Remembering Holy Weeks past

My childhood was spent in Basa Air Base, Pampanga, where my father was a soldier and my mother was a Music teacher. It started with Palm Sunday, when we would bring coconut fronds of various designs—flowers, balls, wands and all—for the priest to bless with holy water. But the rest of Holy Week was meant to be quiet. My grandmother—before she became a Born-Again Christian—would bring us to church, a black veil on her head. My sisters and I would follow her as she went from painting to painting hung on the wall, meant to remind us of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

My parents either went to church on Good Friday, or if it was interminably hot, my father would lug the wooden bed out in the backyard. We would listen to the Seven Last Words on the radio. My father was a tall and big-boned man with a wicked sense of humor. He would make a running commentary on the important men who meditated on the Seven Last Words. “Oh, that one is a thief on a grand scale. And that one, he has a harem of mistresses in the south!” He would only stop when my mother said, “There you go again, and on Good Friday yet!”

One Holy Week we were all wracked with coughs and our noses dripped so my father said we should all go to Cabcaben Beach in Mariveles, Bataan, “to inhale the sea breeze.” And so we did, one of the few out-of-town trips that we made, captured in black-and-white photos in the thick photo albums I had stored in my parents’ house in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan.

When I was in high school we moved to Quezon City and later to Antipolo, where my father drove our blue and dependable Volkswagen that could carry father, mother and five kids up the hills to visit the Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage in Antipolo. I remember a crush of vendors shoving cashew bags right onto our noses and plastic round cameos of the Blessed Virgin Mary being pinned on our shirts. My father shooed them away and my grandmother spouted a rain of words in Bikolano.

And when we moved to San Jose del Monte, I remember my mother, my sisters and I walking up and down the hills to pray at the 13 Stations of the Cross sculpted out of stone and set on the hills. Our trek ended at a rocky shrine where trickles of water flowed and hundreds of wooden crutches had been left. “Those were the crutches of paralyzed people who came here and were cured,” my mother said.

Now I still follow the rites and rituals of Holy Week. I took a leave from my work at University of Nottingham Malaysia to spend Holy Week here: to rest and to pause, so I could join again the world’s tumult next week.

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