Thoughts on Peace and Anti-Semitism

A good sense of history seeks to address
the question of "where" more than "when"

History they say is written by the victors. But memory (national) is not. Remembrance is right that recalls the human cost (in all the names of those who fell along our journey of return) and makes a just and human account in the heart before God of all the things history seldom mentions... a present and living account. 

I used to study history but it was impersonal. I failed to impress upon myself that history is much more than pages of a book. The aim of history is to acquire a "sense of history". Not become all too familiar with the past but discern from a good knowledge of it, a clearer understanding of the living present. 

In this way, books become more valuable than just paper and ink. And what our teachers impart to us about history becomes for us a form of art than just ancient knowledge. We begin to have an appreciation... that history is not just a long tale of woe.

Anti-Semitism too is historical. Here is what I presently understand about it:

The Star of David corrupted into an anti-semitic label.
These labels are all of them devices intended
to dehumanize its victim.

First of all, anti-Semitism is easy. Maybe that's why small-minded people like it. Because it fits.

A says its better than Z to feel itself "the letter A".

A then proceeds to prove to the alphabetical realm that what A says is true, that Z is only half-a-letter. A then begins to persecute Z because A is "A" and A says so. Ludicrous!

The next in line for A after Z is laid low would be Y. Meaning after the Jews, the Gypsies... then the Blacks, Reds, Yellows, Whites, Browns, Grays, Blues, Muslims, Christians, Catholics - everything that doesn't conform to the "A"s own version of the alphabet right up to A's closest buddy, B.

In spirit, the relentless hatred that dwells behind all things anti-human shall only thrive on the victimization of our humanity - where ever and whenever we may allow it. This is the spirit that feeds on anti-semitism. Evil.

A's own version of the alphabet? A, A, A, A, A... get my drift? 

When everything is A, there will be peace. And it will make no sense. 

To A however, it really doesn't matter that in A's version of the alphabet, one can not even spell "peace". It is a paradox that will be rammed down every other letter's conception of itself.

I am not saying that the letter Z is better than A. 

What I'm saying is everybody is different and we should be knowledgeable enough of ourselves now (after enough of a span of time) to accept the fact that we can only be meaningful as letters (as nations) as we are and as a whole. That way we can spell anything (truthfully, meaningfully, and profitably).

The fuse that A needs to light that will cause the subsequent implosion of the synergistic diversity that is the real alphabet, of course, is Z.

That to me is Anti-Semitism.

Allow it into the soul of your nation and it will fester into all those other "isms" that a free and human people ought to always guard against.

Certainly it was never a part of our peace here in the Philippines and if I can help it, shall never prosper in the soul of this Nation.

Not just because of my memory of Anne Frank and her times but because the memory of the last 2000 years is full of destructively inhuman divisions like these... too many, too much. We are confronted with numbers so large and so terrible, it intimates to each our remembrances that we shall not even be enough to render unto the living God, an adequate account...


Go past 2000 years and we get more of the same... but 2000 years is all it takes.

Indeed, the last century as the culmination of the last 1900 years is a foretelling enough to understand that if we remain adamant in our clinging to old molds that need breaking, the momentum of the past shall sweep us into perhaps another century of more of the last age... if we can not account for that century then another one more terrible than the last shall be poured as fire down upon our heads.

Until everything is parched dry. Until the spirit of humanity is diminished enough and darkness overwhelm all nations utterly with the madness of war.

I do not want that... a world overrun by sin and war, dark and indistinct from the darkness of the void. In contrast, I choose another vision of peace. (As it were, one that spells p-e-a-c-e.)

The peace I want is the opposite, obtained through the opening of a new path into the morrow. One that leads to a vision apart from the one whose fruits (the bitterest of which is genocide and an absent sense of truth) we have experienced in the last century; a vision obtained through the closing of the door of the present - as completely as possible - from the evils of the past age.

Peace can be complicated at times, I agree.

We are being confused by so many truths about it even now, here in our Philippines. But if we stay on the path (knowing the firmness of its first principles) and keep our hearts focused on a shared vision of "something new and wonderful", I know determination and faith will take us to places in time we've never been as a Country... better places.

Together, only together. Without those ruinous "isms"... extremism, terrorism, racism, sexism, ageism, shapeism, etc. More wheat, less tares.

The peace of our times will never be a perfect peace, I definitely agree.

