Our dear graduates, dear colleagues in the faculty and dear fathers of the Society of Jesus, my sisters and my brothers, friends – good afternoon. Being one of the older members of the faculty of the Loyola School of Theology, it is with pleasure that I share with you today this commencement address. I have been here for more than forty years already, and at times people have asked me: “Is it until death do you part? Why did you not just enter the Society?” My simple answer has been from the beginning, “The Lord did not include becoming a Jesuit part of my priestly vocation.” Although sometimes mistaken variously here and abroad for a Franciscan or a Dominican or also a Jesuit, I would not elevate myself to the rank of a “secret Jesuit”, – well perhaps at most, by osmosis or something, a “half-Jesuit”! Is that bad?
But more importantly, the Jesuits in my 11 years of formation and studies under them in preparation for the priesthood and working with them in the ministry of teaching for the past 43 years have always been to me what we say in Tagalog “mapagbigay-loob” – meaning benign and heart-supporting, not suppressive or chocking, giving you a lot of breathing space, thus facilitating going-on in life. Actually that is what I want to talk to you about: the importance of theology to the pastoral ministry, and therefore to God’s children, particularly in our contemporary context of physical, social and psychological difficulties in “breathing”, explicitly in avoidance of chocking to death in all its forms.
Hardly two weeks ago, the USA started to be rocked by peaceful protests in some 140 cities across the country in reaction to the murder in Minneapolis of a black American, George Floyd, in the hands of a white policeman who pinned down the victim to the ground beside a police car with his left knee on the neck of the man and his right knee onthe back for more than eight minutes. The man was videoed repeatedly crying “I cannot breathe!”, while two other policemen assisted in holding him down, and a third one stood at the back of the police car looking on and away. George Floyd’s futile struggle to breathe in some air ended as he went totally limp, dead. It was a public execution watched on TV by horrified millions. His desperate words became the battle-cry for the enraged public: “I cannot breathe!” “I cannot breathe!” in a society where racist discrimination against the black has been systemic and for generations. “I cannot breathe!” where police brutality against a minority is a constant recurrence and where justice and equality seem so elusive to millions. “I cannot breathe!” when one must ask the question: Will I be the next? “I cannot breathe!” where rioting is the only language of the unheard, as Martin Luther King had earlier said.
And the anguished cry “I cannot breathe!” still reverberating across the USA today has found echoes abroad. Sympathetic demonstrations have sprung up in London, Berlin, Rome and other European cities, where obviously peoples also find it hard to breathe in the heavy, polluted atmosphere of discrimination, injustice, violence and lack of accountability.
The outrage and frustration of the multi-colored protests going on in the USA today, at times accompanied by violence and looting and clashes with the police and in many arrests, is like a wildfire ignited especially by the pains and anguish that the Covid-19 pandemic has been inflicting, not only on the USA as the most infected country, but on the whole world this entire half of the year. The almost 7 million people worldwide infected so far by the coronavirus of the 2019 strain that was first identified in Wuhan, China, have all experienced what it is to be attacked by an invisible enemy, a virus – a Latin word meaning “poison”, medically a pathogen (producer of disease), that particularly devastates the respiratory organs of a human or an animal. Literally and tautologically, Covid-19 is a virulent virus leading to fatal shortness of breath and hypoxia. It is the sad narrative of our time that millions within few months have already tragically gasped out “I cannot breathe!”
The result is not only a health catastrophe of a magnitude and amplitude unprecedented. The economic fallout has been devastating. As millions are infected and incapacitated, peoples in their communities must be quarantined in the desperate effort to contain the spread of the virulent virus. In the ensuing lockdowns and social distancing, business and work must cease. And the economics of “No work, no pay” quickly translated itself into the rule of the day “No money, no food”. In the biggest economy of the world, the USA, 42 million individuals have already registered for unemployment benefits; in our developing economy in the Philippines, 9 million households are identified as target hopefully for SAF, the social amelioration fund. In the current easing of the restrictions of the last three months, in the move to go back to some normalcy ASAP and get the economy going again, we witness daily the herculean efforts of so many of our people to go and do some work and earn some money so that they can feed their families. In the present social and economic suffocation of our people, the cry “I cannot breathe!” has turned visible and iconic.
Where is our pastoral ministry in all of this? What can our theology do? How do we find God in all these suffocating situations? How do we turn it into a locus theologicus?
