separate itself as much as possible from others, the element individualises itself; but in doing so it becomes retrograde and seeks to drag the world backwards towards plurality and into matter. In fact it diminishes itself and loses itself. To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance- towards the ‘other’. the peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism’. Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.”

And at the epilogue he puts it:

“Christianity is in the first place real by virtue of the spontaneous amplitude of the movement it has managed to create in mankind. It addresses itself to every man and to every class of man, and from the start it took its place as one of the most vigorous and fruitful currents the noosphere has ever known. Whether we adhere to it or break off from it, we are surely obliged to admit that its stamp and its enduring influence are apparent in every corner of the earth today.

“It is doubtless a quantitative value of life if measured by its radius of action; but it is still more a qualitative value which expresses itself- like all biological progress- by the appearance of a specifically new state of consciousness.

“I am thinking here of Christian love.”

Sounds very optimistic. Will convergence really happen? Our world is now getting smaller and smaller everyday. It is a fact. Is this a kind of convergence? Today, one can no longer isolate oneself from the rest of the globe. Our generation is an age of globalization. Our means of communications are rapidly progressing each day. Just a click on your keyboard then you see the whole world before you. We live in a world that is unimaginable by us even during the last decade of the 20th Century. It is already a world of the Internet, of iPod and iPhone. I cannot just imagine what’s next. It seems overwhelming.

And yet, poverty continues to bother us. Social injustices and wars, we witness everyday. Rich and powerful countries are getting richer and more powerful at the expense of the poor ones. Many people die of hunger everyday. Now, is this progress?

“A spiritual renovation of the earth,” as Chardin puts it, is what we need now. And this task is not reserved for some but for all. Progress cannot be found only in the material realm. We should also grow spiritually. This is the within of evolution proposed by Chardin. Darwin’s evolution is one from without- survival of the fittest, a power struggle of some sort. Evolution from within brings us towards a spiritual renovation of the earth. We need this very badly; or else, we can just be digging our own graves.      

My impression of Teilhard de Chardin is that he is a Neo-Platonist. How he reminds me of Plotinus. Man should not be reduced only to matter, and hence to the plurality of things. The Phenomenon of Man is indeed an evolution from multiplicity to the One. The One here for Chardin is the Omega Point. Everything returns to the One. This presupposes that the One is already there at the start. The Alpha and the Omega of things. It is when God becomes all in all. For Chardin the Omega Point is Christ. Our world should be a return to the Christi-centric. When Christ becomes the center of our lives, then this world can be saved. Only Christian love can bring us to our destiny. Only Christian love can rescue us from this seemingly dying world.