In Christian religious studies or theology, it is recognized that conversion is a lifetime rather than an instant process.
We would be wise to make this a principle for engaging revelers who attend Cebu City’s Sinulog celebrations.
There is already wisdom in Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña to reserve around the third Sunday of January part of the South Road Properties (SRP) for the use of establishments or entrepreneurs whose trade enables the much-lamented, boisterous, liquor-laden Sinulog street parties.
Apart from decongesting the city center that is normally packed with devotees and pilgrims on fiesta weekend, the measure puts a necessary physical distance between the festival’s devotional exercises and unbaptized parallel events.
The latter have unfortunately occasioned not only benign intoxication but also public disturbance and physical harm, from vehicles stomped on to people mauled by partygoers.
A liquor ban that Osmeña is contemplating to enforce from 6 a.m. on Fiesta Señor Sunday to the same time the following day while forbidding parties within 300 meters of grand parade and procession routes might seem killjoy.
But neither have the Sinulog nor the Fiesta Señor ever been about license, alcoholism, carousing, immodesty, vicious catharsis or vague, unrestrained expressionism. The street dancing for centuries was about what one could offer in thanksgiving to the divine, not what one could get out of a weekend event.
Sinulog and Fiesta Señor must be protected from entropy into sheer bacchanalia or hooliganism.
This is not to say there is no room for socials in the season of Cebu’s Holy Child, who, at one point when he was of age himself made sure a wedding banquet would not run out of free-flowing wine.
The SRP is a well-picked place for parties. There, the sacred will be spared from disruption, and the banal, under the watchful gaze of authorities kept orderly.
Come Sinulog weekend, in all the right places, serve the lechon and raise beer glasses for a toast. Eat, drink and be merry. Make great memories with family and friends.
Forget not, however, that the center of the celebration represents not ego-worship and hedonism to the grief of many, but generosity and other-centeredness for the well-being of all.
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