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Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Obenieta: Decoding the divine
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
No less menacing than a cabal of terrorist is the fictionist.
Good or bad with the gumption of imagination, the storyteller plays God. That partly explains why the author of “The Da Vinci Code” and the filmmakers cashing in on the novel’s powder-keg premise—threatening to explode in every Catholics’ face—would make it on the target list for another Inquisition.
There’s hell to pay. Or so avers not a few lily-livered fellows who presume salvation is something too real or too rendered in the whiteness of self-righteousness to be streaked wild with the colors of imagination. Now this seems to be the reason for the whole hullabaloo about Dan Brown’s bestseller and its Hollywood adaptation soon to be shown in our theaters.
At Brown’s notion and the filmmaker’s artifice—about a secret bloodline sprung from a presumed union between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene—the critics have been rolling their eyeballs. It builds erroneous impressions against the Catholic Church and the Christian faith, they rage. It casts aspersions on the divinity of Christ, they protest.
Lost in the frenzy is one simple fact: Fiction is make-believe, and it happens real only with the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.
If Brown’s book and its celluloid spawn are making a splash, it doesn’t follow that their readers and its potential viewers would swallow it all in. (Having read and enjoyed the book, I can say my Catholic upbringing is still downright the way I intend to keep it, thank you.)
It’s the storyteller, not the tale. And sometimes all he’s up to is all about wagging the tail. Or stirring us awake out of our doggone complacency about our faith or the lack thereof.
Amid those who pray for a ban on the showing of the film “because it’s blasphemous,” the Cebu Archdiocese is not joining the fray. The film will be a test of every Catholic’s faith, avers Cebu Archdiocesan Media liaison officer Msgr. Achilles Dakay. The Catholic public can watch the film, affirms Dakay. “If they have a strong enough faith then there is nothing to worry about.”
Stressing priests should just continue preaching the word of God, Dakay might as well be hurling out a challenge to them: Be better storytellers. Himself a crowd-drawer, Christ did not just dazzle by dint of his fantastic miracles but also by the power of his parables.
“Let us take this occasion to convert this into a pastoral challenge and a catechetical moment of grace,” intones the clergy, now conscious of one reality check long overdue: To be more zealous in its evangelization.
That, on the part of those spreading the Word, ought to be realized with more fire of imagination.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (May 16, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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