Sunday, March 16, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Cherished week By Erma M. Cuizon
IT’S not just Christmas that Filipinos look back to and miss when they’re out of the country for a good part of their life or forever. Much of what a Filipino child’s memory keeps, with loving care, is the way the Holy Week is marked in every town and city in the country. This they miss now that they’re away even if, through the years, the celebration may not have stayed the same, as the way a tourist referred to the religious procession of Bantayan Island as a “spectacle” which he was dying to see.
The Visita Iglesia isn’t exactly the same anymore, for one. In the late 50s, the city was quiet and pensive during Holy Thursday. People went to churches on foot in a pilgrimage. The city’s vehicles took time out for the day and were parked in the garage, and this hushed the city. Filipinos will always remember the sounds of people on their way to church in a Lenten penitential rite
The Visita Iglesia done within Cebu city were to seven churches, the prayers said in two Stations of the Cross each for 14 stations in all. This is a custom which goes back to the early Church of visits to seven basilicas in Rome.
The Filipinos introduced the Visita in some places in North America even while it’s also a celebrated pilgrimage in Malta, Poland and Ireland.
But when Pinoys come home for a vacation on occasions that they feel can best nurture nostalgia, they might not find anymore the old contemplative air, the unforgettable picture of a town in prayer for redemption and salvation—the murmur, the soft echo, the people walking quietly in prayer down the streets.
Cebuano Pinoys would also remember the Sugat celebration in Minglanilla. In a tagboard and in guest books of Internet users from Minglanilla, you’d know that nearly everyone now living away from the country is missing the Sugat festival, the reenactment of the meeting between the resurrected Jesus and his mother Mary, which is performed in the town at dawn of Easter Sunday.
It’s said that almost all Minglanilla girls, once in their life, have played the role of angel in the Sugat in Minglanilla. Unforgettable is the memory of being an angel literally sweeped down, but gracefully, secure with a rope at the back, in a reenacted glory, said a friend recalling a Sugat two decades before.
This is just before the last activity that closed the dawn on its way to Easter Sunday morning—time out to catch the sight and smell of puto and sekwate sold in small tiendas at the church yard, recalled a Minglanillan now living outside the country. Another in Kuala Lumpur wrote: “Kada-Sugat mingawon jud ko sa Minglanilla.”
Tourism has somehow changed our memory of Holy Week in our birth places. Like, tourism has renamed Sugat (meeting) to “Kabanhawan Festival” and this will somehow change what Minglanillans remember of it from childhood.
But it would be like inviting the world to watch the drama of the resurrection in an interesting southern town of Cebu.
At the outskirt of the city, the changes may not show. There still are Bendita sa Lukay on Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday rituals, Visita Iglesia on Holy Thursday, Santo Entiero on Good Friday, the Sabado Gloria poignant news of Jesus’s resurrection and the Easter Sunday fête. You can see the Holy Week is still the way it was as the grandparents would remember it.
A Spanish filmmaker who visited Cebu was shown some towns on a Holy Week, as he was curious about the country that his forebears “conquered” ages ago. He said he was surprised to find many teenagers at Mass on Sundays. Not so in Spain, he said, not anymore.
We got almost the same impression when we decided to do Visita Iglesia not within Cebu city but toward the south, driving by nine parishes from Talisay to Boljoon towns which we reached just before nightfall. The people, mostly young, gathered in Boljoon church in prayers of contrition, and the impression looked likely to stay through the warm early night.
