I must
confess that I’m a bit megalomaniac.
I must submit myself to some form of therapy for easily associating
power and energy with the grandiosity of structures. Tsk! Thus, I remember, after visiting
the churches of Vigan and Laoag for the first time some years ago, the
compulsive in me was quietly insisting that new churches in the country should
be built the old fashioned way, that is as massive and as monolithic -- testimonies
to the ingenuity of man paying tribute to a great God.
But then, I was catching and asking myself: What do I mean? And so I
thought perhaps that the solid buttresses of the baroque Paoay Church are the closest
that we can get to the mysterious stupas of Borobodur in Djogjakarta or the
magnificence of the Thai King’s Grand Temple of the Emerald Buddha. I can be awe struck by the effort of
reconstruction being done on the Santa Monica Church (destroyed by an
earthquake two months after the Marcos-Araneta nuptials). Up on the still exposed ceilings, hundreds of
cured ancient logs hung uncomplaining side-by-side each other serving as
frame-support for the roof nestling above.
And so with pride, I thought, we can also work wonders with our local
wood approximating those on the temples at Nara and Kyoto. Of course,
I can dream on.
Quickly
enough, I was shaking myself off my deranged musings. I’m not merely admiring
an ancient monument, a tomb or simply another fascinating tourist attraction.
I had to hear myself saying: “These are churches, for heaven’s sake!” As such,
they function more than mere backdrops immotalized on our ubiquitous
postcards. I’m sure the ancient builders
of these Ilocos churches (i.e., the Augustinians and Dominicans) well subscribed
to the claim of a God who “wishes all men to be saved and come to the knowledge
of the truth.” Aptly, at a time when catechetical instructions faced a
lot of limitations and when technology had yet to invent the public address
system, the Church if I may surmised, needed the symbolisms of these massive
structures, the stories conjured by the stained glass windows, the phalanx of
saintly images, the ornate retablos, the spires that pointed heaven-wards to
drive home the point that there exist a great God that remains the sole and
worthy subject of all our expressions of worship. If the life of the faithful then seemed detached
from the cryptic liturgy, at least with the visual sensations around them, they
can worship God. The approach seemed logical enough given the context of the
old.
To state
the obvious, however, we say that times have indeed changed. We needed to graduate from the pleasure of mere visual
sensations to more meaningful and life changing experiences of God. Thus to my mind, the underlying challenge
being posed by our practice of faith is to encounter God in the most
proximate and real way. To this effect, a lot of conscious efforts will need to be made to contextualize our practices and ensure
active participation in memorializing the paschal mystery of our Lord.
We acknowledge the headways done and accomplished in this regard. Now, we receive and translate
the Gospels in dialects closest to our own local psyche. Our songs now carry the temperament and
emotions of our own culture. We can now
sing the Great Amen to affirm and accept our real understanding (hopefully?) of the
mystery unfolding before us during each liturgical celebration. Our participation in such rites, as well,
helps us identify with an assembly that encounters God in a multiplicity of
ways. In short, our inculturated liturgy
allows us every opportunity to experience the power and energy of God via our
supposed participation in the very life of the Church.
The
grandiose buildings of the old have indeed served their purpose. Every so often, we enter a massive structure
and experience the monumental God, the Being bigger than ourselves that the
buildings so wished to impress upon our minds and those of the early believers. Nevertheless, the call of the times points us
to a greater participation in the life of the Church than merely being overly concerned with structures and external
trimmings.
I guess, I myself will need to temper my own compulsions or perhaps more … even say a little prayer that our
Church may be saved from crazy megalomaniacs like myself.
