Sticks & Stones       Resil B. Mojares
 

I don’t think there was an experience in my childhood as deeply charged with meaning as the Friday of  Lent.

On this day, our parents admonished us to do what seemed unnatural: we were not to leave the house, work, play, raise our voices, laugh, or do anything frivolous or frisky. We knew in our little hearts, what the stroke of three meant. God had died. And what could be more momentous, what truth more immense, that the death of God Himself?

A child looks into an empty town, the streets still, the fields deserted. Suddenly, the familiar recedes. He sees not just the fields, the streets, this town, but a vista of everywhere. For even a child knows this is a death like no other.

When God dies, it is not just this field, or street, or town He vacates, He is absent everywhere. What emptiness could be more empty that a world emptied of God.

The child begins to imagine — visited now by some formless guilt and fear — what lies there is no longer this town that, solid under his feet, he can confidently roam in, but an illusion. He could walk down that street and be swallowed up by a void. He has discovered Death. This is the meaning of  Lent.

We all have our personal experience of loss, of people dying. The earliest I can remember was the death of a classmate and friend, a girl who lived down the street of a few blocks from where our house was.

I was 11, or 12 and I cannot now remember why she died except that she was absent from school for a few days and an illness took her away. I remember the day our class accompanied her to the cemetery. I was to read, in behalf of the class, a little tribute that our teacher had written.

There I stood, hoisted atop the low stone wall of the weedgrown cemetery, clutching the windblown piece of paper on which had been written our farewell, our common sorrow. For some vague reason, in the middle of my speech, I broke down and wept, my tears staining the ink that traced the words I was to speak. I cannot now remember whether I ever did finish reading that speech. Perhaps, it did not really matter (except, maybe, for my teacher who crafted the words that remained unheard). I quickly got over my embarrassment and grief.

Such is the course of ordinary, human deaths (though given the weight of our affections, no death can ever be quite ordinary). Whether we remember or forget, we believe in a scheme of things whereby those who are gone from us are really never quite gone. They hover about us, we visit them on All Soul’s Day, they inhabit our dreams.

Our pre-Spanish animist beliefs (and even our Catholic practice) make death so convivial. We buried our dead under our houses or in boat coffins loaded with plates, food, weapons, trinkets, and even as we imagined they were setting forth on a journey, their spirits remained all around us, in trees, earth mounds, water, shadows, air.

Our worlds were heavily populated with both the friendly and unfriendly dead, we could not move without bumping into one or the other. Death, instead of being a subtraction, seemed like a process of endless addition. The human genealogies we commemorate sprout like tropic forests.

When death seems like the dark loam in which life teems, how can we possibly know death? It is thus that death has to be reinvented. Christianity introduced us, through the dying of a God, to the amazing and terrible vision of the death of the soul itself. Such is Lent, the Black Saturday of the soul, marking a death like no other, the death of the One whose absence shall leave a void with no reference , neither a beginning nor an end, with no space even for memories and dreams.

We cannot — if not for the promise, the gift, the grace of Easter — stand such emptiness.

And so we are admonished. Death reinvented, we have to reinvent Life itself.*
 

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