Gloom, doom and Holy Week’s meaning

Palm Sunday, was, for me, always a day of anticipation. First, the gathering of the faithful in churches, carrying palm fronds folded, bent, decorated in fanciful shapes. Then, waiting for the priest to arrive, followed by acolytes bearing at times a small silver urn filled with holy water, with a ball-tipped rod with which to sprinkle the palms and the people. (Nowadays, a squeezable plastic bottle will also do.)

As the priest neared, the entire church and congregation seemed to shiver with eagerness, as Mass-goers held their palms aloft, shaking the leaves in the air, filling the surroundings with the swish and sway of dried palms. The sound increased with fury as the priest made his way through the crowd, and one could with little effort imagine the scene in Jerusalem, as Jesus made his way through a palm-waving crowd laying out blankets and capes for His donkey to step on.

But there was more than just the ceremony to anticipate. Palm Sunday marked the start of Holy Week, a time of both meditation and relaxation for Filipinos. From childhood, we had been indoctrinated in the meaning of the Holy Week, of the need to reflect on the sufferings of Jesus, and of how “our sins” had contributed to His pain and passion. As children, my siblings and cousins and I were admonished to keep a solemn silence in my grandmother’s house where we were all gathered, with the piano silenced and our gleeful laughter shushed. Holy Week was a time of togetherness and shared misery, and only the grand Good Friday procession, glimpsed through the windows of Lola’s house, broke the boredom and almost suffocating silence.

But as we matured, the stern standards of our elders relaxed. And we, as adults, memories of miserable Holy Weeks still haunting us, broke from tradition. I remember how my mother and aunts were scandalized when we announced that we, with our small children, would be going to the Hundred Islands on a Good Friday. “You’re going swimming?!” an aunt exclaimed. “The water will turn red with the blood of Jesus!”

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Nowadays, of course, the struggle over the “proper” way to observe Holy Week has been resolved, in favor of the sybarites.

These days, the four or so days of imposed vacation have turned into a grand national excuse to indulge in leisurely activities: swimming, eating, drinking, cavorting. True, there is the “Visita Iglesia,” a tradition in which families try to visit at least seven churches in each of which they follow the “Way of the Cross.” But lately, even this ritual has been observed more as an excursion, a tour of heritage structures, an excuse for fellowship and bonding.

So that may be why Palm Sunday, with its ritualized blessing of the palms and the long dramatized Gospel of the passion and crucifixion of Christ, is viewed as a preview not to a week of meditation but to a grand vacation. Rare is the family where all members, especially the breadwinners, are free to take time off work for an extended session of bonding. So even if only for four days, we look forward to shedding our workaday responsibilities and stepping out of our worker personas.

Everyone is a vacationer on Holy Week, and if only for this, maybe the Lord will forgive us if we forget how much He suffered, and choose instead to be grateful for the time He made available for us to be our truest, best selves.

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You would think, given the gloom and doom of Holy Week, that we would welcome Easter Sunday with wild rejoicing, with feasting and celebration.

But we seem to have favored—or had drummed into our heads—the darkness of the Passion, forgetting the bright and glorious Resurrection that is its true climax. Holy Week, after all, doesn’t end with the crucifixion, even if our fetish for Gothic touches has endowed the bloody “whip-lashing” and the simulated nailing on the cross a sense of things reaching their logical, dramatic end.

Still, things do not end there. Our Catholic faith teaches us that Christ rose from the dead, and that the blood and horror of the march to Golgotha and the crucifixion were washed away in the end by the empty tomb, and the appearance of the transcendent Christ.

Maybe it’s because the rituals of Easter are gentle and benign, bereft of the blood and drama of Christ’s mortal death.

Compared to a procession in which a Christ impersonator stumbles and falls while bearing a heavy Cross, the Easter Sunday “salubong,” the joyful meeting of the resurrected Christ with his grieving mother, dramatized in the Church plaza, is child’s play. A child, in fact, is the central figure, dressed as an angel and hoisted on a primitive pulley to remove the veil of mourning from Mary’s face.

We bid the heavy shroud of guilt and penance that enveloped Holy Week good riddance, but can’t quite reconcile ourselves with the rejoicing that is supposed to be ushered in by Easter.

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True, we Filipinos have tried to incorporate the brighter traditions of Easter in nations less obsessed with guilt, death and eternal damnation. Shopping malls and some churches sponsor “Easter Egg Hunts,” bidding children to roam the premises and search for brightly colored eggs. But there is about these exercises the air of simulation, of pretend-celebration.

And now that we, as a society, have chosen to chuck the gloom and doom of Holy Weeks of old, the meaning of Easter is ever more lost on us. What more is there to celebrate, anyway, when we have spent a week in relaxation, in companionship, in heedless leisure?

We have broken free of the restraints of guilt and penance on this week, but maybe we have also lost the real meaning of the event we will observe.