This ethos of suffering
Are we a suffering people? the question of suffering as ethical is most felt in this holy Week. It begins for us during Palm Sunday, when we welcome the redeemer—or that man we thought was our Savior. We replicate that event by making sure we have our own version of the palm that greeted him as he rode into Jerusalem.
This is part of the tale that is disheartening as we are told how we, the people who welcomed him on Sunday, will then see ourselves forgetting the palm of royal welcome and replacing it with the Cross of Suffering.
This is the opening discourse of the Holy Week, the legend of the ungrateful people. And we feel sad about that change of heart. This shift in our loyalty to the Redeemer is a slow burn, taking days in fact. Tuesday sees us wondering who will be with us as we relive the Passion and Suffering of Christ. Wednesday arrives and then Maundy Thursday.
But what does the word “maundy” connote? Cursory research will tell us how that old English word “maundy” derived itself from the Latin “mandatum,” which means “command.” What was this entreaty? This was the command, not request, from Christ that all his disciples should love each other. And the symbolic ritual of this is Christ washing the feet of his disciples and the sharing of the last meal, the tender communion made bitter and sweet by the fact that it was the last human act of the quotidian Christ would share with his brothers. And sisters, if we are to believe the tales of the women staying in the shadows as the men partook of that banquet.
All this would lead to Calvary, on Mount Golgotha where the death of God took place and our redemption would be validated.
We, for many reasons a significant part of it we owe to colonialism and geopolitics, are part of this tapestry of narrative. Every Holy Week, we relive this plot and great chunks of the population are into this story. No one could ever refuse to listen to the repeated storytelling of the life and death of Christ. Much as this story begins at Christmas, when Good Friday comes, our memories neglect there call of that most joyous season as we bask in the dark festival that ends with the tremor at three in the afternoon, Friday.
Why must God die to save us? If there is for eternity a battle between evil and good, does the annihilation of the Divine—the destruction of the Incarnate—a symbolic triumph finally and, for good, of that Good?
We know at heart the Seven Last Words. Growing up in a house behind the old church in San Fernando in the island of Ticao, in Masbate, I was close to the drama of Salvation, which was always preceded by thunder and gore. Moving to Naga, my grandmother Emilia could not let Good Friday pass by without listening to the monumental interpretations by priests and, later by adaptations, the laymen chosen to mouth the dying words of Christ. And when the song “Ya Murio del Redentor” (My Redeemer has died) was intoned, introduced by the distinctly funereal chords, my grandmother would begin to weep. This I would learn later: those lyrics and the melody, the heartbreaking atmosphere were bringing her back to the island of her birth, to her dear sisters who used to sing with her the lachrymose ditties. Suffering for my Grandmother Emilia was suffused with the kamingaw—the longing.
The ethos of suffering is all about that mingaw, the longing, the separation, the breach. The death of the Savior is about loneliness, not so much the theological complexity of who gets redeemed and why but the desire to be back in a beautiful place, in the Garden once more.
And because desire brings about an active force, we do not succumb merely to silent prayers. We call upon ourselves to act on redemption as memory, as an element in the collective unconscious of a human group exposed to errors, f lawed perhaps but not fatally, but ready to rise, to follow the path to what could be Paradise.
This ethos of suffering has always relegated us to the passive, the morbid. But can we not acknowledge one fact: that we, in our attempt to understand a new faith, have reaffirmed the so-called positive model of suffering following J. Davies? For this author, suffering can have positive effects. It is not a retreat but a coping, a confronting, even an act of acceptance.
There is a lesson in the small book written by Diego Yuuki, SJ, titled The Twenty-six Martyrs of Nagasaki. In that account, the martyrs are described as arriving at the hill of their own crucifixion, where they “hastened happily to the instruments of their death and of their victory.”
Here are more details: “As soon as the last martyr arrived...the executioners began their task of attaching the bodies to the crosses. They did not use nails, but fastened iron clamps around the neck, hands, and feet. A cord tied around the waist helped to keep the body steady. In this way, the victim remained tightly fastened to his cross. But an iron clamp was not enough for Fray Pedro Bautista; pointing to the palm of his hand, he asked the executioner, “Brother, nail me here.”
In our case, we do not need a nail to fasten ourselves to the imagined crosses. There is the society, the conquest and the memories that have arisen from years of erasures and struggles, which in all cases have produced the desirable ethos, that much desired light at the end of sorrows.