Quach and the power of music

Most everyone has an extreme fantasy. I have mine. By extreme I mean something that is beyond my present circumstances to fulfill or work at. It is not a dark frustration, but rather a thing to happily indulge in once in a while. Something magical brings it on. It is music.

My sweet indulgence is imagining myself conducting a symphony orchestra or playing as a concert pianist. I never imagine myself a car racer or ramp model. The concert or movie in my mind rolls when I hear great symphonic music swell and every inch of space around me is awash in it.

I raise my hand and do a Stokowski, pretend to stoke the music and make it come to life, make it rise and swell and ebb and flow. No, I don’t do this in public. Grand finales could make for good arm exercise and the sound of a lonely oboe rising above the whispers of violins could get me to the ceiling.

It is not the fame or the fortune attached to this occupation that makes my imagination and juices go wild. It is imagining the power, yes, the power, to have awesome music flowing from one’s hand or finger tips. Like, oh, my, God.

I can read and play music. And having been exposed to the classics during my Benedictine-German-style schooling at St. Scholastica’s College, I am not alien to Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. And I also know great music does not simply flow from the hand. It entails practice, practice, practice. And undeserved God-given musical talent.

A rich imagination is what I have. So what brought on my wild imaginings?



You have a few hours till tonight to grab a ticket to a musical treat at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) featuring the world-renowned Helen Quach conducting the Manila Symphony Orchestra, and with Cristine Coyiuto on the piano.

Three great immortal pieces await you. Beethoven’s Leonore Overture, Grieg’s Concerto in A minor for piano and orchestra, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor. We had this triple treat last Sunday at St. Scholastica’s St. Cecilia’s Hall. Last Sunday’s concert and tonight’s at the CCP are part of the centennial offerings of St. Scholastica’s Music Department which is celebrating its 100th year this year. It was founded in 1907 (a year after the founding of the college) by Sr. Baptista Battig, OSB, a talented German pianist who shared her musical genius with Filipinos.

Quach’s nth coming to the Philippines was partly through the efforts of Sr. Mary Placid Abejo, OSB, dean of music. This was a dream she nurtured for many years and she’d have to sit down with me, she said, to tell me the whole story.

Mesmerized is an understatement. I was mesmerized at last Sunday’s treat. Go tonight and listen with your soul.

I am not a music critic, by the way -- but I can say that Coyiuto tackled Grieg with power and grace. Her chords were grand and clear but not domineering or overwhelming and when she needed to make those notes dance, the MSO sprung to indulge her whimsy. What a joy. (Norway and the world are celebrating Grieg’s 100th death anniversary this year.)

My eyes and ears were not on the soloist and conductor only. From where I was (balcony for P500, so my friends and I could have a post-concert “halo-halo”), I could see that the Manila Symphony Orchestra players were mostly very young. The youngest is 17. But their intensity was palpable, and Quach surely drew out the best in them. She made them leap with Grieg’s stunning opening and bang heaven’s gates with Tchaikovsky’s fervid finale. A good number of them, I was told, had trained in Sr. Placid’s Predis program for orchestra players. I caught up with a cello player after the concert and he said he trained with Predis. And that Quach was unforgettable.

Quach was pure energy and poetry. I could sense the spiritual force that was making her draw the music not just from the orchestra or soloist but from the universe. I couldn’t help asking, where was this music coming from? It was not from one instrument or 60 instruments and a piano. Or from so many individuals playing individually. They were one music, moving, alive. Quach was waving the wand and, with the music players, drawing out the beauty and the magic from the cosmos.

Come to think of it, I’ve always wondered how symphonies or concertos are composed, how they are born in the mind of the composers. Before he or she writes down the symphony on paper, does the composer first hear the sound of it as a whole, or by instrument?

I watched Quach the first time more than 30 years ago. I remember her in a white suit and a short skirt, her Beatles bob bouncing. I was enthralled, not only by the music, but by her youth and daring. I don’t remember what was played (so young I was then) but the image remains. But now I know my classics better (thanks partly to the radio station dzFE) and I will indulge in my extreme fantasy for some time.

Well, my ancient Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 played by the USSR State Orchestra and Grieg’s piano concerto (I have two versions) have been on my player since this morning and until a while ago when I began this column piece. Then I got a message from Sr. Placid saying that Quach agreed to be interviewed Wednesday (yesterday) morning for a feature article on her experience of healing.

