PAN DE LA SEMANA

PAN DE LA SEMANA Easter Sunday Year B April 5, 2015 PASSOVER, NOT SIMPLY MAKE-OVER! Make-overs have been a regular feature in this recent decade. Old houses get a new lease on life – and, ohhs and ahhs – after what they call an “extreme make-over.” Fitness and health and beauty gurus speak endlessly about restoration of the physical kind that breathes in youth and very literally some form of new life after similar extreme make-overs. Old houses are renovated. Ancient ruins are restored, and life seems instantly renewed. Or so we think. But soon enough restored buildings suffer from the same pattern of wear and tear. Renewed art works eventually accumulate grime and grit and grease from too much exposure to the ravages brought by too many pairs of feet trampling on very limited museum square footages all over the world. Caverns with stalactite and stalagmite protrusions both up and down caves all over the world soon suf...

Tonight, we come face to face with darkness. Our paschal triduum reaches its highest point when new fire and the light it brings shall pierce the darkness. Darkness, and the intimations of death that are associated with it shall now be vanquished. Sin, the ultimate darkness and sign of death par excellence, is now vanished for all time, for all men, for always. This Good News is something we all cannot remain silent about. We have been redeemed. We have been bought for a price. We are all called to move from darkness into God's wonderful light. This is Easter Good News. We are an Easter people, and "alleluia" is our song, as St. Augustine aptly puts it.

Holy Thursday April 5, 2012 The best of Pinoy popular religiosity, along with its worst, shines out beginning today, first day of the Paschal Triduum. Even as I sit down to write these reflections, hordes are now making their way up Mount Banahaw, or trekking in the concrete jungles of Metro Manila to go to Antipolo, or “carrying their little or big crosses” everywhere in Central Luzon, particularly in Pampanga, to do their own version of “washing and watching.” Elsewhere, throughout the Tagalog region, particularly in Batangas and Cavite, the singing of the Pasiong Mahal of the unsung poet Mariano Pilapil, could be heard or espied taking place in just about every prominent family’s house, or in humble abodes everywhere else. In Poblacion, Makati, the old Sampiro, dozens of what is called “kalbaryos” house the family-owned statues depicting the various events related to the passion of the Lord, where endless singing of the same pasiong mahal is done, replete with food and drinks for...

17 th Sunday in Ordinary Time(A) July 24, 2011 Last week, I gave free rein to the hope that is in me despite the so many problems that beset the Church, the country, on account of the saints and sinners (including me) that make up the Church, almost brought down to her knees by a barrage of media-instigated, PR machinery guided demolition job that started with two letters of request from a Bishop addressed to the former President. A “lapse of judgment” on his part, along with the well-meaning requests born of real needs from far-flung mountainous and remote dioceses both in the north and the south, became cannon fodder for a PR firm intent and bent on humiliating the institutional Church. The 7 bishops responded to the humiliating half-truths that were, as usual, worse than whole lies, by resorting to the Christian way – by humbling themselves even more, even as they spoke out the truth in charity. They begged for apologies to the people of God, both to those who remained loyal bel...