Holy Week Then and Now

This morning, I read an article in yesterday's newspaper written by Betty Jacinto Lopez or something. She compared how Holy week was spent in the fifties and sixties and how it is spent now.

I remember the many processions I joined with my mother in Iloilo. I recall the many services we attended in Carmel church if Holy week saw us in Bacolod. I also remember how we'd get flowers and bring the encargado of the farm Goding to lead the rest of the men who pulled the caro after it was attached to Honda generators so the lights would light up. Occasionally there were glitches but somehow, Goding managed to solve them. He was a big, burly man, dark. he would have passed muster as a goon in Philippine movies but he perpetually smiled, So maybe he wouldn't have. He was killed allegedly by NPAs many years ago in his house in the farm.

Holy Week then also meant having limited viewing fare on TV if at all. How many years did we watch The 10 Commandments, the Song of Bernadette, Marcelino pan y vino, etc. I was surprised one Holy Week when a movie house was showing Goodbye Mr. Chips, allowing Mama and me to watch a movie on Holy week. It starred Petula Clark and Peter Sellers, I think.

Good Friday was always an ordeal for me because I didn't like fish too much as somehow, a tiny but sharp fish bone would always lodge itself on my throat/esophagus or whatever part of my anatomy it is along the digestive tract.

Then, one Holy Week while we were in college, some of my college friends came over to the house and turned on the music. Boy, did I get it from my older sister.

The past years, we have been attending talks in a school in Makati in the mornings, and services near our house if we had the energy considering how hot the Holy week tends to be. Twice we did our visita Iglesia and found ourselves very hungry with no place to go. We ended up in two different hotels both times. is that sacrifice? Another time we bought tuna croissants in Dunkin' Donuts. (An article I read said her father ate meat as sacrifice on Good Friday because he was a fish lover so eating meat was the ultimate sacrifice for him. One abstinence day (maybe Ash wednesday), I ordered tempura to meet the no-meat requirement and realized how inane the practice could be. Eating tempura wasn't at all a sacrifice for me. But there wasn't anything else I could eat.)

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I guess we're going by tradition in the country, but that tradition is fast disappearing. Only last Ash wednesday, a friend and I were having lunch at Reyes Barbecue where we ordered squid and bangus. The tables near us had college students in uniform. They were eating barbecue like it was not unusual for them to do so on an Ash wednesday.

Should traditions like fasting and abstinence be pushed really? I have ambivalent thoughts on the matter. Didn't Jesus say something to the effect that you shouldn't broadcast to the world that you're suffering/sacrificing by wearing the cloak or coarse article of clothing signifying that you are? Instead of something negative (don't do this or that?), shouldn't the Church push for acts of mercy and love instead?