Holy Saturday
I pray that the Lord grants to you a blessed, joyful Easter Sunday of peace.
Saturday morning I went shopping for groceries for our household and for our new friends. When I returned home Dominic and I sorted the groceries and discussed some things then returned to work on our computers for awhile before going downhill to Turning Point with groceries at 2:00. Ely had asked us on Friday to return Saturday after her seminar/workshop in the former gambling hall had concluded.
She wanted to take Dom and I downhill behind Turning Point Home into Mangga to visit her mother. Her mother wasn’t home, unfortunately, so we just visited with Ely, Pie, Jenny, her son Brock, Alma and her daughters, Marvin, Nardo and his daughter, Rev. Espino, his wife Raciel and their son Esra and had a good time becoming acquainted.
Jubilee and Mariel -photo courtesy of Pie
I think that Dominic and I returned home, bringing Jonathan and Arvin with us, around 5:00. I took a shower that I needed after horseplay with Elizabeth and carrying her up the steep road behind Turning Point then dressed for Mass. Dominic and I talked with Jonathan and Arvin about our personal computers and software and I read e-mail and news.
Last night I worshiped in the Easter Vigil Mass in Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Turning Point, a couple miles from home.
I left home around 6:30 to walk out of our subdivision, Monterrazas Village, to the ‘main road’ to hail a jeepney. Three passed me before I could get one to stop. The first one was ‘full,’ but the second and third had ample room. I don’t know if drivers are racist… The fourth driver southbound stopped for me and I rode a couple of kilometers downhill to Turning Point then hopped down and crossed the street.
I walked across the church’s plaza, entered the church for the first time and looked for the taberacle. It’s in an alcove on the left. I knelt to pray awhile because Mass was scheduled to begin for twenty minutes later.
After I prayed I went outside to await our entrance procession. I saw so many people seated in the nave and more walking in. I wondered if we were expected to gather outside for the lighting of the Easter fire/pyre then lighting the Paschal candle then procession into the church… I had seen the stack of logs in the plaza… but no one but I and altar servers was loitering outside.
I hadn’t previously been in the Philippines for an Easter Vigil Mass, so I considered that perhaps Philippine Catholics merely sit in the pews in the dimmed church chatting with candles in hands while awaiting the entrance of a priest with a Easter candle… I tried asking more than one person -teens making floral arrangements, women selling candles for 10 pesos, altar servers- if we’re supposed to gather outside. Each seemed not to know English.
Eventually one beautifully-dressed lady spied me looking around and querying people, and she welcomed me to her church and asked me from where I’d come. After I introduced myself, I asked if we would be assembling outdoors. The cordial lady said yes, so I was confident to wait outside in the darkening plaza for everyone else to come out.
I stood in the dark thinking and praying and watching nine bumbling altar servers in red albs and white surplices scurrying to and fro, fetching the processional cross and fluorescent lantern and sacramentary and trying to light, then relight, then relight the pyre with the help of an adult who poured diesel fuel on the logs from a jug withdrawn from his nearby jeep.
At 7:10 congregants were ushered out of the dim church to the forecourt, and at 7;12 the priest began haltingly, without the sign of the cross, to read prayers from the sacramentary then to bless the Paschal candle. A lector read a narrative and rubrics, and the priest didn’t feel like lighting the Easter candle as the narrator read that he was supposed to do. He beckoned for someone to come light it. No one wanted to.
He has nine servers there. One could have had a small candle to take a flame from the two-foot fire and transfer it to the Paschal candle. Maybe no one understood that the priest wanted help – we had just heard that the priest lights the Paschal candle. Eventually the well-dressed lady who had welcomed me stepped forward then leaned forward to light her small white candle and transfer the fire to the big candle.
The priest , followed by a gaggle of servers struggling through the crowd toward the church entrance, sang, “Christ be our light,” and rather than responding, “Thanks be to God,” some people were lighting their small candles from the bonfire. When the priest, at the threshold of the church turned around, looking outward rather than continuing into the church, he saw all these lit hand-held candles. He told them in three languages to stop lighting them and to put-out their flames.
The Holy Mass was celebrated in English, yet I couldn’t understand some words and some phrases read by the lectors from Genesis. The clearest lector was the last, a middle-age nun. Some of the hymns were sung in Ilocano or Tagalog. With a couple of them I could follow the words shown on a screen and sing along.
The priest celebrant began his homily speaking of “Frederick Handel” locking himself in an apartment for forty days to write a music setting for Easter Mass. During his homily I couldn’t understand some phrases because he had lapsed into a Philippine language.
Because I was in the rearmost pew, during most of the Mass, I heard vehicles arriving outside then saw people slowly wandering into the church long after 7:00. All the jalousie windows were open and the front doors were ‘opened wide for Christ,’ so we felt the cool, damp evening air wafting in and heard traffic sounds and dogs and chickens and van doors slamming and voices outside.
A tan dog repeatedly entered the church, trotted halfway ‘up’ the main aisle, looked about (for a handout? for its owner?) then departed. Despite laminated signs admonishing all to “deactivate” cell phones, telephones rang with voice calls and text message alerts. People left their seats to go outside and use their phones then returned.
Three preteen boys came into the building during the homily and lingered in the rear, looking at me and whispering. I motioned for them to sit with me, and they looked stunned. I gestured toward a mostly-empty pew two rows in front of me, but they wouldn’t go to it until, after a while, they spotted a girl they knew with her family in the pew in front of that. So they boys lurched forward to the pew behind the girl to whisper to her during the sermon. So I wasn’t listening intently to the entire homily, unfortunately. That’s life.
After worship , at 9:13, I walked to the neighboring Turning Point Home to say hello and good night before catching a jeepney to ride uphill. Unfortunately, after I had talked with Ely and Pie in TPH for a few minutes and returned to the curb to await a northbound jeepney, I couldn’t get one. Only one came uphill, and though I waved at it, the driver didn’t stop. It wasn’t full, nor was it labeled “Private -Not for hire.”
I didn’t understand why some drivers won’t stop. I stood alone in the darkness (no street lamp), waving mosquitos away from my ears and wondered if jeepney quit their routes after 9:00. I couldn’t remember whether Dominic and I had ever ridden one after 9:00. Ely kindly offered to take me home and to retrieve Jonathan and Arvin who had been visiting with Dominic for hours. †