Rural poor

JUST learned that the second national rural congress will be convened by our bishops sometime this year. The first one was held, hold your breath, 41 years ago!

When the announcement came in a priestly gathering recently, I could not help but detect traces of a defense mechanism trying to cover and make up for the apparent neglect.

Could it be that our Church had been indifferent to the plight of our rural poor?

I have my doubts. Even if we have been committing all sorts of mistakes and our inadequacies are too obvious to belabor, to think that we have been indifferent to the rural poor would not be quite right.

We have been with everyone. We may have our deficiencies and excesses, still the fact is that we have been enjoying and suffering life with everyone.

We have been in all this together. Let’s never forget we are all members of the same body, the same family. This should be the given from where to start this second national rural congress.

We should just tackle the proposed agenda with sobriety and thoroughness. As it is, it’s already a tall order: “to facilitate the opportunity for the rural poor to voice out their concerns and their experiences of rural poverty and be heard by the Church.”

We have to be wary of the temptation to turn the occasion into a binge of blaming the usual suspects: the rich, the government, the powerful, etc. This way of resolving problems should be a thing of the past. It’s largely useless, making more enemies than friends.

We have to guard against the tricks of ideologues and the media who will try to make capital out of this event. We have to be ready to pacify the waves of hype, flimflam and gamesmanship that will likely accompany this conference.

Most relevant in this kind of collective exercise is the virtue of prudence, one that always goes with sobriety, that seeks to know everything needed to be known, and that blends the demands of charity and justice well.

It is the prudence that goes with restraint, patience, discretion and good manners. It requires studying, consulting and dialoguing about possible options and scenarios, focusing more on what unite rather than on what divide, on what build rather than on what destroy.

Never to be forgotten is the distinctive contribution of the Church, which is to relate whatever social issues and problems we have to our ultimate supernatural calling. This can never be considered irrelevant.

It is to echo what St. Paul said: “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and how to abound. In any circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4,11-13)

All of us have our own personal experiences of rural life. In my case, I consider it as an unforgettable part of my growing-up years. Summers were spent in a fishing village, my father’s birth place.

We used to hike some distance to reach it from where the bus would drop us off. It was then a place with no running water, no electricity. I had to help fetch water from the well, gather firewood, do laundry in a nearby spring, tend the chickens and pigs.

My friends were all sorts, the normal and the not-so-normal, since many had handicaps, if not physical then mental. I had friends who were hunchbacked, hare-lipped, cross-eyed, retarded, etc.

But we were all happy. Hardly anyone felt like an offender because hardly anyone felt offended. Our conflicts and mistakes were settled spontaneously.

Poverty was all around, and yet everyone worked hard and was always hopeful. Occasional heartbreaks occurred as I lost some friends just because of common illnesses like diarrhea, flu, chicken-pox.

The folks treated my father like a demigod expected to solve their problems. I heard and saw them cry. And yet when I would ask what was wrong, they would just smile and spare me the details.

“There’s God and an afterlife,” they would say, giving me a glimpse of their faith. It is this faith that has to be protected at all costs, whatever the social condition.