La Santa Sede Vacante. Viva il Papa!

We mourn the loss of the leader of the Universal Catholic Church. But we also celebrate his life of service to God’s people. More than this, we celebrate his new life with the God he served so well. How can we be sad, we who say that we “believe in God,…, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”?

Viva il Papa!

Easter with the T’bolis

More than half my lifetime ago, I spend six weeks one summer with the T’bolis in the Sta. Cruz Mission run by a Passionist missionary named Rex Mansman (sorry, Fr. Rex, not even sure if I spelled your name right). This was in the mountains of South Cotabato. Everyone thought I was nuts because of the war in Mindanao, but the organizers of the program assured us that the South was, for the most part, peaceful. On that, maybe some other time. For now, I’d like to concentrate on our Easter there. As an aside, the program I joined was the precursor to the famous Jesuit Volunteers Program (JVP) which sends mostly fresh graduates to one-year missions in isolated, depressed communities.

Since it was summer, we were there for Holy Week and Easter. It started, as expected, the evening of Black Saturday, and what I remember most about it is the baptismal rites. For the benefit of those who haven’t been to Easter Vigil, one of the ceremonies is the baptism of new faithful. The candidates for baptism were on one end of a stream, in darkness, to signfiy the darkness of sin. We, the already-baptized faithful, stood on the other shore, carrying torches to signify the light that faith brings and to lead the newly baptized to us. At that point, I was trying to visualize how we looked to the candidates for baptism on the other shore. There was quite a distance between us, and although the moon was bright, we couldn’t really see beyond the torches. Baptism was by immersion, and each newly baptized crossed over the stream to our warm blankets and even warmer applause to welcome them into the fold.

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