Hope in a darkening world
By some mysterious twist of fate, I found myself in the burst of liturgical celebrations during the Easter Triduum (evening of Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday) assigned to sing the most difficult chant which was the Exsultet. It was clear to me that I was the desperate remedy to our predicament.
It’s the Easter Proclamation in Latin, done at the beginning of the ceremony of the Easter vigil when the Easter candle has just been lighted and placed in the church.
Though beautiful and set mainly in monotone, it has abrupt rise-and-fall parts, with some pirouetting notes to boot and varying patterns in the whole 10-minute rendition that truly are a real challenge to any liturgical singer.
I love to sing, but I’m more of a crooner, a la Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (just ask your grandparents if you don’t know them), and so I had to prune and purify my style to make me sound liturgically acceptable. It was a painful make-over.
I don’t remember now how many times I had to go through the score to practice, but in the end, as my friends and critics told me, I did a fairly good job. And so, I concluded, there is still hope in this world.
That—i.e., hope—happens to be the main message of the homilies that I gave in those celebrations. That the world is darkening can hardly be debated now. Pope Benedict himself said in one of his Easter Triduum homilies that “we are drifting into a desert of godlessness.” I immediately nodded in agreement.
And in a lead article of an English magazine that I read in the Internet, the question was raised: “Will Jesus Christ really come back?” Of course, everyone is entitled to his opinion, but I just found it unsettling that a main doctrine of the Christian faith is questioned in such a public, kind of unfeeling way.
I am of the opinion that there are matters, issues and questions of faith that need to be discussed mainly in more intimate dialogues or small circles, precisely because of their delicateness.
They should not just be indiscriminately dragged to the public forum where most people are not equipped to discuss them. This, to me, is part of prudence and discretion and common sense. But then again, people can have varying views on this point, and so I just have to be open to any possibility.
Truth is there seems to be a lot of skepticism, unbelief, doubts and indifference to faith and religion that we can observe in the world today. Here in our country, we are still relatively lucky in that the situation is not as bad as in many First-World but deeply disturbed countries.
I remember that when Pope Benedict issued his second encyclical, Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), back in November 2007, hardly any ripple of media commentary was made, indicating that hope as a virtue is hardly known and appreciated by many people.
And yet, hope is what we do most of the time. It can be so spontaneous that we may not even be aware of it. The problem is that our hope is stuck in the human and natural level. It is not made to go to its more perfect form and level, which is hope in God, in eternal life, in the spiritual and supernatural realities, etc.
I think that at the root of the problem is the loss of the sense and capacity for transcendence. This is the power we have to go beyond the material, purely human and natural dimensions of our life. We refuse to go beyond these aspects.
We seem imprisoned in the world of pure reason alone, if not, worse, in the world of senses, and we don’t like having anything to do with faith. And this predicament is constantly reinforced by an environment of liberalism, consumerism, moral relativism, etc. that seem to prevail in many places.
Thus, many people are averse to any talk about eternal life. Worse, the idea of eternal life is corrupted by the thinking that interest in eternal life would only show selfishness and disregard to earthly and social welfare, which, to me, is completely untrue.
I think that hope as a theological virtue can still rise from the dead, if it is explained properly in classes, spiritual direction, etc., and when there is abiding effective witness to it by those who want to be consistent with their faith.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)