Quach had gone through life-threatening experiences, an electrocution accident and breast cancer that she has survived, not through surgery and chemotherapy, but through spiritual reawakening. I went to Quach’s website and found the beginnings of her autobiography which is intricate and spiced with a tinge of mystery, about her Chinese childhood in Vietnam, growing up in Australia. And then… I thought, now, what, is, this.

Yesterday she shared with the Inquirer the symphony that is her life and her journey toward healing. Will share these with you soon.

“Whether through wounds, capture or shipwreck”

My feature story on the Philippine National Red Cross’ 60th year that came out last Monday did not have its accompanying sidebar because of space constraints. It was Manny Pacquiao day, you see, and with his new triumph, the boxing champ made good “blaze of glory” promise that would momentarily dazzle the nation.

Not that we are wanting in inspirational blazes and sparks nowadays. There are many out there, emanating from the lives of unknown, unsung and unseen heroes. Many of these are Red Cross volunteers who have put their lives on the line in order to help and save others.

I have many interesting reading materials on the Red Cross’ work in the Philippines and around the world but I have yet to see or read one that is exclusively on the human drama many Red Cross volunteers have been part of. I wish stories on this would be compiled and published to inspire the young. Something like the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s “Great Men and Women of Asia” books that feature the lives and times of special individuals who made an impact on communities. The light they had created had turned into a blaze that stunned the darkness.

I have the thick history of the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) as well as a beautiful coffee-table that tells the Red Cross story through vintage images and essays, from its beginnings before the American occupation up to the recent years. I also have the must-read “Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949” which every journalist who goes into a war zone should first read. I’ve had my old copy for many years. I got a new one recently.



Here are some must-know:

After a frenzied battle in Solferino in northern Italy in 1859, Henry Dunant, a Swiss, came upon a bloody scene where French and Italian troops on one side, and Austrians on the other, were killing one another. Imagine 400,000 dead and dying without medical care, fair game for looters and predators.

Army medics could not do their work because they could not be distinguished through a sign that would be easily identified by warring parties. They were themselves fair game.

From that battlefield Dunant picked up the bloody seed of what is now known as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the mother of the Red Cross and Crescent Societies all over the world. Dunant, along with Guillaume-Henri Dufour, Gustave Moynier, Louis Appia and Theodore Maunoir founded the ICRC. Their work earned them the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

In 1863 an international assembly met in Geneva to find means to remedy the lack of medical services in the war zones. It adopted a red cross on a white background as the distinctive sign to be used by relief services for wounded combatants. This would later be adopted by National Red Cross and Crescent Societies.

In 1864, the red cross on a white background was officially adopted by the first Geneva Convention and was officially recognized as the distinctive sign of the medical services of armed forces.

During the 1876 Russo-Turkish war that was fought in the Balkans, the Ottoman empire preferred to use the red crescent (the crescent being an Islamic symbol) on a white background instead of a red cross. The red cross, by the way, was not related to the Christian cross whose vertical part is longer than the horizontal part. The symmetrical red cross is more like the cross of the Swiss flag.

Egypt also chose to use the red crescent while Persia (now Iran) chose a red lion and sun on a white background. These states made their reservations to the conventions and their signs were then written into the 1929 convention. (The Islamic Republic of Iran would give up the red lion and sun and adopt the red crescent in 1980.)

Article 38 of the Geneva Convention of 1949 confirmed the red cross, the red crescent and the red lion and sun on a white background as the protective signs of the medical services of government armed forces. Only these and no other signs or emblems would be recognized.

In 1982, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies adopted as its emblem the red cross and red crescent on a white background. In times of conflict, it is the visible sign of protection conferred by the Geneva Conventions.

During international conflicts, the ICRC bases its work on the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Additional Protocol I of 1977. These treaties lay down the ICRC’s right to carry out activities such as bringing relief to wounded, sick or shipwrecked military personnel, visiting prisoners of war, aiding civilians and, in general terms, ensuring that those protected by humanitarian law are treated accordingly.

During non-international armed conflicts, the ICRC bases its work on Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II Article 3 recognizes the ICRC’s right to offer its services to warring parties with a view to engaging in relief action and visiting people detained in connection with the conflict.

I remember Protocol II being invoked by political detainees during the martial law years.

The Geneva Conventions is the bedrock of international humanitarian law. The fundamental international agreements are inspired by respect for human dignity. They establish “the principle of disinterested aid to all victims of war without discrimination—to all those who, whether through wounds, capture or shipwreck, are no longer enemies but merely suffering and defenseless human beings.”

