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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).