Looks like for the first time in two years, we shall have an Easter today with happy thoughts and smiling faces. Hallelujah!
Rising from the dead exemplifies there is resurrection and applies to all in these modern times, even those who are down but not out.
We all mean well, yet despite the best of intentions, we get crap from people who simply refuse to understand.
In life, it comes like summer rain and brings feelings of rejection, despair, frustration, and emptiness. That must how Christ felt when nailed on the cross between two criminals. He cried out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” It plays like a true to life screenplay but now more than ever, we are all alive and that is more than enough reason to celebrate. May hope and happiness fill our homes today.
As expected with the restrictions liberalized, the supposedly sacred Holy Week of 2022 was not. Hotels, transient houses, bus companies, and local traders had a well-deserved heyday. For two years, people were on home quarantine, me trying very hard to act to look busy doing nothing. The good news is that it gave us moments to reflect on life and its trials and tribulations.
My LSS Jesus Christ Superstar song was “Always hoped that I’d be an apostle… knew that I could make it if I tried… then when we retire, we can write the gospel… so they’ll still talk about us when we die!”
I never became an apostle and neither wrote the Bible. To her credit, my mama Mely, the conservative public school teacher that she was, tried to inculcate into my naughty hard head the significance of Christ’s death, Way of the Cross, Holy Thursday’s washing of the Apostle’s feet, Good Friday processions, Black Saturday vigil, and of course Jesus Christ’s rebirth.
I remember riding in the Oldsmobile driven by papa Art for the Visita Iglesia (no need for QR codes then) starting of course at Trancoville where Don Bosco Church stood.
Attempting at self-recollection again, I have come to realize that like others, we all faced our own kind of life crisis and that Jesus Christ had no monopoly of the sorrows that He went through. Proclaiming Himself the Son of God, He built a strong foundation for His followers, betrayed by His own people, He gave up His life for all of us.
I could say “me too” but that would be blasphemy. I always did what I had to do, the best I knew how. I always believed that if I was not me, everything else was going to be shaky. The chutzpah for myself went pfffft in just one sweep of the Covid-19 magic wand.
If I were Hebrew and Yiddish, people would have been entertained by my audacity. The fall was hard and suddenly, the “nothing or no one can stop me” cosmic attitude became a mere nagging thought.
I and a lot of you now know that real strength is not found in grand displays of richness, power or fame, but in a person’s indomitable commitment to do good, lead and serve his fellowmen from the heart, preferably starting this Easter.
I now realize to walk the talk. As long as there are people who believe in me, we shall have more courage to be selfless and most compassionate in the face of fear and uncertainty.
My good chutzpah remains, “What you see is what you get.” Standing up for what one believes in continues to be a good measure, but now there will be a time and a place when one has to yield his principled stance for the greater good.
Then I can do a Cuban “Fidel Castro” or “Che Guevarra” and proclaim, “La historia me absolvera! (History will absolve me).”
This is the meaning of Easter – hope is indeed eternal.
Sigh.
April 27, 2024
