Second-best week

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.

Romel Bagares in Paris, at the Shakespeare & co. bookstore.

Romel Bagares in Paris, at a small restaurant near the Cour de Cassation, during a week-long study tour as a recipient of the “Programme d’invitation des personnalités d’avenir” fellowship of the French Foreign Ministry.

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 third of six contributions.

In the Christian tradition, we are called out in the second person. God addresses each of us as you, expecting us to respond responsibly to his call. We are homo respondens, in the language of Christian philosopher Henk Geertsema. I am thus a person called by God.

You discover who you are before the face of God, as you work out your calling. How you work out that calling, or how you practice it, is your own reward. Virtue comes in doing, in taking that step of faith – faltering step by faltering step – to head from the land of security, of comfort, to the unknown, to the heart of God.  Yet I fear that this is still theory; this is still only the description of the ought; it is not where I am, in my struggle for wholeness; it only points to where I want to be.

The Christian philosopher Sander Griffioen once wrote that as believers, we should learn how to laugh and cry at the same time.  The reality of brokenness in our own lives – of the fact of deep longings in our hearts that have as yet no satisfaction or will never find a satisfaction in this life – should make us turn to Him, who, as that old hymn says, giveth and giveth more grace.   And in the meantime, in media res, in the middle of things, I am to work out God’s calling for my life, dwelling in the “grace of uncertainty” – where one may well be uncertain of the next step, but certain of God, where one is called to immediately abandon to God, and to do the duty that lies nearest (Oswald Chambers).

Romel Bagares at the Magindanao site

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 second of six contributions.

What G.K. Chesterton called the necessity of the strange and the secure: or, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “there is logos: God revealed is God known. He is not so completely known that he cannot be predicted. He is not known so thoroughly that there is no more to be known, so that we can go on to the next subject. Still he is known and not unknown, rational and not irrational, orderly and not disorderly, hierarchical and not anarchic.”

I believe, with Paul Marshall, that redemption in Christ is not the negation of creation but its renewal. For that reason, we can truly care for our fallen world; we can find beauty for brokenness because in the Christian economy, that is where we’ll also find the grace of Christ’s redemption. I believe that our calling is to serve in obedience to Him in the healing, renewing, and unfolding of His creation, where we love God, and live coram Deo in doing justice, in engaging in politics, in praying, in raising families, in planting crops, in helping others in need, in proclaiming the Lordship of Christ over all of creation, in worshipping as communities of faith.

God has the last word on tyranny and injustice! Knowing this brings immense hope to me in my work as a lawyer engaged in public interest litigation.

[A little more about the photograph above: Romel writes, "I'm the guy in the middle, right after noted Peruvian forensic anthropologist Jose Pablo Baraybar, at the site of the November 23, 2009 Maguindanao massacre, where 58 people, including 32 media workers and journalists, were killed in election-related violence in Southern Philippines. I'm holding  a metal detector and we're looking for more evidence at the site. I'm one of the lawyers representing the families of 14 journalists who perished in the carnage, said to be the worst single attack on press freedom in recorded history.  For further background: http://www.ellentordesillas.com/2009/12/01/its-like-rwanda-un-expert-on-maguindanao-massacre/.]

Romel Bagares (the guy encircled in red) at a rally of Filipino lawyers and law students protesting a ban on protest rallies (imposed by then Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) at the historic EDSA Shrine in Manila (March 2006). To Romel's right (in white shirt barong) is Rep. Erin Tanada, a lawyer and member of the Philippine Congress.

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/ . We’ll begin his series of contributions with a list of the things he loves.

My family – I come from a big one, with an all-male brood of nine siblings, of which I am the eldest

The church I attend, the Christ Our Life Fellowship, a Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation that meets on the campus of the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

The Philippines, my long-suffering country of 7, 107 islands and its “habit of shores”

A lawyer’s work – when it is of help to people who have nothing, who have lost everything, who stand to lose everything; a well-written pleading, a well-written court decision, a judge with a keen sense of humor

Herman Dooyeweerd and the philosophical school he founded, reformational philosophy; Vrije Universiteit; Center for Public Justice

Music:  hymns, jazz, classical, gospel; the oldies but goodies. Karen Carpenter.  I love my turntable!

The King James Bible, my first education in language and literature, and also because in Sunday school, I was taught to memorize and recite by heart 100 verses from it

Liturgy and sacraments. (And it wasn’t always that way.)

The University of the Philippines and its Diliman Campus, a 493-hectare leafy haven in a metropolis of 14 million people drowning in soot

Christmas in the Philippines. There is nothing like it.

Good friends, good conversation, good food, good coffee. They all go together for me.

Teaching – whether in my college bible study group or in my classes on private international law and public international law at the Lyceum Philippines University College of Law

Travel in general, travel by train in particular (especially if it’s across Europe!)

