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Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Obenieta: Not a stable season
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
Even if the clouds are as dark as their doubts, the suckers of faith can always find the sun on Sundays. The churches are full, and the warmth could evoke a claustrophobic intimacy such as slum dwellers are privy to. Home, sweaty home.
Due to its unpredictable mood swings, the weather might as well be schizophrenic—cold now, hot the next. Like the fluctuations of faith, come to think of it. It’s tricky to be a thermometer these days.
Gauging the state of belief or the lack of it, especially the poor’s, is a headache. Hardly surprising, therefore, if the caretakers of our spiritual wellbeing have been popping a lot of pills to fend off the feverish attack of distress. And it’s not only because thieves are hot again, running away with the emblems on the altar. (Recently, for instance, looters decapitated and dismembered two religious icons from a barangay chapel in Danao City.
Though it’s the first burglary of religious icons this year, it’s the 31st reported case since April 2002.) Things, indeed, have been rearing its strange heads lately.
But what’s probably more disquieting to the clergy—short of losing their heads and making them wring their arms—has been the lukewarm attitude of their flock in matters they hold sacrosanct. The poor may still be thronging, along with the rich, to the churches and chapels around the country, but how come the inconstant weather has seeped through their heads?
Consider the low turnout of pro-life supporters of the Archdiocese of Cebu’s campaign against the Department of Health’s birth control programs. How come the fervor of the poor, for whom the poor’s knack to procreate a dime a dozen would have made the Church happy as they live up to the biblical exhortation to go and multiply, are raining on the parade of the Church against the government’s Ligtas Buntis campaign? Its stand, according to the Church, is “moral, spiritual, and ethical” but why is it that the legion of the poor are not holding the candle for the Church?
If only the heaven-sent stewards of our spiritual lives won’t have hell to pay against the government’s passion in holding back the poor’s penchant for making love, in weathers fair or foul.
(yomyko@yahoo.com)
(March 15, 2005 issue)
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