It will take some time, if ever, for the full story on the kidnapping of ABS-CBN's Ces Drilon and her cameramen to emerge. There are few rules for handling often bobby-trapped media coverage. "We were betrayed", Ms Drilon says.

ABS-CBN should tell us how. That can help people avoid a rerun of the Drilon trauma. It will also enable the press to re-examine today's hazy guidelines.

This incident, however, should not spur Muslim-bashing. The Abu Sayafs are thugs who claim, by the way, they are Muslims. By the same token, thieves in the broadband scandal or Jose Velarde theft assert, as an afterthought, they're Christians.

Both faiths, in fact, spurn lip service used to smudge crime. During the Drilon kidnapping, Muslim and Catholic leaders met in Rome for the 14th meeting of the Islamic-Catholic Liaison Committee. "Christians and Muslims alike believe it is their duty to show compassion toward every human being, specially the needy and the weak given that God is compassionate", their joint statement declared..

The co-chairmen were: Prof. Hamid bin Ahmad Al-Rifaie, president of the International Islamic Forum for Dialogue from Saudi Arabia and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. They stressed that religions, "if authentically practiced, effectively contribute in promoting brotherhood and harmony in the human family."

Perhaps, the most striking proof of "authentic practice, is not in the ABS-CBN staff members hostage incident. . Rather, look at Muslim-Christian tensions in Algeria of the early 1990s. . Extremists then warned. all foreigners to leave, including Trappist monks.

Father Christian, their abbot, wrote out a "last testament", to be opened if they were murdered, He was killed with six other monks. Here are excerpts: .

"If it should happen one day - and it could be today - that I become a victim of the terrorism, I would like my community, my church and my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. ...

"I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of lucidity. (This ) would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive, with all my heart, the one who would strike me down.

"I could not desire such a death. It seems important to state this. How I could rejoice if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder. ...

"I am aware of the caricatures of Islam, which a certain Islamism encourages. It is too easy to salve one's conscience by identifying this religious way [Islam] with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists.

"My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naive, or idealistic: `Let him tell us now what he thinks of Islam.'

But ... this is what I shall be able to do, if God wills - to immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them. For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God."

'As I watch the news each day, read the newspapers, and listen to friends share about the situation in the world, I find few words that challenge me as deeply as these".

What this courageous Abbott calls us to is what's deepest inside Christianity and all authentic religion, namely, a solidarity with all others, that's based upon a common God and a common humanity, Fr. Ron Rolheiser notes. This fact trivializes every other difference. "We are brothers and sisters, all of us, Muslims and Christians, and everyone else, under one gaze of love from God.".

That's not easy to see, nor accept. Daily, we hate, imprison, torture, and kill each other in the name of God and our values. Father Christian invites us instead to : live out of the Gospel, not out of our feelings. What, in essence, does that mean?, asks Fr. Rolheiser. One day, Jesus was "walking along the borders of Samaria, when he met a woman." This is more than mere geography and a simple conversation. "A border is a boundary, the edges of something foreign," he writes. Samaria was a different ethnicity and a different religion, and the woman a different gender.

In essence, the Gospels are saying: "Jesus was walking along the edges of ethnicity, religion, and gender, as then known and accepted. Nowhere is there a more succinct description of where the Christian churches today, all of them, stand. "We are standing on the borders of ethnicity, religiosity, and gender, as we once knew these, particularly as these pertain to Islam".

And to what do does this call us to?

"Precisely to what Abbott Christian lived and articulated: to stay in the relationship, not to caricaturize, not to misunderstand, not to let what's worst in each other eclipse what's best in each other," he adds.

All must trust in a common God, to die in love if necessary, and especially to not forget, ever, that we are brothers and sisters, given equal life by a common Father, as the 14th meeting Islamic-Catholic Liaison Committee reminded all.

"This is not a dangerous flight into idealism, a child's naivete. It's also astutely political, a brutal realism. Until we and Islam embrace as brothers and sisters, there can be no peace". And no political or military power can provide us with security, as a "betrayed" Ces Drilon and her team belatedly discovered.

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)