Life should be a sacrifice

THERE is no mistaking about this. If we study our Christian faith, it
is quite clear that our life ought to be a sacrifice, that is, to be
made holy. That’s what sacrifice etymologically means. It comes from
the Latin “sacrum,” sacred, and “facere,” to make or to do.

    And that’s because that’s how we originally were made. Even in the
state of original justice when our first parents had not yet sinned,
they were supposed to make things and themselves holy by following
God’s will freely and responsibly. We always need to refer everything
to God, who is our all.

    That’s because even if God made us to be like him, he wants us to
want to be holy like God also on our own volition. God is treating us
the way he treats himself, precisely because we have been made in his
image and likeness. He does not force us to be like him. He wants us
to do that freely.

    But our first parents disobeyed, and thus, sinned. It’s a sin that
all of us would inherit. And even if erased through baptism, we would
still be left with some scar that would dispose and tempt us to get
attracted to evil instead of good that comes from God.

    And so the duty to make things and ourselves holy or to make
sacrifice now involves greater effort on our part and also the direct
intervention of God himself, for we cannot make things and ourselves
holy without both our effort and God’s grace. The two have to be
together.

    So from the beginning of our salvation history, this idea of
sacrifice was already inculcated in a steady fashion, starting with
Abel and Cain down to the patriarchs and prophets like Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, a mysterious character called Melchizedec, till Christ, who is
both the perfect priest for the perfect sacrifice.

    This sacrifice of Christ is perpetuated till the end of time in the
sacrament instituted by Christ himself called the Holy Eucharist, one
aspect of which is precisely the Holy Mass.

    In the Mass, what is actually taking place is not just some ritual,
some dramatization of a past event. It is the very sacrifice of Christ
on the Cross. This is a truth of faith, a mystery, that unites time
and eternity, earth and heaven. It also makes all of us contemporaries
of Christ, inextricably involved in his continuing work of redemption.

    Because of how God’s plan is for us, we are supposed to make our
whole life a sacrifice by uniting it to Christ’s sacrifice on the
Cross made available to us through the Holy Mass. This is the
underlying framework of our life.

    Our every thought, desire, intention, word, judgment, reasoning,  and
our action in all its variations and levels ought to be a offered to
God through the Christ on the Cross, perpetuated at Holy Mass.

    But I wonder how many of us realize this, and more importantly, how
many of us know how to convert this truth of faith into tangible
reality in our life. What we see around most of the time is wanton
self-pursuit, self-seeking, self-absorption.

    In the world of entertainment, for example, how many are the artists
we see around who truly have great talents but who fail to offer their
talents to God. In fact, many are those who ridicule the idea of
offering their talents to God, who don’t see the connection between
God and them, between God and their talents.

    It gives me an experience more bitter than sweet, because while I
greatly enjoy those talents, I also feel terrible at the outright
expropriation of those talents from God to make them their own
entirely. This may not be quite obvious in our country, but try to see
the decadent West where you have many talents, and you know what I
mean.

    The area of politics is even worse. Here we see many political
animals only paying lip service to faith and religion when such
service is at their advantage, but who blatantly, without any seeming
qualms of conscience at all, violate basic religious and moral tenets
just to attain their personal goals.

    The values of charity, magnanimity, mercy, compassion, patience,
truthfulness, etc., are shamelessly trampled upon. If ever some
aspects of these values and virtues are present, you can be sure they
are more caricatures than the real things.

    We need a strong reminder about the true purpose and character of our
life. It is supposed to be a sacrifice, to be made holy by offering it
to God through Christ.

The Pope’s Lebanon visit

LITTLE has been said about the Pope’s recent Lebanon visit in our
local press. I suppose we are too concerned about our burning local
issues to be distracted by some news about the Pope. But there’s
actually something of importance and of universal relevance to say
about this papal trip.

And that is that the Pope managed to attract rousing, even rapturous
welcome and attention from the people in a region severely torn by
conflict and violence. He seemed to click with the Muslim crowd in a
way no world leader today could.

This, in spite of the fact that the visit coincided with some
unfavorable conditions. For one there is that current rage in the
region because of a video that denigrated the Prophet Mohammed and
that has resulted so far with the killing of an American ambassador.
Then you have Syria that is practically going down into flames now.

It also coincided with the anniversary of an ugly event, the massacre
by Christian militiamen of some Palestinians and Shiites in Beirut 30
years ago. That’s, of course, a very emotional memory.

Then let’s recall also that the Pope himself ruffled the Muslim world
back in 2006 when in an academic address, he said something the
Muslims considered to be a smear against Prophet Mohammed.

But this time, it’s a different atmosphere. The Pope was even welcomed
by the leaders of one of the most uncompromising Muslim sects. One of
the Muslim exponents of co-existence welcomed the Holy Father with the
kindest words, saying, “any harm done to a Christian is a wrong done
to all Muslims, and every attack on a church is an attack against all
mosques.”

The crowds that attended the Papal activities were large. All these
indicate that in spite of the worrying developments in the region,
there are also some good ones taking place, albeit in some quiet way,
typical of what is truly good compared to our own different versions
of what is good to us. Let’s thank God for this.

But the Pope managed to attract this attention also because of the
message of peace and hope that he brought. He proposed a way forward
to a society composed of very different elements.

