(Extracted from Frontlines: The First Christians through www.pbs.org)
To my students in Theo 2 (New Testament: History of Salvation) at Claret College Seminary, note the following elements of Divine/Christian Salvation as discussed in the video by the scholars.
1. MESSIANISM
2. FILIATION
3. COVENANT
4. DISCIPLESIP
5. PAROUSIA/END OF THINGS
We shall orient ourselves with these trans-Testamental themes in our first class this coming Friday, 21 October, 9.00-12.00
My Thesis Defense/Graduation on 26 August 2011 at “The Castle,” Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I presented my Research Masters Thesis: The Radical Hermeneutics of Community in Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Some weeks ago, the Forbes List unveiled the richest Filipinos. These are billionaires whose wealth could match some of the richest in Europe and America. Topping the list are Henry Sy of SM shopping malls, Lucio Tan of Fortune Tobacco, John Gokongwei of Robinsons Malls, Andrew Tan of the McDonald franchise, Consunji of the construction business, Jaime Zobel de Ayala of the real estates industry, Razon of the port operation business, and Danding Cojuangco of San Miguel Corporation. Some Filipino journalists declare that our billionaires are as rich as the billionaires of America and other powerful economies.
The power of these billionaires are reflected not only in the financial assets they have, but more in how they directed Filipino way of life. I could name at least four current trends that have come to define Filipino life:
1. MALLING. With Henry Sy and John Gokongwei’s warring SM and Robinsons shopping malls, Filipinos have come to fill cathedrals of consumerism as if poverty and unemployment is not a big problem.
2. SMOKING. The price of cigarettes increases fast as rice and gasoline, but this does not stop Filipinos consuming Lucio Tan’s products.
3. FASTFOOD EATING. No amount of surveys on hunger and poverty among Filipinos could topple the ubiquity of McDonalds, Jollibee, and other fastfood shops in the cities and even in rural areas.
4. BEER DRINKING. Life has to be celebrated. For Filipinos, without beer there is no celebration–and that is till dawn and everyone goes home drunk and look forward to the next pay day.
Indeed, our rich billionaires can match the wealth of the billionaires in developed countries, but our poor fellow Filipinos can also be as poor as those in the poorest of nations like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. There is so much talk about the potential and strength of the Philippine economy and it is apparently showed in the flood of people malling, smoking, fastfood-eating, and beer-drinking. As if we have no problem buying rice, or sending our children to school, or living in decent shelters. Everything runs by way of deception orchestrated by those on top.
There are only eight of them–but a large part of the 90 million Filipinos are practically enslaved by them.
This coming Sunday, 19 June, is Holy Trinity Sunday. We call this the “WRAP UP” Sunday–the encapsulation of the big events in our liturgical calendar, from Easter Sunday (Jesus rose from the dead) to the Feast of the Ascension (Jesus rose to heaven and to the Father ) to the Pentecost (Jesus sends down the Holy Spirit). Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most important fundamental beliefs of the Christian Church. Many believers today are aware of its importance as a doctrine. Hundreds of sermons, books, and dogmatic articles have been preached and written about the Holy Trinity. However, many people have wondered whether the Holy Trinity is immediately necessary to the way in which our life of faith is lived out.
I would say that the Trinity is not only necessary, but essential to every area that our Christian lives consist of. The feast of the Holy Trinity conveys not just the inner unity of Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit but also God’s intention to involve humanity in such a unity. There are at least three important features of the Holy Trinity which can be used as reference for how we live life in the present age. These three features are: 1) PERSONS; 2) UNITY and RELATIONSHIP; 3) SUBSTANCE.
PERSONS
cyborg
Our present age marvels at the power of machines. Computers, cell phones, gaming gadgets, and many others have diminished our personhood. Our human will, emotions, and goals have become digitized. We love interacting in chat rooms rather than person-to-person because there we can be anonymous, we can disguise–we can be not who we are. We become digits of cyber-networking. Hence, we are not PERSONS anymore, but CYBORGS–mechanized individuals. When we look at our young people today, they can spend hours just sitting in front of a computer and they forget they have people around them and activities more worthwhile. They are stuck like robots.
The Holy Trinity shows us that being PERSONS, unique persons and not robotized or digitized, is the best way we can live our lives to the fullest. None of us may have perfect personhood as the three persons in the Holy Trinity, but certainly our imperfect personhood is far greater than the perfectly configured cyborg.