In this age of terrorism, the battle lines have blurred. The battlefield could be anywhere.

Fish be with you

Happy Easter!

Are they poor because they are fishers? Or are they fishers because they are poor? These questions of causality sum up the concerns of international fish experts—scientists, academics, government and NGO workers—who were in conference two days ago.

Easter week opened with fish and the poor on top of the agenda of the International Conference on Fisheries and Poverty. The discussions on the theme “Poverty Reduction Through Sustainable Fisheries” zeroed in on emerging policy and governance issues in Southeast Asia.

With the glow of Eastertide still washing over the land, I couldn’t help thinking that the first Pope was a fisherman. Fish—ichthys—was a sign used by the early Christians. May I digress by saying that I remember “Ichthys”, the weekly militant (okay, subversive) underground church publication that I was involved in during the martial law years. The Marcos military never found the catacomb where “Ichthys” was coming from.
Fish has been a staple since the dawn of time. Fish signs and symbols are very much a part of civilizations, and fishing a way of life for many people all over the world. So important is this human activity that it is even romanticized in literary works.

Today, the planet’s bodies of water cannot simply be left on their own to naturally grow all the fish we need the way they did in the days of yore. Feeding the planet and its present inhabitants means finding ways to increase food yield.



In this age of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, sustainable fish production as a source of livelihood for the teeming poor and as a source of protein for human consumption could spell the difference in narrowing the yawning social divides. There is something better than subsistence fishing. And it is not sport fishing.

Sustainable fisheries is the key, the fish experts say. Sad to say, the fisheries sector remains neglected in the research and development department. Here are some of the questions raised at the conference. How dependent are the poor in fisheries? How poor are the households that depend on fisheries? Can fisheries offer sustainable livelihoods for the poor? What policies, institutions and technologies are needed to spread and sustain the gains for the poor?

I ask why is fishing synonymous with poverty? From capture fishing to fisheries or fish farming—is this an answer?

The conference, organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), WorldFish Center and the Philippine Council for Aquatic and Marine Research and Development (PCAMRD) presented evidence on why fisheries for the poor (not just for the big capitalists) could change lives and communities.

I am mainly a fish eater (90 percent of the protein in my fridge is fish) and coming from a coastal town known for great fish, I have no craving for meat. I am interested in the fish issue.

Dr. Natasja Sheriff of the WorldFish Center based in Malaysia (the center used to be in the Philippines) described fishers as often marginalized and with few occupational alternatives. Her topic was “Fish and the Poor”. Fishers are often portrayed as the poorest of the poor, she said, with fishing as their occupation of last resort. She stressed that recently “the focus has shifted away from economic issues (low income) and biological issues (overexploitation) to a new current paradigm which proposes a greater emphasis on the role of socio-institutional mechanisms which govern access to fisheries resources as a critical step to addressing vulnerability and poverty in fisheries.”

I have been covering developmental issues that concern the poor for quite some time and, it seems, fisheries for the poor, has not caught fire. Land(lessness) and poverty issues as advocacies are commonplace, but not fish-lessness. I learn about and get to see the greening of the horizon through sustainable agriculture and all that, but sustainable fisheries, hardly. And yet fishing and fisheries are still within the domain of agriculture.

I know NGOs that help subsistence fishermen, but the poverty issues they tackle are often linked to inaccessibility to fishing areas (pearl farms with armed guards), their fight against destructive fishing and big trawlers. I wish the conference had invited more NGO types. But it was good to listen to the different country reports and how “fish and the poor” figure in different Southeast Asian countries.

Dr. Westly Rosario, director of the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources presented the Philippine experience. Seaweeds, bangus and tilapia are the Philippines’ top three aquatic produce, he said. He enumerated three major issues related to “fish and the poor”, namely, too much open access to marine resources, population, and government inability to address problems.

Dr. Madan Dey, regional director of WorldFish Center said that the supply and demand for fish have changed dramatically during the last three decades. Global demand for fish has rapidly increased with the increase in population and per capita income. There has been rapid growth in production and global trade. The fastest growing component is aquaculture, while capture fisheries have remained generally stagnant.

Citing 2006 Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, Dey said Asia is the leading contributor to this expansion, accounting for over 63 percent of total fish production, and as much as 90 percent of all aquaculture output.

