Beginning of Human Love

Human love is one of the most difficult matters for human intellect to understand.  I believe that no human word can give perfect meaning of human love without any action. We all know that different languages have their own terms of love, but those terms may connote different meanings and interpretations.  I am sure that love is real; it is present among us. We feel it and we see it through the fruits of its expression.  The question is: Do we really know when human love begin and visibly expresses among the human beings?

 

My simple answer to the question would be: Human love begins when the human heart starts feeling and the intellect begins having consciousness of God’s love. It becomes visible when we start sharing it to other human beings. The expression of human love, charity, compassion, kindness and care among the Filipino people is more visible when there are victims of natural calamities in the country. I know it because I have been witnessing it many times with my own naked eyes for the last 11 years.  My fresh experience of natural calamity in the country was the heavy flood caused by monsoon rains last August 7 to 9, 2012, in Metro Manila. I can still clearly recall that in the evening of August 7, 2012, there were some evacuees who came to the Sto. Domingo Church (where our apostolatic group, KADAUPAN, members volunteered) for refuge because their houses were flooded and they had nowhere to stay. Soon, the number of evacuees swelled and Sto. Domingo Church was converted into a temporary evacuation center for around 4,000 evacuees. The brothers and volunteers were tireless in helping the victims. They served foods, drinks, gave them dried clothes, blankets, mattresses and materials which the evacuees badly needed.  How wonderful God’s love was! When the sustenance from our convent was about to run out, God sent a lot of generous donors to help the victims. There were many volunteers from the parish, the different universities like FEU, UE, UP, although the majority were from UST. What inspired me more was that some of the evacuees rose to the occasion by volunteering to help fellow victims. I heard a youth volunteer said that even if he had been a victim of the recent calamity, he still opted to help his fellow victims. He said that as a Catholic, to keep his spirituality better, it is good to help others in a simple way such as volunteering because this way, he could help many people who were like him, victims of flood. If these were not the expressions of human love among the Filipino people, then what could it be? 

         

And if human love is visibly expressed among the Filipino people during natural calamities, like typhoons, earthquake and heavy flood, how about among the Myanmar people?  I hardly think about it. But finally I thought that civil war can be the most visible expression of human love in our country. This civil war started from the love of freedom for their ethno-linguistic groups, their peoples, their families, their lands and to protect their full autonomies in internal and external administration by their own leaders. They sacrificed their lives for their peoples.  

I had experienced nonstop civil wars between the government’s forces and Kachin Independent Armies in our country for many years while I was in Myanmar. I saw the Burmese Military has left innocent people brutally tortured, abused, raped and killed. The people most affected, were the largest of the ethno-linguistic minority groups living in the States. They were really helpless.  It has been 58 years that the people of Myanmar or Burma have suffered under military rule. 

The root causes of the civil war in our country principally are: first, the failed historic Panglong agreement masterminded by the General Aung San, the father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi; the second, the Burmese government has historically treated the minority ethno-linguistic groups and their land as a colony that must be subdued and exploited. Concurrently to promote such a colonial enterprise, Burmese colonizing project entails systematic creation of obstacles to deter intellectual progress of the people, repress their identity as a people by marginalizing their cultural and religious traditions, and well-planned racial project to enhance divisions among the ethnic groups while promoting systemic ideology of superior Bamar in the population-- in reality the inordinate human love of power, money and lack of educations among the leaders of the country.  

Are those the expressions of human love? Maybe, but it is not a favourable one because a true expression of human love must not be about power over others but helping the unfortunate people. We need more leaders who know how to express human love rightly and justly not to focus on power, money and their comforts but the common good of the country, society and our people particularly to the poor. 

by Br. Stephen Mari La Ja, OP

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