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Romel Bagares and colleagues after oral argument before the Supreme Court of the Phillipines

I have asked several guest bloggers to tell us what they love, and to briefly respond to the SIX big questions. Our fourth guest blogger, Romel Regalado Bagares, is the Executive Director for the Manila-based Center for International Law, a non-profit engaged in strategic human rights litigation. He also lectures in public and private international law at the Lyceum Philippines University College of Law. Romel’s personal blog is at http://sanpedrostreet.wordpress.com/ . This is the final of six contributions.

It’s a thought drilled from day one into the consciousness of students at the University of the Philippines that they’re the iskolar ng bayan – scholars of the people – and they ought to make the most out of their privileged education by being of service to the nation. My friends and I would often joke about this as our “historical burden” but we know at the back of our minds that so much of what we are was shaped by our public education.  I feel the strong pull of this idea. Perhaps, it was this idea in the first place that led me take up journalism as a profession right after university and then eight years later, law.

I tried my very best to fulfill my obligations to my family as an eldest child while working in a profession that, as Pete Hamill said in his book News Is a Verb, does not pay well wherever you go. It was a wonder how I managed to do that while sending myself to evening classes in law school.  I think of what I now do as a lawyer engaged in strategic public interest litigation for the Center for International Law as my way of paying it forward. For me, this somehow coincides with what I believe should be my response to God’s call to service, that the Christian faith must have a public expression that helps one’s neighbor. Of course I do recognize that at some other point of my life God may call me to a different expression of service to others. For now this is where I am. But this is something that my parents do not quite understand although I know they mean well. I’ve had arguments – and still have arguments – with my father about this.

[Note on the photograph: This photograph was taken on November 24, 2009,  after oral arguments in a case where Romel and his colleagues represented residents of the Philippine island of Palawan, in their claim for a rightful share in the utilization of oil and gas resources found off the island's coast by the national government.]

Romel Bagares reading for his thesis in the Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, 2007.

I have asked several guest bloggers to tell us what they love, and to briefly respond to the SIX big questions. Our fourth guest blogger, Romel Regalado Bagares, is the Executive Director for the Manila-based Center for International Law, a non-profit engaged in strategic human rights litigation. He also lectures in public and private international law at the Lyceum Philippines University College of Law. Romel’s personal blog is at http://sanpedrostreet.wordpress.com/ . This is the fifth of six contributions.

Though I come from a family of limited means, I have had the privilege of a good education at a state university heavily subsidized by Filipino taxpayers. I am grateful for friends whose generosity of spirit saw me through many difficult times in and out of the university. I owe an anonymous Dutchman his generous sacrifice of paying for half of my tuition when I was doing my master’s degree on Herman Dooyeweerd’s systematic philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the other half of the tuition and living expenses having been provided for by the Faculty of Philosophy, for which I am also grateful). It is tender mercies like these that have opened for me doors to personal and professional advancement.

I work in an office where, as my bosses often remind me, I “don’t do collection cases all the time.” They give me space to pursue my other inclinations, such as teaching. But it’s not a walk in the park. Sometimes, human rights work exposes you to a lot of physical danger. It is emotionally draining, especially when you’re up against the powers-that-be and things don’t happen for you and your clients the way you imagine they should.  It is difficult to imagine “proximate justice” amid intense opposition. At the same time you have to deal with certain expectations from your loved ones about your career choices. It is not for the faint of heart and I am faint of heart. Which is why it is important for me that I have a strong sense of the Christian hope.

Romel Bagares interviewing the exiled Filipino communist leader Jose Maria Sison at the press conference of the Permanent People's Tribunal at the Hague in the Netherlands (March 2007), for an article for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

I have asked several guest bloggers to tell us what they love, and to briefly respond to the SIX big questions. Our fourth guest blogger, Romel Regalado Bagares, is the Executive Director for the Manila-based Center for International Law, a non-profit engaged in strategic human rights litigation. He also lectures in public and private international law at the Lyceum Philippines University College of Law. Romel’s personal blog is at http://sanpedrostreet.wordpress.com/ . This is the fourth of six contributions.

When I was a young Christian, I loved listening to B.J. Thomas sing of  “going home, where I belong.” It was huge comfort to me who came to faith because of my morbid fear of death. I have since come to a deeper understanding of heaven in relation to the coming God’s kingdom – that time and space where the dividing line between heaven and earth is dissolved in the deep magic of the renewal of all things in Christ. I belong to the here and now but I also belong to a certain future whose wonderful contours I can only begin to imagine.

Karl Marx claimed his was a scientific view of the unstoppable engine of history that leads to the utter destruction of capitalism. But at church every Sunday, just before we say together the Gloria in Excelsis, we proclaim the mystery of the Christian faith: Christ died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again. One doesn’t usually think of the Lord’s Supper as a restatement – a “long view” – of a particularly linear trajectory of human history. But I realize that this proclamation is the Christian “long view” of history. Also, the Eucharist as celebration is the experience of belonging as communal. God’s word calls individuals and gathers them into a community. This community is our first taste of the communal banquet at the end of history, the fusion of heaven and earth, the redemption and transformation of time and space.