Ritual Thought

My first thoughts, on this your graduation day, are most ordinary ones indeed. You hear them all the time. You will say “corny”, and you will be right. But I will voice them out anyway: Where will you be five years from now?  Or ten?  Or fifteen?  Or next year? And will the education you have earned at this institution- at great expense to your parents and trouble to yourselves- make a different at all to your lives and the lives of the others? And will that difference be for the better? or for the worse?

These are , as I said, very ordinary thoughts. Prosaic. Expectable. But ancient. As ancient as those expressed  in an institution rite, ages ago when mankind was young- and a wise old shaman spoke to young initiates of duties and responsibilities they were to take up as adults,of the ways and traditions of the tribe of which they were henceforth to be full-fledged members.

It is a ritual thus , that we go though here, usual, commonplace. And it is ritual questions we ask , also usual, commonplace, but for all that, necessary. And not at all irrelevant (unless, of course, you want to make them so because the future, yours, the community’s, the people’s, the nation’s, is never an irrelevancy- for the mature citizen, for the real Christian) And that maturity, that Christianity -I take for granted here.

So, though we go through rituals today, I trust we will not be indulging in irrelevancies; nor in asking questions about your future, in fantasies. For the future I am concerned with is the future that stems from the present . And it is present that does not allow for an escape into unrealistic dreaming. True, you are young. And you must dream. But there is dreaming and dreaming. And is the kind of dreaming,built on reality, not on sheer fantasy, that would like to dwell on today.

Today

The reality of today. Or realities. 1983 Anno Dommini. The 462nd since “the Discovery of the Philippines”. The 85th since “the First Republic”. The 38th since “Independence.” The 11th since “the New Society. “The 2nd since “the Fourth-or Fifth?- Republic.” It is strange that all those labels are just that, labels. And labels that cloak, not reveal, the reality they are supposed to name.  And that, my dear graduates, it the first fact we will note about today’s reality: its as if character.

The second is like the first. If the first does violence to our sense of the honest and the true, the honest and the true, the second does violence too- because  it is violence Militarization and counter-militarization – these are the order of the day. Not one day passes but we hear of murders, of killings, not the usual ones perpetuated by common criminals but by those who are supposed to ensure “peace and order” for the people on the one hand, and on the other hand, by those who are supposed to be “liberators of the oppressed.” In short, there is a war going on, a real, shooting war. And despite the high and noble intents claimed by the combatants, it is directed against the people. A fratricidal war.

The third fast born from the first two: fear, uncertainty. IN the atmosphere of easy suspicion under which we live and the easy charge of being “subversive” , of being a “rebel” or, contrariwise, of being  ” a hindrance to the revolution,” “and enemy of the people”- for so anyone who dares to refuse to be cowed by fear is labeled-the ordinary citizen cannot but fear.  And then, the most common response to enervating fear is apathy, unconcern. This state of things, this reality does not bode well for the health of ourselves as a nation- and as individuals.

That , in  great part, is the reality. Our reality. Or at least my reading of it. You contest it. You can deny it. You can analyze if differently. But  whatever you do whether you agree or not, you will have to do more than look  at the surface reality O have focused on.For the untruth, the violence, the dear, problematic as they are , I am afraid, only the symptoms of a far more serious sickness. There is a deeper reality.

Roots

This deeper reality I speak of is more during – a reality that will not go away by our simply naming its components, by talking about them- -or re-labeling them. Because they are the hard roots of the surface reality we have just reviewed: poverty – endemic, destruction of dignity;injustice – all-pervasive, corrupting both perpetrators and victims; and selfishness — institutionalized, glorified as virtue.That is the reality you are going into and for which your education, presumably, has prepared you.That is the reality about  which I asked in the beginning whether you would make a difference to it, in it, at all by what you will be,by what you will be doing after today.

So let me ask this further question: If this in truth is the reality you are to live under as adult men and women; If you are to be part of that troubled-and troubling -society; if you are to be responsible, concerned citizen, cognizant of your rights and duties and fulfilling them precisely because you are citizen; and if you are also men and women of faith to whom justice and charity are not simply private virtues but social as well, having much to do with our common striving for the good of all; what will be your response to the challenge demand of our reality and the problems that we see mark it and make it what it is? This question and your differing responses to it are no longer going to be discussed and analyzed under classrooms conditions. They will have to be lived. And  the living -that is going to be tour task and lot henceforth. Out there.

