IT’S always good to check from time to time this social and political requirement of ours. We always need leaders who can effectively orchestrate the different elements of our life so that we can attain or, at least, facilitate the attainment of our common good.
It’s a tremendous responsibility to choose the right people we put at the helm of our society to steer us in the right direction. With challenges getting not only plentier but also trickier, we should know what criteria we are using or what values guide us in selecting our leaders.
Are they the appropriate ones? Or do we allow ourselves to used and deceived by all sorts of gimmicks played around?
Candidates for leadership will obviously try to take advantage of anything they think would help them in their pursuit for positions. They will build up their war chest, bolster their popularity, package themselves as attractively as possible.
If you allow them, they will buy you, drown you with their images, hypnotize you with their names, etc. We have to be most wary of these unwelcome cohorts candidates bring along, and focus on what truly is important in selecting.
Besides, they might think of leadership only in the practical sense, without any reference to God. Power and authority are seen as coming only from the people, and not as a participation of the power and authority of God. Charisma, if they have any, is just pure personal luck, again with no reference to God.
It’s the voting populace that has more or less the last say in the choosing. That’s why, to a certain extent we deserve the kind of leaders we have, since we, in a collective sense, choose them.
The classic criteria in choosing our leaders are basically two: competence and integrity. These, of course, can ramify into countless branches of considerations.
But already at the first level, there’s a significant segment of the people who put these two criteria into conflict. One part is just contented with competence and look down on integrity. As long as the goods are delivered, no matter how, the leader is regarded effective.
Another part just looks almost exclusively at integrity, defining it in some curious ways, with God largely excluded, and hardly gives any attention to a candidate’s capabilities and expertise.
Many fail to see the organic connection, even the mutual relation between these two basic qualities. They can get contented with one without the other, not knowing that both need each other to survive and prosper.
It’s true that the combination is often an elusive ideal, and that we can always manage with our enormous capacity for tolerance and for resourcefulness to get by with any situation. But we have to work on this goal for choosing leaders with greater determination and system.
Our times call for it. We need authentic leaders and we have to learn how to recognize and elect them. We’ve been in some kind of a bubble produced by a democracy that hardly exerts any effort to nourish itself with true values. It contents itself with simple majority.
We need to outgrow this mentality and effect a real conversion, not just putting lipstick on a pig. It’s no easy job at all. It requires tremendous effort on the part of everyone, and especially of our leaders. Of course, the transformation has to start in homes, schools and churches.
Sadly, in many parts of the world today, leadership is understood and pursued in this way. It’s as if the challenges are purely political or social or economic. And thus, the solutions can only come from those provinces. The religious grounding of leadership is at best confined to an ornamental role.
It’s truly funny to hear talks of ethics in business and politics when God is not put into the picture. Instead, shameless maneuverings and brute power plays are resorted.
The crisis of leadership in the world stems from this purely secular outlook. Only time will expose the anomaly of this attitude. Its congenital error will play out in full, as it seems to be showing in the current global economic crisis. Soon, it will paint Godless leaders and peoples into a corner.
At the moment, many of us still feel deeply awkward to admit the role of God in our leadership and in our assessment of leaders’ competence and integrity. We are actually playing into the hands of worsening trouble.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
A big bang for dressing
DRESSING may be a routine activity for all of us. We hardly give any serious thought to it other than what common sense tells us. But it can have deep theological basis important for us to know. Let’s put it under the crosshair and see what relevant adjustments we have to make.
This can be gleaned from an interview sometime ago with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
When asked about how our first parents, after their fall, immediately realized their nakedness and then wove fig leaves to cover themselves, the Cardinal practically referred to the origin and theological basis for our dressing.
“This demonstrates how man, who is no longer standing in the splendor of God, and of course no longer sees the other in the light of that splendor, now stands as it were naked before others,” he said, to explain the immediate effect of original sin.
That is to say that while before the fall, Adam and Eve felt no shame in their nakedness because they saw in each other the splendor of God in their bodies, that innocence was lost after the fall. Their bodies did not anymore show the splendor of God. They had become a source of shame.
The sin they committed did not only alienate them from God, but also disturbed the pristine order of things and damaged the harmonious relationship between the man and the woman.
