Graduation 2020

#RESIST AND PROPHESY

By Daniel Franklin E. Pilario, CM

#RESIST AND PROPHESY

Congratulations, my dear graduates.

As we put this school year to a close, we look forward to the new one. But it is not easy to go on. We are in difficult times, indeed, very difficult times. The future is bleak for us.

People are not only dying. Our government are instituting laws and procedures that further push them to death. Ours is a leadership that does not offer us hope out of this doomed situation.

We are in our fourth month into the lockdown. People are sick. People are lonely, tired and hungry. Drive around Manila, and you can see jeepney drivers begging, grandmothers telling you they only want to eat. They are not the usual beggars. They are decently dressed but they are begging now. People are losing their minds and are just walking aimlessly in our streets. People are losing their jobs; and their children could no longer go to school. And the government help is slow in coming. Either the distribution system is disorganized or there is nothing to distribute at all. They do not say what they are planning to do to viably alleviate this suffering.

Our hospitals are full. Some are closing their emergency rooms, no longer accepting patients. Our medical frontliners are getting sick and tired. Some have died, others are dying. And this government do not even know how to count well the number of those infected, much less, those treated. All we know is that the numbers are rising. And there is no viable roadmap to recovery. Their only solution is total “lockdown” with checkpoints, machine guns and arrests. Instilling fear: this is all that this military government knows.

The times are becoming more repressive; the margins of dissent more narrow; and military power more harsh and brutal. They silence their critics. They curtail press freedom. They are weaponizing the law against the poor and those they do not like. They are arbitrarily chasing "terrorists" who can practically be anyone of us, all of us. After the extrajudicial killings and the Anti-Terror Law, now they want death penalty. Not contented with death by sickness, they continue with death by the bullet. They are so blood thirsty, they want death by lethal injection. And many still continue to applaud. That is the tragedy of it all.

Known to a few of us, St. Vincent School of Theology was born in a time like ours 35 years ago – in the school year 1985-1986. Then as now, people were killed left and right. Activists were tortured and disappeared. Media outfits were closed – from TV, newspapers, radios. Church people were red tagged; evidences were planted; and priests, sisters, lay leaders were killed, missing or incarcerated.

Yet we stood up to tanks, negotiated with military men, distributed flowers and food, went out to the streets regardless of the risks it entailed to our young lives – students and professors, men and women, young and elderly, priests and religious but also millions of lay people. We were all in EDSA. And SVST was there, too. We resisted Marcos and his tyranny.

Today we ask: "what is our way out?" It is this one word – RESIST. After this celebration, write in your FB status #resist!

First, resist unjust and brutal power. Speak out when they prevent us from talking. Resist when our human dignity is trampled underfoot. Resist when they kill the poor. Resist when they harass you or anyone beside you. Resist death. Fight for life. Shout it in the streets. Shout it in the pulpit. Shout it out online. We need you to be prophets today.

Second, do not just resist against external power. Resist also the apathy inside of us. Do not succumb to fear which they have always wanted to instill in us. Fight the complaceny, callousness and numbness that tempts us all to inaction. Silence and neutrality is no longer an option.

Third, resist not only with words. Resist with compassionate action. While we are told to do “social distancing”, let us be in solidarity with those who suffer. Do not just be contented with the devotional and the liturgical. Go to the margins and have the odor of the sheep. And this time, the sheep are sick, dying and hungry. Be with them, and make them feel that the church is not just about online Masses.

In the new normal, the virtual seemingly becomes the answer to all our ills and problems. Resist this, too. Go beyond the virtual and touch the real. Touch the bodily, the concrete, the physical. Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty. Welcome those hounded by the powerful. Counsel the lonely, and there are many today. Open your homes to victims of injustice. Bury the dead. If we go back to our traditional theology, this is called the “corporal works of mercy”. Revisit it today in order to resist the dying around us.

This is the way God has travelled. This is the way God revealed Godself. The divine became incarnate. The Spirit became a human body, a poor man in Nazareth, and he "pitch his tent" among us.

This is what we have learned from SVST – to do theology from the margins! For the last two or four years, we learned it from the classrooms. It is about time to do it in the field during these difficult times.

One young SVST student from Myanmar said several years ago, this is what she learned from SVST: “In front of someone in need, do something. In front of someone who suffers, do something. Whatever it is. Do something.”

Resist. Prophecy. Show compassion. Congratulations, graduates. Be our prophets in the world today. And we all wish you well.

Daniel Franklin E. Pilario, C.M.
St. Vincent School of Theology
Adamson University
danielfranklinpilario@yahoo.com
07.31.2020