The national peace shall always be an unfolding work in time and will always mirror the truths about our common humanity. Knowing its foundation and its vision should be enough... for it is both location and destination, plus a compass of identity and memory to carry us through.

And vigilant trust; an agility to react and to innovate (ideals, principles and vision) properly. For we are as a nation still learning a new landscape and have yet to reach a safe distance down along the path to our new morning... a new dawn para sa lahat ng Pilipino (para na rin siguro sa lahat sa mundo).

Salaam. Shalom. Peace. 

Let us continue to work and pray for peace in our time, here in our Philippines and in our world...

Mabuhay po tayong lahat.
---<--@

JFK in a letter requesting his Secretary of Labor to deliver 
a wreath in their nation's behalf to the Anne Frank House wrote... 
"the hopeful and the gentle are the true makers of history".

Salutation #139

(Helping Hands)

My brother and sister Filipinos -

A nation who
has no remembrance of its own past
is like a man who
have lost the use of his legs.

A nation who
has no love of its own present
is like a man who
have lost the use of his heart.

A nation who
has no vision of its own future
is like a man who
have lost the use of his mind.

If we are this nation, 
what for are our hands?

What for are our hands, my people?

- selah -

What for the memory but the light?
What for the light but the life?
What for the life but the hope?
What for the hope but the love?
What for the love but the labor?
What for the labor but the peace?
What for the peace but the LORD?

And what for the LORD, our King,
but the victory of all these good things,
alleluia to God on high, my people! 

What for our independence if not our freedom?
What for our freedom if not our peace?
What for our peace if not each other?

What for are our hands, my people?

- selah -

Who has given us our nationhood but God?

Alleluia to God on high, my people!

Did any of us choose to be born with such a soul?

Who can take this spirit in our hearts away?

Alas! Only we, my people, you or I -
by our unremembrance, by our impenitence,
by our unpeaceful, and false ways.

So let us, as the stars,
in this time before the dawn,
awaken Now.
---<--@

Salutation #122

Here we are, locked in a moment...

Here we are, searching for a way...
Here we are, seeking what questions to ask...

What shall we fill this moment with?

Where shall this moment take us?

All the while, 

history waits for an answer.

And history can not wait forever.

---<--@

(Scarborogh Shoal)

I want to tell you, China - again -
you are a valued nation
among the nations of this world.

In your completeness,
I see you not as a thing of War.

This is my hope for you - success!

For peace is what I desire for you.

And in those same terms,
may you be able to also respect mine.

For I too belong to a nation
- just the same as yours -
fully engaged in a work of completion
upon this same earth
as a particular undertaking of Country
unique to my people.

We are a particular responsibility
established in peace and human community
- human and imperfect -
yet free, and able, and willing to grow
by grace of God and our own determination
as a sovereign labor of living life
upon this world.

Sovereignty is what lays claim
to a national responsibility
that can (and must) be defined
but can never be shared.

To impugn on sovereignty
is to deny the right of any nation
to array itself across time
as a particular undertaking of Country.

We can not share sovereignty -
neither can you share yours.

But resources,
perhaps this,
we can.

But Scarborough Shoal 
is not just about resources.

- selah -

It is about the future shape of things.
And of this - we all have a stake.

For the future of our failing world
is a vision that we all must quest for
- and - if the history of the last 2000 years
have sufficiently taught
the memory of all our nations,
one that must be shared.

The destiny of this planet
is both a burden and an endowment
we must commonly bear
the labor and the responsibility for -
as nations dreaming together this time.

You seek to isolate us
from the judgment of our kindred nations
to expose us to thy military might
and speak to us in the terms of War
but this is not thy spirit
and this is not thy tongue.

We can not prosper unto an agreement
if we have already surrendered it
to the War that seeks to pit us
against each other as pawns.

For War is the bane of our existence!

Shall War distinguish between us
which of our people it shall devour?

Nay! 

War shall take us to a place
- even our angels dare not tread -
a lonely and desolate place.

Let us then affirm,
O my kindred Chinese nation -
Peace is the craft of our nations.

- selah -

I go back to the words
my own President spoke to you
about this vital area of sea - that -
more than it separates our nations
are waters that connect us
and connect us better - and more deeply -
than we at present
may claim to understand.

It is a sea of friendship (and harmony)!

(Its waters being purposed

as a medium of peace, goodwill, and justice

between our nations, 

between all the nations in our region, 

our continent, and our world.)