But why have Asian fishers remained generally poor? Will things change when fishers turn fish farmers?

Stunned by God’s fierce, passionate love

Philippine Daily Inquirer/FEATURE/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

MANILA, Philippines -- “GOD IS A FIERCE LOVER who will never let go,” says popular Catholic lay preacher Bo Sanchez of his experience.

“Being in love with God is capturing and being seized by God’s eros—God is in love with us,” says Fr. Percy Bacani of the Missionaries of Jesus.

During the seasons of Lent and Easter “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son…” will be an oft-quoted line from the Bible. If the Holy Book has not driven this home strongly enough for today’s distracted, multi-tasking faithful, Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” at least tried to do the job.

But faith and intimacy with God are not nurtured in the movies. God offers His love to individual persons in a more real way. Real not reel. Stronger than the human heart could feel or the mind could intuit. For, as the Bible reminds, God loved us first. And continues to do so in season and out of season.

This holy season, a special few, the called and the chosen, spoke to the Inquirer about God’s eros at work, “God loving with eros” or with a passion that consumes and makes the beloved “like the deer that panteth for flowing streams.”

Carmelite contemplative nun Sr. Teresa Joseph Patrick of Jesus and Mary (aka Josefina Constantino, writer and former professor) describes it thus: “It is an unquenchable thirst. Yet too, in the stillness, in the repose of the abyss where He dwells, finding rest in His embrace…” Sister Teresa, 87, has been a nun for 33 years. She joined Carmel in Gilmore, Quezon City, in 1974 when she was 54.

It is real, it is personal; it is felt in the body, in the soul. The touched, the called, the chosen—many are able to articulate the real-ness of God’s love and presence and, as in all relationships, even God’s sometimes seeming absence in the divine romance.

A love affair with God, falling in love with God and staying in love, seeking out the divine and being consumed by the longing is a love plot that has played itself out in the lives of special individuals in different contexts throughout history and in this present time.

Words fail in describing this divine love play and often gets stuck in human comparisons. A 10th-century Hindu mystic pleads to her Lord, “Make of my body the beam of a lute … Clutch me close and play your thirty-two songs, O lord of the meeting rivers.” The psalmist waxes, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents.”

For some, it was a slow but steady wooing, for others, it was a swift and sudden leap to God’s overpowering call and pull and then responding with a love so human, so clumsy. The experience could be initially draining as the uninitiated soul gets inexorably drawn toward an incomprehensible force.

Eros and agapé

Sister Marie (who wishes to remain anonymous) of Carmel in Lipa City gives a glimpse of her love affair with God: “Many a time, God made me experience His love in a very human way since I am a creature of flesh and blood. As Richard Hardy, a doctor of theology, said in a conference on St. John of the Cross, God loves us with an erotic love, with passion. In God, eros and agapé become one. How true! So I experience God’s love not only in the mind, not only in the spirit, but as passion.”

Sister Mary has had her “dark nights” when God seemed to be lost. “God hiding so that I might search for Him with greater longing, then God manifesting Himself as pure delight. No wonder the saints speak of marriage in the mystical life.”

As an Indian mystic had written, “You hide, lest I seek and find. Give me a clue, O lord, white as jasmine, to your hiding places.”

Grace upon grace

Sr. Victricia Pascasio, a Holy Spirit sister felt God’s generous love and faithfulness when she was in college. She was a student leader at that time. “That day was crystal clear to me. God had been so faithful, so generous. The whole of me for a lifetime was the only fitting gift I could offer.” Looking back Sister Victricia says that was God’s way and “initiative” to draw her to Himself. “Many years later,” she reflects, “I could only say, how foolish of me to feel so generous toward God when it had been God who was most generous and faithful. Since then, it has been grace upon grace upon grace.”

A religious missionary for 47 years now, Sister Victricia, is involved in her congregation’s socio-pastoral apostolates in the Philippines and is immersed in the issues affecting indigenous communities. She sees her work “as Christ’s, not mine.”

Into an inner clearing

“How can I really thank you?” Sr. Edith Olaguer, a Good Shepherd contemplative sister, recalls asking God in prayer. She was in college then. “Hundreds of images flit through my mind. They left in their wake a clearing so empty, so still, I was jerked clean of all thoughts. Then I do not know how to explain it because I heard no voice, saw nothing, was not thinking but I simply understood.” God was drawing, wooing her. She would be brought to that “inner clearing” again and again and there would say her “Yes.”

