Rolling the stone
By Rex Catubig
IT was for me the most awesome Easter experience. It happened during the confirmation rites of my niece, some years ago. Held at an unimposing chapel of the University of California in San Diego where she was enrolled, it was a 3-hour service that lasted from 10pm to 1am!
It started inauspiciously with a bonfire right outside the building. There we lit our candles then were ushered inside the darkened chapel. A number of votive candles strategically ensconced on the altar wall, were alternately lighted as bells pealed and music played on. Once all lighted, the Easter vigil began. And it was hauntingly dramatic, resoundingly prayerful, and its intensity shook one off his stupor.
The vigil was an exuberant son et lumiere performance combining powerpoint, gospel, R&B, chants, bells, violin and cello, piano and organ, conga drums and tom toms, gourd shakers, electric guitars, and a gamut of theatrical devices– which inspired awe, joy, excitement and created a whole new dimension to the phenomenon of Christ’s resurrection.
The homily in itself was a theaterpiece of Christian eloquence: the Priest, standing dead center at the foreground of the altar, began by intoning a plaintive and soulful Latin chant, at the end of which he exclaimed–“Who will move the stone?” –in metaphysical reference to the slab of rock that sealed Jesus’ tomb.
With outstretched arms flailing like some semaphore signals, he strode to the back, then worked his way back to the front, slowly building up the tempo like in Ravel’s Bolero, as he impassionedly expounded on the theme, repeating the rhetorical question time and again, thunderously asking: “Who will move the stone?”
With dramatic flourish, he implored and exhorted one and all to take action and cast off that barrier, that obstacle to our rebirth, our becoming: With the fulcrum of faith, hope and love. So that the promise and power of the resurrection could be revealed to us, and we could share fully in its resplendent glory.
And when the bombastic sermon reached its crescendo with the priest now back at the foot of the altar, he clasped his palms in prayer and supplication. Facing the congregation, he started almost in a whisper, then building up exultantly, he raised his hands and roared the triumphant message: “Christ is risen!”
It was the perfect climax to the hypnotic mystical experience. The Priest rocked! Not a single soul in that congregation was unmoved. It was as if the rock just rolled off from one’s heart. Everyone was ecstatic.
My chest heaved with an unnamed joy. I was thrilled, I was alive, I was reborn!
The rolling stone had unsealed our lockdown hearts.
HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!
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