by the editor, Fr. Niall O'Brien

There are various ways to do mission – some true and tried, some original and creative. The following article tells of a missionary who is truly creative and indeed successful in his approach to mission. Read on.

The recent World Cup soccer finals in Korea and Japan have turned all minds in Asia to sport.  The Philippines unfortunately was not represented as football is not our thing but athletics are and that gets me to thinking of a certain person.  You probably have not heard his name.  When it comes to sport he is one of the most successful sports coaches in Negros and maybe the Philippines.  A couple of years ago his little group of athletes won 6 golds, 5 silvers and broke 2 national records at the National Open Track and Field Championship in Manila.  Many top class Asian athletes competed at these games.  So that made the victory all the sweeter.  It was a fitting climax to a string of successes over many years.

Fr. O'Halpin with young athletes during the Centennial Palarong Pambansa in Bacolod City

By Wawel Mercado

I didn’t quite fathom the depth of our marriage vow until after almost a year of being married to my wife, Mila.  I met her at Basic Advertising where we were officemates.  Later on we became very good friends, and that friendship eventually paved the way for deeper affection.  We decided to get engaged.

Long before our marriage, Mila would go on yearly prayer retreats.  The year before we tied the knot, she wrote in her retreat journal her vision of family life which was very similar to mine: that our family would be like a small church, a community of love where, by loving our children, we could teach our children the love of God and bring them closer to the Father.

By Richard Deats

Richard Deats, a lifelong peace activist in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and author of many peace books, writes to warn us of the great threats tour environment which are around the corner if not already upon us. This particularly relevant to us here in the Philippines where attempts are being made to introduce genetically engineered plants as the Philippine Government is considered to be a soft target by the companies who want to do this. Richard Deats is a longtime friend of the editor of Misyon.

I lived in the Philippines from 1959 to 1972 and was part of an antiwar group there that called itself American for Peace in Indochina. We did research, we wrote open letters, we talked to members of the U.S. Armed Forces coming to the islands for rest and recreation, we met with the U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, and we picketed the U.S. Embassy on Roxas Boulevard in Manila every month. With our homemade signs, my wife, Jan, and I, and our two young sons, Mark and Stephen, joined twenty or so others in vigils to stop the war in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh, exiled Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, stayed in our home during his Manila visit, and I organized speaking engagements for him, as well as a press conference.

By Ernie C. Turla

Our languages in the Philippines, except of course for Tagalog, have been on the verge of deterioration for the past half a century or so. Not because people don’t want to use them, but because they have been relegated to the background in the country’s vision to have a united people speaking a national language based on one of the major ones. What has happened is that, instead of uniting the peoples, this phrase of the Constitution even created an estrangement among the many ethnolinguistic groups (excluding the new generation who have been, according to some experts, brainwashed and with little hope for a reversal of attitude) who suddenly realized that their indigenous languages were being grossly neglected and on their way to possible extinction.