In the story of the suffering and death of so many because of the coronavirus infection, we find intertwined the inspiring narratives of heroic front-liners and first responders who risked and are risking their lives to assist those infected. Yes, there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another. But it is in our own house of theology that we need to do some examination of conscience. Our systematized reflections on our Christian faith based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ and nourished by the tradition and teaching of the Church is our special area of responsibility, and should be our contribution anytime and anywhere in the history of our nation. Our theology is the soul of our ministry in the service of God’s people. Our theology proclaims our faith and evokes faith, gives birth to hope, and inspires us to charity. But where is that theology even as we hear our local version of the people’s cry “I cannot breathe!”? In the stifling conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, aggravating even more our endemic poverty, the refreshing wind of the good news of divine mercy seem to have blown rather sparsely. The Lenten season came and went, and the quarantined people did not have the uplifting experience of pastorally creative penitential services online for every community complete with general absolutions. The month of May came and went, and the pueblo amante de Maria missed the evangelization opportunity of daily liturgies of the Word in a Flores de Mayo online available to every Filipino home. Remarkable is how we have instead automatically concentrated on livestreaming the Eucharist online because of the lockdown, and so become readily deviated from the primary imperative of evangelization in this rare opportunity just before our celebration of the 500th anniversary of Christianity in our country. But it is not yet too late to make full use of this chance to proclaim, spread, and deepen our faith. Nobody among us should be crying “I cannot breathe!” because of deprivation of the Word of God, because of our dead faith.
A lady texted me in the midst of the pandemic: “Msgr., it is very clear that the Mass is not obligatory, as of now. Why do these ‘strict’ rules even have to be disseminated to the public? It just adds to the confusion and is discouraging to the common tao. Sabi nga, God closed the churches and opened up many homes to take the place of churches (for worship). It has, in fact, become more meaningful!” She was reacting to the discussion on the social media that went on for a while last month involving some priests and religious in the Metro concerning among others the distinction between participating in a livestreamed Mass and watching later a replay of the same, that there is blessing in the former but not in the latter, and that the sacrifice of Christ is in the live celebration and not in a video recording. In the field hospital (to borrow Pope Francis’ metaphor for the Church) as the dogs of war wreak havoc, the medics are debating about the size of the medicine bottle!
Interestingly, my friend’s text that renders her own version of our hashtag “I cannot breathe!” touches on some of the major challenges to our sacramental theology in the post-modern world. Allow me to mention just a couple of points that should clear up the air and facilitate breathing for our stressed communities of faith. First of all, our understanding of the sacraments including the Eucharist needs to be rebooted, reclaimed from the metrics of scholastic causality and human instrumentality and repositioned as God’s blessings and absolute acts of love and mercy. A sacramental event is primarily a self-disclosure of the Triune God and secondarily a human response. The Father alone is the source and goal of all liturgy, of all sacramental actions. In a sacramental event we primarily celebrate God’s action, that is, the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. In a sacramental event the Holy Spirit acts, makes present, and gives life. And God in the Church through the sacraments is disclosing Himself to us unique human beings, subjective human individuals, within the coordinates of our given time-space continuum and therefore limitedness and imperfections. In our theological centering, from propositional to personalist revelation, God in the humanness of Jesus is who is primordial and unsurpassable; also, God alone in the Church is foundationally unsurpassable. Similarly, God is thus not confined to the limitedness, the historicity, the singularity of the Church’s sacramental events. God’s blessing is especially available and beautifully given at the live celebration of the Eucharist, but not exclusively. By the way, do you know who I found out has been expounding this kind of good theology to the members of his Magis Deo community? Our own brand-new Doctor of Ministry, Fr. James Gascon, SJ!
Another point that cries for deepening in our theologizing so that our pastoral ministry can be as it should be pertains to the fuller meaning of the divine presence through Christ in the Church’s sacraments. God in his compassion sent his Son for our salvation; God entered directly into our human history and made history in its definitive culmination in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God is present at all times in our history with the offer of salvation, and the Church in her liturgy cultically celebrates this salvific presence and availability of God. Liturgy does not only preserve an external memory of the crucified and risen Lord, but leads the participants to enter into salvation history and become “contemporaries of God”. To belong to the believing community is to have the hope in a future with God, in a cosmic embeddedness where the present, the past-made-present, and the hoped-for future are inseparably continuous and interrelated. There is no pre- or post-Eucharist which would mean in fact God’s absence. There is only the sacramental making present, (actualization, beautifully in Tagalog: pag-sasangayon, in German: Vergegenwaertigung), opening oneself up to, connecting and linking up with God in a personal encounter, with God who is always present for us, in all the varying situations and circumstances of our existence, pandemic or no pandemic. God cannot be excluded and made non-available to anyone by any of our own human or ecclesiastical definitions.
Our theology, dear graduates, must energize our pastoral ministry. It is a journeying with and for our people of the contemporary times, homeward to the God who reaches out to us and who reveals Himself to us as the “God of breath”, the God who does not want His children to be crying “I cannot breathe!” – the Creator who “blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Gen 2:7), the Father who “gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16), the Redeemer who breathed on the disciples and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:21). Go, dear graduates, and in the Holy Spirit animate the faith of God’s people with the theology you learned here at Loyola. Congratulations! May God bless us all! Everybody stay safe. Thank you.