UNITY and RELATIONSHIP
In our very competitive age, unity and relationship have become secondary. Individualism has eroded family relationships, communal commitments, religious leanings, and even national unity. We no longer appreciate the importance of being-together. We are scared of trusting people around us so that we wake up one morning and feel so alone. We are afraid to share our innermost issues and problems to our father, mother, brother, sister, wife, son, daughter, friends…no one is trustworthy. We look at them–not as significant others–but threats to our innermost selves, orientations and goals. We rather live and strive alone. In this manner of living, however, only the fittest and the strongest can survive. This is the slogan of individualism: “Do it yourself, solve it yourself, and die yourself.”
The Holy Trinity shows us how invaluable unity and relationship is. God could have willed that there is ONLY ONE PERSON in His being GOD–no Son, no Holy Spirit. But God’s nature is never solitary nor individualist–He relates, unites, and shares His love even to us humans who are not always trustworthy. There are always risks in relating and uniting…but life is hollow without the people around us.
SUBSTANCE
Most young people would love to eat the delicious rather than the nutritious. Junk foods, hotdogs, marshmallows and many others can be very tasty; but they don’t really contribute to good health. It is the same with other actions in life–we love that which is pleasing, that which is desirable–but no substance, no meaning. We are contented with going to work, receive our salary, go to the movies or to
the bars. We sometimes live in a cycle of fulfilling our desires–but not much in being contented with life even if we do not have much in our pocket.
The Holy Trinity shows us that though there are three persons–there is only one substance, one essence. Our being human, no matter who or what we are–different persons–there is only one SUBSTANCE that makes us who we are, that is, our being God’s Image. When we remove this very essence in us, we are no longer humans. Once we remove God from the core of our person, no matter how much treasures we have, we can be very empty. This is why people can be restless and sleepless even if they are so rich and secured. This is why people may end their lives even if they have so much wealth, even if they have beautiful careers. This is because their very persons have become devoid of that divine substance imprinted by God in us.
HENCE, the Holy Trinity is not just a dogmatic matter–it is the LIFE that characterizes GOD. It is also the LIFE (in being persons, in relationships, and in substance) that makes us fulfilled and happy.
I remember these simple but striking words of Pres. Corazon Aquino: “I would rather die a meaningful death, than live a meaningless life.”
DALLAS MAVERICK’s clinching of the NBA Championship trophy is an attestation of the importance of teamwork over individual star power, business of play over klieg lights and cameras, and above all perseverance over instant returns. Dirk Nowitzki has been despised for years with his failure to give Dallas a trophy. However, he does not go to talk show hosts like David Letterman and Larry King or to broadcast networks like ESPN to defend his side ; instead, he goes to his team and escalates his dedication in the context of collective undertaking. He is undoubtedly Maverick’s most deserving man to receive the accolades upon winning Game 6 over the Miami Heat; but he went to the locker room, and digested the impact of the victory and then celebrate it with the whole team. They may not repeat this glory again, but they demonstrated how a team sport like basketball should be played…not with a celebrity fuss, but with a unified vision and heart.
This is a video essay of an artist giving flesh and life to the images produced by his brushes and paints–and then he elevates his aesthetic work into a canvas of social realities.
This video depicts two of the most harrowing conditions of kids and young people today: being left alone and being fastened or chained. Hence, inside them is either a roar or a whimper of beating loneliness and pressure.
This video was created by Fr. Victor Hoagland, CP.
[First published in The Philippine Star on 07 April 2002]
Only a few of us may think like Plato or Confucius; but certainly all of us possess inherent wisdom. Merely a handful among us may have grand theories like those of Copernicus and Einstein; but each of us shares access to certain truths. Not many of us may die being revered like Gautama Buddha or any Christian saint; but every human being who passes this earth bears an imprint of the divine.
I am a “religious.” And very few would get what I exactly mean by that word. Only a priest, a monk, or a theologian could easily associate that with one who vowed a consecrated life – in obedience, chastity and poverty. A fish vendor who likewise lives religiously is merely an “ordinary faithful.” Why the distinction? I do not have a ready answer. For the meantime, charge it to the Dark Ages, to the fuga mundi mentality of the monastics, and to the blind Jorge of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
As a religious, who allowed a convent to cloister my youth and to shape my entire future, the phrase “murder in the monastery” naturally intrigues me. This very phrase came to me four years ago highlighted at the flipside of a paperback copy of Eco’s masterpiece. I picked up the book and made an initial effort to connect the phrase to the question: What is the name of the rose?” The difficulty I bore in that effort, however, is scratch compared to the task demanded by the book for me to enter into it. The first 15 pages triggered me to almost throw the book for I could not ride with Eco’s word game, until I remembered that he is a semiologist, someone obsessed with the marriage of sign and logic. But I should make it, I told myself. I needed to know the name of the rose.