Let those words come back to us now
in this moment, in this space between our hopes,
and let the history of the present
be written in the spirit.
of our mutual determination
see to it that this work of division
does not overcome our common desire
for a better world - for our Asia -
and for all the nations of our Mankind.

- selah -

How do we settle this dispute?
---<--@


Madness

Salutation #73

If you love something, make sure you can defend it.

(Peace is Prologue)

These were the days,

my brothers and sisters of the Promise,

when our nation was still a leading light in our region -

those days have now passed away into today

when all seem dark and the night is deep...

But you know now as well as I do

that the 'morrow for our land is not so far away

- each of us know it by heart how to get there -

what we must decide upon today is how to get there

- together this time.

For there is no getting into the morning

for our Land of the Morning - without unity -

and this unity is our peace

- a pledge to both heaven and earth -

that we belong.

---<--@

20110506

My Annelies Marie's Legacy

OUR WORLD has not changed, my Anne.

It is still the same world that God has created.
The same sun, moon and order of the seasons;
the same restless and violent lands of the earth
under this same blanket of unconscious skies
that bore quiet witness to your life and times.

My dear Anne, our world has not changed!

When I contemplate your life here on earth,

during those quiet nights, O beloved of my heart,
I often look up at these same starry night skies
and see those familiar patterns of stars
that I know in my heart looked quietly down on you
just one timeless instant away from me, my Anneka.

A moment seemingly so distant, it hurts me to miss you.
Yet an eternity so close, it fills me with all your love.

It is as if I have you and I don't have you...

And I realize this certain closeness between us:

We are separated only by spaces between our souls;
in what littleness of self that we may each obtain
by virtue of our unique and individual humanity
in the you being you and the me being me.

O my beloved friend, I know you suffered!

I know how much others like you suffered!
From the very beginnings of the nations of Mankind,
'tis the holy and nameless innocents that carry the burden
of the precarious and desperate state of our fallen nature!
The very soil of our earth is soaked in their blood
and the undying memory of their secret silence cries out
like a chorus rising all around us to pierce the heavens -
Almighty God Himself has heard and the season is late.

O my dearest Annelies Marie, I know you suffered!

I know how terribly you suffered but at the same time
I stand ignorant of your personal pain and suffering.
A sacred space exists

between yourself and God alone.

And God knows, I love you enough to want to know all of you -
but I love you enough also to let you be free to be yourself.

I am drawn near you by the lovableness within yourself.
I am drawn near you by the infinite promise love contains.
Of good things I know and good things I know not, that I desire:
All the virtues and the gifts that your friendship brings -
most especially your steadfast hope, cheerfulness and courage.

Today, my darlingest Annelies, here in my present time,

I look out into my own time, full of wars, death and suffering
and wonder at how some may say our world has changed.
I see the same evils and the same sufferings and the same sins.
I see the same terrible injustices that Man inflict upon Man;

nation against nation waste themselves in endless battle.
And I realize in myself that our world that has not changed.

Some may say that the times have changed.

Some may say the world is a different place.

Some may say that the world indeed has changed.

But this it is yet another illusion to lead astray!

For it attempts to run away from the awful truth

that this world is still the same world God created:
The same sun, moon and order of seasons;
the same restless and violent lands of earth
under these same blanket of unconscious skies
that bore quiet witness to your life and times.
Scripture says, "There is nothing new under the sun."

(Ecc 1: 9)

It is the illusions that we human beings create in our hearts;
the gravity and the perversity of our own dark imaginings,
the ancient malice and diverse scope of our own willful rebellion -
those things that make of Man less than himself or herself
in the sins that brutalize the image of the Creator in each of us.
It is these that have changed in us and not the world around us!
It is not the world that must change, my darlingest Annelies,

Scripture says, "There is nothing new under the sun."

(Ecc 1: 9)

In order to better Mankind and advance the cause of humanity,
it is each ourselves that we must change for we are changeable.
Because it is through common witness of a good and well-lived life;
of a life lived in peace and friendship with God and others in God;
it is only when the Wars waged inside of ourselves have ceased;
when our minds have found the light beckoning outside of the dark
and the struggle for good will in our hearts have prevailed in us
that a true transformation of human society becomes possible.

So may your life, my love, be for others a simple remembrance.

May it inspire justice, responsibility and discipline in our world.

May it foster further understanding, freedom and community.

