Who Am I and What Really Matters in Life?

With the passing away of Miriam Defensor Santiago at the age of 71 due to lung cancer, we lost a brilliant senator with a many-colored personality since Miriam is called the Iron Lady in Asia, yet she was also a weaver of jokes and puns that entertained many Filipinos, especially the youth. Miriam lived a life of professional and academic excellence. In 1988, she received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, with a citation “for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency.”

The records of the Commission on Audit show that her “pork barrel,” also known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF, was never marred by any kickback, unlike those of her colleagues in Congress. Sen. Santiago gave her PDAF to: the University of the Philippines system, Philippine General Hospital, and local government units. Many may not have been aware that Miriam hated and fought government corruption and never received kickbacks from her pork barrel fund or cash gifts from the senate funds.

Her death reminds us once more of the temporariness of our lives on earth, and we all actually have accepted, especially those who are in their middle age years or in the twilight of their lives, that life on earth is really but a temporary sojourn, that we will all die, that death will come to us and we will have to leave everything behind in this world.

The writer of the Christian song “Who am I?” (Mark Hall of Casting Crowns) vividly pictures our ephemeral life on earth and our finite nature compared to the sovereignty and glory of God. He asks who is he that God cares to know his name and to feel his hurt in the following words:

Who am I, that the Lord of all the earth

Would care to know my name,

Would care to feel my hurt?

Who am I, that the Bright and Morning Star

Would choose to light the way

For my ever wandering heart?

Then the songwriter answers his own question on who he is: he is an ephemeral, mortal, finite being just like a flower that quickly fades and a vapor in the wind but that he belongs to this Bright and Morning Star which is one of the names of  Jesus Christ:

I am a flower quickly fading

Here today and gone tomorrow

A wave tossed in the ocean

A vapor in the wind

Still You hear me when I’m calling

Lord, You catch me when I’m falling

And You’ve told me who I am

I am Yours, I am Yours

We are nothing but finite and fragile beings but if we find God and give ourselves to Him, we become special because we will be God’s own, God’s beloved, and in the Christian sense, this means we will be, if we receive Christ into our hears as our Lord and Savior, Christ’s redeemed, His Bride, His Church, His flock, His sheep, His beloved ones, and His lovers, and followers.

Going back to Miriam Defensor Santiago, I read an article about her published a year ago in Rappler.com. The title of the article is “Miriam on God, hell, and the middle finger” by Ayee Macaraig. In it, she is described as the favorite speaker of young audiences in forums and commencement exercises. In one such commencement exercise, she read from her Philosophy of Religion book encouraging future doctors from UP in 2012 to “find inspiration in our Third World circumstances” and stressed “happiness in serving others.” She quoted from her own book about life as “a journey to the absolute truth” and not “a race among the vain”:

Life is not a race among the vain. Vanity merely yields the prize of material riches, which endangers the spiritual outlook. Life is a journey to the absolute truth, in the course of which we develop the ability to communicate with God.

To paraphrase Miriam’s words, life is a journey to God, the absolute truth, and we grow in our ability to communicate with God during this journey. It is not a race to gain more and more popularity and wealth but a journey towards finding our happiness in serving others. This she said even as she strove for excellence in every endeavor of her life and career, but the best thing is that she upheld honesty and strove for incorruptibility in her government service.

For Christians, what really matters is not who we are and what we’ve done but who Christ is and what Christ has done for us as the song “Who am I?” goes to say:

Not because of who I am

But because of what You’ve done

Not because of what I’ve done

But because of who You are.

Miriam has run her race. I assume that she must have made her peace with God on her death bed as she said, “Life is a journey to the absolute truth,” and she had asked for prayers when she was diagnosed as having stage 4 lung cancer, though at one time she questioned God’s ways in the presence of so much suffering and evil in the world.

For us who are still on our journey through life, let us keep on running the race and looking unto our goal: union with God, service to others, and finding our happiness in such. For Christians, this means looking unto Jesus constantly, for He is the author and perfecter of our faith.