Tenebrae: Lightening the Pain

Before the rains come in June are two of the three major religious feasts of my childhood. In late March or early April comes semana santa, Holy Week, and on May 24 the town fiesta.

The Christian calendar is a schedule of liturgical and devotional commemorations intended to focus the believer on what keeps his faith alive and his soul from hell. The holy days disrupted the bleak landscape of childhood; they were the highlights of my days.

I am nostalgic for those years of innocence when the world was largely shades of gray but at opposite ends of the spectrum were incontrovertible black and white. Compared to my world today, those early years were as comforting as cartoons with their clearly outlined shapes and unambiguous primary colors.

Then everything was both simple and unfathomable. What I didn’t understand didn’t bother me because I had not yet discovered that bothering with mysteries I could unravel them. It was the simplicity and bliss of ignorance. Today when I watch cartoons anticipatory pleasure quickly turns to ennui. To grow up is to substitute colors for all those shades of gray, no matter that colors are more of a struggle to live. When they are bright life is joy, when dark they are hell on earth.

In grade school I lived with my grandmother whose house at La Granja was within walking distance of the school. I often walked home alone after school, delighting in discovering ways of getting home without using the street. A child alone learns the pleasure of invention, the thrill of making the commonplace new.

I cut across the yellow rice fields with a view of the crocodile-like green mountain in the distance, the island of Guimaras. Gingerly treading the narrow ridges of the dry, empty fields, I felt closest to God. A child prone to solitude develops intense friendships but his most intense relationship is with the person he communes with in his most private moments. It establishes a self-defeating precedent. The rest of his life he will seek that intimacy which is nothing more than narcissism, a relationship with a reflection of himself.

In those early cartoonish years, two-dimensional for lack of experience and breadth, God was more personal than family or friends. God’s death on Good Friday is prefigured in the service of Tenebrae. On Wednesday evening, people gather at church for readings from Lauds. In reverse of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, fifteen candles are extinguished one by one after a gospel reading or psalm until the whole church is plunged into darkness.

The congregation fumbles their way outside where the dark sky still suffused with summer’s sunset colors reassures them with the familiarity. At its best, religion teaches us how to endure life’s hardships. We learn to use contrast to lighten our dark pain.