The original clothing, the fig leaves, became a way to hide themselves from God and from each other. Later the covering became a necessary element to establish their personal and social identity, and restore and keep their relationship with God and with each other.
This view, I believe, is worth developing further as well as spreading far and wide. It gives deeper meaning to our dressing, and connects it and us to God and others in a more intimate way. It can and should create a big bang in our attitude and understanding of our clothing habits.
It shows us how our garment is not only a covering and an instrument of modesty. It also has become a tool to identify ourselves and to facilitate communication with others, God being the first and the ultimate other for us.
For sure, this idea, which is not yet an official Church doctrine, will go a long way in changing our mentality for the better, affording us to derive spiritual significance from this banal business of dressing up.
It’s time to give our dressing activity its proper moorings and orientations, making it transcend the twists and turns of purely human and natural considerations, which can give us a high if blinding degree of excitement but fail to affirm our true dignity.
We have to understand that clothing, which is at the fundamental level of our earthly life, can exert tremendous and crucial influence on the other higher aspects of our life.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it can even make or unmake us. It can enhance us or compromise us. A basic need, it can give the fundamental character of our life. It reflects what’s inside us, and can also build it up or harm it.
For the Christian believer, our attire then assumes greater relevance to our personal dignity, our social relations and our supernatural destiny. It’s not just something purely individualistic, at the mercy of one’s whims and caprices. By necessity it is at once personal, social and spiritual or religious.
If we realize this truth about our clothing, I suppose we’d exert the appropriate effort to comply with its due requirements. We just cannot be casual about it, aloof to its objective standards. We just cannot allow ourselves to mindlessly flow with the fashions without knowing where we are heading.
This truth reminds us that there’s a need to be suitably dressed because of part of our personal and social identity comes from our profession, such as being a priest, a doctor or nurse, a lawyer, a policeman, an engineer, etc.
It also indicates to us the criteria we have to use to pursue the goals of functionality, beauty and elegance in sartorial tastes. All these criteria should culminate in the fact that our garments should reflect the splendor of God.
I believe it’s not a restrictive criterion, but rather one that integrates and enriches all the legitimate concerns we have whenever we talk about clothing and fashion.
This can be gleaned from an interview sometime ago with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
When asked about how our first parents, after their fall, immediately realized their nakedness and then wove fig leaves to cover themselves, the Cardinal practically referred to the origin and theological basis for our dressing.
“This demonstrates how man, who is no longer standing in the splendor of God, and of course no longer sees the other in the light of that splendor, now stands as it were naked before others,” he said, to explain the immediate effect of original sin.
That is to say that while before the fall, Adam and Eve felt no shame in their nakedness because they saw in each other the splendor of God in their bodies, that innocence was lost after the fall. Their bodies did not anymore show the splendor of God. They had become a source of shame.
The sin they committed did not only alienate them from God, but also disturbed the pristine order of things and damaged the harmonious relationship between the man and the woman.
The original clothing, the fig leaves, became a way to hide themselves from God and from each other. Later the covering became a necessary element to establish their personal and social identity, and restore and keep their relationship with God and with each other.
This view, I believe, is worth developing further as well as spreading far and wide. It gives deeper meaning to our dressing, and connects it and us to God and others in a more intimate way. It can and should create a big bang in our attitude and understanding of our clothing habits.
It shows us how our garment is not only a covering and an instrument of modesty. It also has become a tool to identify ourselves and to facilitate communication with others, God being the first and the ultimate other for us.
For sure, this idea, which is not yet an official Church doctrine, will go a long way in changing our mentality for the better, affording us to derive spiritual significance from this banal business of dressing up.
It’s time to give our dressing activity its proper moorings and orientations, making it transcend the twists and turns of purely human and natural considerations, which can give us a high if blinding degree of excitement but fail to affirm our true dignity.
We have to understand that clothing, which is at the fundamental level of our earthly life, can exert tremendous and crucial influence on the other higher aspects of our life.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it can even make or unmake us. It can enhance us or compromise us. A basic need, it can give the fundamental character of our life. It reflects what’s inside us, and can also build it up or harm it.
For the Christian believer, our attire then assumes greater relevance to our personal dignity, our social relations and our supernatural destiny. It’s not just something purely individualistic, at the mercy of one’s whims and caprices. By necessity it is at once personal, social and spiritual or religious.
