Loss that is gain

I HAVE written about this topic in one of my previous columns. To lose is to gain. It is the paradox of Christianity. To lose your life for the sake of the community.

Below is an article written by the late Ernesto R. Mondoñedo, a Jesuit and an extension worker of the Institute of Social Order of the Jesuits.

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We speak of a group of animals as a herd, a flock, a litter, etc. Only of a group of people do we predicate the word “community”. This is because people establish a relationship with power to inspire the contribution of their time, talent and material resources to their common effort. It separates their group apart from any other human group and gives it its own identity. That is the vital importance of family spirit, neighborhood spirit, or national spirit. Without it, the group is no better than a herd of cattle or pigs.

People in community do not just band together. Neither do they merely agree to do something together and do not do it. In this case, they do not even communicate. They rather pay lip service to their common agreement. They kill whatever community spirit they have built.

People, in the community, come across with their promised time, talent and other resources. They empower their relationship into becoming a spirit or soul that inspires their organization to service its members according to each one’s need.

This kind of communication is genuine and endows a group with a dynamic personality that can inspire voluntary coordination of individual functions with the common function of the group. This is the system of communication operating in a good society. It enables its members to produce more results together than the sum of results they can produce separately. It is truly synergistic or creative. In fact, it generates a third person: the corporate person of their co-unity or community. Its operating formula is accordingly one person plus one person equals three persons or (1 + 1 = 3).

There is no substitute to genuine communication for enabling people to discover what they can do cost-effectively together; for motivating them to dip into and cultivate their store of hidden talents with which they can satisfy their needs not necessarily on more capital but on more effective demands on capital.

It is the power tool of synergistic Human Resource Management whose philosophy is group productivity for individual development, not the other way around. It is best at transforming problems into management opportunities.

Above all, genuine communication revitalizes the bond of unity in families, the cells of society’s tissues and organs into a soul or principle of productive group effort. Couples who marry merely for the ecstasy of loving and being loved in return and not for the enrichment of their union do not really communicate or love. They will soon dread the loss of the bargaining power of their youth, affluence, or status. They will love for and at a price, until they tire of each other; give up on their unity; and simply discard each other in anguish. In either case they inflict irreparable harm to each other’s dignity and to the well-being of those around them.

Should we wonder that so many marriages head for the rocks as the glitter to their priced buy fade or age away? Should we also wonder at the decadence of a neighborhood of loveless families and broken homes?

No individual person is worth giving one’s all. Only a divine, or at least a good corporate person of family, church, town or nation that they co-create when they truly communicate or love is worth losing their all to. In this case, to lose is to gain. This is Christ’s message to those who choose to lose their lives for their common life with Him. (Mt. 10:39).

Thus a Christian community is a people who enjoy the rich benefits of a provident co-unity with God. They do not need to steal or beg for the benefits of their membership in it. Their ennobling and healing language is communion into an empowered and empowering society of God and men in Christ. Its power tool is a System of Communication that Christ initiated and sustains. We will christen it ‘Chriscom.’

The installation and operation of Chriscom will constitute the package of solutions offered by the author to help resolve permanently man’s problems with himself, his fellowmen and with the world he lives in. The author sees it as a movement rather than a project or program.

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Miriam Santiago has declined her nomination for Chief Justice; Leila de Lima seems to have accepted the nomination. That would be a blessing in disguise. I hope President Aquino will appoint de Lima as Chief Justice. We would lose a Secretary of Justice but gain a Chief Justice. That would mean the redemption of our judiciary.

(For your comments, email nolvanvugt@gmail.com)