20110226

"If the veil of time were withdrawn and the Kingdom of God stretched forth in plain view before thy sight, if the LORD does not incline thy heart unto Him, O Man, thou still would not be able to believe."

The Story of Being Special

The LORD God created all living beings to be unique - Angels and Men - the LORD created them, seen as well as unseen, We became. And All of us are made to be special.

But the Devil and his angels, they said, "since the LORD God willed that all living beings are special then I must be special".

And so was division in heaven sown. For the Devil and his angels undid in themselves the life that the LORD God in each of us did bestow in abundance.

They cast themselves into the void.

But the Holy Angels of the LORD said, "as the LORD God willed that all living beings are special, then you, O my beloved, must be special".

And so they were in God gathered. For the spirit of the world is a scattering spirit. But the Spirit of God gathers together.

You make me special, beloved of God, and so I am. And so you are, alleluia.

Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." Thus evening came, and morning followed--the first day.

- Genesis 1: 3-5

---<--@

Now, I should like to share this with my brother and sister Christians:

Litany of Love

Have mercy on us, dear Jesus! From behind mere accidents of bread and wine, You peer at our world so full of war and sin.

Incline our hearts to Thee, dear Savior, that we might better serve the cause of Thy peace.

And as we journey together as Thy Church in this world (during the season of Lent add: towards Thy Holy Mountain of Easter), renew us in our togetherness and faith. Make us hungry for God and thirsty for the right things of God, dear Jesus, out of love for Thee!

Deign to bless us in our nations as keeper and friend, one to another, and prosper us in our hopes to build a better world.

AMEN.

(Here follows my personal pattern as an example)

God the Father in heaven, I love You.

God the Son, Redeemer of the world, I love You.

God the Holy Spirit, I love You.

O dearest LORD, my one, triune Perfection, I love You.

Holy Mary, Queen of my heart, I love you.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saint of the Suffering Addict, I love you.

Blessed Jacinta Marto, Flower of Fatima, I love you.

Blessed Francisco Marto, Helper of my Lord, I love you.

Sister Lucia, Servant of God, I love you.

Saint Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila, I love you.

Saint Therese of Liseaux, I love you.

Saint Josemaria Escriva, I love you.

Saint Anthony of Padua, I love you.

Saint Peter, I love you.

Saint Paul, I love you.

Holy Father Dominic de Guzman, I love you.

Holy Father Francis of Assisi, I love you.

Saint Lawrence the deacon, I love you.

Saint Dymphna, I love you.

My darlingest Annelies Marie Frank, I love you.

All you Holy Innocents of God, I love you.

All you Holy Souls in Purgatory, I love you.

All my family and friends, I love you.

O my Philippines, I love you.

All you nations of Mankind, I love you.

Angel Caritas, my guardian dear, I love you.

Saint Michael the Archangel, I love you.

All you Saints of God, I love you.

All you Holy Angels of the LORD, I love you.

---<--@

Meditate on each your loving relationships. Wonder at the fact that we are able to love. Because it is no small miracle in itself that we are made to be aware that we are in love at all.

If faith is light, then hope gives it brightness, but it is love that gives to it sharpness and clarity.

Love sees far, overcoming both distance and time. When love holds us near, we perceive a sense of the timeless. For when we hold near to our love it hold us near to Itself. All lasting things are preserved by it.

In its embrace, our spirits are quickened. And in this prayer, brothers and sisters, we mean to encounter that embrace.

To be in love is to be aware. To be aware is to be alive.

I hope it helps.

---<--@

Let us pray for the victims of the recent earthquake in New Zealand and for peace in Libya.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

20110225

Completing our EDSA

"How long ago is 25 years?"

This question seems to ask something more from within itself, something else more existential than a mere passage of time:

"How much of it have we forgot?"

Brother and sister Filipinos, let us never again forget our nation's potential for good in this world. For just as all human beings are equal both in dignity (being) and potential (becoming) so too are all human nations thus endowed with a just equality. From this equality we all must begin. From this equality we all must return.

In sharp contrast to the national movements seizing the consciousness of other Countries, ours still stand out as a truly well-inspired, grace-filled transition into our own better selves; a truly remarkable feat of nationhood.

Our EDSA is exceptional in its non-violent character.

For what revolution truly is is a willing disintegration of a Country into violence and uncertainty. All revolution being a measured descent into fire and shadow.

What tempers the violence however, is the discipline of the nation but what makes the uncertain certain may be decided only by God without Whom no nation may survive this descent.

