“If I believed in God’s love by loving my neighbors, I had to love my enemies too.” The story of Fr. Emmanuel Mijares and his commitment to follow in Jesus’ footsteps.
Fr. Emmanuel Mijares—“Am,” to his friends—is one of those priests who never fail to inspire you, whether it’s through a sermon, or a classroom lesson, small talk, or now his blog on the internet. You could say he was born a priest. And actually it was a priest, who happened to be his uncle, who gave him his name, Emmanuel. Ever since then, the whole family prayed and encouraged him to become a priest. Raising a middle class family of five, his parents, and especially his mother, who was a very religious woman, wanted to inculcate in the children the importance of loving each other. “My childhood,” Fr. Am shares, “was a happy one. I always felt the love of my parents and my siblings. Religion was very much present in our family, although my father was a bit skeptic about religious practices and some attitudes of priests. Nonetheless he often shared stories and adventures about a mission in Romblon where he had helped his cousin, also a priest.”
Thus every time he was asked what he wanted to become, Am would answer readily: “A priest!” Two friends also shared his desire, and so one day, when he was 12, together with his friends, he entered St. Pius X Seminary in Roxas City. “I am grateful to God for those years,” Fr. Am says, “for the many gifts of friendships, the good relationships with our formators, and a special devotion to Mary that gradually developed in my heart.”
Then a few years later, martial law was declared. Everyone was sent home as the priests were afraid for the seminarians. Am did not understand what it meant. For him it was just an occasion to go home and be with his family.
Some time later, upon his return to the seminary, Am learned about and acquired a belief in the love of God but it was more like academic knowledge, a fact learned from the classrooms, rather than really a part of his life. He later attended the University of Sto. Tomas for philosophical studies. “I was happy,” he says, “since my sister and my younger brother were studying there. I started to notice however that my brother was becoming involved in political activism, his attitudes about justice and equality being influenced by the glaring disparity between the poor and the rich in Manila. His landlady worried because he was always out, sometimes for days, attending seminars and organizing rallies.”
During summer vacations, Am’s diocese invited the seminarians to carry out their apostolate in the parishes. There, in the far-flung barrios, Am came to encounter the poor and learn about their sufferings. Their poverty and the constant exploitation of their labor made him resolve to be a priest to serve the poor. This lead him better to understand his brother’s behavior, although he was afraid for the latter’s life. The military had in fact started to follow his brother’s moves.
Martial law caused a lot of suffering to Filipinos, including the family of Am. His teacher parents had to till the little land they had to earn extra income. Both brothers were invited by their parents to work manually in their little orchard. “Seeing my parents who were both teachers sweating it out to cultivate the land made an impression on my brother who often went back to visit them. He would usually tell us before sleeping that many others were suffering and there must be a solution to these social evils caused by martial law. At a certain point, I felt so helpless that I too began to entertain the idea that maybe a violent revolution could solve these evils.”
Nevertheless, Am continued his studies, doing everything to complete seminary training at all costs, since he really wanted to become a priest.
After ordination he was asked by his bishop to remain in Manila to finish his theological studies. Afterwards he was assigned to a parish in Manila and asked by its archbishop to help in the office of the Nuncio, in the English section.
On the one hand, his choice had been granted: to become a priest. Yet on the other hand, Fr. Am felt that celebrating the Sacraments was just a job. “I felt like a bureaucrat,” he says. Two years passed and he started to ask himself: “How can I serve my people by just being in the office and most of the times celebrating the sacraments?”
His faith in God’s love was seriously put to the test when one day he read in the papers that his only brother had been captured, tortured, and killed. “I was asking ‘why,’ since he wanted only the good of the poor. I began to question the love of God for me. I told God: ‘You could have just taken me as I had offered my life to You, but my brother was barely twenty two and had a whole future in front of him.’ I doubted His love. In order to avenge the death of my brother I even entertained the thought of going to the mountains and joining those who actively wanted to change society by violent means.”
That was Fr. Am’s mindset when he returned to his “job” after the burial. One day, a good friend in the ministry became psychologically sick and asked Fr. Am to take care of him. “My decision was clear: my brother’s life had been lost, and I didn’t want to lose a friend. For more than a week we were together in ‘hiding’ until he agreed to go to the hospital and receive the appropriate medication. Now it was my turn to rest.” Fr. Am returned to his office only to realize that, because of his sudden disappearance, he had been replaced.
