Jaime, you can be
quite poetic and intellectually savvy, at the same time! Thanks.
Del
Del Hunter Morrill
3217 North Mason Avenue
Tacoma WA 98407-5419
H: (253) 752-1506; W:
(253) 383-5757
Web
site: www. hypnocenter.com
The cave you fear
to enter holds the treasure you seek. (Joseph Campbell)
From:
oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Jaime R Vergara
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013
4:12 PM
To: oe@wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd
Good Friday
FYI
j'aime la vie
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In
all, Celebrate!
-----Original
Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara
<jrvergarajr2031@aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera
<jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago
<mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@saipantribune.com>
Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 7:03 am
Subject: OpEd Good Friday
GOOD FRIDAY
It’s a bleak Holy Week in Dong Bei.
If the Siberian winds are not howling like midnight on a New England Halloween,
the skies are overcast that hardly a ray of sunlight gets through while the
shadow of Batman nooks on midday’s corner.
We are not alone. London was a
frozen mush early on in the week, and the Kremlin made it to the tundra without
moving an inch. The freeze is expected to lash out through America’s
northeast from Bar Harbor to the Chesapeake Bay.
We had a respite of a sun last
Sunday. Young men braved the elements 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 at the street market, what started as flakes meandering down
like pillow puffs turned quickly into a snowstorm.
North of us in the Harbin Winter Festival,
the ice sculptures are still intact and its tourist trade is doing brisk
business as the “Moscow of the East” lives off intricate remnants of its
Byzantine past, its central commercial district with its cobblestones
reminiscent of horse drawn carriages of bygone days, converted into pedestrian
traffic, leaving an old world feel to the revelers of overflowing malt brew on
brightly lit ice lanterns.
The solemnity of the Christian Holy Week
is, however, hardly evident in post-1949 China of secular humanism, in spite of
the cultural resurgence of its three major philosophies – Confucianism (ru), Buddhism (shi), and Taoism (dao). Artifacts
and sacred sites have taken in of late considerable market values. The
Chinese vaunted aptitude for mathematics has ¥uan coloration.
Today, ours is a quietude of the soul as
years of conditioning in Christian dramaturgy revives images of Hosanna’s palm
fronds to early sunrise religious services singing hymns of joy on the triumph
of the empty tomb. Protestants, inured to the automatic happy ending of
Hollywood celluloid in the era of Ike, tend to skip the high point of this
weeks paradoxically titled “Good Friday”.
Penitent souls and flagellating bodies trek to the top of Mt. Tapuchao
this day, as some barren field in Guagua, Pampanga grossly reenact the Roman
crucifixion so vividly portrayed in Mel Gibson’s overwrought movie, the Passion of the Christ, turned into a
community spectacle in Bavaria’s Oberammergau as it relives every decade since
the 1600s the stations of the cross.
In Christian dramaturgy, the week’s high
point is the innocent Jesus willfully allowing the sword and the lance to let
him hang, “for the sins of the many” (in the guilt-ridden language of
Paul). The Roman Catholic Church drapes its altar black at 3 pm on
Friday, and calls the day “Good”. Rational minds of the Reformation raise
an eyebrow having forsaken the practice of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice
his son as barbaric, with cynics seeing the practice no different from fathers
sending their sons to war. Still, the modern world has also condemned the
virtue of martyrdom as a mere justification of the Empire oppressing the
outcast, 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, (literally means,
self-evident) the highest good, summum bonum
of Aquinas and Kant.
Cut to the chase. Good Friday is an
affirmation that life is good 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 good fortune, fate and destiny. The democratized human looks at the
power of choice. The diversity and the many combinations of the three
mark the current state of our humanity.
Europe, preoccupied with Time, sought
clarity on one’s relationship to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It came
up with yesterday as done, 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
totality can be lifted high, like the ostia and
the vino, and celebrated.
The Christian’s common meal of the Upper Room invokes: “this is my body, … this
is my blood, that is given for you”. It constitutes the Christian essence
of what has since become the Eucharist.
East Asia is not as preoccupied with Time
as it is with Space. The taiji of
ancient China has the yin-yang in
the middle surrounded by 8 trigrams covering all points of the compass.
The important words are geographical in meaning, thus, bei = north and jing = city, gives us Beijing. But there is a fifth
cardinal point to the familiar east, west, north, and south designation.
The fifth direction is the wu fang, the
Center. It is no accident that Chinese call themselves Zhongguoren, the people of the middle
realm!
Silence at the tranquil center is the Good
Friday of East Asian spirituality. The dynamic stillness in the middle of
the taiji is the loci of profound
humanity since discovered in the interfaith exchange of the East and the
West. The blackout of Christendom’s Good Friday echoes in the sounds of
silence of meditation and contemplation.
My humanness this day is bowed.
j'aime la vie
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today,
participate. In all, Celebrate!