Many years ago, being one of the newly-designated
leaders in our Couples for Christ (CFC) community, I led a team that held a
Christian Life Program (CLP) in our barangay. Intended to lead married couples
into a renewed Christian understanding of God’s call, the program laid down the
following major tasks: select and arrange a venue complete with a sound system
and whiteboard, prepare snacks, invite couples, and arrange for a guest
speaker. Being a civil engineer in the corporate world at that time, my
specialty was project management whose basic functions I drew on earnestly in
my groundwork: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling.
Much the same as managing any project intently,
everything went well -- until the moment of truth came. On the day of the scheduled
event, sad to say, only a handful of couples turned up out of more than two dozen
we had invited and expected to attend. To fully make use of what we had diligently
prepared -- especially the high-end restaurant venue topped off with a man-made
waterfall -- we decided, right then and there, in inviting couples living near our
venue: owners and workers of a welding shop, junkyard, auto repair shop,
vulcanizing shop, and the like.
What happened then was like the wedding feast of a
king’s son in the Bible:
“This story throws light on the kingdom of Heaven. A
king celebrated the wedding of his son. He sent his servants to call the invited
guests to the wedding feast, but the guests refused to come… Then he said to
his servants: ‘The wedding banquet is prepared but the invited guests were not
worthy. Go, then, to the exits of the ways and invite everyone you find to the
wedding feast.’ The servants went out at once into the streets and gathered
everyone they found, good and bad alike so that the hall was filled with guests.”
(Mt 22:2-10)
Three lessons my team learned from such experience:
1. We were renewing lives. The power of the mind was
not enough. We realized we needed the love of the heart.
“It is only in the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye.” (The Little Prince)
2. We were building a community: is and must be
inclusive.
“The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups
that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or
of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques –
actually defensive bastions against the community.” (M. Scott Peck, M.D., “The Different
Drum: Community Making and Peace”
3. We were uplifting the plight of the poor. In our
CLP program, we invited mostly our friends and colleagues in the corporate
world. God loves the poor and would always call our attention not to leave them
behind.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” (Lk 4:18)
As we matured in our renewed life in our community, subsequently,
our service also came of age through our works in Gawad Kalinga, our CFC’s army
on its work with the poor: building houses. Without expecting anything in
return, we shared our time, talents, money, and other resources in building
houses for the poor. At times, I put on the line my family’s lives by going to far-flung
high-risk depressed areas in the province. It was during those provincial trips
that I met and worked with a publicly dreaded character who I learned later to
be Aldong Parojinog.
Far too often, my wife carried our small baby during
our provincial trips. We usually made our way back home at night riding in an
overcrowded bus. During the night trip, imagine a scene where a crowd of male
passengers staring at my wife with our small baby on her lap. Strange to say, not
a bit of fear did I feel at any moment during those periods of our building houses
for the poor. Those daring experiences reminded me of this passage about God’s
love for the poor -- that was instilled within us then.
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out
fear…” (1 John 4:18)
Loving the poor without fear – could be the spirit of
my experience in working with the poor. This could be the same spirit of the “bayanihan”
that has inspired VP Leni’s Kakampinks
movement. Former Senator Bam Aquino, the campaign manager of VP Robredo, nailed
this truth on its head by expressing confidence that Leni’s supporters are
ready to fight it out for the May 2022 elections:
“For me, this caravan is a sign of courage. Before,
many are afraid to show support, speak up, and bet. Now, as VP Leni always
says, our strength has awakened.”
It is Advent season in the Catholic Church and the PH
nation is hopeful that the 2022 election will be the “advent” of a whole
culture change.
While Leni’s Kakampinks has the passion of the Spirit,
on the other hand, Bongbong-Sara’s tandem has the power of the Mammon -- driven
the crowd, the surveys, the social media to promote family rebranding and history
revisionism. Brittany Kaiser, a whistleblower of Cambridge Analytica revealed:
“When I joined Cambridge Analytica in 2014 we had
already worked in the Philippines. There was a national campaign where my
former company had gone in and undertaken national research to figure out what
was the type of persona that would resonate best with voters...
“We had a request straight from Bongbong Marcos to do
a family rebranding. This was brought in through internal staff at Cambridge
Analytica and was debated. Some people didn’t want to touch it and there were
others like our CEO Alexander Nix that saw it as a massive financial
opportunity and asked us to write the proposal anyway. So, as you call it:
historical revisionism.”
PH as “Patient Zero” of organized political disinformation
through troll farms elected PRRD in 2016, many experts believed. Meta (formerly
FB) failed to curb such disinformation operations and recently conceded that
political disinformation has continued to be the most prevalent and hardest to
suppress.
Question: Will Leni Kakampinks’ passion of the Spirit overcome Bongbong-Sara tandem’s power of the Mammon?
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