We should indeed be thankful and properly proud of our faith both in God and in our people.

This is not to say however, that this transition is anywhere complete. For the work of our nations is never complete until we have all arrived. So while we are yet here we must always make due provision for the generations that are yet to come - their songs must not remain unsung.

EDSA is EDSA. There are no sequels to this, our timeless coming together. Every other lesser movement that our EDSA has thus far inspired in ourselves is both enhanced as well as embraced by it. So that what we are always desiring to obtain out of our EDSA is not another EDSA but the completion of our first and only one.

This labor to complete our EDSA, all its signal graces and its right season under the sky, now lies before our hearts and before our hands - right here, right now - in this present time.

This is no time to dwell on past mistakes but on the wisdom that those trials have produced in our people. This is no time to argue what void there is but what we can do - together this time - to help steer our one Republic clear of the impending perils that clearer understandings now perceive.

No longer shall past shadows hold sway that we shall not allow in our hearts this time. For the times are sufficiently changed. What we shall will to leave behind, shall now depend upon what we shall choose to freely and humanly embrace.

For the essence of EDSA is a transition to peace, the peace that prospers - our original peace, our one Republic peace. It is this work that shall define us, my honorable compatriots - this work of peace.

It is our work; the labor of these present times:

Now is the time to complete our EDSA.
---<--@

The Responsible State

Upon the Responsible State is vested the authority to govern the people. This authority is a divine authority.

For this authority is the right to govern your peers and therefore, belongs to God alone.

Upon this vital mandate is built the structure and the systems (Constitution or Ideals of State) from which the Offices of State derive both form and power.

And these Offices are served by their various national institutions.

These institutions when their purpose and design are directed toward the nation (not towards persons or personalities) are what safeguard the national good.

Duty is empowered and rights protected. Peace is preserved and prosperity assured. Hope is sustained and service made meaningful. Law is observed and justice is vigilant. Civil order is maintained and freedoms understood. Vision is perceived and the national destiny clear.

These proceed from a strong and empowered Responsible State.

"Verily, every living thing, above all every human being shall be accounted for - to the very last hair on their head."

---<--@

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

Forward Thinking

20110217

A Plea to China

I am making this plea on behalf of my fellow citizens convicted of drug trafficking in your Republic. I am fully cognizant of the penalty that your law prescribes for such an offense. Having said that, I am also duly compelled to respect the law of your land with due recognition to the sovereign will of the one Chinese nation. This is why I am not making this an appeal to the law.

I am making this as a plea to your sense of justice.

Your civilization is old and your history learned. Through all those years, the virtues of your people have shaped the form of your civil society and the laws that govern its necessary peace. I myself have read, studied and reflected on it. It is also part of my culture here in the Philippines.

Indeed, your common experience as a nation is both varied as it is also diverse. This kind of tempering, through which all nations are subject, in the long withering away of time, must have unfolded through great adversity, as a flowering of the wisdom of your culture.

Therefore, I am making this plea in good faith to your sense of common humanity. Because law is constrained by its incidence in time, but virtue is timeless and resides in the wisdom of nations. Justice is such a virtue.

A great demographic of my people are presently living in poverty. We, like your nation, is also inescapably involved in that inevitable struggle to mature into our necessary ages in time. Those three Filipinos who were convicted by your court are part of this demographic.

That the poor in our humanity are vulnerable to exploitation is an inherent trait of the evil of every age, and one that is universally expressed in the strictures of all human moral traditions meant to counter it, as well as the laws, derived from these, meant to bind it.

It is clear to me that my compatriots were exploited, and their humanity violated. They were either deceived or coerced or both into exposing themselves to the penalties of your law by those who intend to defeat it. They were acting as drug mules.

And they were indeed vulnerable to this exploitation for the simple reason that they were poor. The were overcome by evil intentions. And they succumbed to it not by their own choice because they were, in fact, not given a choice. It is the unhappy circumstance of those who are in need to be vulnerable in this way. Prudential action, in this case, is often not the luxury of poor people. There are entire institutions of state that serve this cause.

Prudence here require an act of justice. Evil when repaid with more evil propagates it. Law by itself is not cognizant of this unless it is animated by the spirit of justice.

If this primary mitigating circumstance is ignored, the poor in my own Country will all the more become vulnerable. They will all the more feel defeated and unrecognized for their being in need.

And what of their immediate kin and kith? They themselves will feel deprived of the very causes that are meant to guide and to help their human development. These causes are universal and are present in the essence of every undertaking of Country because they are also present in the longings of every human heart.

