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On All Souls’ Day, we wait eagerly on “nuestros muertitos” (our beloved departed): we prepare some delicacies for them, we sing to them and feast for them because they are our root and the guarantee of our heritage as peoples with a specific history and identity. It can be said that we share our life joyfully with our dead people, or rather, they live in us because they gave their lives for us.
November, which is universally dedicated to the departed in the Christian world, has special importance in the Philippines. It is a time when Filipinos keep vigil at the cemeteries where there exists a spirit of festivity. Although considered a Christian country, Filipino Christians find many roots in the traditional religion or primal religion of the indigenous peoples.
Can we bring a message of peace to situations of conflict which seem to increase daily? Can we offer a message of uprightness in an atmosphere of corruption? Can we hold up a message of hope in situations of despair? Can an assurance about the future be carried to contexts of helplessness? Can a word of faith be brought to a society that is fast losing its religious convictions? These are challenges before us. There is much work that a believer can do every day of his/her life.
Gospel, Spirit and Mission walk together making use of ‘the many languages’ of humanity
right from the beginning. The more we manage to express the Gospel in the many languages, mentalities, and cultures of humanity, the more we are being faithful to the impulses of the Spirit. Even a very quick look at the history of the Church would clearly show that the times of infidelity and of ‘going astray’ are often linked with the ever present temptation to be led by fear and to seek refuge behind the closed doors of one language and one culture.
Reconciliation is needed, otherwise, differences degenerate into aggressivenessand violence. Hence, the boundless and long-awaited need of Christ as the Mediator and Reconciler. Pentecost, the announcement of the harmony between many languages and different peoples, is the manifestation of the victory of the Spirit of the Risen Christ: the successful entrance and penetration in human history of the Trinity, the divine mystery of the perfect symbiosis between diversity (the three Divine Persons) and unity (one God).
When I think of mission, there are faces that come to my mind. Faces of the people with whom I share the river of life that carries me and makes me feel immersed in the inexhaustible and ever-shifting complexities of the human condition. The majority of them are poor, humble people struggling to support themselves and their families, obsessed with putting together something to eat everyday, and being able to pay their rent at the end of the month. They are people who are in many ways in a transition between tradition and modernity, at the mercy of social, economic and cultural forces that are immensely stronger than them. But when you talk to them about God they manifest a genuine faith. I speak of the challenges to my life as a missionary only thinking of the people I have met in recent times, of the questioning eyes that have searched my eyes, and of the questions they have sometimes asked without even opening their mouth.
Journalist and author, Camille Eid is also an observer of Middle East Churches. In an interview, he explains why Christians, once a strong minority in Iran, are now going abroad, at an estimated rate of 10,000 families a year. And why, he makes a somber prediction: “In fact, there is a real risk of disappearance, of an extinction of Christianity.”
In the XI century, the mid-Eastern churches split from the Roman Catholic Church. However, since then, a number of them have recognized the primacy of Rome. And the ecumenical work to promote a larger and deeper communion is still under way.
The Middle East is one of the worst hot spots in the world, not only at a geopolitical level, as a fertile ground for every sort of violence
and conflicts, but also at a religious one, due to the rising of a militant and political Islam. All over the area, the minorities suffer all kinds
of discriminations and persecutions, like the Christians, who are leaving the region at a growing speed. That’s why the Pope convoked a Synod of the Catholic Church for the Middle East, which will be held next month in the Vatican. At play is not only the future of communities that lived for centuries in the land of their ancestors but also the diverse and unique spiritual heritages.
Sr. Mary John Mananzan is the prioress of the Missionary of Benedictine Sisters in the Philippines and the co-chair of the Association of Major Religious Superiors (AMRSP). She has been very vocal and active against corruption, one of the country’s social evils. Some critics accuse her of destabilizing the nation, but she sustains that the struggle for truth and justice is part of their prophetic vocation as religious.
