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Manila Bulletin devider Opinion devider After standstill

After standstill

Published Apr 1, 2024 11:46 pm

MEDIUM RARE

Jullie Y. Daza

After the standstill of Holy Week, it took a while for the secular world to get back on its feet and revive the noise, the sounds of the city.

On Saturday, aka Black Saturday, ChowKing could not serve halo-halo for lack of ice. Cinnabon   ran out of coffee but not of strawberry juice. Mama Lou apologized for the absence of their Mama Lou pizza special. Army Navy had no stock of their trademark taco soup and clam chowder. For these branded businesses and their clients, Holy Week would end on Easter Sunday and no sooner.

How two days, especially sacred ones called Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, can upend expectations! But then we are just about the only people on this side of the world who pause from sensual pleasures during the Holy Week as a means of reiterating our faith in the Christ who paid for our sins. I recall, and almost guiltily, how I spent one Holy Week in Hong Kong with my favorite cousin dining on roast goose and watching an “objectionable” movie starring a seductive French actress.

Luckily the good nuns of my alma mater never found out! But if by chance they did, I would’ve repeated to them the story told by Sister St. Joseph of the Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception (M.I.C.), as I repeat it now. The story goes that there once lived a man who was a laggard, a good-for-nothing who was drunk most of the time and could not hold down a job. But every night on his way home he would pick a flower by the wayside and offer it to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose image stood at a roadside shrine. The man’s gesture was simple but heartfelt, Sister said, and Jesus was pleased because it was a simple man’s way of honoring the Mother of God.

Different people pray differently, just as not all churches are alike. Don’t you love being inside a big church, such as a cathedral, especially an empty one, where you feel the majesty of God’s presence and the poverty of the words containing your prayer? Then again, why does praying in a small chapel make God’s presence more intimate? What is hard to do is praying inside a crowded church. 

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