Remember to Keep the Week Holy,” Father Laurian, a fellow senior and a Franciscan priest, who joins our thrice-weekly aqua-aerobics at Annabel’s home whenever he’s on leave from his post in Samar, reminds us, as he rises from an atypical post-exercise breakfast of sliced fresh fruits, bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon and veal sausages. It is especially planned for him by Linda, the captain of our team in Annabel’s absence.

He is stationed in a place blessed with fresh air and fresh fish, so we spare him the fried rice and danggit or daing na bangus we normally have. In Samar, he says, “It’s isda every day.”

Before he leaves with Linda to be dropped at San Antonio parish in Forbes, where he gives retreats at this time, he asks every one of us where we might find ourselves on Holy Week.

“Baguio,” I answer.

“Tagaytay,” says Tessie.

Meya, our instructor, would stay home to take care of a father recuperating from surgery.

From Father Laurian, she gets a sympathetic nod. To Linda, who is going on retreat, he beams a wide smile of satisfaction.

Easy to forget

To all of us, he says, “Wherever you are, please don’t forget what Holy Week is all about.”

Indeed, it’s so easy to forget, especially if one spends it in vacation places like Baguio or the beach. Holy Week is the first long holiday after the Christmas break—a tempting chance to relax, have some sun and a dip or some cool mountain air.

But there’s no getting away from traffic. We seem to bring it with us everywhere we go, like our own shadow. Wherever people flock in great numbers, there’s bound to be traffic. More and more people stay home on Holy Week precisely to avoid traffic, and not just on roads but at bus terminals and airports.

Sundays, never mind Holy Week, our town, Makati, is itself relieved of congestion; staying home when the rest of the population has gone elsewhere with the traffic, I might indeed have a better chance at keeping Holy Week holy, as Father Laurian advises.

There’s the beautiful Lenten tradition of the Stations of the Cross, and when I heard they had put them up on Fifth Street at the Global Business Center I wished I had experienced it; but we were away, again, in Baguio.

Overcrowding

Baguio traffic during Holy Week limits Visita Iglesia—if we think of it at all. For my granddaughter Mona, horseback riding is what Baguio is all about. For me it’s the mountain air and the sight and scent of pine, or what is left of all that after air and the trees have been appropriated by an overcrowding of people, structures and machines.

In the autumn of my life I’ve become exempt from fasting and abstinence, and perhaps as another natural consequence of age, I have also become more prayerful and grateful for just about everything. Increasingly, religion has, for me, taken the simple sense of becoming a better person every day and in every conscious choice I make throughout the day, not just seasonally.

Father Laurian informs us that the Catholic tradition of having palms blessed on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Holy Week, is now being given less importance by the Church, because of an increasing tendency to associate the palm with some kind of power to ward off evil spirits at home and bring good luck. In other words, the palm has become tainted with superstition.

Proper significance

The Church would like to bring Catholics back to its proper significance: People welcome Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem waving those palms, and afterward His passion begins.

In the Philippines, young coconut leaves woven into decorative shapes are used instead. On Palm Sunday this year, in front of the chapel at Rockwell’s Power Plant Mall, I noticed a table selling palms and wondered whether they had already been blessed.

Vergel said, “If they had already been blessed, people might just buy and probably no longer bother to go to Mass.” That might have been the exact thought that had crossed my mind.

The Church is right to discourage practices that might divert people from the true essence of religion. While the Church is at it, it might as well do away with other things, too.

For simple compassion, say, it might reconsider suspending its judgment on contraceptives for married couples who want to plan their families.

Perhaps it should also acknowledge its own imperfections and come clean with its own errors. If they must come down hard, it should be on their sinful clergy, who should know better than to destroy the innocence of children, possibly confusing them for life.

They should show more compassion toward homosexuals and look at them not as inferiors or deviants, but as equal children of God.

Perhaps Holy Week should remind us that, regardless of faith, we are brothers and sisters, created by the same God. This realization should make us change the way we regard one another, and with every year of life become better and better human beings.

That’s what Easter is for: reform, renewal, resurrection, hope.