lakambini 3

I'm deferring publication of my poem dated 6 October 2009.

 

The title of the painting above is "Wheatfield with a Reaper" (1889) by Vincent Van Gogh. 

lakambini 2

A mother’s sorrow
By the death of her loved son
A grief so immense
-Rod Escobin

The morning after typhoon Onyok hit Manila, after delivering relief goods to Radio Veritas, I saw a new statue in Manila Cathedral that for me symbolizes a nation still in grief and shock, not yet able to understand the death and destruction wrought by the storm nor see the Resurrection- that surge of national unity and collective heroism that had already begun to unfold and would grow exponentially in the coming days.

I attended the Sunday mass celebrated in the cathedral by Cardinal Rosales, Archbishop of Manila. Understandably, because of the storm the night before, there were only a few people with us, some of them seafarers, and I sat in one of the front right pews.

After the mass, we went to the first chapel to the left of the massive doors of the cathedral, St. Joseph's Chapel, for the unveiling of Manila's Pietà, a copy made by an unnamed Filipino craftsman from a cast of the original statue by Michelangelo Buonarroti in Rome. Pietà in Italian means pity, sorrow, or compassion- the word is associated with paintings and statues of Mary holding and grieving over her dead son Jesus.

Even if I knew it was a copy- and I would have preferred sculpture that the world had never seen before- the Manila Cathedral's Pietà still took my breath away. It was an exact copy of the original, but this time bathed in the colors of tropical light streaming through the chapel's stained glass windows. Compare it with the setting of the original statue in St. Peter's Basilica- it's dark as a dungeon inside Rome's churches because of the different climate:

They look exactly alike- artists and pilgrims need only go to Intramuros to see the form.

Here is how Irving Stone described the statue in his biographical novel on Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961):

Because the Madonna was gazing down on her son, all who looked must turn to her face, to see the sadness, the compassion for all men's sons, asking with despair: "What could I have done to save him?" And from the depth of her love, "What purpose has all this served, if man cannot be saved?"

All who saw would feel how insupportably heavy was her son's dead body on her lap, how much heavier was the burden in her heart.

It was unusual to combine two life-size figures in the same sculpture, revolutionary to put a full-grown man onto the lap of a woman. From this point of departure he left behind all conventional concepts of the Pietà. Once again, even as Ficino had believed that Plato could have been Christ's most loving disciple, it was Michelangelo's desire to blend the classical Greek concept of the beauty of the human body with the Christian ideal of the immortality of the human soul. He banished the lugubrious death throes of the earlier Pietàs, bathed his two figures in tranquillity. Human beauty could reveal sacredness as clearly as could pain. At the same time, it could exalt.

Ave Maria (Roa) - Philippine Madrigal Singers