Piety

I went to Quiapo today. I usually attend the Saturday anticipatory mass in our parish but since I was cooped up in the house the whole day trying to finish some artwork that I promised some friends, I thought I would drive all the way to Quiapo to bask in the purity of the devotion to the Black Nazarene that many people display. I caught the 6:30 pm mass; it was perfect time since the procession of Black Nazarene replicas was winding up.

The piety that devotees during the annual Black Nazarene procession has always struck me emotionally. You just have to be there to appreciate it.

It's... raw passion and emotion. The whole thing is like a dance that's always teetering at the brink of complete and total mayhem; but it never does. Somehow, there is method to the madness. There is poetry in the chaos.
Sadly, this year's feast falls on a Monday. I would have gone on leave to be able to join the procession, but I have lots of important meetings. But I am hoping my meetings would end early and that I would still be able to catch the procession as it winds down towards the church. This would probably be around 10:00 pm.

Wish me luck.

And no, I don't really have plans of being able to hold the rope that pulls the image of the Black Nazarene through the sea of people; nor do I have intentions of scampering up the float to be able to touch the image.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Letter To Our Leaders

Dear Tita Cory, Senators, Congressmen, Businessmen, Media people, Leftists, and all Bleeding Hearts Out There: I am angry. And I know that there are many out there who are angrier than I am for the same reason. And that reason is simple. I am sick and tired of all you guys claiming to speak for me and many Filipinos. I feel like screaming every time you mouth words about fighting for my freedom and my rights, when you obviously are just thinking about yours. You tell me that the essence of democracy is providing every citizen the right to speak his or her mind and make his or her own informed judgments, but you yourselves do not respect my silence and the choices I and many others have made. In other words, your concept of democracy is limited to having your rights and your freedoms respected, at the expense of ours. I am utterly flabbergasted that you still do not get it: we already responded to your calls, and our response has been very clear - we chose not to heed your calls to go t
Read more

Farewell, Victor

Image
This is my column today. Renato Victor Ebarle Jr. was at the prime of his life; barely 27 years old and just starting to build his career in human resource management. At the time of his death, he was recruitment manager of the Hotel Peninsula Manila. To say that he still had the whole world ahead of him sounds like a cliché but those among us who actually knew him, those among us who were aware of the kind of passion he had for life and for his work, people like me who had the privilege of having been consulted by him on many professional matters, know this with a certain degree of certainty. I was Victor’s professor in three major subjects when he was in college. In each one of them, he sat at the first row, which said a lot about the kind of person he was. Professors know this for a fact: Bullies don’t sit in front of the class where they cannot annoy anyone. I was his thesis adviser and he and his team spent a whole academic school year trying to break new grounds on the question o
Read more

How That Letter Came To Be...

I had some time in my hands last night. I bloghopped. For the very first time I got to read in detail what people are saying about that letter and about me in other blogs. I have already responded to most of the comments in this blog. However, I cannot possibly answer all comments given that I have only ten fingers and there are only 24 hours in a day. It is very tempting, but this blog is not my life and contrary to the overactive imagination of some people, I do not have the resources to do that. I cannot possibly monitor the thousands of blogs out there. Besides, the comments in this and other blogs (and even in the newspapers) do tend to answer each other, and I do not fancy myself as an ultimate arbiter or judge with the final and definitive opinion (I do not think anyone is qualified to do that unless that person died on a cross and resurrected in three days), so there is really not much to say after reading the various pros and cons. Some people do a better job at it anyway. I d
Read more