Choosing Love in the Aftermath
19 April 1981, Easter Sunday. A bomb explodes in San Pedro Cathedral, the heart Davao City. It takes five firetrucks to clean up the bloodied church, hoses roaring in full pressure. There are no clear records of how many were killed or injured.
26 December 1993. The same cathedral is bombed again. This time, three bombs inside the Church. Seven killed, 151 wounded, 32 seriously injured. I was three, happily lost in my Christmas holidays with my family. At the time, I was the youngest of my cousins and probably the loudest. The New York Times reports that “Christian Militants” bombed a mosque eight hours after the incident. For years I would remember the holidays as a joyful time to be with family, I would later realize that terror has always been lurking around.
11 September 2001. The Twin Towers in New York city is hit by two incoming commercial planes. Hundreds killed, thousands of lives changed. My mother was in Tennessee at the time, she was working as a physio, away from her family back in the Philippines. I was 11 at the time and I remember this day like it was yesterday because I feared for my mom. In my head though, I still thought was this kind of terror was far away.
16 May 2002. A bomb explodes in a room at the Evergreen Hotel, severely injuring American treasure hunter, Michael Terence Meiring. The explosives were reportedly his – and yet he is flown back to the United States by the FBI before local authorities can even question how explosives from his backpack were able to enter the country.
My aunt celebrates what would be her 40th birthday, give or take. She prepared some roast chicken, Filipino style spaghetti and a whole lot of beer for our uncles who loved a good old birthday party. We call her Mommy Barbs. All seven of me and my cousins used to try and fit ourselves in her old Beetle Volkswagen. It was pearly white, shined in the sun, and tended to announce itself when it arrived. A month earlier, a bomb went off in a town, just 150 km south of Davao killing 15 and injuring 55 others.
Mindanao is on high alert. To me, it still feels like background noise.
4 March 2003. Davao international airport is bombed killing 22 and injuring 155. Barely a month later, the Sasa Wharf, just a 10-minute drive from the airport, is also bombed at the gates. These are the first ones that I remember clearly.
It takes me thirteen years to realise how close terror and hate have always been – not somewhere else, not “over there,” but threaded into the same streets where we went to school, celebrated birthdays, and sang in church. I grew up with a shallow understanding of war, partly because the way these stories travelled was uneven: muted, censored, normalised. We were foolish enough to believe we were living in peace, when in fact we were living inside a cycle we did not know how to name.
14 December 2025. Bondi. Words escape us. A Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah by the water is attacked — two gunmen, father and son — claiming faith while enacting something we can only name as hatred.
2026
Only now, more widely, are we beginning to admit what terror feeds on: the moment a person becomes easy to dismiss, stereotype, or dehumanise. That is why it can not be ignored. Our response cannot be more hatred. We can no longer look away, this is at our doorstep now.
If hatred is cultivated – excused and normalised over time – then love must be chosen on purpose. Hope must be practiced. Peace must be found together. And in between those three is the hard, daily work of saying yes to love, hope and peace again and again.
That is where this program comes in.
Many of our featured works were written as responses to war – music that refuses to look away, and refuses to let despair have the final word. Rudolf Mauersberger’s Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How desolate lies the city), drawn from the Book of Lamentations, was composed in the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden: grief set to sound, offered back to a shattered world; Francis Poulenc’s Bleuet sets a poem written in the shadow of World War I, then reawakened as Europe fell into war again – tender, devastating, and painfully human; Hubert Parry’s There is an old belief comes from his Songs of Farewell, written during World War I as death reached even his own circle of students; and in 1999, Karl Jenkins wrote The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace – where “Now the guns have stopped” is taken from – as a reflection on “the most war-torn and destructive century in human history” – a plea that the next one might be different. So far, we are not really doing so well.
From Ashes, Light isn’t only a concert you sit through. It’s a story you witness.
The arc is deliberate: from brightness, to rupture, to lament. And then, not a denial of what happened, but a decision about what comes next.
We end in hope through Bernstein’s Make Our Garden Grow. A reminder that after devastation, we still choose what we plant, what we tend, and what we refuse to surrender.
This is real. If hatred is learned, then love can be chosen to bring hope and peace into being.
