When our group met with Father Bert at the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Foundation in Pikit, I asked if I could buy his book, “Fields of Hope,” which many of us did. He was signing them for us at the end of our meeting, a role he was obviously not comfortable with, but that he performed in service to his cause and our expectations. We exchanged a little about the conflict and its relationship to human conflcit in the wider world. I told him, “Father, you’ve seen the same terrible losses, the same destructive behaviors, over and over again. If you tell me peace is possible, I’ll believe it.” “Really?” he asked me, quite sincerely, considering. When I walked away from the table and peered inside my book to see what he had written inside it, it began, “Dear Myshel, Peace is possible!”
So do I believe it? Even as I write this question, I don’t know how willing I really am to answer it.
I remember going to see the Richard Attenborough film “Gandhi “in the theatre with my Father, Prem. He was born in India, in Bihar, in 1935, and came to the US in the 1950’s as a young medical intern, and was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi. Seeing the film together felt like an important rite of passage; I never forgot what I felt both watching depictions of Gandhi’s first acts of civil disobedience as well as the massacre at Amritsar… At the end of the film, which ends with Gandhi’s death, Ben Kingsley, the actor who played him so beautifully, quotes the words: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible but in the end they always fall. Think of it- always.”
But it wasn’t long before I began asking myself whether or not I couldn’t look at this statement in reverse. Perhaps we could say that peace too will always fail in the end. Although a given tyrant, murderer, warlord, dictator, may fall, yet another tyrant is still waiting somewhere in the wings of history. Violence, imprisonment, torture, massacre, yes, these too shall pass, but this is not much comfort if you have had the poor fortune to be caught on the wrong side of that cycle. Meanwhile, what of the destruction wreaked by modern weaponry? The slow march of poverty and poison behind abusive extraction and exploitation industries that leave behind sometimes irreversible environmental damage? The tyrant may fall, but the forests, the mountains, the clean water are still gone, species become extinct.
Father Bert, I think, is acutely aware of these kinds of questions. He has said that in Pikit there is “constant war and sporadic peace.” The son of settler parents, poor tenant farmers who came to Mindanao seeking a better life, Father Bert became the Parish Priest of the Immaculate Concepcion Parish in Pikit in 1997 where today he continues to “wage peace” daily on the ground, carefully and responsively- not “apocalyptically.” Outside of the context in which Gandhi was using it, I think it was the phrase “in the end” that I was struggling with. Most of us suffer from at least a touch of apocalypticism, a narcissistic fantasy where our death is the death of the world, our end is “the end.” But there is no final peace in nature, no neat narratives that tie up all the loose ends. We we can not end conflict, and we should not be discouraged by this; conflict is in fact vital, it allows the catalysis of energies, the release of possibilities, disruptions in static systems. But we can work to limit violence, mitigate damage, and harness what is best in conflict itself to create the space for more profoundly harmonious alternatives, a living peace.
This is no small project, there is tremendous work to be done to minimize the incidence and the human and environmental impacts of violence at the global system level, analytically and structurally, but people suffer locally. The peace building that a community spiritual leader like Father Bert is engaged in has heroic dimensions, but is humble, personal, patient work, from his organization of inclusive relief services for Christian, Muslim, and Lumad alike (which was not without its critics), to culture of peace trainings and livelihood projects, he is working with and within his community to weave the delicate silken threads that connect human hopes with peaceful cultural and ultimately political transformations, watching the web tear, and beginning again. It is difficult to understand this process in an international development framework (i.e. what exactly are the metrics for changing the terms by which we hope?) but to me it is a lesson in what peace building, or what I would also call real human development, looks like in regions of conflict.
I don’t know if Father Bert relies entirely on the cosmology of his faith to make this work make sense for him, each time that he must start again, after the violence comes again, tomorrow. But even if he does, I suspect the secret is still his humility and not simply faith but a wisdom about the way nature works. In a speech last month to graduates in Davao, where he and Mike Alon from IMAN together received honorary degrees, Father Bert said, “You know what I love to do as a priest is to go to the remote barrios to say mass. During the month of June, when rains start to fall, you see the vast fields totally bare. It does not mean though that nothing is happening just because you don’t see anything on the ground. Actually, on that same month, the seeds have been planted and soon they will grow.”
Maybe there will come a peace that is in fact the end of war, of tyrants, of torture, in human history, maybe that kind of peace is actually possible, I obviously have no way of knowing that. But the “way of truth of love” (and there are many), the way of peace that is always possible, in this moment and the next, is the peace that we personally commit ourselves to.
Father Bert finished his inscription in my book with the gentle injunction, “Let’s continue promoting peace to make this world a beautiful place to live in.” This isn’t easy sentiment. Beauty is a fierce goal, and a beautiful world, to me, is one that I assume a radical acceptance of. Which leads me to Walt Whitman; songs and poems are the closest things I know to prayers, so I’ll end with this, for our friends in Mindanao tonight:
“I swear they are all beautiful;
Every one that sleeps is beautiful—everything in the dim light is beautiful,
The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.”
