Repent!

   

While waiting for my friend Beena to go jogging with me earlier today (she slept on me, that girl! haha), I was forced to sit in the waiting area of her condominium for about 40 minutes and read—for lack of more worldly fare like, say, fashion magazines—apocalyptic religious material which scared the begeezus out of me. Pardon the inappropriate language.

 

Not that the stuff I read was all entirely new. Having grown up in a very Catholic family, the concept of the Three Days of Total Darkness was all too familiar to me. That, as well as Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia in Fatima; Father Gobbi; the consecration of Russia; the apparitions in Medjugorje… you get the picture. I started to get exposed to these ideas when my sisters and I came to live with my Grandma when I was in fifth grade. Then, nightcaps consisted of the rosary prayed ever so slowly and devoutly, because my Grandma believes (and I do, too) that you do not really pray properly if you slur your words out too fast. Dinner talk was, at least half of the time, bound to lead to the importance of living a pious life. My sisters and I were also encouraged to read Catholic magazines like Misyon and the Catholic Digest, to which my Grandma had monthly subscriptions, and my aunts liked to buy me and my sisters colored comic books on the lives of saints like St. Bernadette Soubirous and St. Agnes.

 

We were the sort of household where loud music and television were banned during the Holy Week and while mourning, such as when my Uncle David (that’s Major David Sabido, PMA ’78, to you) passed away after being gunned down by Abu Sayyaf. Okay, we weren’t entirely banned from listening to music and watching TV, as long as it was religious. A typical Holy Week conversation would go like this. “May we watch a VHS tape?” (VHS was still the latest entertainment console at the time). To this my elders would reply, “Sure, Cha-wee! Take your pick.” And then out would come our collection of 2-volume VHS tapes with titles in the likes of Christ is King, The Coming of the Messiah, and The Life of Elizabeth Seton. The first two movies have scenes with John the Baptist preaching, “Repent! Repent! For the Messiah is coming.”  Allow me to say at this point that the movie on St. Elizabeth Seton’s life is still one of my favorites, and I really did enjoy watching the other two movies the first few times.

 

Having said all this, it would seem as if I grew up in an uptight and fanatically religious family. Not so. Admittedly, it did seem like so at the time. But I suppose that everyone, including my Grandma and my aunts, is bound to loosen up at some point. It is regrettable that, what with our diverging schedules, we don’t get to pray the rosary nightly as a family anymore. And there really can be no justification for not being able to hear mass as one family as regularly as we used to, although it really has been unavoidable for the past few years, most notably when I started medical school and moved away from home.

 

But at least my Grandma and my aunts have stopped breathing down my neck for quitting my post as presidium vice-president of the Legion of Mary. Also, my Grandma has added to her monthly reading staple publications in the likes of Reader’s Digest, Time and Newsweek. And yes, we have already reached a compromise on the whole no-music-during-Holy-Week edict. We play classical music instead, which I absolutely love. Although it beats the idea of sacrifice which is what it is all about in the first place, I don’t really care.

 

Sure, the very idea of spending three days indoors (“72 hours, no more, no less”) amid total darkness and roving demons (“There will be no demon left in hell, for they will all be let loose upon the earth”) isn’t exactly a very pleasant thought. When this concept was first introduced to me in fifth grade, I was paranoid for months. I constantly bugged my dad to rush home from work well before dark (“You must bolt all doors and shut all windows, and you must never open the door and peek out a window when you hear a loved one begging for you to let them in, for they are lost, and you shall be lost as well”). I worried like crazy for my cats (“Do not worry about your animals, for they shall be taken care of”). And until now, I have several bottles of Holy Water and one giant blessed candle in my room (“There shall be no electricity nor running water, and your light can only come from blessed candles”). And what happens after all that, (“After it is over it will seem that you are the only ones alive… there will be much clearing of bodies, but eventually all the plants will start to grow again”), oh can there be a more optimistic prospect than that.

 

You can only imagine how high-strung I was for a time when I was a kid.

 

Nearly a decade and a half of successful repression so easily brought back to my consciousness, all because Beena dozed off on me. Haha, I’m kidding. But seriously, what do I think about all that? Well, I’m keeping an open mind. Although I have been taking an awful lot of interest in Buddhist philosophy these past few years, I still am very much Catholic. You could say that I’m more spiritual than religious, and that’s the best way I can put it.

 

I haven’t been the most virtuous person alive, but I do value life, mine as well as others’, and I honor God. I still wear my scapular sometimes, and I have blessed medals under my pillows and a blessed rosary and crucifixes hanging all over the place. But what am I explaining myself to you for? You’re not the one to judge me when the Day of Reckoning comes. Hahaha.