If we realize this truth about our clothing, I suppose we’d exert the appropriate effort to comply with its due requirements. We just cannot be casual about it, aloof to its objective standards. We just cannot allow ourselves to mindlessly flow with the fashions without knowing where we are heading.
This truth reminds us that there’s a need to be suitably dressed because of part of our personal and social identity comes from our profession, such as being a priest, a doctor or nurse, a lawyer, a policeman, an engineer, etc.
It also indicates to us the criteria we have to use to pursue the goals of functionality, beauty and elegance in sartorial tastes. All these criteria should culminate in the fact that our garments should reflect the splendor of God.
I believe it’s not a restrictive criterion, but rather one that integrates and enriches all the legitimate concerns we have whenever we talk about clothing and fashion.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
An Open Letter to Obama
His Excellency
Barack Hussein Obama
PresidentUnited States of America
Dear Mr. President: Some six months ago at the Saddleback Forum when the topic of abortion was discussed, your Excellency admitted that the question of when human life begins was beyond your pay grade. It is therefore with fear and trembling that I learned that one of your first acts as the new President was to overturn the executive orders restored by your predecessor barring U.S. government funds from any foreign or domestic agency that promoted or performed abortions.
This single unthinking act wiped away any semblance of the benefit of the doubt I willingly invested in you during the campaign: that you were the true maverick and not the impostor like your opponent. Now I know better: you look like a politician cut from the same wretched cloth.
I expected you to do better. Anyone whose mind is mired in doubt on such a vital issue as to when life begins would first seek to clear up matters. You did not. Instead, you swallowed wholesale the unscientific argument, believed by countless people whose pay grades are much lower than yours, that a fertilized egg of twelve weeks is not human and could be disposed of medically and flushed down the drain. Or worse, as you recently signed too, an embryo could be experimented on, genetically tested, or played around with as a specimen at the mercy of high pay grade professionals in white lab coats.
These are some of the basic reasons why I and other citizens of the developing world quake with fear. It is ironic that such a seemingly enlightened politician – who campaigned on a platform of change we could believe in, who enjoyed the triumph of struggle against all the odds that defined him, and who has been an inspiration to many people – signed into law a policy that would eliminate the same opportunity from shaping the minds and hearts of future generations of young people and leaders.
One other thing. Just the other day, you ranted and raved against the outsized bonuses Wall Street bankers gave themselves for their rotten performance in the past year. Unfortunately, your Excellency has no moral authority to do that, because by allowing abortions to resume and stem cell research to be conducted without regard for their moral dimensions, you have acted like someone whose pay grade has been raised beyond those of the bankers you so vehemently condemned.
True, every nation gets the government it deserves. The United States and its President are woven from the same culture, the same woof and warp that led it to its moment of crisis. Mr. President, the greatest problem you and your nation face is not purely financial, and neither is it just economic nor legal. It's much deeper than that, and one need not have a high pay grade to realize that your nation's problem is rooted in moral turpitude. As the axe of investigative vengeance falls on the Madoffs and Fulds who made off with the billions from fooled investors, not only in America, we hope you and your government learn from the lessons of history that mighty empires are not lost overnight by the actions of a corrupt few. Every worldly kingdom – Persia, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, France, Ottoman, Prussia, Spain and England – eventually collapsed because of the moral weakness of its leaders. If you learn from the lessons of history – and we hope your teachers were at the right pay grade so you learned from them – then America will not join this sorry list of losers. We hope, at the least, that you would not hasten the beginning of the end.
Mr. President Obama, not all is lost. It's not yet too late. We in the Third World chuckle at the kind of democratic politics you have in the West, because there is not much difference between you and us. We too have low pay grade politicians running our affairs, deciding on matters beyond their pay grade, and making the same stupid mistakes signing into law popular policies on issues they don't understand. Like the poor Americans who voted you into office, we too suffer the follies of our rulers. We bleed when untimely ripped from our mothers' wombs. We cry when our hard-earned money is taxed and wasted.
