I received an email from my former schoolmate Alvenio Mozol entitled “An Easter Letter to a Blogger Priest-Friend” and he asked me to post it in my blog. I am three years his senior but we finished Philosophy in the same university. He recently finished a three-year CPE course in the U.S. and will soon move to Canada for another academic degree. He is Catholic.
________________________________
Dear Fr. Stephen:
“The world is deep; deeper than day can comprehend.”
Nietszche
I began this letter with a quote from this famous German atheist. This cunning advocate of God-is-dead philosophy seems to synchronize with the time of this writing – Good Friday. At one point, Nietszche and company were right. Yet, we can only wonder with TS Eliot, that bloody as the silence of Golgotha was, we still call it Friday good.
The Holy Week is always the most challenging time to look at the real – the reality of political machinations, of abuse of religious powers, of Cyrenic succorance and Petrine denial, or of who-cares-bystanding. The latter, for reason of consensus, we may call spiritual indifference.
The forum you paved on praying publicly as a Christian revolves not only around the issue of tolerance of atheism nor on the weak accusation against you of trampling the atheists’ right to belong to a gathering as “secular” as the Philippine Blog Awards Night. The issue, I reflect, is deep, deeper perhaps than the bloggers’ understanding.
I would say this outright: yes, the homo indifferens is as real as the spiritual indifference of 17th century France, or of 21st century Europe that you are witness to. Spiritual indifference borders not only on the rejection of institutionalized religious and spiritual practices. It is a growing global phenomenon of outdating the foundational kernel of daily living – God and faith in God. It is a spreading wildfire, blazing through the trail of Western world materialism, making headway to the East through globalization, and using internet as its potent instrument, if not, the most potent nowadays. As a keen observer of life yourself, needless will I expound what spiritual indifference is. It is knocking on your blog and others’ blogs, because the den of discussion with those who adhere to it would now less be the pulpit but the internet. Adept as you are in this medium, I think you have just pioneered this e-discussion in this country.
Understandably, spiritual indifference is endorsed largely by artists of many forms, blogging geeks, materialist scientists, geniuses – real creative and intelligent people who advance atheism and ban God in the name of Reason, Individuality, or Free Thinking. People who think and feel the rooms of religious conventions they grow up with are suffocating for their seemingly boundless creative energy and insatiable need for self-expression. Ironically, without realizing it, or perhaps with a good dose of denial, reason, individuality and free thinking are what hold up atheists with a sense of absoluteness and finality – they eat, sleep, read, argue, relate, work, play – with Free Thinking as their compass, their captive god. Whoever says atheists have no god of their own is on the wrong side of reason. For those in the crossroad, discerning between atheism and faith in God, which god would you choose?
As a creative communicator yourself, you have entered this virtual, creative world and have initiated dialogue – reflective of the way Fr. Chevalier took a loving look and responded to the real – the religious indifference of his time. It is my prayer that a healthy human exchange with our atheist brothers and sisters will continue not only in the spirit of Nietszche’s intellectual humility, but more radically, in memory of Him who washed Peter’s feet – the same disciple who showed the atheistic tendency to decline being washed…being served. This is one promise of blogging and we are strong enough to stand by this promise because of the gift of Easter.
Happy Easter!
Alvenio Mozol
No comments yet.