Radicality

The living, if it is to be answer at all, if it is correspond with all you have learned so far from textbooks, will have to go in only direction. It has to go at those roots. In a word it has to be literally radical. The term is fast becoming another of those labels that hide, rather  than reveal truth, reality, meaning . Just a few weeks ago, I was reading a commentary on the Catholic Bishop’s latest joint pastoral letter, and the author of the piece noted bow not one of the bishops of the Philippines had yet “gone radical.” It wasn’t hard figuring out what he meant by his statement: No bishop has yet come out in support of bloody revolution. He was right in the narrow way he understood the term. But is that what it means? To be radical in the Philippines today means to be for violence, for bloodshed, for revolution? I am not too sure.

To be radical, according to the ordinary dictionary sense, is to depart considerably from the usual, the traditional; to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions or institutions. If that definition holds, I see nothing radical about violence: Countering violence with violence is as old as the hills, dating back in fact to our beginning in the jungles. Neither do I see anything  radical with the ends the champions of revolution propose: Replacing a totalitarian system of government with another just as totalitarian is no change at all. And, yet , we will have to say too, apathy, unconcern,as responses to violence, or criticizing and talking but doing nothing – passive acceptance of things as they are – these are no way radical either. So what is radical?  Who is radical?

Gospel Radicalism

A young man put it to me very simply once: “The truth is the one who lives by the Sermon on the Mount.” That definition does not sound too exciting. And you may laugh at it, reject it out of hand. I didn’t when I first heard it. If it had been said by the priest , a holy manang, a professional cursillista of charismatic, i might have dismissed it as conventional religion at bet, as pious dribble at worst. But the young man who spoke those words had known war and violence, insurgency and counter-insurgency, and had gone through such soul-searching as may a thoughtful young man or woman does today not only in regard to his mode of thinking but as well in the style of life he and his family were to live . And knowing all that, I saw his acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount as his charter of radicality made plenty of sense.

If his words still strike you , as I said above , as sheer “pious dribble,” try doing what he did: Try giving up great opportunities for economic and social preferment for a life given over to service, often thankless service, of the needy; try putting everything you have in working mightily for justice and turning the other cheek when you are slapped for your efforts; try hacking away at entrenched oppression and exploitation and keeping at it even when you see no result , or when there are, seeing them brought to naught because to the powers-that-be they are “subversive”; try facing the nozzle end of a gun held by one who looks at you as a hindrance to his ends of power mainly because you are for peace, truth, justice, and still go on working for those ends, come what mat; try in the face of frustration  after depressing frustration to continue believing in the human capability to find answers to the apparently impossible, to go beyond “last resort”  solutions; try walking the way of peace when that way leads through violence, hatred, the threat of death-for yourself.

I don’t think this particular young man can be easily ignored, his Christianity dismissed as “opiate”. For if there is anything what will go to the roots of our untruths, our violences, our fears, do something drastic to our poverties, our injustices, our selfishness it of his formula. Or rather, Christ’s. We talk of options a lot of these days, of alternatives, ideologies, approaches to change.And when we do, we think in terms of huge systemic, political, and economic structure like capitalism and communism and the like. We debate and argue and fight among ourselves about which system will best bring about the millennium of peace and prosperity to our poor benighted country. We talk about reform, renewal, restructuring . We talk about radicalism.

The meaning I give radicalism, I am fully aware, is not acceptable to many of you here. Events in this part of the country in the recent past only serve to strengthen the definition of radicality in terms of violence and the destruction of present  oppressive structures of society through violence. But that is exactly the point: Change there has to be, but if the change we envision is to be truly radical, the methods and means we use should also share in the quality to radicality of our ends, the process of bringing about change must carry in itself, if only in germ, the radically new structures we aim to build. The seeds sown, the harvest reaped, cannot, as the folk saying goes, be two different things, Neither can the manner, the how of sowing and the reaping

Hope

These are heavy thoughts for a joyful event such as today’s. So let me end on an up-beat note. And that note is hope. Our young man is not an isolated” voice crying in the wilderness.” There are thousands like him, I am happy to say, little people, the majority away at their Christianity in the midst of killing and bloodshed, rapine and fear, and consuming  selfishness. They are our hope. Though unnoticed,though unsung, they will make a difference in their attempting to go beyond  mere labels to the radical core of their Christianity. With them striving , plugging away, suffering in the manner of the Preacher of the Sermon on the Mount, whatever happens in the future to us as a people, they will make a difference to that future.

You too will make a difference, certainly, whatever you do, whatever you will be after today. I only pray it will be the kind that those little people I spoke of represent the kind that will enlarge out hope . From these rites, then from our rituals questions and our ritual answers, we pass on from symbols to reality. In that reality, let us make- hope.