The 2004 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for emergent leadership, Ben Abadiano, was about to get married when the religious call made itself heard. He had reached a crossroad.

“How could I offer my life,” Ben asked God. He had, at that time, already worked among indigenous peoples (IP) for almost a decade. He wanted to give more. “While thinking of that I was shedding tears of joy. I felt as if grace was raining down on me.” It was a watershed moment.

He joined the Jesuit novitiate and stayed on for four years, did studies in philosophy at the Ateneo, even pronounced his vows as a Jesuit. Ordination to the priesthood was still far down the road.

But God beckoned yet again and lured him back to his first love—the IP. Ben left the Jesuits in 1997 for a new path. He had nothing with him except dreams and a song in his heart. And the memory of that watershed God experience long ago.

As a wise French nun once told an enamored young seeker: “You must hold on to the memory of that moment. Many, many years from now, no matter where you will be, you will need that to give you strength to go on, to convince yourself that God’s love call was real.”

Stunned, embraced, gripped

Bo Sanchez says: “I believe that the first step of the Christian life is not to work, to do, to strive or even to love—but to first be loved. I have to first be stunned, moved, embraced, gripped by God’s passionate love. And when my soul is overwhelmed, yes, overpowered by God’s generosity, I cannot help but love the Lover with my all. Many times I left God, but God kept waiting for my return. God is a fierce lover that will never let go.”

God chases, like Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” and the object of this fierce love flees. “I fled him, down the nights and down the days, I fled him … Down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind…”

Sister Marie remembers how she fled. “I just plugged my ears, hoping that God would call someone else. At about that time, I fell in love with a man of great simplicity and integrity, and I thought then that I was destined for married life. At a certain point though, I realized the immensity of God’s love for me, and it was so overwhelming that I felt that love could only be repaid by love. Only a total surrender of myself could match the greatness of that love. I heard a clear voice within me, a voice so clear there was no use denying it.” To Carmel she went.

There are peaks and valleys, moments of consolation as well as desolation, bright mornings and dark nights of the soul. Great saints had their share of triumphs and turbulence, agonies and ecstasies.

Their written works about their love affair with God leave ordinary mortals in awe. It could be so saccharine like Therese of Lisieux’s, or earthy and forest-green like Francis of Assisi’s. Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain” is a classic. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” (song offerings to God) endures, rivaling in passion and depth the Bible’s “Song of Songs” that drips divine eros.

Gratitude

“Passion for God is not fear-based and is not sacrifice-driven,” Father Percy speaks from experience. “It is being filled with the superabundance of God’s love and the only response is gratitude. I become mindful of the ordinariness and the giftedness of everything. This is my mid-life discovery in my God-quest. Being in love with God is capturing and being seized by God’s eros-God is in love with us. St. Augustine says it better: God is closer to our hearts than we to our own.”

God’s face in every star

Sr. Mary Edith has glimpsed that too. “I had been given a glimpse of how good God is. This hollowed in me a cavernous thirst that has never been quenched. And so I hold fast to the dream that one day, I will be allowed, even while on this earth, to see God’s face in every star, in every human face and in every quivering tear. I want to know in my heart that I belong to everyone and everything, and that everything and everyone is part of me. When others suffer, when one is disgraced, it is to my shame. I want to live out in everyday life the fact that all I want to be, I already am.”

The search, chase

The search, the chase, continues. There could be bewilderment. A modern-day seeker asks: “Are you the symphony, are you the silent river that runs through my thoughts, that floods the cave of my heart, that breaks open the soul to an unknown wilderness?”

Most likely, the answer is “Yes.”

The late Sr. Christine Tan, RGS, told the Inquirer seven years ago, “Encountering God is a passionate experience. Violent but also tender. In prayer, when you go deep into the silence, you could actually feel God. You and God are merged as one. In that utter stillness you could feel the light, and the fire and the tight embrace, and the tenderness enfolding you. Then you become strong like a bull. You go straight like an arrow.”

Interactive Via Dolorosa

Here’s wishing you a passionate Holy Week.

The Internet has revolutionized ways for people to prayerfully contemplate the world. (Contemplation could be defined as taking a long, loving look at reality.) If one cannot be physically present in places where the Via Dolorosa is being played out daily in people’s lives, one can at least participate virtually through the web and then live out Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection in the context of one’s own life.

