God of the living

The WORD in other words (2006) by Father Dionisio Miranda SVD – Catholic Trade Manila

Wednesday 9th Week in Ordinary Time

Some of today’s burning issues are, surprisingly, yesterday’s news. Brain drain, which sees the best and brightest from the developing world flow in an irreversible one-way direction toward countries of opportunity, has been with humankind since the formation of urban centers. Go to any major city in the United States today and you will find a directory of Filipino health care professionals in the thousands, while whole municipalities back in the Philippines do not even have a single resident doctor.

The Philippine education system has always been conflicted on the matter. There are those who argue that, for practical purposes, one must migrate if one wants to have a future at all, since this is realistically unattainable at home. On the opposite side, others argue that professionals owe it to their country to remain, as this is the land which gave them all and made them what they are today. The contest between the pragmatic and the ideal is once again displayed in this human problem.

That is the debate happening on the ground; sadly, it is not taking place in the schools themselves. Is it official policy now, and not only common practice, that the educational system is meant to produce professionals, scientists, and health care providers exclusively for export? Is that what Philippine education is meant to achieve? That the question is not idle can be seen in the simmering controversy over the proliferation of certain schools for special manpower needs. At one time it was teachers, today it is nurses, tomorrow it will be some other group; always it has been about our most critically needed and most valued human resources.

Despite the pretensions of noble-mindedness, the plain and simple fact is that nursing departments are increasingly seen by certain schools as their financial cash cows. This is appalling, to say the least, of secular schools. But for those schools which were born of a religious and missionary vision, can we not say, as Jesus does to His religious interlocutors of the time: “You have missed the point altogether” (cf. Matthew 23:23)? Religion and morality were never meant to be spirited discussions about contrived issues, seductive for their theoretical complexity but ultimately irrelevant for today’s believers. Religion and morality are about life-and-death issues of the here and now; unless they focus there, they miss the point altogether of their existence.

For “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12,27).