Ash Wednesday is happening as I annotate. On TV screen, the news says, the ritual of inscribing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful would take place once more. For the last two years, the Church looking to the body and not the soul, decided that it was wise for priests not to touch the foreheads of the believers. They, the bearers of truths about us coming from dust and to dust returning, had resolved the issue of tactility and possible infection through containers with the proxy artefact of our immortality. Dipped into them, our own hands swam with a newly found authority in the ashes/dusts as we became the minister of our own complex religion.
The wind, it seems, has blown away the unseen sources of the disease, which isolated us from each other and we are once more submitting the corporeal in us to the default spiritual in the church ministers. If we are to believe the updates, the priests in Roman Catholic Churches and in other denominations are recalling their power to be the ultimate appendage officially allowed to brand us with the ashes of life. These are the same artefacts that inhere in us the thought that we cannot go on living but, in a compromise which is a strategy for conversion, rudimentarily handing us the lesson how life, as with death, is transitory in our chosen religion. This is the baggage as well as the product line of our doctrine: hoping for in a life that will not go on and hoping against hope in a death that is not the end of everything.
Shall the ashes usher us to the end of the pandemic, or are we seeking succor in metaphors? Think kindly of metaphors and other figures of speech, for they have launched books and wars, gave birth to careers and conscience, or entertained us during those years when the act of moving into the sun was initiating the loss of the sunshine.
Allow me then these claims: Outside of the launch of the candidacies of individuals who promise us heaven on earth, or, at least, a respite from killings outside the judgement of courts (States do kill their own people), or a break from hunger amidst plenty, there is no sign at all that the pandemic is gone. But as there has been no reported surge after thousands of people jostled each other for a look at their own presidents, then election, the instrument of democracy, is the cure for the virus that respects no popular choice.
Looking back, the lockdown of the entire island of Luzon in March 2020 and the disclosure of towns and cities possessing boundaries are now part of our histories. And history is the best teacher. The only problem with history and the learning curve it brings us into contact with is that the events of the past, the historical accounts of our behavior to the events that transpired are pedagogies of the I-told-you-so. We learn from hindsight, and the courses taught by that past make sense if we so much glance backward. The plot of Lot, however, twisting her head to become a pillar of salt is a misplaced cautionary lesson about sitting at the feet of historians.
The lessons of the pandemic is that we do not learn from the past because we do not live in the past. We go on living with the future that remains unseen, very much like the virus that came to us in the first three months of 2020. There was no way the world was prepared for the pandemic as there was no way for the world to fight the vital signs of the future.
History works with footnotes and endnotes. See how in the last months of the year 1918, the First World War was sensing its end. But as the war was ending, somewhere what began as common cold brought upon the killer influenza. The succeeding years saw the rise of a pandemic in the form of what was wrongly attributed as Spanish flu. With war raging in other places, flu was observed more in Spain which remained neutral. This led to the perception that the virus originated from the said country.
What is happening at present seems to be the opposite. As the pandemic appears to be winding down, there is a war in the offing. Ukraine and Russia may be far but in the highly globalized world, no country is isolated enough not to be affected by any event impinging on other territories. Then comes the discovery of airspaces being closed by countries. This war teaches us a new lesson – the clouds and the span of sky up there are not owned by God but by countries with their own ideologies about war and peace; the grounds below—the bogs, the muds, the trodden soil—territorializes our misgivings, fears and tight embrace of redemptions in our own humanity.
Was there wisdom then in allowing us, carriers of our own mortality, to be given the tender, trembling right to mark our foreheads with the sign that makes us, contrary to the Humanist tradition, not the power center of this discordant universe? Or was that an acclamation that the body was prized more than the spirit on this viral Earth? Whatever it was and whatever will be, the dust is here to stay.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano