Speech delivered on September 7, 2023 during The Good Lawyer Project online event.
Magandang gabi sa inyo mga kaibigan at kapatid.
This is my second occasion to speak to lawyers and law students. The first one was 10 years ago as a Commencement Speaker to San Beda Law graduates.
The legal profession is my field of incompetence, so I will talk mostly from the perspective of divine and social justice, in my calling for Kingdom-building through Couples for Christ and Nation-building through Gawad Kalinga.
My particular interest is simply how to work within the law to address issues of social unfairness and injustice in a poor predominantly Catholic country I love, honor and care for, which has no excuse to be poor or remain poor.
In the early years of my life, I was a prisoner of poverty like most Filipinos. Education was my key to freedom from my feeling of life’s unfairness by my lack of wealth and pedigree at birth.
I grew up in Negros Occidental with sacadas on weekends and istambays in Alunan Baybay during weekdays, oblivious to the social disparity in our province where there was brewing insurgency in the countryside. The hacenderos had their Kahirup Ball at Manila Hotel and their debutante daughters drank champagne at the Marapara Golf & Country Club, to which, naturally, I was not invited.
Many landowners were kind to their workers who were in turn loyal to them from a long generational culture of servitude. What many among the privileged and entitled did not understand was the inhumanity of unfairness and the immorality of injustice – when we do not do anything to change it, starting with changing ourselves.
What is clear to me now is that in God’s time, divine justice would eventually prevail to those who do not surrender hope. The pyramid will be flipped – the last shall be first, the lost shall be found, the bottom will rise to the top.
Roots of Injustice
In my faith journey, I have to unravel the fine prints on three particular roots of injustice embedded in our cultural poverty:
1. Need and greed.
A few have too much, and many have too little.
2. Legal and moral.
Our huge human capital and vast natural resources essential to prosper our nation were wasted and ravaged through unmitigated greed and corruption.
The lack of fairness and opportunities in the Philippines sent our talents to foreign lands to make rich countries richer.
Thousands of forest and pasture lands were grabbed by the powerful with the means to legitimize their ownership, depriving our descendants the needed forest covers to mitigate our climate change vulnerabilities. Indigenous Filipinos lost their home, food and sacred burial ground to fund the luxury and vanity of those who couldn’t care less.
Sadly, the law provided loopholes to make what is immoral, legal.
Greed and vanity desensitize our humanity and trivialize our Christianity.
In the land of the homeless and hungry, flaunting Hermes and Aventador is immoral to many who are stuck in helplessness and hopelessness.
3. Spiritual and social.
Ironically, we are the biggest predominantly Christian country in Asia, baptized to follow Jesus – to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, give sight to the blind and set free those in captivity.
Apparently, the words of Isaiah were lost to us who preached religion that did not lead to faith in action.
It was when I finally embraced Christ that the social dimension of the Gospel became clearer. It would take divine intervention to transform hearts and build our nation.
Anger for me was not the fuel to achieve social change. I resisted the invitations of patriotic friends to join them in the hills.
Conflict is pyrrhic and not the road to lasting peace. I had to discover a new pathway to change without self-righteous anger and self serving conceit.
The Goodness of God in Us
I was a nominal Catholic until my wife Lyn brought me to Ligaya ng Panginoon right after we got married 44 years ago. God’s plan slowly unfolded before my eyes in simple words and acts of kindness every week in a community of believers who nurtured my foundling faith. Their kindness had a quality of constancy and serenity in prayer and presence that patiently polished the rough edges of my behaviour and banished my disbelief.
I finally found God in the community that helped me seek the good in myself. The hunger for prayer and Scripture fed my soul and taught my unsettled heart to be still, forgiving and caring.
Ligaya brought the Good News to my life. That was the beginning of my passion for mission.
The Goodness of God in Others
Couples for Christ propelled my grateful heart to share the Good News to many others through massive, rapid, global evangelization, starting with my own family and friends. We have to unleash the goodness of God in others.
Our five children were raised in our church of the home when God used me to father the CFC Family Ministries in 1993. They grew up with thousands of brothers and sisters throughout the Philippines and over a hundred countries abroad where CFC grew roots. My four married children are exemplary parents today to my twelve grandchildren. They were nurtured growing up by the goodness of our global spiritual family.
The Power of Kindness
Kindness became the law of God that brought harmony to our family.
Kindness, not protest, was our path to justice and peace within troubled communities.
Kindness was the big Social Equalizer that broke long-standing barriers in our society.
When I brought Couples for Christ to Negros Occidental in 1987, it triggered a massive social transition of divine proportion. Rich hacenderos in my home province started to care more for the poor sacadas as family and community, conducting Christian Life Programs in their sugarcane plantations. They sang the same worship songs and shared the same simple meals weekly in household gatherings as brothers and sisters, no longer as masters and workers.
Jesus became truly alive in a feast of kindness.
With the start of Gawad Kalinga in Magsungay Bacolod City in 2000, the Word of God was not just preached in the pulpit but it was now reality on the ground with land for the landless, home for the homeless and food for the hungry.
The truly Christian culture of caring and sharing transformed many hearts from greed to need.
“Less for self, more for others, enough for all” became our mantra for nation-building following the model of the early Christian communities.
One in Christ
To highlight the dramatic social transformation of a once Aristocratic province, Gawad Kalinga held a Kahirup Ball in Bacolod City to
celebrate true Christian solidarity among landowners and farm workers who waltzed and tangoed all night in their resplendent gowns and barongs on the same dance floor.
I’m now in my sunset years in Paraiso Farm in Batangas. But my days are sunnier than ever. I pray, play and party with Senior Citizens weekly. I’m happy that my little acts of kindness make many lonely elderly happy.
My dream is simple: to make Paraiso the sixth Blue Zone in the world, where the happy elderly can aspire to live longer with healthy food and a less stressful life.
When visitors ask: Is this heaven?
We can simply say: This is Paraiso.