Thanks, Jaime.
John
From:
oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Jaime R Vergara
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 3:21
PM
To: oe@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.
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
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
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
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.
j'aime la vie
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today,
participate. In all, Celebrate!