The following is an article by Magdalena Torres that first saw print 27 years ago, shortly after the “EDSA revolution.” After all these years of celebrating EDSA I, we ask ourselves: What has the Feb. 25 EDSA revolution really done for the Filiinos?
It is interesting to note that in spite of the “miracle at
EDSA” the people of this only Christian nation in Asia have remained loyal to
anyone but Christ. Note the various factions we are thanking for the so called
“bloodless revolution.” Believers in the US supremacy maintain that it is the
American intervention in Philippine affairs that saved the Filipinos from a
bloodbath. Fans of the Enrile-Ramos block insist that the “bloodless
revolution” would not have happened without their heroes’ crucial change of
heart. Marcos sympathizers assert that there surely would have been bloodshed
had it not been for Marcos’ love for his people. A foreign correspondent writes
that the television cameras (notably those which recorded for worldwide viewing
the Marcos-Ver “debate”) are to be credited for actually having prevented
carnage among our people. And advocates of “people’s power,” led by the
involved clergy, of course, are just as quick in claiming it is “our rosaries”
that brought about the “miracle.”
While each may be valid in its own right, all these claims,
however, have one thing in common; they all attribute the almost bloodless
revolution to human cause, thus further dividing this Christian nation into
segments none of which seems to have absorbed the message of Christ from the
“miracle.”
I recently bumped into a priest I had not seen for months.
To my smiling “How are you?” he exclaimed, “We’ve won! We’ve won! It’s over!
All efforts didn’t go to waste! Marcos is out!”
I must admit it struck me dumb, but only because I was
asking inside, “Lord, where is this country headed to if all the evils our
priests cared to fight are those outside of ourselves?” But I quickly rode
along and asked him, “We’ve won? You mean, we’re now all on the side of God?”
The priest, unsmiling now, blurted out, “What do you mean
we’re now on the side of God? We won because God has always been on our side,
right from the start!”
I switched to another topic, but the brief encounter was to flash
on and on in my mind, like a yellow traffic light that wouldn’t be turned off.
I view the “miracle at EDSA” as an act of Divine Mercy, a
blanket absolution granted to an unrepentant nation of blind followers and
blind leaders.
Imagine what would have happened had events pursued the
logical conclusion our human actions were leading them to. We had sown so much
hatred around us then that we deserved nothing less than a national tragedy to
make us learn our lesson, yet God chose to send us His love instead, and like
the proverbial rain that falls on both the just and the unjust, His forgiving
hand came to preserve a whole nation bent on destroying itself. In that
momentous event that nobody expected, Jesus Christ— with knuckles swollen from
knocking on the door of our hearts—once more cried, “Let me in!” And He is
still weeping, because our hearts have remained shut.
We are back in the rat race, and human folly may yet reduce
the “miracle at EDSA” into just another tool for attracting tourists’ dollars
to our shores. In the euphoria following this Christian nation’s miraculous
escape from a bloody confrontation, Christ is all but forgotten. Our idolatry
goes on. A lady president is deified as “a goddess in the Pantheon of
democracy,” lionized as a “Joan of Arc in a yellow tunic.” We’re still
groveling before our colonizers as the true guardian of our welfare. We’re
still counting on men with guns to bring us peace. We continue to take the word
of the media—especially foreign media—as gospel truth. In a mad play for power
we threaten to draw the blood we claim our fallen idol refused to shed. And we
are in greater danger than ever of clinging to our pagan ways to bring about
Utopia. How thankless can we be, that even in “gratitude” we must grab the
glory for ourselves?
“But we thanked God for the miracle, didn’t we?” Perhaps a
million of us would cry thus, citing one impassioned celebration at the park
where we flew balloons and shamelessly hailed Cory with much greater zeal than
we’ve ever done for Mary. And we go on “thanking God,” here and abroad, all the
while betraying our lack of consideration for Christ by discarding the season’s
liturgical purple in favor of a political color. Feverish with false joys and
unexamined victories we come to our houses of worship burning with politics
instead of prayer. We call this thanksgiving?
How much longer must we remain deaf to Christ? How can God’s
kingdom come when we do not want to dethrone ourselves in our hearts? The
“miracle at EDSA” is not a reward for our efforts. It is part of a Divine Plan
for this only Christian nation in Asia: God allowed the evil in us to drag us
down to such depths so that we may finally see that only He can lift us up
again. How can it be a reward when all our efforts were leading us to hatred
and divisiveness?
Let us be humble and admit that we did not cause the miracle—it was God who willed
to save us from ourselves in spite of the self-serving prayers we uttered when
we found our necks stuck on the chopping block. How dare we say our actions, our prayers, prevented bloodshed? Who moved us to pray when blood threatened to rain on our picnic?
What a shame that the face of Christ continues to be spat
upon in a Christian nation! We are not thanking God at all—we are merely using
His gift to puff up our egos. Since the “miracle” we’ve been boasting: I was there. I’m proud to be a Filipino. Look
at these pictures―that’s me in front of the tank. Galing, ano? Two
days ago, at a movie house, I sat next to man wearing a yellow shirt with a
picture of a tank that says “I WAS A HUMAN BARRICADE” in big bold red letters.
I found it ironic that someone who could stop advancing tanks could not stop
himself from littering his surroundings with butong-pakwan shells.
It is saddening to think that in spite of the miracle we
have remained slaves of sin and habit―look around, the danger signs are everywhere. Did this
Christian nation merely change her dress for the benefit of the foreign media?
Thanking God for a miracle means acknowledging God as the only Power in our
lives. This Power deserves more than just token gratitude. What is a miracle
for if it comes into our eyes and our ears and goes out of our mouths without
touching our hearts? Did God give us this gift only so we could slap His face
with it? Or only so we could brag to the rest of the world that we are special
children of God?
If we sincerely want to thank God we will make Him “Number
One” in our hearts. We will make an honest effort towards change through
individual conversion. The “miracle at EDSA” is Christ’s invitation for us to
expand as Christians. Let us raise the quality of our worship, deepen our
faith, heighten the levels of our prayer, and pray for a constant awareness of
God’s presence, so that one day when each of us will have enthroned the Christ
in our hearts, we may know what we mean when we say “Thy kingdom come, Thy will
be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”
The article ends there.
I can’t claim political savvy, but I think that as a
blatantly Christian people we ought to examine our use of the word
“revolution.” As it has come to be popularly linked to “EDSA 1”, writer Ambrose
Bierce would be spot-on correct in saying “Revolution is an abrupt change in
the form of misgovernment.”
Pity that we have to count on political icons, slogans and
symbols to better our lives! The teachings of our Lord Jesus are as
revolutionary today as they were when He walked the earth, but in overlooking
their relevance we have failed to use them to revolutionize our hearts. So,
dear countrymen, unless and until we take Jesus seriously, we can expect more
of the same headlines in year 2036, the 50th anniversary of the
“bloodless revolution.” And that’s the truth.