And we tremble, because you have condemned us to suffer the evil that threatens to multiply when economists like your advisers, bankers like those you condemn, and politicians like you who are unthinking decide on matters beyond your pay grade. We tremble at such inconsistencies, because in your efforts to find and punish the culprits that led to the crisis we face, you will discover that without the moral fiber your nation is sorely lacking, you would collectively point accusing fingers at the less powerful: the immigrants, unborn babies, and millions of workers in the world who are on the receiving end of the collective monumental stupidities which we hoped you would stop.Though we tremble in fear, we also tremble with hopeful anticipation of your willingness to learn. You are powerful, not because of your pay grade but because you symbolize change. You can turn the status quo upside down, injecting a sorely needed moral imagination to your dying nation in a world wallowing in the throes of legislated extinction. You campaigned on an optimistic platform of change, responsibility, accountability, a better life and progress for all. Having gone so far and succeeded against all odds, you more than anyone should know that the best things in life have a moral dimension that go beyond pay grades, titles, and mandates.
Dear Mr. President, you talk of our era as the Age of Responsibility. This is a powerful concept with a deep moral dimension. One cannot talk of responsibility without consideration of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. If the Age of Responsibility you speak of would be but a continuation of the shallow, two-dimensional, and hedonistic world your people in the West know so well, then you will fail. However, if the Age of Responsibility you herald were to remind the world's people of our common humanity, our shared goals of respect and appreciation for each other's beliefs and differences and the admission that there lie beyond us realities we may not fully comprehend but that we must respect and cherish, then you truly could be the leader of real change in the world.
You can, Mr. President, symbolize the rebirth of humanity and the dawn of a new age. You more than anyone else would know what direction a genuine democracy must take for true human freedom to take root and flourish. You are in the unique position as the ruler of the first democratic superpower the world has ever known to chart the course of world history and bring the present and future generations to a destiny our common ancestors could only dream about.
Follow your heart, enlightened by your mind, and lead us. You know the right thing to do. Every world crisis results from the lack of good and just people ready to give up their lives to do what is right. America wants you to lead us to a New World, not the old one where unborn babies don't have rights, where colored peoples are discriminated against, and where the poor have no one to care for them. I, and billions of people the world over, trust you to lead us by example through this New Age of Responsibility. Please don't waste that trust.
A London Telegraph reporter ventured to say that you are an emperor without clothes, that you are all bluster and pomp, and that when America discovers you to be in the same mold as your predecessors Harding and Jackson, there will be a revolution so great that its threat to the world would not be matched by that which made us tremble during the Cold War years. We hope he's wrong, not only for our sake, but more especially for the sake of Michelle, Sasha, and Malia. They deserve better, and you can make sure they do.
Sincerely yours,
Manoling de Leon
Senior CitizenRepublic of the Philippines
Barack Hussein Obama
PresidentUnited States of America
Dear Mr. President: Some six months ago at the Saddleback Forum when the topic of abortion was discussed, your Excellency admitted that the question of when human life begins was beyond your pay grade. It is therefore with fear and trembling that I learned that one of your first acts as the new President was to overturn the executive orders restored by your predecessor barring U.S. government funds from any foreign or domestic agency that promoted or performed abortions.
This single unthinking act wiped away any semblance of the benefit of the doubt I willingly invested in you during the campaign: that you were the true maverick and not the impostor like your opponent. Now I know better: you look like a politician cut from the same wretched cloth.
I expected you to do better. Anyone whose mind is mired in doubt on such a vital issue as to when life begins would first seek to clear up matters. You did not. Instead, you swallowed wholesale the unscientific argument, believed by countless people whose pay grades are much lower than yours, that a fertilized egg of twelve weeks is not human and could be disposed of medically and flushed down the drain. Or worse, as you recently signed too, an embryo could be experimented on, genetically tested, or played around with as a specimen at the mercy of high pay grade professionals in white lab coats.
These are some of the basic reasons why I and other citizens of the developing world quake with fear. It is ironic that such a seemingly enlightened politician – who campaigned on a platform of change we could believe in, who enjoyed the triumph of struggle against all the odds that defined him, and who has been an inspiration to many people – signed into law a policy that would eliminate the same opportunity from shaping the minds and hearts of future generations of young people and leaders.
One other thing. Just the other day, you ranted and raved against the outsized bonuses Wall Street bankers gave themselves for their rotten performance in the past year. Unfortunately, your Excellency has no moral authority to do that, because by allowing abortions to resume and stem cell research to be conducted without regard for their moral dimensions, you have acted like someone whose pay grade has been raised beyond those of the bankers you so vehemently condemned.
