Passion Death and Resurrection
I spent Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday in Naujan, to be with Inay. The hours I spent by her bedside, watching her sleep, gave me quiet time to reflect on a theme that recurs in my life – passion death and resurrection.
The theme had a very personal angle during those days, because of the pain my mother felt in her gangrenous foot. As I watched my 88-year old mother sleep fitfully, I couldn’t help but confront the truth of human mortality, and dig deep into my inherited belief and hope in resurrection.
I remember a similar moment during my years in the underground resistance, in a conversation with Nick Ruiz, a guerrilla priest operating in the hills of Bohol. After a rather heated debate with his party political officer about his religious beliefs, he got permission to visit Manila so he could meet his comrades in the Christians for National Liberation. We met one evening in a retreat center. After sharing the story of his own struggles, he posed very intensely the question, “Tell me. Did Christ really rise from the dead?”
He said that the application of Marxism in the methods of analyzing, strategizing, and evaluating his work necessarily affected how he looked at his religious beliefs. He probed into where they came from and what sustain the religious ideas that he still held on to, which he believed were part of what fed his revolutionary commitment.
The unspoken premise, of course, was that as a guerrilla priest in the countryside, he faced the daily possibility of being killed, in an encounter or an ambush. Death was one of the facts all of us had to consider when we joined the underground movement. The movement’s secular ideology emphasized the meaning of the death and the life that precedes it – was it in the service of the people, rather than vested interests. But even without any official space given to it, the existential question posed itself – Do we have existence, life, after we die?
When the question is intensely personal, and faced in the intimate space of friends and comrades searching together, we cannot settle for the easy comfort of lessons from our seminary studies, or books we have read. We can only exchange our understanding of the beliefs that make sense to us and that we hold in the depths of our heart and mind.
Political actions and discourses take a short ritual break during the Holy Week. Still, from time to time, I looked back at politics through the same prism of passion, death, and resurrection.
Rey Ileto’s influential study on the Philippine revolution, Pasyon and Revolution, puts forward the proposition that the militant peasants interpreted their life and struggle not in the secular language of the ilustrados, but in the religious language of the pasyon.
Even without recounting it in detail, his basic argument makes sense. I could detect part of it during recent discussions we’ve had with UNORKA leaders about their struggle in the Yulo estates and elsewhere, when they express their appreciation of the solidarity extended by some church leaders in Laguna and MetroManila. Beyond the political and institutional value of church support, the church symbolizes the link of the peasants’ life experiences to the story of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
Actually, the peasants’ struggle for land has been mainly an experience of passion and death. Resurrection is a far-off hope, although there are “first installments” that give glimpses and keep hope alive. As young Christian activists, we took pleasure in translating resurrection as “rising up” or “uprising.” But that was the bravado and passion of the young.
We made a choice in the mid 80s to interpret our experiences through a “theology of struggle” rather than a theology of liberation. The specific language came from Fr. Louie Hechanova, but it resonated. In addition to the theoretical influence of the protracted people’s war strategy, the realistic calculation was that success in the struggle against the dictatorship (and within that, for justice) was far off into the future. Hence the need to find meaning in the struggle itself, rather than tying it to its outcome.
For many Christian activists who did not see ourselves as holding power after the fall of the dictatorship, the worth of the struggle was not determined by the prospects of victory, even though devoutly wished for. There may have been an element of the “martyr complex” that young newly-radicalized Christians are heir to. In the late 60s, a Protestant theologian from Siliman University essayed that the central religious (and cultural) icon of Filipinos is the “Suffering Messiah,” – the one who set out to save his people but died in the attempt.
When the First Quarter Storm popularized the fighting slogan – “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” – I said that activist Christians tend to have another version – “Dare to struggle, dare to die.”
In fact, there may even be an unexpressed worry that “Dare to win” may result in what Lord Acton was supposed to have asserted: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I haven’t managed to check the original quote, but I am told that the assertion is less than absolute. Rather, power “tends” to corrupt, but not inevitably.
So do we push back all talk of resurrection to the distant future? Is it a more moral stance to delink the worthiness of the struggle from its power and transformation goals? Or is this a cop-out, even if subtly clothed?
It’s too early this Easter Monday morning to pursue this further. Let me just borrow a welcome phrase from a book written by a Canadian social activist – “transforming ourselves as we seek to transform the world.”
It’s a good Easter challenge to those who call for a change in the current leadership of the country. It is only fair to ask that those who would lead us should demonstrate some change in themselves, even as a first installment, to reassure us that more is at stake than being in power or out of power.
