When the meaning of existence is pounded and held hostage by death repeatedly, your soul turns inside out. The intricate complexities of a man's life suddenly pulses with the grandest simplicity in the imperfect spirit's quest for survival.
So it is that a sense of being part of mankind's natural order begins to emerge in one's consciousness. It becomes apparent that one must either accept the emergent shift in one's worldly capacity or crumble in its grip.
Borne from this self-examination is the Jose Rizal Online endeavor to bring peace to the impoverished nation of my birth.
My spiritual journey is now aligned with my physical journey. What must be achieved is considerable but so would be its bounty.
Today, life in the islands remains steeped in the suffocating corruption inherent in society since the devastation inflicted by Catholic friars and their thugs. Local customs were destroyed, history, traditions burned in the name of a fearsome God.
The Filipino people were stripped of their human rights, their dignity, their culture.
Really, not much has changed for the Filipino people since the mid-1500's.
Each generation in the past 500 years has died while fervently praying for an unattainable salvation. When one generation dies, it is followed by another that repeats the mistaken belief that the Filipino people are somehow unworthy of life's blessings in the eyes of an angry God.
This punishing, low self-esteem has endured for five centuries.
To the present day, the Filipino citizen prays for redemption to the angry God of brutal conquistadores, of the Spanish Inquisition; church prayers still recited as if spoken by the unworthy (a label from conquerors who misused their own faith to subjugate our people).
What if the Filipino citizen, as Catholic mass is celebrated, instead prayed to a magnanimous, merciful and loving God for its deliverance?
