Slave

When we did military training, back in the days of ROTC, we did slavish things. We were indoctrinated into believing the merits of an obedience that was paramount, and so there we stood and marched like little wooden soldiers, baking under a Saturday sun. As our commanders taught us to assemble and fire M1 garand rifles in Fort Bonifacio, we were made to understand that our only task was to do and die, and never to question why.

Nothing wrong with that really. In the trenches of warfare, your very survival depended on following orders, and being enslaved to your master and commander, who you trusted to be wise enough to know more than what was happening in your little foxhole. In the midst of mayhem, martial rule and discipline (we surmised) spelled all the difference between coming out alive or being buried in the front lines.

Except that that didn’t work with us during martial law. For 14 years, we threw out our freedom and followed orders. We obeyed like slaves and we got buried like slaves.

The exodus at EDSA gave us hope. At last, we thought, we were free again. Yet to this day, we know how far we are from being a truly democratic and egalitarian society. Access to justice and wealth is still largely through patronage and con-nection. Our masters have a stake in keeping us divided and uneducated and impoverished. Our poverty is done to us and by us on purpose. We are still in truth a nation of slaves.

In Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, the lead character remembers a line on slaves from Iqbal, one of his favorite poets: “they remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.”

Perhaps it is this blindness to beauty that moves the Lord to free us from our slavish ways and ordain us friends. In today’s Gospel, we hear his words, “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing.” In his parting words, the Lord calls us friends, so that we can begin to see what is beautiful in this world. He names us friends so that we can begin to know what the Master is up to, and to behold at last the beauty the Master is doing right before our very eyes, even if those eyes are blurred with tears.

Yet we know that if there are eyes that cannot see, there are eyes as well that will not see. It is difficult after all to get a glimpse of beauty in a fallen and mortally wounded world. To miss beauty, and all the beauty being done to us by our Lord and Master is to live as miserably and blindly as slaves do.

There are some of us who would rather return to Egypt than risk the perilous journey in the desert to the promised land. Some of us would rather follow orders and be safe, rather than risk leading or loving others and be crucified.

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Even wooden soldiers do this and die for their comrades. Yet they live and die only as slaves who have been drilled to do this without ever questioning or discovering why.

“They remain slaves because they cannot see what is beautiful in the world.” What is beautiful in the world is not the doing and dying. What is beautiful in this life is to be found in the reason why we do our daily dying and keep on living. In Jesus, we see why. We see the ultimate reason for the doing and dying in how he knelt as a slave to wash the feet of his friends. We see why we live in how he died for us. We see why we die for others in how he gathers us as friends. 

In other words, it is love that is beautiful in this world, and it is love that slaves cannot and will not see in this world.

Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin SJ is President of Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan. For feedback on this column, email [email protected]