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