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Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Obenieta: After the festival
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
Beyond doubt, the recently-concluded Sinulog drives home the point: Devotion, though it seems doggone in this jaded age, looks like it’s here to stay even if it seems as lonely a word as honesty.
Faith doesn’t only walk its talk; it dances. From the choreographer who carried on to train dancers after he got his legs amputated to the ill-starred passengers of a boat that capsized during a fluvial parade off the coast in Southern Leyte, there was no denying the crosscurrent of devotion.
How to be a devotee—something that pilgrims thronging around the basilica of the Holy Child plays to the hilt—is also a challenge, or a test of faith, to all and sundry.
To dedicate one’s energy to an ideal—be it a person or a project devoutly to be wished— is to give light. Something worth doing, yes, beyond the skin-deep trappings of the annual festival or its pomp and pageantry.
No, being devoted doesn’t have to be flashy like fireworks. Like, for instance, our local government’s fierce concentration to flaunt Cebu as a showcase for the rest of the world on the countdown for the Asean Summit slated here in this Queen City of the South later this year.
Never mind, if shadowy forces like the summary-killing squad of vigilantes are just as staunch about their devil-may-care design to purge crimes and misdemeanors out of the metro.
On a personal level, being a devotee can also be significant through simplified forms of affirmative action.
True, it can be exercised through efforts to be true and steadfast to our loved ones. To come to terms, if not exceed, whatever expectations cut out for us— whether at home, school or work. To be conscientious about being decent while being daring in coming to terms with the fullness of each other’s humanity.
In the long run, to be a devotee is to consecrate ourselves to the altar far away from the spur of self-interest,
That’s something we hope our leaders and politicians would take their cue from. So that they would be devoted at last to the notion at once simple, but also almost as impossible to believe in as a miracle: Public office is a public trust.
With that, society at large would renew or rediscover a devotion to our institutions. So that, in the end, we can rekindle faith or find something like hope and redemption for our nation.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 17, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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