Visit the interactive Way of the Cross in the Internet of the Operation Rice Bowl (ORB) of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS). ORB’s 14 Stations of the Cross give the googler a virtual experience of a modern-day Via Dolorosa contextualized in ORB’s project sites in different parts of the world.

I can’t show you the images and maps but here are edited reflections on several Stations. You could also check them out in the Internet.



II. Jesus carries the cross: Unjust wages

After being condemned, Jesus begins his journey toward Golgotha, the place of the skull. Jesus now has to bear the heavy cross. Step by step, Jesus carries this instrument of death and shame. Very soon, the cross will bear him.

Much like Jesus under the weight of the cross, the workers in Mexico’s maquiladoras (factories that import duty-free materials for assembly) toil under a great weight. Their cross comes in the form of unjust wages and unfair labor practices.

III. Jesus falls the first time: Human trafficking

Jesus falls under the weight of the cross. He suffers pain and abandonment. Many have left him and he now walks alone. He is the joke of the people.

In our world today there are persons who are treated like mere objects, to be used and then abandoned. The victims of human trafficking suffer indignities in the hands of traffickers who make money out of their victims’ misery. Alone, with no one to trust, and far from home, the victims are later discarded, like objects that no longer serve their purpose.

IV. Jesus finds his mother: HIV/AIDS

Tired and beaten, Jesus finds his mother in the crowd. The son of God, walks towards our redemption while Mary sees how the life of her child becomes shorter and shorter with every step he takes.

Today, in South Africa, thousands of mothers experience the same passion that Mary went through. Because of HIV/AIDS, many lives come to a painful end every day. There is much sorrow among those who watch their loved ones die slowly and there is much uncertainty for those who are left behind.

VII. Jesus consoles the mothers of Jerusalem: Suffering in Darfur

As Jesus moves on, he finds himself in front of mothers who weep upon seeing his agony. In an act of love, Jesus lifts up his head and says to them, “Do not cry for me, cry for yourselves and your children.” (Luke 23:27-31)

Today, Christ asks us to recognize the suffering of the people of Darfur in Sudan. Armed conflict has driven hundreds of thousands of refugees to live in tent cities and suffer human rights abuses. Lack of medicine, food and basic necessities have resulted in the death of innocent victims of this conflict. Surely, Jesus would have offered words of consolation to these mothers. He now invites us to do something for their innocent children.

X. Jesus is stripped: Preventable disease

Upon arriving at his destination, Jesus is stripped of his clothes and is left naked. It is a great humiliation. The soldiers prepare him to receive his ultimate shame—crucifixion.

In Angola, thousands of children have been stripped of their access to the polio vaccine. As a result, only 57% of children under the age of 1 have received the vaccine. Polio outbreaks continue. CRS has been working to eliminate polio in Angola through immunization campaigns, and provide care to those already afflicted. We can do a lot by providing medicine against preventable diseases.

XI. Jesus is nailed to the cross: Terror in Iraq

Naked and abandoned, Jesus is now nailed to the cross. The pain is great and he shouts in agony. When the cross is raised, the pain intensifies.

In Iraq, many people have felt the desperation, agony and terror of constantly having to watch out for a possible violent attack. Today, Iraqis await the day when peace will return to their country. Right now, they remain in constant danger, nailed to the cross of daily terror and insecurity.

XII. Jesus dies on the cross: Destruction of God's creation

“Into your hands I commend my spirit…” After saying these words, Jesus dies for us. The Lamb of God, innocent and immaculate, breathes his last. Through his life, he showed us how to love; through his death, he showed us how to live.

On February 12, 2005 while en route to the village of Good Hope in Brazil, Sr. Dorothy Stang was murdered because she defended God’s creation. She denounced those that harmed the land and the farmers with whom she worked. We carry on Sr. Dorothy’s work of caring for God’s Creation when we prevent the destruction of our natural resources. We recognize that the destruction of the earth’s resources is the destruction of our future.

XIV. Jesus’ body is placed in a tomb: Forgotten in Zambia

Having been prepared for burial, Jesus’ body is placed in a simple tomb. His followers mourn his passing. Never again will they see the one whom they loved so dearly. Or so they think.

In a way, the town of Lukulu in the Western Province of Zambia in Africa has also been buried and forgotten. For more than 40 years, the people of Lukulu have had to live isolated lives. With only one road of about 190 kilometers, which takes eight hours to traverse, the people of Lukulu are like a body that has been long buried and forgotten.

Easter promises joy in the morning.