Our Republic undertaking does not have legal recourse to capital punishment. This is the choice of my nation and one that is expressed in our laws. As a courtesy to our Republic undertaking, this is a secondary consideration. For what good there is in one Country is also the potential good of another. No nation learns in isolation. No Country matures on its own. There is an unspoken kinship that have long been eclipsed by the conflicts of the last age, among peoples, that through it all has always been.

It is in this spirit of a common humanity that I make my plea to you, the one Chinese nation and the older Republic that serves your people, trusting that those kinship bonds of good will have always remained between our two nations, to hear out the concerns that impassions me and my compatriots regarding that case of the three convicted.

I am humbled by the occasion to communicate this to you and thankful for your consideration.

Peace is all that I desire for your nation.

---<--@

20110209

My honorable Filipino compatriots, don't you know we have not yet begun to build?

You must never allow yourselves to become prone to comparing our Country with others before our time. This inclination only leads to disillusionment, bitterness and despair.

Whatever difficulties God has set before our nation is sufficient for us in our day. Verily, God allows each undertaking of Country upon the earth a measure of evil sufficient for the good of each nation according to His most beneficent design for all the children of Mankind.

If today we somehow feel we do not yet possess a sense of national history illustrious enough to satiate that desire within our collective memory as a people, it is only because this history is still being written for us and by us even this very day.

Never must you delve again into the things we ought not to be, my nation, because what we take into our hearts these days will invariably dictate what our generations make of this land and its peoples.

Therefore, we must, under the eternal vigilance of Almighty God, exercise our citizenship to each other with the utmost fidelity.

If we are to emerge into our ages in time, we must know by instinct that as far as Country goes, we are all Filipinos - one work, one people, one destiny.

This is not to say that we shall allow evil to dwell in our land, this is to say that we shall now work to banish it - into the void, forever. For true citizenship does not make deals with the evil in all evil things.

But let us also not forget, my fellow Filipino compatriots, here in this present time, that we are still at the twilight of our present awakening. Here, O my nation, where our greatest enemy is truly only the darkness itself (or as Kenneth Cragg eloquently stated in his book, "Palestine", the guilt of structures, the wrongs of society i.e. the inhumanity in interhumanity).

Therefore, let us be gentler in our dealings with one another. Let us be kinder in our perceptions about ourselves. We have no other master now but the freedoms our nation have gained for itself at such a cost; a liberty we must continually purchase with much sacrifice and vigilance of heart.

We have no other sovereign now but the LORD Whose manifest will it is for us to succeed in our quest for an abiding peace and true self-determination; God Whose most efficacious and decisive assistance we may always rely upon.

Never again must you lose sight of the hope that we have always possessed as a people. Nor the love that must forever bind us all together in our authentic human freedoms. Nor the faith that allow for our nation to overcome all that is adversity.

In the midst of these present travails, O my people, never again must you believe in despair. Be generous in this way, my nation Philippines, and we shall not fail to see the morning dawn upon this Land of Promise.

---<--@

For the Philippine Peace Process:

Concentrate on building up the national community. This is our primary task.

Let us not forget that the foundation of a meaningful, sustainable, durable peace is a strong and vibrant national community.

If we neglect this or lose sight of it, we will - as ordinary citizens, lose our necessary sense of an abiding connection to the larger process of peace-building that we, as a nation, have duly invested in our responsible state.

This larger peace process is only secondary to this task of nation-building with which we as ordinary citizens are everyday engaged.

Everything we do as a nation is connected to this larger peace process (and this larger peace process is also connected to the greater peace-building initiatives around our world).

In this way, your smallest kindness counts for much. If you are to be kind to our poor and needy compatriots, you affirm the peace in our communities. If you help them but above all teach them to be right about themselves as citizens, one to another, you add to the strength of our civil order.

Nothing that is good is ever lost. For all good things contain in them something that is true about ourselves as human beings and all true things cleave to each other in the light - for as these are the things that are truly worth remembering, these are also the things that angels remember, that God does not forget.

So strive to always fulfill what good God places before your heart. Do not cling to evil things nor be influenced by it.

The peace process walks on two fronts - nation to nation and state to state. I am speaking this to you as part of the nation.

It would be a hollow victory indeed to have peace on paper alone. Do not be discouraged. Break the rule of war (division) in your hearts and make the choice to shed away the darkness forever.

Be generous in this way, my nation Philippines, and we shall not fail to see the morning dawn upon this Land of Promise.

