People often forget – or perhaps simply do not know – that holidays are times dedicated to enabling people and nations to be whole, to be wholesome. The rough and tumble of daily life, the stressful pressures of daily routines, tend to break people down. Holidays are designed precisely to allow people to regain their wholesome selves, to recover much of their endangered sanity and, most of all, to refresh their trust in themselves and other members of their community.
In a country like the Philippines, holidays can serve a most vital function. They can resurrect a sense of divinity which the now often empty rituals of institutionalized religion fails to activate. Holidays can reinforce a sense of national community which most young Filipinos – now largely self-oriented as graphically revealed by recent national surveys – would do well to cultivate. They could also help fortify that sense of personal equanimity which undisciplined traffic, uncollected garbage and unpardonable politics assail with such consistency.
All these excellent things holidays can serve. However, for holidays to be so laudably productive, they have to be properly observed. It is doubtful whether giving themselves up to a vulgarized idea of R and R – of rest and recreation – would enable people to benefit from the intrinsically wholesome effects of holidays. Blown minds are the inevitable consequence of powerful stereo sets with ear-splitting sounds passing for music. Equally powerful karaokes blaring their invariably dangerous renderings of (I Did It) My Way have pretty much the same effect. The cacophonous discourse of dedicated drunks - the ubiquitous maboteng usapan, where high volume is mistaken for irrefutable logic and compelling reason - is hardly compatible with the objectives of uncorrupted holidays.
Holidays are truly festive occasions but one should not confuse feasting with pigging-out. The presence of ample victuals and drinks during holidays must not be misconstrued as an invitation to gluttony or inebriation. The wholesome fasts of Holy Thursday and Good Friday should not be reason enough for overeating and drunkenness come Easter Sunday. Neither the body nor the spirit is made whole by excesses of any kind. How could anyone think otherwise?
Ahead of anything else, holidays must be a period for honest reflection and critical commitment. A person’s holiday songs and dances, parties and socials should never disable her/him from examining her/his personal life and its necessary links to the life of the bigger community, the nation. One’s wholeness cannot be independent of the wholeness of others in that bigger community. Truly, a commonwealth is ultimately the only framework within which holidays are properly situated.
When holidays are recognized to have this primarily social context – as enhancing a people’s ability to serve their collective cause – the idea of resurrection takes on an even higher meaning. What is resurrected is not simply the same egoistic individual, the selfish person who seeks salvation primarily or exclusively for himself and his immediate family; it is now the Filipino who refuses to be personally saved before she/he has exhausted all means to try saving her/his nation first.
That Easter Sunday may yet come to pass, although probably not in this columnist’s or his children’s lifetime. If it did, this columnist would be seriously provoked to believe the incredible – that the Divine does intervene in Philippine affairs.