EDITORIAL - Days of faith in a season of trials

In a few days, Cebu will be celebrating yet another Feast of the Santo Niño, and the popular festival that it has spawned — the Sinulog. While going toward opposing extremities of devotion and merriment, both at least are centered on an enduring object of faith.

To many Cebuanos, as well as to a growing number of Filipinos and foreigners, there is something in this faith that has kept this island truly blessed. It has reaped some of the best, and has been spared some of the worst.

This blessedness we need to keep, year after year. And we earn that keep by nothing else than pure and unadulterated devotion, plus a little of the merriment as a bonus, to the Child about whom stories are incomplete without some mention of childish mischief.

We need to keep this blessedness because right after the days of faith, the nation is once again expected to descend into a spiral of political activities that have increasingly shown a tendency to become more degenerate and violent.

While a few good men and women who have chosen to make a career out of politics can still undoubtedly stand with their heads held high in honor and grace, most have perverted and converted the opportunity to serve the public into a profession of greed and shamelessness.

While no profession is without shortcomings, none matches politics in sheer wantonness and profligacy. The few good men and women who have tried mighty hard to be the redemptive qualities in a tarnished calling are simply that — too few to make a real difference.

And so we march on with trepidation toward the next political exercise, anxious of what may be in store for a country that has shown with increasing regularity a fearsome and dangerous capacity to inflict harm upon its own self.

Strange therefore that, in the order of things, Cebuanos must deal first with salvation before plodding on toward possible damnation. But then again, maybe that is the purpose of faith, to be strengthened first prior to getting tested, instead of the other way around.