[Oe List ...] Ash Wednesday

[John Cock]

Thanks, Jaime.

 

John

 

  _____  

From: oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net
[mailto:oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Jaime R Vergara
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 3:21 PM
To: oe at lists.wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] Ash Wednesday

 

The following is in today's ST opinion page. 

 

Ash Wednesday

 

Many of our friends and colleagues among the faithful in Christendom today
shall be sporting a symbol of the cross on their foreheads made with ashes.
The Torah line was an objective statement to Remember that thou art dust,
and to dust thou shalt return in the familiar King James rendition.
Christian Churches then added the admonition to Turn away from sin and be
faithful to the Gospel.

 

It is Ash Wednesday in the Christian liturgy, forty-six days before Easter,
starting a forty-day fast culminating on Palm Sunday morning that remembers
the triumphal entry into Jerusalem during Holy Week.  The palm fronds to
welcome the donkey-riding messiah are kept and burnt into ashes to be used
for the next Ash Wednesday to mark the crosses on the faithful's foreheads,
they who understand the life journey from baptism, confirmation, covenant,
crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

 

Fast, to the unfamiliar, is a period of reflection, meditation,
contemplation, (prayer in Christian liturgy) understood by my secular
friends as moments of profound silence, of detachment and distancing from
the immediate, an assumption of the cloak of transcendence in perspective,
and intense quiet engagement of full consciousness, the elan of the immanent
human spirit that clears the cobwebs of the soul!

 

We may want to skip the poetry, but Saipan is abuzz with the House's
impeachment proceedings.  We are reminded of T. S. Elliot's much-quoted
Hollow Men that begins:

 

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 

Devoid of moralism, we are in accord with the acts of the Legislature.  The
mandate of voters in the last election was instructive, and Uncle Ben did
look like a stuffed man (my judgment) but there is a feel of shallowness
about his indictment from men and women of a sector that has shown itself
through the years to be too self-serving to merit serious consideration.

 

The Senate hearing might just end with our paraphrased T.S. Elliott:

 

This is the way the proceedings end

Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

We tend to be sympathetic to Benigno Aquino, not only for his critical place
in the Chamoru/Carolinian divide, but also personally for his cervical
stenosis since we also suffer from cervical spondylosis!  Not to forget the
wisdom of marrying Pinay Josie!  We are, however, on record of being on the
other end of thepolitical spectrum.  T.S. Elliot, after he joined the
Anglican Church, penned his Ash Wednesday poemending:

 

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessed face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice.

 

It is, perhaps, appropriate that this hiatus from productive legislation is
happening in the season of Lent.  The Legislature and the CNMI are busy
constructing something upon which to rejoice!

 

Rejoice is a Shrove/Fat Tuesday state of being, the day before Ash Wednesday
to be picked up again on Palm Sunday.  The Mardigras in New Orleans and the
Carnival in Rio are bangs before the whimper!  Our rejoicing this week came
from the Vatican. 

 

Pope Benedict XVI had not been one of our favorite Pontiffs.  Erstwhile
Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, longtime Prefect of the Sacred
Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (1981-2005) before his election to
the papacy, in our Methodist and reformation view, had been a reactionary
cleric who negated Vatican II advances.  But he redeems himself in our eyes
in acknowledging his inability to function to meet the demands of his office
by virtue of health and age, and decided to do something about it.  He
resigned effective the end of the month.  We rejoice.

 

No longer a practicing communicant even in universal Christendom, with a
foot long ago in the scientific, urban, and secular world of eco-democracy,
I have no claim on relevance nor integrity to speak for or even within the
Christian communion, though we were once ordained in its priesthood.
However, the universality of its gospel, neither Jew nor gentile, allows us
in freedom and responsibility to engage in the continuing conversation over
the efficacy of its powerful symbols like Ash Wednesday.

 

>From dust we came and to dust we shall return, indeed!  S/he who is without
sin cast the first stone.

 

Mt. Carmel High School's distinguished alumnus and alleged Catholic faithful
Ben Fitial might consider the discourse in this season of Lent, might heed
the season's dramaturgical pronouncement, and act accordingly.

 

 

j'aime la vie 

 

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all,
Celebrate!

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