May your spirit inspire in us a sense of common humanity

that we may always remember our most basic of citizenships.

This is your legacy as I see it and as I live it, my Anne.

This is your love, my love, that

I now share with other hearts:

Imploring God to bless the seeds He shall plant in our souls today
that it may flower in full into the saints He shall raise tomorrow
for His glory, our good and the good of the one family of humanity.

Thank you, my dearest and most patient friend,
Annelies Marie Hollander Frank, my Miyang.
May God keep you now, may His Peace embrace you,
may His Light comfort you and may His Love surround you -
O forget me not, beloved of my heart, forget me not!
Pray for me, my darlingest, ever as I shall pray for you
until the glorious Day of the everlasting alleluias!

---<--@

Time is a Nearness

WHEN I SIT DOWN TO VISUALIZE TIME, I see it as an infinitesimally minute point upon the infinite surface of an eternal ocean.

For me, there is something intrinsically wrong about the thinking that time is anything linear, like it is somehow a measure of distance - the past, forever growing dimmer and dimmer, colder and colder, the further and further away the present inundates our forgetful minds and hearts with the rush of those realities coming to be as we journey headlong into the void of the future.

In my mind, time is not a measure of distance. Time does not become for me, a kind of coldness. For me, time is a measure of our closeness. To embrace it is a certain warmth.

It is not a moving away from the past but a merging together.

It is a gathering sense.

It is not a blind rush into a chaotic, frenzied future. Nor is it an inescapable, falling down into a dictated, ordered array of molds but a series of free acceptances in the timeless Now.

Like the image of Jacob's ladder, time itself ascends and descends according to the free and human choices we each make as individuals. It is the common fabric of everything we bring out of these choices for good or for ill.

Like every realization within the sacred silence, each moment in time is one blink, one twinkle, one timeless point on the eternal sea. L

ike a myriad shining stars, beautiful, patient, forbearing in light, time is a twinkling from grace to grace, hope to hope and truth to truth. As

stars

adrift upon a boundless ocean of Love, time is all that gathers from the darkness, like a coming Home together, the love that lives in the longing in you and in the longing in me.

Hence, one may not look back at the past, one may only look into the past but never back.

For the past is what imparts motion to the present.

Therefore, n

ever with a sense of distance or coldness must one perceive time and its precious contents but with a very near sense of eternity as something entrusted to our living memory.

Time is not an illusion, nor does time exist for evil purposes.

It is the evil in all evil things that proposes to the heart of Man that all of time were but a drifting away,

like it were a faded distance, like the truth were in full retreat, like all human hope were a backward flow, like

the victory of the incomparable goodness and unfathomable mercy of God is but a slow sunset

receding comfortably in the horizon, w

hat a lie!

Lo, it is far easier to hide inside the solid rock of a granite mountain than it is to hide from within the billowing folds of the gossamer veil of time! Where will evil men hide from God?

What lies

behind the veil of time but the everlasting abode of Justice?

Men forget but time does not.

So must one use what time is given him or her on this earth well, my beloved friends, avoiding evil and doing good, loving virtue and forsaking vice.

Because time flows from purposes noble and Divine. It exists for Sacred Life and flows for all of life's fruition. It is not a coming apart, it is a coming together of all of life's longing for itself.

All our nations are embraced by the one LORD of all the living and the everliving lights that we really are in time and through it we are constantly called in every present generation to return again and again to an Eden rebuilt unto the promised restoration of all things new.

So when you shall now perceive history - your particular national as well as regional or even all of human history entire - you must view it also with a subtle sense of timelessness and therefore closeness and affinity,

hinting at a Heart at the heart of all of time; that all of this is not random, blind chance, but a certain part of a grand design that exists, no matter how deep the maddening darkness, for the good of each and every nation of the one family of the nations of Mankind.

Honoring your most basic of citizenships requires you to be as thus, my honorable compatriots, a citizen of all humanity and therefore, a human being and citizen of all creation, seen and unseen - a natural laborer with the Holy Angels, undivided in your heart before God.

Lest we forget. Lest we forget.

---<--@

Some Thoughts on Time:

If history belonged only in the pages of a book, soon enough there will be no one left to write it.

A good thing left unremembered is a good thing still.

But an evil thing left unremembered leads to further calamity.

A nation without a past is consequently a people without a future.

---<--@

Mabuhay ang Pilipines! God bless us all.

The Two Questions