Tuesday, November 20, 2007 Obenieta: Disgrace By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
THOSE taken by the romance of reading may swear the Bible is the best ever written. Or some would probably lay claim to Marvel Comics as the ultimate turn-on, more fantastic perhaps than the Kama Sutra.
Talk about textual heat, and the seduction is easier consummated when there are minds innocent and hearts open enough to the sway of the supernatural.
Something that fantasy and faith, which don’t make strange bedfellows, ascribe its potency from. As Peter Parker has proven, wimps can win. Water can turn to wine, agreed the apostles.
Far more transcendent, definitely, than the deadline-beaten hullabaloo about a priest and seven teenaged girls who would have us believe the confessional could be as shadowy as a labyrinth with a virgin-devouring minotaur.
But rage, rage! How hellish and tricky to read body language.
Fr. Ben swore his fingers did nothing beyond soothing the girls with the touch of the Holy Spirit. If you don’t have the power of faith healers, you could probably do wonders by pressing on as a priest.
But the girls felt no less wracked than Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” In his report to the prosecutors, a psychiatrist noted that the girls have suffered “considerable psychological distress” comparable to the anguish of a poison victim or those who witness a classmate die. Why, even the Church and the courts—bastions of dominance both—saw them as though they were spouting sulfurous green vomit while their heads were swiveling.
“Que horror!” So goes the gospel of the fiscals: It will entail “an unreasonable overstretching of one’s imagination” to rule that Fr. Ben violated the law.
It’s as if the girls were reading too much pulp fiction, as though their testimonies might as well come straight from the pages of mythology. Too spectacular to be true it can only be speculation of the spiritually unhinged, gasp.
But if they ever read Edith Hamilton, the judges would know nothing is more aphrodisiac than the aptitude for playing god.
There’s no rapist more prolific than Zeus, remember? He did the unspeakable to Rhea/Demeter, his mother. Same thing with his twin sister Hera whom Zeus, when she revolted, hung up in the clouds by her bracelets and burdened with an anvil tied around her ankles. Even his own daughter Persephone was not spared.
No sweat for him, too, to deal with women scared of anybody with a man’s appearance, even if he would wear a priest’s robe; Zeus had it in him to seize them in a trance. Remember how he transformed himself into a bull and swept Europa off her feet to the island of Crete. And how he ravished Leda, who must have seen an angel’s beauty, when he appeared in the form of a swan.
Not long ago, another girl in Danao City also made some old ladies swallow the beads of their rosaries in dismay and disbelief when her accusing fingers pointed at their parish priest as her rapist. Another figment of the imagination, shrugged the judges who dismissed the case.
Ecstasy is about an exonerated man whistling in a bath tub of holy water.
These young girls, what’s eating them? Why are they so prone to spout a mouthful of fire? How else to decipher their words when those who bask in the flame of power regard them as though they were speaking in tongues?
