This is an article wrote by my late father, Joe Marquez on his column in The Voice, a newspaper published weekly in the province of Pampanga and Angeles City, dated March 27-April 2, 1994. He was also, a columnist in The Sunstar, Pampanga Times, and Manila Times. I want to publish and share what he had written about the celebration of Holy Week in our town, Sto. Tomas.
Every Holy Week I always remember what my grandmother used to tell me, when I was still a small boy, about this most solemn and longest of religious occasion.
My grandmother ? Telesfora Dino Bondoc ? was a young beautiful woman during the turbulent years of the revolutionary period, the last decade of the 19th century which saw the intense struggle of the nation to free itself from the clutches of a foreign colonizer.
She was no Maria Clara, but she was among the most beautiful women of our town of Sto. Tomas, then a place quite known for its pretty women. And she had a very beautiful singing voice too.
During those days, she would tell me, people were deeply religious. At the start of Ash Wednesday ? the day that ushers in the beginning of the Lenten Season-up to Easter Sunday, when Christ rises from the dead, people would work and eat sparingly.
People, she said, would store food, water and firewood for Holy Week and they would never work during the entire week except for very menial jobs.
She said people in her town would stay most of the time in their homes, spend the whole day in intense prayers and recite the ?Pasion? in soulful incantation.
Abstinence and fasting, she said, were religiously observed by the people and partaking of pork and meat during those days was considered a mortal sin.
The rural folk, even the not so religious, would never take a bath on Holy Friday, as they regarded water on this particular day as ?dead.?
My grandmother also used to tell me that during Holy Week, there was a complete solitude prevailing in the air, the atmosphere was somber and had a tint of sacredness. The people, she said, were at peace, life was simple and there was no hurry in the daily struggle for existence.
On Eastern Sunday, she said, people would come out of their homes in their best dress, join in the rejoicing and exultation of the faithful to the heavenly meeting of Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ after He has risen from the Dead.
My grandmother, orphaned at an early age, got married in 1899, a year before the turn of the century. She was forced to marry our grandfather, an unschooled farmer, after he touched and embraced her.
Our grandparents had five children, one of whom became the first lawyer in our town from the old University of the Philippines in Manila.
Grandmother died in 1958 at the ripe age of 86. My grandfather died two years later at age 88.
My mother, the eldest of the children, never went to school. Widowed at the height of the Second World War, she reared and raised us ? seven children ? the best she could. She died in 1987 at age 87.
Today, as I silently pause and reflect on the observance of Holy Week, I could easily discern that time has, in deed, rapidly changed. Gone were the days of my grandmother when people would observe the Lenten season with pious devotion and intense solemnity.
Gone also were the old ways of marking the season and in their stead are the modern versions of observing Holy Week. Of course, the cenaculos are still here, the hundreds of flagellants, the penitents re-enacting Christ?s crucifixion. But, if I had my own way, I would prefer the way people observed Holy Week during the time of my grandmother.
I am not a religious man. But the way I see it today, some people appear to be fast drifting away from their Creator and Saviour, and I begin to wonder if the entire world is now beginning to forget Christ?s love for all humanity.
