LET’S never forget this fact of life. For as long as we livein this world, and if we want to be consistent to our dignity as children of God, waging a kind of war of peace and love is a necessity. We cannot help it. We have enemies who mainly are our ownselves. We have enemies because they choose to be enemies of God, and therefore also of our own selves. Yes, we can be our own enemies.
Christ, who is supposed to be the Prince of Peace, warned us about this. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth,” he said. “I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” (Mt 10,34) But we have to understand these words well.
He is actually telling us to wage precisely a war to bring about the real peace meant for us, a kind of war that is inspired by true love that comes from God himself. We cannot deny that with all the goodness God has done for his creatures, practically all of the latter have chosen to go against God. And among the enemies, we can be counted, together with the devil, as the primary ones.
But the war we will be waging here on earth will be a constructive war, not destructive. It is a war to win our way toward heaven. It is a war to make ourselves “another Christ,” a new man, stepping out of the old man that we all are due to sin. Any obstacle along the way, including those who are very close to us but who compete with God for our love, should be fought and rejected.
We have to remember that we always have to contend with powerful enemies in our spiritual life. The first one would be our ownselves, our own flesh that has been weakened by sin. There is such a thing as concupiscence, a certain attraction to evil that leads us to have a lust of the eye, lust of the flesh and the pride of life.
Its urges can be strong and can make us feel that they are irresistible. We should not worry too much about them. As long as we beg always for God’s grace and we do our part of prayer, self-denial, recourse to the sacraments, and spiritual struggle, we can manage to take the wind out of these urges’ sails.
Then we have the world with many of its sinful, or at least, potentially dangerous allurements. There already are powerful structures of sin in the world, like pornography, religious indifference, secularism or a new paganism, and quite developed ideologies that are openly against God.
We need to know how to be discerning of the things of this world. More than that, we have to learn how to relate the things of this world to God, because unless we do that, there’s no other way but for us to be swallowed up by their ungodly dynamic.
Then there’s the devil, a very powerful spiritual enemy that can easily insinuate himself in our thoughts and desires. He is indeed very clever. He does his wiles often without us realizing it. But with God we can actually outsmart him. Let’s remember that while Christ told us to be innocent as doves, we should also be clever like serpents. We should be quick to reject those insinuations of the devil in our thoughts and intentions.

Nothing else in the world…
Not all the armies…is as powerful
As an idea whose time has come.”–Victor Hugo

With the first sign of the dawning of a new election season, we at the sidelines are seeing how fervent and how vigorous the positioning of our politicians. The tenacity of the said positioning of our traditional politicians are enviable, if only these per positioned alliance can be similar or half the tenacity that our leaders does in times of calamities?
The Philippine presidential and vice presidential elections of 2022 are scheduled to be held on Monday, May 9, 2022, as part of that year’s general election. This will be the 17th direct presidential election in the Philippines since 1935 and the seventh sexennial presidential election since 1986. Incidentally, the year 1986 was the time of the EDSA Revolution and 1987 was the ratification of the Constitution.
We cannot miss the jockeying-up of positions for the bounty of becoming the next overseers or administration from 2022 to 2028. Being the main Administration means that they control the infrastructure projects and approves rather clandestinely the positions of influence and power in the government. This is a euphoric and real high for the people plucked from obscurity transformed into gods, demigods and patron saint of enriching kickbacks. Thus, after all these years, this is the very core of the problems of this country. The election based on money endearingly called BADIL, HUKIP, HATAG, comes as the Carcinogen that creates the ongoing social cancer that creates the low ranking educational standing, pawned sovereignty, selective justice, extra judicial killings and patronage and ultimately the dismay of the international community and the exodus of talented Filipinos to destinations abroad. During the heated Syrian Civil War many Filipinos opted to stay in that ravaged and war torn country than go back to our nation, the reason is clear.
With the upcoming elections a good 10 month ahead, we can sense the simmering and rising temperature of the tag-siring, because pure and simple it is where the money is. A running joke says that in this country to get rich you have to organize a sect or religion marry a rich foreigner or Afam and win an elective post.
Seemingly absent from the mindset of the candidates is the recent parameter for the selection of our new leaders, the PANDEMIC RESPONSE / READINESS SKILLS of the incumbent or the challenger.
The need for leaders to be adept with how to safeguard its people, lay good and workable plans for the on-going and may I say uncertain times. The media outlets are bringing up the good old days or press releases, but conspicuous absence of the parameter of the response, care and resilience towards the pandemic is being relegated to the back stage. We see headlines of squabbles or even war within parties, we see anointment and show of support but the pandemic was never a factor within the dynamics and orbit of things political.
Thus , let me remind everyone that quote of Victor Hugo the famous French Author and Social Activist “Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. “To paraphrase the passage, nothing else in this world not even the biggest political party with the deepest of financial arsenal can deny that our biggest problem is not your chances of winning but the chances of people surviving in these times. It must be the next gold standards for leaders, the planned and track record for pandemic response.
After all, it’s about our chance of surviving in this infected world.