ShareThis
by Arnold De Villa
April 4, 2011
We followed them with awe – men garbed like Jesus, carrying a cross beam, walking down the road with an entourage of curious folks, flogged with a make shift whip. Faithful hordes form long queues in churches, praying rosaries, novenas, and the Way of the Cross. It was an environment marked with a sullen ambience, the season of spring in this new place, a traditional bookmark among Christians, an esoteric rite among the non-believers.
From Maundy Monday through Resurrection Sunday, I recall the heaviness of an atmosphere that reminded us of death and the burden of sins. I remember that on a Holy Thursday we had to visit seven Churches and pray three prayers in each church. On a Good Friday, the only shows to entertain us were sermons and homilies of the “Last Words”. On a Saturday night, we attended the Easter Vigil and struggled to keep our childhood vigilance. But on an Easter Sunday, there was nothing much I can recall except for the fact that we were no longer required to keep our repressed silence. Normal television shows were resumed. Loud biblical incantations from our neighbor’s porch were muted. Long processions were disassembled. We passed through the gravitas of death and resumed a normal life. That was Semana Santa – the Holy Week, the days when hip hop was not yet invented. We had the Pabasa instead.
Moving forward, welcome to the land of Hallmark Cards, the Easter Bunny, colored candies and Easter Eggs! Welcome to the Sunday brunch, the Egg hunt, and the festive spirit. The cold frigid dingy winds of winter will soon relinquish its post for the bright gaiety of spring. Clocks have sprung forward, days will be longer, bunnies and squirrels will once more roam around our yards. Ah, the warmth we missed which we have patiently waited for will finally arrive. Trees will regain their verdant foliage, grass will begin to grow.
Despite all these preppy feeling of spring, we can’t help but recall the soggy season of rain back home. In Manila, where I grew up, it seems that the highlight of this season is on death. The masks of pain and suffering are ubiquitously posted like tourist candies. It is as if hope was a faint reality designed never to meet its epiphany. It is as if the whole world deserved to be crucified, as if Christ was forever tucked on the gory of the nails and the thorns of men’s sins.
In contrast, here in America, it is apparent that the vortex is on the abundance of a touchy and warm sensation, a cozy experience of a giddy joy, an emphasis on a triumphant jubilation. Forget about the incantations. Let’s party and have fun! Let the torments of pain be done and over with. Christ will rise again.
Meanwhile, as pilgrims of an accidental Diaspora, Filipino Americans are witnesses to the distinct realities that sometimes catch us unaware and off guard. We look past as we live in. In between we get trapped in the daily routine of the American life style: work and home, home and work. Until we feel the shock of our internal fragments and the dichotomies of cultural ambiguities, we will tend to swing like a pendulum between our roots and our current anchor. We will tend to compare between what was and what is. We will long for yet we would want to keep.
I am convinced that we are a fun loving people, celebrants of life, and participants in the triumphs of the Resurrection. But deep within the recesses of our beleaguered past, the wounds of our defeat, historical blunders seem to taunt us to a mockery of suffering and pain. The pain it brings becomes an unspoken paradigm of vicious patterns from which we are still struggling to be set free. The not so beneficial residues of Caesaro-papism seem to have dented the entirety of the Philippine system within its efforts of sovereignty and independence.
Until the seed is dried, dead and buried in the ground, it cannot grow as a tree – a tree whose arms give umbrage to birds, bees and other creatures of our earth. Our life is not a perpetual Good Friday. Our Motherland will pass through the heinous reality of the Crucifixion. Our pass over is at the stage of becoming. Our nation is on the verge of a true Easter.
Yet, will faith suffice? Will our Pabasa be enough to conquer the doldrums of darkness like seeds enslaved in the darkness of the under world? Will our Panata hold us up when we need it the most? Will our traditions provide us with that cohesive identity we so need to mark a difference in global history?
Resurrection Sunday is around the corner. It will be the season of life conquering death. In America, we have been blessed with so much opulence that some of us have succumbed to the vices of ingratitude. And then we forget. For a change, when your kids or your neighbors’ kids start searching for that hidden egg, have some time to hunt for the eggs of our past. Let us look for them like nuggets and recall the Semana Santa we once had when we were kids.
Our nostalgia is holy because it is a sanctifying force that separates assimilation from annihilation. Blending in does not mean melting in. The Lenten Season is not the same as Spring break. Although the latter is a moment of glee and an awakening from hibernation, the former is a reminder of our humanity and the divinity that purified its moral pathogens.
Yes, we followed those men who walked our narrow streets towards their crucifixion on a cross beam, as if it were the essence of a Catholic faith. We were kids back then and the spectacle of life attracted our attention. That spectacle brings us to the past and helps us anticipate for the future. The spectacle of a good feeling is what America shows us. Sometimes, that good feeling could be bad, especially when it does not allow the proper sensitivity to grow and nurture others. The thoughts of the past are holy because they help discriminate between folly and virtue, allow us to rewind the errors and motivate us to delete the possibility of an instant replay.