In his own words, he said that to promote a future of peace and
solidarity, the people must work “to ensure that cultural, social and
religious differences arrive through sincere dialogue at a new
fraternity, where what unites them is the shared sense of the
greatness and dignity of every person, whose life must always be
defended and protected.”

These words remind me that what usually unites us in spite of our
sharp differences in politics, social position and religion, is when
we have natural disasters. There, we don’t talk about differences. We
just help one another.

But we don’t have to wait for disasters to put us together. We have to
learn to build unity and genuine fraternity with or without disasters,
and especially when we move forward to national and world progress and
development.

This, of course, will need some fundamental requirements. There has to
be unconditional respect for the dignity of the person, always
acknowledging his transcendental destiny and not just his earthly,
temporal and material welfare. This will stretch our patience to
infinity as we unavoidably traverse through our differences.

There has to be genuine religious freedom that is the antithesis of
intolerance, discrimination and bitter zeal. This means we have to be
filled up with unconditional love for one another if we truly love God
or Allah or whatever it is that one considers as God.

True religious freedom allows sincere differences in our religious
beliefs, but also knows how to resolve these through cordial dialogue
and respect for the others no matter how convinced we may be that they
are wrong.

Then, of course, life in all its stages, from conception to natural
death, should be respected if peace is to be attained. The Pope said
it well when he said: “If we want peace, let us defend life.”

How can we have peace when there is already fear of life by
contracepting and aborting totally defenseless babies? The attitude
for contraception and abortion is already the very germ that can grow
into the monsters of hatred, suspicion, envy, violence and terrorism.

The Pope also said that we should foster stable families and that
instead of hoarding on weapons, we should rather make a growing stock
of good ideas and creativity about ways of how to handle our
differences well. This is the challenge of all of us today.

What they want vs. what they ought

 I WAS gratified to read the pooled editorial of the Cebu newspapers

done on the occasion of this year’s Press Freedom Week. There were
many things that they dropped there for their readers to chew, but one
statement immediately caught my attention.

It’s when it said: “Figuring out what people want to know, and what
citizens should know, is one of journalism’s finest burdens.”

That definitely is a mark of maturity, a sign of progress, a certain
sophistication and nuanced thinking meant to blow the bubble of
naivete, simplism, herd mentality, sensationalism, etc., that have
also afflicted local media for long.

It seems to say that journalists these days are now more courageous
and responsible to present things even if these things are unpopular
as long as they believe these things are what their readers ought to
know. It’s a very difficult position to be in.

If truly meant and sufficiently supported by an abiding program of
continuing formation, then these words can give us basis to expect a
press that would really serve the common good, not only in terms of
closely monitoring events, but also and more importantly of creating a
healthy and vibrant public opinion, one committed to truth, justice
and charity.

It cannot be denied that more people are becoming more discerning and
discriminating of what they read and see in the media. They know when
they are tricked. They can easily detect spins, gratuitous claims and
badly researched reports.

They know when a newsman, columnist or editorial writer is biased or
not, reckless or not, engaged in shallow and trigger-happy ways or is
doing serious, responsible work.

More, they now have greater power to answer back, clarify and even
correct erring journalists. Or they can simply turn off and look for
many other alternative sources of news and information that they
consider more balanced and fair. And thanks be to God, we have many of
these alternatives now.

And so media practitioners, given their immense power of influence,
should feel it more sharply that they too, like everybody else, are in
need of a deepening formation to be able to carry out their task and
mission with utmost sense of responsibility. This is, of course, a
very serious duty, not to be taken lightly.

We know that these days many of our journalists do not have a clear
idea of where they ought to base and root their sense of right and
wrong, good and evil, just and unjust. They, of course, simply reflect
the general trend we sadly see in the world today.

Many are just in some fishing expedition with regard to their beliefs
and convictions. “Way klaro,” as we put it in our dialect. And so many
of them just get contented with what may be considered as
politically-correct, or socially or culturally-correct. Nothing beyond
that.

They just depend on some popular consensus, but not anymore going
further to see whether such consensus is truly right and fair. And
these days, the “vox-populi-vox-Dei” theory fails more often than not.
It gives messages and signals that are more uncertain than certain.

We need to remind everyone, journalists or not, to really go back to
basics, go back to the origin, and that can only be God, who is the
ultimate source of everything that is good.

But do you think religion is taken seriously by many media people? I
really wish that it were so, but pieces of evidence are aplenty
showing a cavalier attitude toward religion.

Some even give the impression that religion is what causes biases and
prejudices. They prefer to be guided solely by their own reasoning,
their own thinking, their own bank of data and information

Many fail to realize the import of what St. Paul once said about
charity which is the very essence of God, and the ultimate criterion
for our knowing, judging and reasoning, and in fact, our whole
behavior and life.

“Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the
time will come when they must fail. Or the gift of languages, it will
not continue for ever. And knowledge, too, the time will come when it
must fail.” (1 Cor 13,8)

When we, people in the media, are not really inspired by charity, that
is, by God, but simply by some worldly value or our own estimation of
things, then we are yet in the imperfect stage, just as St. Paul again
affirms:

“Our knowledge is imperfect...but once perfection (charity) comes, all
imperfect things will disappear.” (13,10)