Fr. Bembol, DSPNSDA Shrine Rector and Parish Priest, planked by parish workers from Lectors, Seminarians, Altar Servers to name some during photo ops this morning at Easter Sunday Mass. Photo: Mel Monterola / Association of OLAR
This may seem no-brainer, at first blush. Truth is, it should take us reams of papers and lots of ink if were to do justice to the whys and wherefores of Easter. The more practical course to steer in this explanatory venture would be to limit ourselves to the more obvious and therefore manageable aspects of this feast of feasts.
It is perhaps no accident that our parish is located in San Mateo – the evangelist’s place name well, being the first of the Four Evangelists it is only in order that we should make a competent enough attempt at explication if not narrative.
JRR Tolkien of Hobbit fame once declared that of all fairy tales (in no pejorative sense of the term, let it made clear) the tale of the Incarnation, of God’s katabasis into the world, is the greatest of all. Simply because it opens up the gates of eternal life post-redemption or after Christ’s passion. Otherwise, the prospect for mankind is bleak indeed. For that redemptive act of Christ, involving his multiple hardships and eventual death on the Cross, that act, and his resurrection makes available to us the promise, and fulfilment of, man’s immemorial longing to go beyond the severely delimiting games of death where, as Dante so nicely expresses ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE. But Christ’s Passion and Death… and Resurrection put another chance for man, if only he were to keep to the strait and narrow.
Thus Easter – the Feast of All Feasts – should be celebrated as the culmination of what had seemed to be the long drawn out obstacle course of the VIA DOLOROSA. I might tend to get mixed up here, and if so, it’s from the overwhelming joy that I and any Christian, have in my heart in the contemplation of this supreme event.
Having so much and so little, I must still keep to the course we’ll all take and enjoin you San Mateans most heartily to look forward to Holy Easter and celebrate it with all your heart, all your mind and all of every effort we can muster in honour of our Lord’s Resurrection. MABUHAY! Is the most apt expression of this joy.
-Rev. Fr. Lopito “Bembol” Hiteroza
