Easter Sunday (April 8, 2012)
There is a Catholic tradition where every Easter Sunday at 4
o clock in the morning, the statue of Jesus Christ meets the statue of the
Mother Mary, literally a re-enactment of the said meeting in the bible. After which a dawn mass follows. I had attended such a dawn mass in my youth
and it is quite a treat to expose my three children to such a tradition. This morning is the first time that we as a
family attended the “salubong”.
Philosophically, the premise of the Christian belief is
based on resurrection. If there is no
resurrection, everything is bogus. The
entire Christian tenet revolves around the resurrection of Jesus Christ because
without it, everything is a lie.
The question now is “how do we know that Jesus Christ really
did arise from death?” Do we take it on
blind faith or do we reason out the likelihood of resurrection actually
happening? For the ignorant, blind faith
is sufficient but for the rational mind, a little more than blind faith is needed
to sustain a questioning psyche.
Psychologically, while a
person could live a life based on a lie – a person will never die for a lie. The entire original disciple of Jesus Christ
died violent deaths; in fact, most of them were tortured just so they would
renounce the resurrection of Christ.
Surprisingly, all of them willingly died for their testament that there
was such a thing as a Jesus Christ resurrection.
From the history of violent deaths (the disciples and early
Christians), it is safe to assume that the testament of resurrection was more
than blind faith but rather an actuality.
Now, how do we make this story of resurrection relevant
today? Tradition will only take you up
to a certain distance. Psychology and
History is the purview of an inquiring mind which to my assessment does not
appeal to the masses.
Maybe the collective thrust of tradition, psychology and
history will carry the day. Because this
current fixation on tradition produces a bigot which is no different from the
bigot raised by the terrorists. A sound
psychology with a solid history will carry and sustain the day for the modern
day rational mind.
It is just too bad, that the Roman Catholic Church is
fumbling this opportunity of raising and producing rational minds. I suspect that they want drones that blindly
follow whatever dictates they issue, they seem to be allergic to a mind that
independently thinks. A person who thinks is a person who asks questions. An entity with a question is the biggest threat
to tradition and religion hence the non-encouragement of a questioning mind.
The collective unconscious is lazy; it doesn’t like the actual
exercise of thinking. It would even
prefer a mass hysteria as opposed to
a single thinking mind. And that is the sin that the current Roman
Catholic Church will have to answer for.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who is a heavyweight theologian/philosopher
ought to do something about this sin of omission.
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