Loving Our Land
“But how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a pagan land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget how to play the harp. May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I fail to remember you, if I don’t make Jerusalem my greatest joy.”
PSALM 137: 4– 6
The psalmist expresses his intense longing for his homeland far as he is from its familiar places and well-loved vistas of wide sweeping spaces. Worse, he is being taunted, yes, even forced by his captors to sing happy songs about it. Indeed, how can he?
In saying, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem,” a Jew asserts his or her ongoing loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people. When many delegates denounced Zionist founder Theodor Herzl for betraying the land of Israel when he raised the possibility of securing Uganda from the British as a temporary Jewish homeland in 1903, he was deeply stung. At the Sixth Zionist Congress conclusion, he raised his hand in the manner of one taking an oath, and swore, “Im eshka-kheikh Yerusyalayim (If I forget you, O Jerusalem).” This oath is often invoked to convey the sacredness of an obligation that a Jew has assumed.
Unlike the Jews, we may have lost our attachment to our homeland with six out of ten Filipinos wanting to migrate to other countries. However, Dr Salonga in his many campaign sorties has this to say of our country:
“I have gone through the entire length and breadth of this country; I have seen the long, sad faces of men and women cursed by years of poverty and misery and ignorance, but I have seen too the bright faces of children everywhere, apparently full of hope and confidence in tomorrow. I have seen many villages that have not been touched, it would seem, by the refinements of progress, but I have seen too the infinite wonder and beauty of this land: the everlasting green of our countryside, the rock-ribbed mountains of Northern Luzon, the magnificent beaches of many islands, particularly in the Visayas, the luster and splendor of the sunsets in Dapitan and the endless fields of grain everywhere from North to South that attest to the patience and industry of our people.”
It is impossible to love this country unless we love our fellowmen in concrete terms. That is to live as brothers, to respect each other’s differences, heal each other’s wounds, to promote each other’s progress, to benefit from each other’s knowledge, to disagree without resort to violence and build a social order where ‘the weak shall be safe and the strong shall be just.’
It was Adlai Stevenson who wrote that it is easy to say we love our country; what is difficult is to love it in the right way. “Let it not be said of us,” Salonga emphasizes, “that in a time of great challenge, we did not love this land of our fathers in the only way it should be loved to put the public business ahead of our own private interests.”
This is an an excerpt from Faith in the Corridors of Power by Evelyn Miranda-Feliciano and Dr. Jovito Salonga.
In this thought-provoking collection of reflective entries, Evelyn Miranda-Feliciano interacts with Former Senate President Dr. Jovito Salonga on the issues of life and faith in the context of Filipino society. The author leads you to take a peek into the mind and heart of this noble statesman who reveals how his relationship with God plays a crucial role in his decision-making as a politician, as an advocate of justice, and as the so-called conscience of the nation.
This s available as an ebook at Amazon, iBooks, and Google Play Books.