If you are reading this, it means you are still alive, being one of those who have reached 2021 in one piece. In this past year 2020, close to 10,000 people in the Philippines have lost their lives to COVID-19. What’s more, the number of casualties of the drug war has also tremendously increased during the four-month lockdown, not to mention victims of human rights violations such as media practitioners and environmental defenders. Besides the lives lost, livelihood and education have suffered a major blow also due to natural disasters like the Taal Volcano eruption and the consecutive typhoons that hit our country in recent months.
As Christians, we believe that death does not have the final word, for we have faith in eternal life. Our souls go to heaven, hell, or purgatory, while our bodies will rise again on the last day. So we can presume that “up there” in heaven, people still read, but they read things differently from how we read and see events here on earth. But what if we start reading and seeing things from the viewpoint of heaven while still here on earth? Astronauts who went to outer space can help us. They saw the earth from a different perspective. From space, the earth looks like a beautiful big blue marble. Things are not disconnected for the land, oceans, and clouds are joined harmoniously. It is all one and beautiful! In the same way, we may be different in culture, language, race, age, or gender, but we belong to and have but one common home, the Earth.
As we want to get off to a good start this 2021, we wish to offer you a paradigm shift, a change of perspective – that of “thinking from above,” with paradigms that can help us celebrate our oneness.
First, the paradigm of gratitude. Thankful persons are joyful and hopeful. They are more focused on relationships with God and with other people. They are grateful that now, they are still alive, and still breathing. They are appreciative of simple joys like walking on the beach, watching the sunset and sunrise, the birds and trees, gazing at stars, hiking on mountains and in forests, and having meals with family and friends. Let’s be thankful that we still have something to eat and drink. Our lives will change when we have a disposition of thankfulness. Quality of life improves a lot when we are filled with gratitude and love for God and others. Such an attitude brings us to the next paradigm: the paradigm of care.
Aware of the gifts that we have around us like our lovely planet, we are moved to care for it, and for humanity. We start to be in solidarity with those who are in need: street children, the elderly, the sick, migrants, and those suffering injustice. In preserving nature and taking care of the environment, we cannot do it individually, for the ecological problems we are presently facing are insurmountable if we do it on our own. The paradigm of care leads us to the third and last paradigm we wish to propose: communion.
The paradigm of communion is essential and of absolute value. For us Christians, it can be easily understood because we believe in a Trinitarian God, who is perfect communion because of love – three persons in one God. Communion is absolute value in God, because it looks at each person in his dignity and diversity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If such dynamics from “above” are lived here on earth in our relationships with each person, who knows what redemption can obtain for humanity, in a similar but infinitely smaller way to how Christ’s death and abandonment on the cross out of love has changed the course of human history?
Communion values the “we”, and this means our walking together, and working together towards a common-union – translated by the letters of Pope Francis as – the common good for our common home.
This communion entails parrhesia, courage of speaking the truth, not afraid to touch and mend the wounds and heal divisions in society, and caring for those who are hurting in society, especially those who are marginalized, even if, at a certain point, we are persecuted, or feel abandoned like Christ, by everybody, and seemingly even by God himself.
Communion is love par excellence, and is humanity’s saving grace. It is absolute and important. People who are bearers of light and hope, at times, have to die, to feel abandoned, but in their abandonment or death lies the terrain where hope and new life bloom. We saw such force of love in history in change-makers like Mahatma Gandhi, John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Ninoy Aquino Jr., Chiara Lubich and Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. In this communion process, we have seen that the force generated is greater than the individual person. It is a collective triumph of the human spirit, just like the 1986 peaceful revolution of the Philippines, and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This force, for us, is the hand of the Father who loves us in return for the love we have freely given to others. He is the Lord of history, guiding peoples and events toward communion, which is God’s very life.
Our collective tears and losses in 2020 will not be in vain, for history and nature teaches us that in every death and loss, there is new life and victory in the end. Moreover, our Christian faith echoes this. Death and suffering for love of God and humanity always bring us to the certainty and hope of Jesus’ resurrection, the embrace of a loving Father for humanity…
A Hope-filled 2021 to all!
