4 MIN READ
By REV. FERDINAND ANNO
www.nordis.net
The Christian is meant to speak even with her or his mask on. She or he can be “itinerant” even when confined in the house. She or he can be close to people even when physically distanced.
In other words, given the communication and information technology available in the technopolis, no quarantine safety protocols can prevent the Christian from speaking out (kerygma-to- marturia), from sharing the gospel (marturia-to-didache/diakonia) and being where the people are (diakonia-to-koinonia). Speaking the truth, sharing the truth in love, and being there where Christ is are sacramental to the Christian; these are chief material expressions of Christian spirituality. There may be levels or degrees and varieties of forms and ways of how these are lived but the Christian cannot be silent about God’s truth (Lk 19:40); she or he cannot keep the lamp of God’s truth under a bowl (Mt 5:15); and she or he cannot be as distanced from the neighbor as the rich man was to Lazarus (Lk 16: 19-31).
The Christian as An Activist
God’s truth and sphere of activity is nowhere imagined in the bible as confined to and emasculated in what many assign today as strictly spiritual or religious sphere. This kind of thinking is polytheistic, heretical, and blasphemous. It is contrary to biblical and church teachings. It assigns God to some negligible margin of public life while leaving the other more dominant and central spheres to other gods; it reduces God into a marginal provincial god amongst many other contending and more cosmopolitan gods in the public square (like in the PRRD cult), in the market place (the “invisible hand”), and other temporal realms, personages, ideologies which we give ultimate worth to.
In contrast to this operative divine economy of the powers that be, the God of the Bible is one who summons prophets when the bounties of the earth are no longer shared, when men have lorded over the rest of creation, when life is demeaned and dehumanized, and lies have supplanted truth. The God of the Bible was one who dwelt amongst us in Jesus to show how central to God’s agenda is the subversion of unjust social orders; and who in the Spirit continues to empower the faithfuls into pursuing this agenda of God in our world. It is these that make the Christian activist. Spirit-led, the Christian lives freedom (2 Cor 3: 17) and defies even the Sabbath when it stands in the way of what is life-giving to people and creation (Mk 2:27). The gospel that the Christian witnesses to is far larger than the religious observances of our pharisaic laws and moral codes. It is about life in its non-compartmentalized totality.
When the Christian speaks of justice, of the integrity of creation, of human rights, structural sin and systemic wrongs, she or he is speaking and acting out of the promptings of his or her faith in the merciful God of justice, hope for Jesus’ promise of the fuller life, and unconditional love for the neighbor. Unbeknownst to many, social justice, ecological wholeness, inter-human justice, egalitarian living, freedom, human rights are prominent themes in the Christian scriptures.
These are how faith, hope and love are enfleshed and appropriated in Christian witness. Apart from these enfleshment “faith,” “hope,” and “love” are but clanging cymbals (Amos 5: 23-24; 1 Cor 13:1).
Allegations that the Christian is being infiltrated and frontlining for insurgents are a gross misunderstanding of Christian spirituality and the sacramentality of Christian witness and service. Pastor Dan San Andres, Rev Marcelino Mariano, and Sr Mary John Mananzan, three of many church workers being red-tagged, harassed, criminalized, and targeted for “neutralization,” whatever that means, are prophesying on the promptings of faith, hope, and love. There is nothing insurgent or terroristic about what St Paul considered as the ultimate criteria of Christian living (1 Cor. 13:13). Living in faith, hope, and love is Christian living at its purest. But this, the blinded sacristans of a neo-Marcosian order would refuse to see and acknowledge and they are not without pseudo-theological apologists among the religious partisans of the current establishment.
The Anti-Terrorism Act and the Christian Activist
One of the chief issues surrounding the recently signed Anti-Terrorism Act is the way it is being weaponized to target not what the countries with similar laws target. Our anti-terror law specifically targets civil society and political dissenters from right to left of an imaginary political center. When, in his recent report to the nation, the president reprised his labeling the “communists” as “terrorists” he was not simply talking about the CPP-NPA-NDF. The president was talking about student activists, labor unions, human rights workers, the organized poor, environmental activists, progressive intellectuals in media and the academe, and church people: bishops, priests, pastors, nuns, deaconesses, and lay workers engaged in social witness/apostolate. This is what PRRD’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) is telling the public; and this is what almost everyone in government, toeing the government’s “whole nation approach,” is saying: everyone who speaks of human rights, ecological debt and climate emergency, self-determination of indigenous peoples, or every dissenter is a communist supporter, ergo a terrorist (!). Most of the would-be members of the Anti-Terrorism Council are already resolved on this self-constructed phantasmal claim and are deceiving themselves into thinking that they can defeat insurgency by simply draining the waters of the sea where the insurgent-fish swims. Being contracted to the national politics of the empire, the root causes of insurgency are not and would not ever be in this government’s agenda.
These are what makes the Anti-Terrorism Act terrorizing to the Filipino people. The new law is meant to silence, to keep people ensconced in their homes, and prevent them from coming together to raise a united voice against creeping tyranny. The people may abide with the quarantine regime’s safety protocols but resist the agenda guilefully concealed behind the “cover your mouth, stay at home and stay away from people” mantra of our quarantined communities.
But the Filipino people are smarter than that, they see in the “new normal” a return to, what the president of Union Theological Seminary-Philippines dubs as, the “old normal.” And church people, like Pastor Dan, Rev. Mar and Sr. Mary John? They will continue to bear witness to faith, hope and love or, in the words of Sr. Mary John, “dance with the cosmic playfulness of God.”
Yes, undeterred, unafraid and forever inspired.
“Blessed, indeed, are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:10) # nordis.net
