Some people can afford to squander the memory of our heroes...
But I can neither hate nor ignore them for I can not afford to be like them. What they do only strengthens my own remembrance.
In some way, I pity them. May God quicken their souls...
---<--@
On Remembrance
Remembrance is a commandment of God of all human nations.
Hence, a lack of remembrance breeds a certain contempt of the sacred.
Either one draws away from the sacred, placing it in a place out of reach of the heart. Or one becomes enraged by it, making of it an enemy of the heart.
A person who looks for God who has not the remembrance of God in the heart looks for Him in vain.
He or she may seek God in the heavens or on the earth and God shall nowhere be found for that person.
The great scandal of this is that this person may claim that God is not - where in fact, he or she has closed the eye of the heart to the Presence of the LORD in all things, seen and unseen.
The remembrance of the war dead belong to the realm of the sacred.
In an ever increasingly materialistic society, where God is being everywhere forgot, a healthy regard for the sacred soon becomes an uncommon virtue.
What lies beyond the veil of time, where all unity must proceed, in unseen realms beyond the nature and scope of the physical and the temporal, is where a healthy sense of sacred remembrance grounds the human heart.
Where remembrance is increasingly becoming scarce, there shall in its place be a growing lack of a sense of connection with history and with each other.
For all truly human relationships are spiritual connections.
---<--@
Salutation #34
(A Vision of the Desolation)
I saw in a dream
- a few days before the Easter Triduum of 2009 -
a prominent list of atrocities
listed according to their heinousness.
Their frequency was from the most heinous to the least inhuman act
with the most heinous one to be committed against the people twice a year.
There was a camp
much like Bergen-Belsen.
But it was not a dream about the Holocaust.
It was a dream about another Holocaust.
There were people (of every nation)
in the middle of the night,
civilians - men, women, children -
being thrown whole
(to be consumed body and soul)
by faceless men in uniform
into a smoking pit in the ground
and from out of this pit was thick smoke -
the smoke of poison gas.
There was no sound to the dream
only this terrible feeling of growing horror
at this appalling vision in greyscale
unfolding before the eye of my heart.
I felt powerless.
An increasing sense of panic overtook me,
wanting for the dream to end.
(And then the vision was replaced
by my Miyang Marie,
smiling like a star in the night -
a safe harbor for my heart
amidst all that darkness;
beautiful life amidst all this death.)
---<--@
Mabuahy ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.
Madness
