Sunday, June 22, 2008 Mercado: Teetering on the edges By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
THE full story on the kidnapping of ABS-CBN’s Ces Drilon and cameramen hasn’t yet emerged. “We were betrayed,” Ms. Drilon says. ABS-CBN should tell us how. That’d help avoid future “betrayals.”
Nor should this incident spur Muslim-bashing. The Abu Sayyafs are thugs who happen to be Muslims. Thieves in the broadband scandal or “Jose Velarde” say they’re Christians. Both faiths spurn lip service used to smudge crime.
During the Drilon snatch, the Islamic-Catholic Liaison Committee, by happenstance, met at the Vatican.
“Christians and Muslims believe it is their duty to show compassion toward every human being, especially the needy and the weak since God is compassionate,” their statement said. "If authentically practiced, (religion) effectively contributes in promoting harmony…”
Recall Muslim-Christian tensions in Algeria. Extremists in the ‘90s warned foreigners to leave, including Trappist monks. The abbot, Fr. Christian and six monks were murdered. Excerpts from his "last testament":
"It could be today that I (will) become a victim of terrorism…I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of lucidity. (This) would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and my fellow human beings, and forgive, with all my heart, the one who would strike me down.
“I do not desire such a death. It seems important to state this. How I could rejoice if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder?
“I am aware of the caricatures of Islam, which a certain Islamism encourages. It is too easy to salve one's conscience by identifying this religious way (Islam) with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists...
“My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naive, or idealistic: `Let him tell us now what he thinks of Islam.'
But...this is what I shall be able to do, if God wills: to immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them. For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God."
This Abbott calls us to what's deepest in all authentic religion, namely, solidarity with all others, based upon a common God and humanity, Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI notes. This trivializes every other difference.
That's not easy to see or accept. Daily, we hate, imprison and kill each other in God’s name and our values. Instead, Fr. Christian invites us: live out of the Gospel, not out of our feelings. What does that mean?
One day, Jesus was "walking along the borders of Samaria when he met a woman." This is more than a story of mere geography and a simple conversation.
“A border is a boundary, the edges of something foreign,” Rolheiser writes. Samaria was of a different ethnicity and a different religion, and the woman a different gender.
The Gospels are saying: Jesus walked along edges. Nowhere is there a more succinct description of where Christian churches today stand. “We are standing on the borders of ethnicity, religiosity, and gender, particularly as these pertain to Islam.”
This calls us to what Abbott Christian lived and articulated: “stay in the relationship, not caricaturize, not misunderstand, not to let what's worst in each other eclipse what's best in each other.”
All must not forget, ever, that “we are brothers and sisters, given equal life by a common Father,” as Islamic-Catholic Liaison Committee’s 14th meeting reminded all.
“This is not a dangerous flight into idealism. It's astutely political, brutally realistic. Until we and Islam embrace as brothers and sisters, there can be no peace.”
And no political or military power can provide security, as a “betrayed” Ces Drilon and her team belatedly discovered.
