Tuesday, April 06, 2004

The First Day



You can smell it, almost: the anticipation in the air for the holy days. I write this on a Tuesday, on the last day for living it up till the mandated piety of the next few days comes and makes Christian believers of all of us. Some have already begun by practicing some kind of restraint on pleasures. Like Coke, or chocolate. My friend Anita is saying she makes the Holy Week as an excuse to go on a diet. “The perfect way to prepare for the bikini summer,” she grins. I shush her misplaced reasons, but we both laugh. Some have already begun by extolling, too, the virtues of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, crying out how this movie has “absolutely” changed their lives. “It shows, in graphic detail, the pain Jesus had to go through to save the world!” one friend gushes.



I merely raise an eyebrow. I want to be cynical just to prove a point.



But, yes, of course, I know the drill, and my faith. I know.



“Jim Caviezel is hot,” someone texts from Australia.



I tell my texter Jim Caviezel got struck by lightning while making the movie. I ask her: “Answer this: was that a divine message of sorts?” She meanders, but we both agree: Jim Caviezel is hot.



There is almost a kind of panic everywhere. At the nearest video store, more than the usual number of people are lining up to bring home films the way squirrels, and what-not, hoard food for the coming winter. I swear, as well, that my mother is stocking up on groceries. “What’s going to happen, Marms?” I ask her. “Is the world coming to an end?” She gives me that look, and shrugs: “Who knows? I’m just preparing for anything, a contingency, just in case everything in the city will be closed.”



I don’t believe her, of course. Dumagueteños of late have shown an interesting tendency to celebrate Holy Week in more secular ways. Like taking to nearby resorts and calling it a Black Saturday well spent. Only the coming Friday, it would seem, would be the true showcase of descending quiet. The rest of the Holy Week will be business as usual.



I’ve always liked Holy Week. It is like the Official Start of Summer, the way Memorial Day is for Americans, I guess. The enjoyment is mostly secular, you must forgive me—the way it adds quiet to a life in whirlpool, for example, or the way its caloric days make me fall in love with someone, like a clock, five years running. The universe runs that way, I guess. Right on some cosmic schedule. And yet it is also a way of reminding me of what is important—and we all do need some reminding: our forgotten faiths. Or reflections, as well, on how piety can be dangerous, taken to the extreme.


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS