Wake Up, Sleeper

Dorcas Domingo TH141 - K

Wake up, sleeper

We are created thirsty, dry, empty. Everyday, we open our eyes and find a hollow hole inside us, extending towards nowhere like an infinite abyss. We try to shake the thought off, dismayed by the tormenting sensation of unrest. But it lingers. And so we get off our beds and go out to the world, searching for the filler that would fit in that interminable void. We put everything through its paces--looks, grades, career, wealth, power, you name it--by any means, only to find out that nothing measures up enough to the expanse of the hole inside us.

Hence, we continue the search and aim for everything that glitters, no matter how its glare hurts the eyes to the point of blindness, that we then never know what is truly gold. And maybe, this is why we like to be immersed into that slumber, that sleep of inhumanity, as Fr. Jon Sobrino, S.J. calls it: because in that sleep, we can rest in comfort, without the troubles of anxiety, knowing that the void is not filled but at the least not empty, basking in relief that we do not have to admit to the fact that we can no longer see as it seemingly makes no stark difference because we are asleep.

Yet, it makes all the difference. Because in that sleep, we find ourselves in a retreat, in complete isolation that is absolutely devoid of all that the remaining functional senses can make us aware of. No cries of despair that the ears can hear, no odor of a hard day's work that the nose can smell, no scabrous hands that the skin can feel.

For this very reason, we desperately need to be nudged from our sleep, be pushed to fall off our beds even, so that we feel a painful thump. We need to realize that the solace is illusory, for even if we keep on working for things to fill in the void, we are getting nowhere near the brim. We need to be free from the chains of denial of our lost sight and search for the ultimate cure to our blindness, the single filler that would fit perfectly in the void within us. Thus the call of liberation theology: the call to transform us, to renew us, to make us feel the shame of belonging to an inhuman humanity and move us to be agents of change.

Integral evangelization intends to answer this call. And it starts by bringing us back to ourselves, to our hearts that yearns for all that is good, which we can only truly find in God, who is the only One that is big enough to fill that bottomless pit inside us--and still overflow. We return to Him who has the fullness to make us all full, and we return because He is our home, where we come from, where we truly belong. We return to love (noun), because God is. We return to love (verb), because God is. This is why with Him in our lives, we would gain the ability to see Him in everyone and more importantly, to love those who He loves the most: the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized. And we must love just as how He loves: beyond words, beyond mere sentiments. Just as He has sent His only begotten Son who carried His Cross to carry ours, we must learn to help carry the cross that most of our fellow Filipinos have unfortunately carried for years and throughout different generations.

The Salvadoran people have long found themselves in a similar situation, and it took a changed man in the person of Archbishop Óscar Romero to galvanize the revolution against the oppression through integral evangelization and the preferential option for the poor. On the onset of his tenure as archbishop, he was decided to keep the Church as traditional as possible--to serve merely its role as a preacher of the Gospel to the people and the performer of the Sacraments. He opted to remain quiet and apolitical, unwilling to instigate conflict between the Church and the government. But the oppression never waned and Archbishop Romero began to see what the violence and the duplicity of the government's ways did to the very Church and the people of El Salvador. He thus gained the conviction to speak for justice and join the struggle against the corrupt military government. Archbishop Romero, however, did it without total condemnation of anyone--just as Jesus Christ did. He fought with the poor non-violently, pushed for their rights, and criticized the brutality of the government, but at the same time, he reinforced the fact that everyone belongs to one Kingdom that is God's. He never saw the rich as an arch-enemy, but only as group that had strayed from the holy path and needed repentance to be reconciled with God.

Archbishop Romero is perhaps the expression that the Church indeed has an immense responsibility upon its shoulders. Beyond the teaching of dogmatic principles, it must be present in and relevant to the concrete life of people. It must awake from its own slumber. After all, the Church is the community through which man intimately shares his experience of Gemüt (according to Friedrich Schleiermacher), of his natural instinct for a Supreme Being that reigns over all creation, especially in times of great distress.