The art of Vincent Van Gogh, especially his Japanese phase; his correspondence with his brother Theo

The Spoliarium by Juan Luna (1857-1899), Filipino painter par excellence

Jose Rizal (1861-1896), the polymath Filipino national hero, and his novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. I wish the day will come when I could read these novels in the original language in which it was written, Spanish

Old Manila’s historic spots

Books, books, books. I suffer from what the Filipino novelist Gina Apostol calls bibliolepsy and I consider myself a first-rate bargain-book bandit

Amsterdam without the Red Light District, but with its antiquarian shops, its bicycles and canals, and the Vincent Van Gogh Museum

East Berlin and its graffiti, Unter den Linden; Paris and its museums, walking  along the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. and the Paris Review

Old movies; writing long love letters in long hand … and I so miss doing this one!

The art of Filipino painters Pablo Baens Santos and Rodel Tapaya

The works of Francis Schaeffer

The abstract paintings of my friend Ronnie De la Cruz, because they speak so much of his struggles as an artist

San Pedro Street, Lagao, General Santos City, where I grew up

My three-year stay at the now defunct Narra Residence Hall, a legendary men’s dormitory at the University of the Philippines Diliman campus

Dispatches, by Michael Herr

Adobo, Filipino comfort food; Tuna kinilaw (Ceviche) – and my brother Jojie makes a delicious one!

The Maginhawa Street scene at the heart of the UP Teacher’s Village, with its artisanal restaurants, artists’ shops, second-hand bookstores, cafes, coffee and tea bars. (I happen to live nearby.)

My beat up Mazda 323 model 1995 sedan

The poetry of Adam Zagajewski, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luci Shaw, Wislawa Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Rayvi Sunico, Joel Toledo, Luisa Igloria, Galway Kinnell … and many more!

A glass of wine for a nightcap; a steaming cup of coffee in the morning; a walk in all-enduring rain

Long conversations with my brothers on sundry topics, including our plans for the future

A Dutch bicycle

The fiction of Jose “Butch” Dalisay Jr.

Magazines – Granta, Paris Review, New Yorker, Books & Culture, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, First Things, New Criterion, Comment, Poetry Magazine

The City of Leiden from the vista of my friend Julian Struijk’s apartment

My  Ipad; my Powerbook G3 Pismo

The music of Filipino singer-songwriter Gary Granada; the work of the world choral wonder, the Philippine Madrigal Singers; the Beatles-inspired music of the defunct Filipino band The Eraserheads.

Theology

A solid piece of news reporting

A String of Pearls, on BBC Radio Wales, hosted by Dewi Griffiths

My alma mater, the storied University of the Philippines College of Law, which celebrated its centenary on 11/11/11

The Amsterdam Public Library and the view from the La Place Restaurant on top of it

The eight years I spent working as a newspaper reporter for the Manila-based English-language daily The Philippine Star – a real education on the inner workings of politics and society

America is in the Heart, by Carlos Bulosan

The Alliance Graduate School (AGS), an evangelical seminary in Manila where I had been serving as a trustee for nearly six years now

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans; Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), because it’s free, and because it dispenses the latest legal research from most anywhere on the planet – it’s the next best thing to a PhD in law!

The huge electronic library contained in so small a wonder as my iPad; the smell of ink on the pages of a newly-printed  old-fashioned book; the thrill  I feel upon opening a just-arrived package of books ordered online

Thinknet (an email discussion group) and its wonderful mix of characters; Facebook; the New York Times (before it limited free reading to 20 articles per month … but okay, I remain a fan of the newspaper)

“God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity”

Pablo Neruda

………………………………………………………..

Ode to My Socks
by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter

Ray Pennins writing

I have asked several guest bloggers to tell us what they love, and to briefly respond to the SIX big questions. Our third guest blogger, Ray Pennings, is Senior Fellow and Director of Research at Cardus. This is the last of seven contributions from Ray.

I have adapted four questions (borrowed from others) to help me sort through vocational questions.

(1)   What are my gifts?  I can be sure that whatever contribution God wants me to make are those for which he has given me the requisite gifts to do well.

(2)   What are my passions?   God delights in His work and desires me to do the same.  Hence there is something to be learned from assessing my passions regarding my calling.

(3)   What is my temperament?   The capacity to do something does not always correlate with the temperament to be a blessing in a particular setting.   Learning and considering how I fit into a particular setting so that I might live in a way consistent with my biblical calling and be a blessing to those around me is vital.

(4)   What are the needs of God’s kingdom and how are the doors of providence opening and closing for me?  While we all must answer this question personally, we must not do so in isolation of considering how our gifts might serve others and the broader needs of those around us.   We need to be attentive to the input of others and ready to hear the Macedonian call, even when our own preferences may be otherwise.

Answering these questions honestly and prayerfully, we can live in peace knowing that we fulfilling our calling in the context of the divine plan.   In the theatre of God’s glory, there are no bit actors.   Everyone plays a perfect part, their imperfections washed away through that perfect obedience and sacrifice of Christ on the cross.