---<--@

An Abrahamic Prayer:

LORD God, We humbly implore Thee: help all of Thy Muslims, help all of Thy Jews, help all of Thy Christians, help us in all Thy nations, dear God. Help us to find each other in the dark.

Incline each our hearts unto Thee, O LORD, our one True Light. Refresh our spirits. May we be as a people after Thy own Heart, O LORD, all Thy numberless stars, guided by the light of Thy peace and blessed by Thy will of good for all Mankind.

Forsake us not, O LORD, lest we perish in the darkness. Fulfill in us that promise Thou swore to our Father Abraham, that promise Thou hast made of old, O LORD, that Thou shalt lead us ever onward, that Thou shalt guide us toward the building of a better world for all Thy nations.

By the light of Thy own faithfulness, O LORD, bind us together in the unity of Thy own Truth. Establish Thy Holy Presence in our hearts as a revelation upon the nations, that Thou art God, O LORD, He Who is, the LORD and let this be as the dawning of Thy glory upon the earth.

AMEN.

---<--@

Serviam (Serve): This is what is meant by the last will be first and the first will be last.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

Angelo Reyes (19450317 - 20110208) via con Dios.

Are we not all Filipinos? This is the bottom line: We have lost one of our own.

However which way we are to receive his passing away, we are still the lonelier now for it and for this I am grieved.

Nation-State

20110201

I am just going to speak to you freely about some things here...

Some of the things I am feeling I find difficult expressing in words. Because if I do, they will become distorted. Usually, these things just need a little more time. But sometimes, they do not need any form of expression at all. Regardless of which it is, what I put down I must put down or else not at all.

But let me tell you of what I am feeling instead of what it is all about. You know that line between patience and impatience; where anxiety meets daring right at the confluence of faith and hope. I am there. Because, my fellow Filipino compatriots, the world is speeding up again.

You know that holiday lull, that sense of a calm in the storm? It's over now and the calm that we felt we now realize was the calm right at the beginning of it.

Moreover, we can no longer afford to be insular in our thinking as a nation. I know this thinking because I used to have it. Before I left for overseas, I thought Filipinos were all there is to our world.

But our world is a community of peoples - a family of nations.

And it is getting smaller in a sense that we must be able to take it all into our mind and hearts to understand how we fit in and how to go forward from where we are.

What's happening in Egypt seems far but it is no longer so. We must remember we are now presently living at a transition into a different age; a twilight if you will, and that in this twilight, it is so easy to be lulled into a deadly complacency.

What we have discovered so far about ourselves as a nation seems easy to dismiss. For they are mostly immaterial in nature. But the work of the heart always precedes the work of the earth. Indeed the calamities we must now face on a planetary scale have all precipitated from a neglect of these same things.

I know that there will be those who will find their security in complacency; that there are those who will deny themselves the effort and the concentration to even attempt to understand the work that is being proposed to us. Indeed I am fully aware that there will be those whose hearts God will harden. It is written.

But it is not for the unwilling that I am writing, it is for you - my fellow Filipino compatriots - for us and for all those other free and willing citizens of our kindred nations in general - all the people of the peace - so that what belongs to you might always be yours in peace and good will. And that we all (including myself) might become better for it - as a nation, indeed as one family of nations.

For in my heart, O my nation, as I know you do, the colors I have chosen to wear is that of our Old Defiant. So I will have nothing to do anymore whatsoever with that Old Compliant: I reject the lie of war (and its train of social and personal sins along with it). Therefore, I must tolerate no division in my heart and strive to constantly uphold the honor of the LORD in my soul. For the LORD is God and He alone is God, one, peerless and eternal: My one, triune Perfection.

So what is happening in Egypt affects us indeed. Therefore, may peace reign in Egypt. May the people over there including our fellow citizens find safety. Above all, may peace reign in the Middle East and in our native Philippines. Let us not forget to put these in our prayers to God today.

We do not have to exceed our promise nor must we hold back on it: We are one whole sky after all, my honorable compatriots.

Today is the first day of World Interfaith Harmony Week: Try to learn something about those who are different from you and use this learning to enrich your sense of our nation today and all this week.

For me particularly, I think the Muslim hijab (head dress) is a beautiful thing. As a Roman Catholic Christian, I see it as a true symbol of a woman's right to choose; it is a practice that encapsulates a freedom that is not license; a responsible freedom; a freedom that leads to good things; a freedom that is pleasing to God Who Himself is free.

---<--@

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

Forward Thinking