Routes
An invitation
"All are invited to a forum on the prevailing national situation on Wednesday, September 27, 2006, 9 AM, St.Vincent Ferrer Seminary Auditorium, Seminario Road, Jaro, Iloilo City. The speaker is University of the Philippines professor and Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Randy David."
After receiving the SMS, the Randy David, the talk show host, the visits to the Seminario, democracy, translating speeches for GMA, poverty, and my prayer meetings came to mind.
Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Amartya Sen in his book "Development as Freedom" says:
"THE PRACTICE OF DEMOCRACY AND THE ROLE OF OPPOSITION
The achievements of democracy depend not only on the rules and procedures that are adopted and safeguarded, but only on the way opportunities are used by the citizens. Fidel Valdez Ramos, the former president of the Philippines, put the point with great clarity in a November 1998 speech at the Australian National University:
Under dictatorial rule, people need to think -- need not choose -- need not make up their minds or give their consent. Al they need to do is to follow. This has been a bitter lesson learned from Philippine political experience of not so long ago. By contrast, a democracy cannot survive without civic virtue... The political challenge for people around the world today is not just to replace authoritarian regimes by democratic ones. Beyond this, it is to make democracy work for ordinary people."
Sen continues:
"Democracy does not create this opportunity, which relates both to its "instrumental importance" and to its "constructive role." But with what strength such opportunities are seized depends on a variety of factors, including the vigor of multiparty politics as well as the dynamism of moral arguments and of value formation..."
Sen, considered the most pragmatic of contemporary economists, is putting across the philosophy that democracy works with opposition, while Ramos, considered the most tactical of Philippine presidents is putting across the philosophy that virtuous participation of ordinary people sustains democracy.
In moral politics, church ecumenism succeeded where state agency did not. Decisive popular action to end immoral national politics were ostensibly church-led: EDSA 1 and EDSA 2.I am not constructing a sequence here. I have translated speeches for GMA.
I have discussed with my Franciscan missionary guide and visual arts tutor Vic Fario the church as a ministry to advance positive political values. I have stressed that Biblical liberalism contrary to Biblical fundamentalism gives material and spiritual rewards exclusive of the cost of faith. I have long wanted to substantiate this concept in our prayer meeting with mostly informal settlers on a foreshore area in Iloilo City.
God would not want his flock deaf and mute because of state-induced ignorance.
Sharing is paramount in small ministry work. and the locus of the sharing is how the prayer meetings made God help people in one inexplicable instance or the other find the money to pay for debts used to buy medicines and pay tuition fees, Here, the spiritual engenders the material. Our brothers and sisters say how the prayer meetings eased the burden of getting the promise of a more stable though not necessarily Christianly compensating jobs because of the lack of choice.
The situation is pathetic. I should know. I am one of them.