Remembrance of Lents past

I don’t think of myself as a particularly religious person—I have issues with Church doctrine that will take another column to sort out—but I look forward to the Lenten season not only for the break from work that it brings, but also as a time for some quiet introspection, a reconnection with a time and spirit past if not lost, with a boy’s unquestioning faith. Many decades ago, around this time of year, you knew Holy Week was here because of a general if not total shift in the mood of things. First of all you sensed it on the movie page, on the radio, and on what passed for TV in all its black-and-white glory. Happy movies like “The Sound of Music” and happy music like the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” vanished all of a sudden, to be replaced by somber perennials such as “The Ten Commandments” and Barber’s Adagio. On Good Friday and Black Saturday, there was nothing at all—just a deep, penetrating, enshrouding silence, relieved only by the caterwauling of a pabasa somewhere in the neighborhood. I took part in those pabasas, in our corner of Pasig. I was, after all, a good Catholic boy who knew all the Latin hymns by heart and who went to Mass twice a week, and who proudly belonged to the local Legion of Mary, Praesidium Virgin Most Powerful. There were worse ways to spend Lent than to sing verses of Christ’s Passion, with occasional breaks for tepid cups of coffee or macaroni soup and hard jacobina biscuits. We sang the Pasyon in two tempos—slow and fast, depending on the state of our wakefulness—and in some strange way it was both penance and pleasure, an agelessly rhythmic retelling of an old story coming off the lips of young and old alike. We sang seated on rough, unflinching benches, shielded only by a makeshift roof of plastic sheets from the harsh summer sun, and in the evenings a few bulbs hanging from snakelike ropes of wire illuminated our pious labors. The highlight of Holy Week for me was the grand Good Friday procession, a virtual pageant of the town’s worthies and notables decked out as Marys, Magdalenes, Roman soldiers, and the velvet-robed penitents called pasos. The train wound around Pasig’s poblacion, and I dutifully tagged along, carrying one of a hundreds of candles that soon marked a trail of waxen tears on the asphalt of the narrow streets. I reveled in the procession’s communal escape from the tawdry present—I sold slices of overripe pineapple in our sari-sari store then, and when I was bored I read the Reader’s Digest perched on a crook in a jackfruit tree—into something exalted by smoke and paraffin. The agony of the man honored to bear the Cross seemed more real than his costume and theatrical cohort suggested; whatever sin or divine favor he was marching for seemed outrageously beyond his capacity to pay. And of course there were the girls, the nameless Pasig beauties I pomaded my hair for, never as beautiful as when they assumed the mantle of simple supplicants tinged only by the most venial of sins, like vanity. As the years wore on, I would witness other Lenten spectacles, sometimes more garish, sometimes more gory. In 1971, I would sing the Pasyon again as a student activist weekending on the foothills of Biak-na-Bato, among peasants who believed in both the miracle of Easter and the invincibility that special pebbles to be found on the dry riverbed was supposed to give them against blades and bullets. (They didn’t; many of these people had died in a hail of gunfire while protesting on the streets of Manila as the Lapiang Malaya in 1967, but still the belief persisted.) Two decades later, I stood by as 13 Filipinos—at least one of them a woman—were nailed to the cross on a hilltop in San Fernando, Pampanga one Good Friday, and I nearly passed out myself just from the pain of watching, until I saw one of the Kristos later walk away, nursing a Coke in his bandaged hands. These days I mostly stay at home and find my own quiet way of atonement for all my sins, real and imagined; I may have my quarrels with the Pope, but that hasn’t banished the wormy guilt that imprints itself on every Catholic schoolboy, and which just seems to get worse the farther you stray from the easy gestures of the sacraments, with nothing but your reasoning to fall back on. There was something in all that smoky mystery I sorely miss, and I suspect it has to do with boyhood itself. o0o I’ve promoted the annual writers’ workshops in Baguio and Dumaguete often enough in this space, so now let me mention another important workshop that’s been around for quite some time, serving young writers not only from the great island of Mindanao but from Luzon and the Visayas as well. This is the Iligan National Writers Workshop, now on its 16th year, sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in cooperation with the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT)-Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Extension’s Multimedia Information & Dissemination Unit and the Mindanao Creative Writers Group, Inc. Sixteen fellows have been chosen for this year’s Iligan workshop, which will be held May 25-29, 2009 in Iligan City. These fellows are: LUZON: FICTION (English): Timothy James M. Dimacali, UP Diliman/Pasay City; (Filipino): Ma. Fe de Guia, UP Los Baños/Caloocan City; POETRY (Filipino): Jason G. Tabinas, Ateneo de Manila University/ Pasig City; Arvin T. Ello, De la Salle University/ Paranaque City; PLAY (Filipino): Marianne Mixhaela Z. Villalon, UP Diliman/Quezon City. VISAYAS: POETRY (Waray): Phil Harold Mercurio, UP Tacloban/Calbayog City; Jhonil C. Bajado, UP Tacloban/Maydolong, Eastern Samar;(Cebuano): Russ Raniel A. Ligtas, UP Cebu/Cebu City; Cindy A. Velasquez, University of San Carlos/Cebu City; and (Hiligaynon):Sam S. Prudente, UP Diliman/Iloilo City. MINDANAO: FICTION (English): Gabriel P. Millado, UP Mindanao/Davao City; Justine May R. Torregosa, Ateneo de Zamboanga University (ADZU)/Zamboanga City; Paul Alfonse J. Marquez, ADZU/Zamboanga City; POETRY (English): Anderson V. Villa, Ateneo de Davao University/Davao City; (Chabacano): Edgar Darren G. Bendanillo, Zamboanga State College of Marine Science & Technology, Zamboanga City; and, the Manuel E. Buenafe Writing Fellow (poetry-English): Everlyn T. Jaji, ADZU/Zamboanga City. They will be mentored by a distinguished group of panelists, who include Ma. Rosario “Chari” Cruz Lucero, Jaime An Lim, Merlie M. Alunan, Victor N. Sugbo, Antonio Enriquez, Leoncio P. Deriada, German V. Gervacio, Steven Patrick C. Fernandez, Macario Tiu (this year’s keynote speaker), Ralph Semino Galan, and INWW Director Christine Godinez-Ortega. All best to our colleagues in Iligan and to the incoming batch of fellows. UP will be holding its own workshop in Baguio starting on Easter Sunday, so you can expect a report from me from there. Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.