True, every nation gets the government it deserves. The United States and its President are woven from the same culture, the same woof and warp that led it to its moment of crisis. Mr. President, the greatest problem you and your nation face is not purely financial, and neither is it just economic nor legal. It's much deeper than that, and one need not have a high pay grade to realize that your nation's problem is rooted in moral turpitude. As the axe of investigative vengeance falls on the Madoffs and Fulds who made off with the billions from fooled investors, not only in America, we hope you and your government learn from the lessons of history that mighty empires are not lost overnight by the actions of a corrupt few. Every worldly kingdom – Persia, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, France, Ottoman, Prussia, Spain and England – eventually collapsed because of the moral weakness of its leaders. If you learn from the lessons of history – and we hope your teachers were at the right pay grade so you learned from them – then America will not join this sorry list of losers. We hope, at the least, that you would not hasten the beginning of the end.
Mr. President Obama, not all is lost. It's not yet too late. We in the Third World chuckle at the kind of democratic politics you have in the West, because there is not much difference between you and us. We too have low pay grade politicians running our affairs, deciding on matters beyond their pay grade, and making the same stupid mistakes signing into law popular policies on issues they don't understand. Like the poor Americans who voted you into office, we too suffer the follies of our rulers. We bleed when untimely ripped from our mothers' wombs. We cry when our hard-earned money is taxed and wasted.
And we tremble, because you have condemned us to suffer the evil that threatens to multiply when economists like your advisers, bankers like those you condemn, and politicians like you who are unthinking decide on matters beyond your pay grade. We tremble at such inconsistencies, because in your efforts to find and punish the culprits that led to the crisis we face, you will discover that without the moral fiber your nation is sorely lacking, you would collectively point accusing fingers at the less powerful: the immigrants, unborn babies, and millions of workers in the world who are on the receiving end of the collective monumental stupidities which we hoped you would stop.Though we tremble in fear, we also tremble with hopeful anticipation of your willingness to learn. You are powerful, not because of your pay grade but because you symbolize change. You can turn the status quo upside down, injecting a sorely needed moral imagination to your dying nation in a world wallowing in the throes of legislated extinction. You campaigned on an optimistic platform of change, responsibility, accountability, a better life and progress for all. Having gone so far and succeeded against all odds, you more than anyone should know that the best things in life have a moral dimension that go beyond pay grades, titles, and mandates.
Dear Mr. President, you talk of our era as the Age of Responsibility. This is a powerful concept with a deep moral dimension. One cannot talk of responsibility without consideration of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. If the Age of Responsibility you speak of would be but a continuation of the shallow, two-dimensional, and hedonistic world your people in the West know so well, then you will fail. However, if the Age of Responsibility you herald were to remind the world's people of our common humanity, our shared goals of respect and appreciation for each other's beliefs and differences and the admission that there lie beyond us realities we may not fully comprehend but that we must respect and cherish, then you truly could be the leader of real change in the world.
You can, Mr. President, symbolize the rebirth of humanity and the dawn of a new age. You more than anyone else would know what direction a genuine democracy must take for true human freedom to take root and flourish. You are in the unique position as the ruler of the first democratic superpower the world has ever known to chart the course of world history and bring the present and future generations to a destiny our common ancestors could only dream about.
Follow your heart, enlightened by your mind, and lead us. You know the right thing to do. Every world crisis results from the lack of good and just people ready to give up their lives to do what is right. America wants you to lead us to a New World, not the old one where unborn babies don't have rights, where colored peoples are discriminated against, and where the poor have no one to care for them. I, and billions of people the world over, trust you to lead us by example through this New Age of Responsibility. Please don't waste that trust.
A London Telegraph reporter ventured to say that you are an emperor without clothes, that you are all bluster and pomp, and that when America discovers you to be in the same mold as your predecessors Harding and Jackson, there will be a revolution so great that its threat to the world would not be matched by that which made us tremble during the Cold War years. We hope he's wrong, not only for our sake, but more especially for the sake of Michelle, Sasha, and Malia. They deserve better, and you can make sure they do.
Sincerely yours,
Manoling de Leon
Senior CitizenRepublic of the Philippines
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)