The Name of the Rose is narrated from the memories of Adso, an aged monk. It was the height of the Dark Ages, the 15th century, when the Church had two Popes. More remembered of the two was John XXII, who acted more of an antipope by rounding off heretics. He represented well the medieval Church’s blindness and exclusivism.
Adso went back to his mid-teenage years, when he deferred his entrance to a monastery for the special chance of being with the renowned William of Baskerville, a Franciscan Church investigator. Their mission: to solve the mysterious murder of a young monk within the famed and wealthiest abbey of the world.
I went with Adso’s fears, worries, excitements and foresights as he traveled with the great inquisitor towards the far-off abbey. With him, I got short of words to affirm the genius of his master. Like Adso, I felt being with a philosopher and a Church doctor combined. A mystical journey, that was.
The mystical journey reached its summit when the abbey was at sight. It was heaven-on-earth far glorious than the words “famed” and “wealthiest.” It was a perfect alternative to the City of Man outside, which the monks call hell. Entering the abbey, Adso lost his fears and worries; even his excitements and foresights could not ask for more. Mine too.
But all these were outraced by the events that came fast during their stay. Three more monks were murdered. All had something in common – they were poisoned. Together with William and Adso, I was thrown into a confusing den of suspects – the herbalist, the glassmaker, the cellarer and the librarian.
It was not only the series of murders that changed Adso’s and my own regard of the abbey. There was sodomy, dirty politics – and gruesome self-conceit. The center of this self-conceit is Jorge of Burgos, whose age and blindness failed to destroy his brilliance. There is one thesis he would defend up to his deathbed –”God never ever laughed.” For him, laughter is a devil’s craft. A man of God does not laugh as he prays; only the men of the world do so as they are caged by folly, falsehood and evil. This he fought with all his nerves during a debate with William.
Little did Adso and I know that that laughter thing was a link to the murders. The killer was not, directly, human. It was a book, believed to be Aristotle’s lost piece, entitled Finis Africae or The End of Africa. The book acclaimed an African legend, which explains the world as created out of laughter. For Jorge, Africans are evil, like the black witches around the abbey. Finis Africae is the Bible of evil, an anti-truth; thus, it had to be kept in the dark. Only one truth should shine, the truth held by him owing to the conceit of the Church. Jorge filled the book’s core pages with poison so that all who would dare touch and read them would die like the murdered monks.
It took the sharpest mental power of William to locate the book in a shelf intricately hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library. However, it was in the arms of Jorge, who still had the strength to wrestle with Willliam and Adso. The lamp of the inquisitor fell and the whole library including Jorge and Finis Africae, and eventually the whole abbey, was burned.
William and Adso managed to escape. And I was left wondering where the name of the rose is.
I had read the book four times but still could not find the title being justified. But every hour since my first reading I am pushed to see a rose in the wisdom of scavengers in the streets, in the truth formulated by the farmers in my province, and in the divine presence among death convicts. Naming the rose is like explaining reality. It is not reserved to the philosophers, the scientists, and the priests – it is for all to marvel at.
The ghost of the Dark Ages and Jorge’s character swing today in the prevailing hierarchic orders: the spiritual over the material, the white over the black, male over female, the experts over the layman, the “religious” over the “ordinary faithful.” In the resolve to uphold a self-held truth, we resemble Jorge who was afraid to see the other side of the rose – of wisdom, truth and the divine; we even destroy those who are not on our side.
Umberto Eco’s novel is much bigger than what I have accounted so that I have to read it the fifth time, and for sure, the sixth time and more. No book has ever dared to command me that way. And I love it.
In times of severe stress we cannot think very well; it is hard to focus and we are easily distracted. A study from Radboud University Nijmegen has shown that the stress hormone cortisol does not contribute to this effect, as was previously assumed; it actually counteracts it. 
http://www.radboudnet.nl/english/radboud_university/news_agenda/news/@804162/stress-hormone/
