Part 6: In Search of Sacredness in Postmodern Times

 In Search of  Sacredness in Postmodern Times

San Lorenzo Ruiz is the layman's saint and the most
recently canonized. Will the people follow his path?

“Why can’t many people find sacredness anymore?” asked Time in a special issue. Moses asked the same question, puzzled on why his people had turned their worship to a golden calf. Christ released His anger, the first and only instance, when the synagogue was turned into a marketplace.

I remember Alvin Toffler’s books “Future Shock” and “Eco-Spasm”. We are unprepared visitors of a changed planet who broke away too soon with the past. We are willing victims of an accelerated thrust of time and change. We are a people of the future too soon, carried away by the concept of transience and adhocracy, and not one of permanence. We created a throw-away society that we discard many things including values in favor of novelty.

We find little sacredness when we talk in the future tense, of foreign ideologies not founded by enduring philosophies, but of futurism, its promises of choice and kaleidoscopic images. How can we find sacredness in subterranean cities, in modular fun houses, in sprawling mega malls, in mail-a-bride and rent-a-person, in hurry-up welcome, in Batman, in temporary marriages? Welcome to the rental revolution, to simulated environments, the portable playground.

Gone is the homing instinct. Broken is the old family. If we are a product of periodicity, then we are but a drifting lead swept onto the ocean of change. No, we are not.

Here we remember the classical period, the anchor against the fallacy of human dreams and ambitions. What caused the downfall of Alexander and Napoleon? Here we remember the historical period. History is the greatest lesson of mankind. He who knows his history does not run and get a stabbing thorn. He who walks sees reality and the beauty of the countryside.

We remember liberation theology – it is the catalyst of social justice; the feminist paradigm – it gives wholeness to man-woman relationship; the Filipino paradigm, the quaintness of Filipino life, shy from the world, but full of life’s simplicity as well as flavors, while ecological paradigm is making us move closer to nature.

Continued...