Where to go now? Fr. Am decided to go on a retreat at a Franciscan sisters’ hermitage in Tagaytay, but they kindly suggested that he go instead to the Focolare’s newly established Priests’ School for Asia. Some diocesan priests had just started to live together to make a concrete experience of the love of God and neighbor. They did the most basic things like cooking, cleaning, marketing, etc. with the same love as they celebrated the mass. Fr. Am was immediately attracted by this life: “Everything they did had the same value: doing it all as the will of God. I realized that they had chosen God, not the priesthood, as the center of their lives. For me this was something new, for I had made priesthood the center of my life. I had always followed my own poor will and not God’s...”
In that atmosphere of reciprocal love, Fr. Am realized that Jesus had been quite specific about the will of the Father: “Love God with all your heart… and your neighbor as yourself.” And love of neighbor included one’s enemies… “My enemies at that time were my brother’s killers. If I believed in God’s love by loving my neighbors, I had to love them too.” Thus he decided to go to the military camp of the leader of the group who had captured his brother. “He seemed to be embarrassed when he saw me and tried to justify many things. I was angry at first, for murder can never be justified. Yet I was there not to deal with my brother’s murder, but to love my enemies. Later I shook his hand to show concretely my love and forgiveness. I left that camp with a joy in heart that I had never experienced before. I believe it was the joy that God gives to those who do what He wants.”
As Fr. Am resolved to be a good Christian even before being a good priest, even his work now afforded him many opportunities to do everything out of love. He came to understand the meaning of suffering. “It was my participation in the suffering of Jesus, the Priest, on the cross, especially when He cried, ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’ I felt that in those days, weeks, and months of pain, I had come to resemble Him more. It was a liberating moment for me.”
Then his 29-year-old sister was struck by cancer, and before she went into coma, her last breath was spent embracing Fr. Am. “I had not realized that her lungs had stopped functioning and in fact they immediately placed her on a respirator. Those were terrible nights, but it was there that I offered my life to Jesus Forsaken. Till now, I keep renewing that choice which, I believe, is a gift from my sister, just as the death of my only brother had given me the light to come to know God’s love.
In 1989, three years after being in the seminary as spiritual director and working with the youth of the diocese, Fr. Am’s enthusiasm was gone. Work had taken its toll. Suddenly Fr. Am felt weak, and the awareness of his being a bad priest became strong. He seemed to be looking for something more, a deeper union with God. “This time, I believe through the intercession of Mary, I received a scholarship in Rome.” He took the opportunity to go deeper in the communitarian spirituality of the Focolare. For two years, he lived together with other priests who were members of the Focolare also studying in Rome. “To live communion with other priests became like the air in my lungs, without which I cannot exist.” Coming back to the Philippines, he always looked forward to his meeting with other priests and focolarinos in Cebu, while at the same time teaching in a Regional Seminary in Iloilo.
Then two years ago Fr. Am was asked to help in the Priests’ School in Tagaytay. With the permission of his bishop, he immediately said yes. “Now, twenty years after my brother’s death, and with the death of my sister, I believe more in the Risen Lord, not only in the after life, but also in His presence here and now as a constitutive element of the Church, if mutual love is concretely lived. Yes, there have been deaths in my family, but the reality of the resurrection is stronger, not only in the sense of a pious faith, but also as a lifestyle, a culture. Recently, my brother’s name was placed in the roster of heroes and martyrs in Manila’s ‘Bantayog ng mga Bayani.’ They have honored him as one of the martyrs of the Marcos regime.”
During his speech for that occasion, Fr. Am said: “The death of my brother [and your loved ones,] is not a defeat of justice, rather, it is the affirmation of human freedom. For me personally, (since he was killed on a Good Friday), it’s also an icon and sign of the love of God for me and humanity. God also offered His only Son to be killed as a martyr because He wishes men to be free to love Him and their neighbors.”
Today a priest for almost 25 years, Fr. Am often likes to share something that happened in his seminary years: “Even if as a child we had always prayed, it was in the seminary that I truly began to pray the Rosary sincerely. One day a seminarian handed me a chocolate which I ate gratefully, only to hear him saying, after I had consumed it, that there were addictive elements in that chocolate bar which would make me a drug addict. In my ignorance, I prayed to Mary during our daily rosary not to make me an addict and to free me from the toxic and addictive substances in that chocolate. Of course, I later realized that it was not true and therefore I did not become an addict, but instead I became “addicted” to praying the holy rosary. I think it is Mary who has shown me the way to her Son and still continues to do so.”
New City
(http://www.newcityph.com/archive/0701/exper.htm)
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