[Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Good Friday

Wed Mar 27 16:12:04 PDT 2013

FYI

j'aime la vie

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago at saipantribune.com>; editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 7:03 am
Subject: OpEd Good Friday

GOOD FRIDAY

It’s a bleak Holy Weekin Dong Bei.  If the Siberian winds arenot howling like midnight on a New England Halloween, the skies are overcastthat hardly a ray of sunlight gets through while the shadow of Batman nooks onmidday’s corner.  

We are not alone.   London was a frozen mush early on in theweek, and the Kremlin made it to the tundra without moving an inch.  The freeze is expected to lash out throughAmerica’s northeast from Bar Harbor to the Chesapeake Bay.

We had a respite of asun last Sunday.  Young men braved theelements and bounced the ball on twenty hoops in the courtyard.  I was not yet ready to let go of mitt, muff,and muffler.  The dudes dribbled on nearly bared chests in the still frozen air.  My instincts paid off.  Within two hours Sunday afternoon, while atthe street market, what started as flakes meandering down like pillow puffsturned quickly into a snowstorm.  

North of us in theHarbin Winter Festival, the ice sculptures are still intact and its tourist tradeis doing brisk business as the “Moscow of the East” lives off intricateremnants of its Byzantine past, its central commercial district with itscobblestones reminiscent of horse drawn carriages of bygone days, convertedinto pedestrian traffic, leaving an old world feel to the revelers ofoverflowing malt brew on brightly lit ice lanterns.

The solemnity of theChristian Holy Week is, however, hardly evident in post-1949 China of secularhumanism, in spite of the cultural resurgence of its three major philosophies –Confucianism (ru), Buddhism (shi), and Taoism (dao).  Artifacts and sacredsites have taken in of late considerable market values.  The Chinese vaunted aptitude for mathematicshas ¥uan coloration.

Today, ours is a quietudeof the soul as years of conditioning in Christian dramaturgy revives images ofHosanna’s palm fronds to early sunrise religious services singing hymns of joyon the triumph of the empty tomb. Protestants, inured to the automatic happy ending of Hollywood celluloidin the era of Ike, tend to skip the high point of this weeks paradoxicallytitled “Good Friday”.

Penitent souls andflagellating bodies trek to the top of Mt. Tapuchao this day, as some barren fieldin Guagua, Pampanga grossly reenact the Roman crucifixion so vividly portrayedin Mel Gibson’s overwrought movie, the Passionof the Christ, turned into a community spectacle in Bavaria’s Oberammergauas it relives every decade since the 1600s the stations of the cross.

In Christiandramaturgy, the week’s high point is the innocent Jesus willfully allowing thesword and the lance to let him hang, “for the sins of the many” (in theguilt-ridden language of Paul).  TheRoman Catholic Church drapes its altar black at 3 pm on Friday, and calls theday “Good”.  Rational minds of theReformation raise an eyebrow having forsaken the practice of Abraham’swillingness to sacrifice his son as barbaric, with cynics seeing the practiceno different from fathers sending their sons to war.  Still, the modern world has also condemnedthe virtue of martyrdom as a mere justification of the Empire oppressing theoutcast, the rebel, and the marginalized.

But the English“Good”, of the same etymology as the word “G-O-D”, derivative of the Teuton’s“Gott”, is used in the King James translation of the Biblical YHWH, (literallymeans, self-evident) the highest good, summumbonum of Aquinas and Kant.

Cut to the chase.  Good Friday is an affirmation that life isgood just the way it is, woof, warts and all. In today’s language, it is a mishmash of cause, chance, and choice.  The religious seeks cause in a Supreme deity.  The dice-thrower lights incense for goodfortune, fate and destiny.  The democratizedhuman looks at the power of choice.  Thediversity and the many combinations of the three mark the current state of ourhumanity.

Europe, preoccupiedwith Time, sought clarity on one’s relationship to yesterday, today, andtomorrow.  It came up with yesterday asdone, irretrievable and finished.  It is“forgiven”.  Tomorrow is open.  One needs only to decide.  Today is in the pulse of “amazing grace”,unconditionally accepted.  Its totalitycan be lifted high, like the ostia andthe vino, and celebrated.  The Christian’s common meal of the Upper Roominvokes: “this is my body, … this is my blood, that is given for you”.  It constitutes the Christian essence of whathas since become the Eucharist. 

East Asia is not aspreoccupied with Time as it is with Space. The taiji of ancient China hasthe yin-yang in the middle surroundedby 8 trigrams covering all points of the compass.  The important words are geographical inmeaning, thus, bei = north and jing = city, gives us Beijing.  But there is a fifth cardinal point to thefamiliar east, west, north, and south designation.  The fifth direction is the wu fang, the Center.  It is no accident that Chinese callthemselves Zhongguoren, the people ofthe middle realm!

Silence at thetranquil center is the Good Friday of East Asian spirituality.  The dynamic stillness in the middle of the taiji is the loci of profound humanitysince discovered in the interfaith exchange of the East and the West.  The blackout of Christendom’s Good Fridayechoes in the sounds of silence of meditation and contemplation.

My humanness this dayis bowed.

 j'aime la vie

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

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