Masyadong mahaba ang pastoral statement na binasa sa pautal-utal na Tagalog kaya hindi ko gaanong naintindihan pero isang bahagi ang pumukaw ng aking atensiyon -- yung paghahalintulad sa atin at sa mga Egyptian.

Eto yun ...

The Model for Change is the Desert.

The history of salvation teaches us that the long road to freedom inevitably passes through the desert of purification and conversion. Having escaped from Pharaoh, via the miraculous crossing through the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites considered themselves liberated. But they were not yet free, because they wanted to go back to their old ways in Egypt. “Should we not do better to go back to Egypt?” (Numbers 14:2-3).

The chosen people hesitated at the shores of the Sea and remained enslaved. So Moses led Israel away from the Sea of Reeds, and they entered the desert of Shur. (Exodus 15:22) Believing that Pharaoh was the idolater refusing them the worship of the true God, it was in the wilderness where the people discovered that they too were guilty worshipers of golden idols. (Exodus 32:1-29). People were disciplined and converted from their greed (Exodus: 17-21); and the desert which the Israelites feared to enter became for them a place of purification, discipline and conversion, before they could enter the promised land of freedom, forty years later.

There are yet no proven easy short cuts to conversion and renewal.

Looking back at EDSA I, euphoric and heroic as it was, it appeared that the event became the Filipinos’ day of crossing to freedom; but that was only the first step that hardly anyone knew. The “desert” awaited the people who would be purified and converted, before they become fully liberated. But people preferred the convenient streets as the easier route to an imagined freedom, and feared that the “desert experience” that awaited conversion and new beginnings.

Hay, ano kaya yung disyerto ng mga Pilipino at ako? Ano ang disyerto ko?

Binalibag Ni Choleng ng 8:02 AM at 0 Nagdilim ang Paningin