Published December 16, 2005
Anchor Notebook
Maria Ida "Deng" Giguiento, a Catholic Relief Services project officer from the Cotabato Archdiocese in the Philippines, visited Anchorage last month to further the "global solidarity partnership" between her archdiocese and ours. Through Catholic Relief Services (the U.S. bishops’ international relief and development arm) she has worked for years with Christian, Muslim and indigenous people to restore peace to the Philippines and East Timor.
After speaking to a group in Anchorage about Muslim-Christian relations, a middle-aged Catholic man confided to her that he had only ever heard of Islam as a religion of hate, and he thanked her for dispelling that myth.
Hearing that made me remember my own visit to Deng’s homeland last year to witness the creation of the solidarity partnership. On the Philippine island of Mindanao, I met a priest, Oblate Father Roberto Layson, who had helped negotiate a "space for peace" — a miraculous oasis of villages that, during the height of war, got the opposing factions to pledge not fire a shot when passing through. Father Layson, who personally tracked down leaders in the conflict to craft the physical peace spaces, explained that the concept really begins in the individual. As long as there is that war in the hearts and minds of the people, farmlands can once again become battlegrounds, he said.
Space for peace, then, is not just an absence of war but a constant cultivation of reconciliation.
Deng Giguiento and Father Layson are working to create peace every day in Mindanao, and elsewhere. When Deng told her Anchorage audience about peace-loving Muslims in Mindanao, about how Muslims appreciative of her work thank her for being "a good Christian," she created a different kind of space for peace within at least one of her listeners. Now that man has a new awareness and a new space inside where the concept of peace can survive.
Hopefully, our global solidarity partnership will be a powerful way for us to learn about our one human family and help us heed the call of our faith to harbor peaceful hearts.
— Kelly DuFort