Wednesday, April 04, 2007 Holidays for hands By Mayette Q. Tabada
I THINK of Holy Week as a day for hands.
For all their ordinariness, our hands are intimate with the feet, food and silence.
These everyday things, observes Fr. Aloysius Cartagenas, a professor at the Seminario Mayor de San Carlos, are “powerful symbols for spiritual journeys.”
We hold our hands still while waiting for silence.
By attending to these ordinary but useful features of our life, we open ourselves to the sublime in the commonplace.
The way Jesus’ dying for His people—love at its most sublime—is celebrated by an act as ordinary as hands folding.
Washing
As Jesus washed His disciples’ feet on Thursday evening, Fr. Aloy urges husbands to wash their wives’ feet. Wives can do the same. As sons and daughters, too old for childhood bathing rituals, can do for their parents.
At the heart of this deed is service, he says.
Jesus reversed this Jewish convention even if, according to the New American Bible, the act of washing another’s feet was considered even too debasing for the lowliest slave.
There can never be enough humility in the world, reminds Fr. Aloy.
Communion
By choosing simple bread and wine, Jesus wants us to pay attention to the food we eat.
Although He could have chosen other symbols, Fr. Aloy believes that Jesus wants us to see His love as being part of our day-to-day.
Where would we be without bread and wine, rice and water?
When we ask the Lord to bless our food, we ask Him, too, to bless the people who have given our provenance.
The rice farmer, the vegetable grower, fisherman, Carbon porter, helpers or relatives marketing, cooking and washing up after us—it is not just flavors comprising this grace.
On the night of His betrayal, Jesus chose to break bread and commune with his disciples. During the Last Supper, there was food and drink for all.
It is not always so in the world today. Fr. Aloy invites us, in the midst of feasting, to think of the hungry. We sin when we waste.
But when we share of our talents and resources, giving despite being in want, we partake of Christ.
In the community of believers, there can be no one so poor as to have nothing to give; no one so rich as to have nothing to receive. (Second Pastoral Council of the Philippines)
Silence
As a child growing up in Loon, Bohol, Fr. Aloy remembers the silence of the church on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
His description of that preternatural quiet—linaw (still)—reassures us that we should welcome the void and not be in a hurry to fill it with the whatnots of the world: malling, chatting, texting.
Silence is an accommodating friend. It can expand so we can take shelter and reflect. The quiet can also shrink to fit the tiniest pocket our busy lives can spare.
But for some things, silence is ill-fitting. You cannot amass silence like wealth. Silence is a weapon that cuts both ways.
Though not everyone can penetrate the “Spiritual Exercises” of St. Ignatius de Loyola, we can all try silence, encourages Fr. Aloy.
