Wood for the Mass from Pre-War Talamban

I am pretty certain the people of Talamban do not remember this anymore. But way before the war, there was this tradition of bringing pieces of wood to the altar of Cebu’s Catholic churches on Good Friday.

The tradition must have disappeared during the war years for obvious reasons but I also suspect something else may have caused the practice to die out.

It was like this: during Holy Thursday or even a day earlier, some Cebuano Catholics would go to the mountains and spend the night there, ostensibly to contemplate on the coming passion and death of Christ. Remember it was on a garden up a hill in Gethsemane where the final mission of Christ unfolded, with Jesus asking God the Father if the cup of suffering could be removed from him. Going to the nearest imagination of Gethsemane in Cebu as it were must have been encouraged at the time, to test one’s mettle to prepare for the suffering of Christ the following day.

The favorite spot happened to be the hills and mountains of Talamban, which, before the war, encompassed places whose names aptly describe their difficult condition or terrain: Pit-os, Dita, Guba, Paril, Agsungot, Budlaan, Cambinocot, and even as far as Lusaran.

For reasons most probably connected thereafter to Good Friday – when all Christians commemorate the carrying of the wooden cross by Jesus, the same piece of wood that would be used to nail and hang him on – it became a practice to cut some piece of wood from those upland places and bring them to the church altar where one went to. Alas I have seen as yet no photo of how altars or chancels may have looked like with all those pieces of wood brought by parishioners from their overnight pilgrimage into the wilderness.

I can also just imagine the damage that practice would have caused had it been continued to the present. One wonders how many young narra, tugas and other hardwood trees not yet mature enough to withstand numerous cuttings here and there lost their will to survive amidst such an onslaught during the driest and hottest month of the year at that.

Nevertheless, there was as yet no strong tree-hugging environmental movement at the time and thus for a while the practice was observed.

Trust young people to ruin the practice or take advantage of it, however. It appears from published reports of the 1930s that the tradition had become, if I may so brazenly describe it, almost like those of the noisy, raucous, bacchanalian Black Saturday bikini beach parties that once made the white sand beaches of Santa Fe, Bantayan the devil’s playground while the rest of Christendom mourned the passing of our savior Jesus Christ and await his resurrection hours later. (I remember it took former Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia sometime in 2010 to raise the loudest howl against it by filing cases against bikini-clad actresses, eventually ending the enterprise).

Of course there were no bikinis yet in the prewar years but something akin to unchaperoned dates between young people of the opposite sex apparently ensued as the practice of walking to the hills of Talamban and sleeping overnight there in some secluded place eventually led to young people spending time not in quiet contemplation.

Thus the expose and condemnation in the newspapers: not because it was damaging to the environment but because of its impact on young people.

Happy Easter Monday everyone!