Holy Week is time for cool change. There are instances wherein a storm has yet to rage on before this astounding change happens. It is not the geophysical storm as strong as the destructive supertyphoon Haiyan, but one that swirls within one’s inner self prompting him to let go of what is kept hidden for years and not be bothered by the “cold” around him. The kind of hurricane that is truly life changing is the sincere return to the Holy One.
From the time Shirlee Herrera-Kaquilala, a beauty and wellness entrepreneur, felt her spiritual calling, she would not miss a time sharing about her transformation. She would recall having chided his husband, Marlaw, a successful businessman based in Metro Manila, for giving more time and part of his material wealth to his vocation, before she heeded to the vocation to a more solemn spiritual devotion. She then could not understand the essence of surrendering oneself to whom she now accepts as her true master – God, Our Father.
Not questioning any of the responsibilities that go with such calling, Marlaw over time became the president of God Our Father Foundation, while Shirlee an obliging follower sparing a regular part of her business income to the foundation’s missionary works. She is more than inspired every time they would visit places, including the remote sitios in Tacloban City’s northern barangay, to join in prayer and Bible service and giving out prayer books and Bibles to the members and the natives there. She admitted having to spend quite a sum, but assured that God is constantly returning what she shells out for God.
What is most astonishing in her is the transformation in the way she looks at life, paying special focus on what is most important – a fuller life with God and a place in Heaven. This Holy Week, she encourages friends to do the CARE – Confession, Adoration, Rosary and Eucharist, which she learned in the advices of priests, including his first cousin who is now a parish priest in Allen, Northern Samar. She believes that CARE should be fulfilled in CARE before the Holy Week.
Lent is a time for healing, Rev. Fr. Rex Ramirez, rector of the Sacred Heart Seminary in Palo, Leyte, said in a Lenten recollection he recently conducted. Besides being a chance for real spiritual conversion and transformation, Lent is the time for reshaping one’s soul and improving one’s health, properly utilizing each sense organ in ways pleasing to God. By meditation and sincere prayer as medicines for the soul, the body also gets a cleansing by God’s grace.
The Holy Scripture speaks of a story in Moses’ time about healing and conversion, which was one of the Holy Mass readings this week. While Moses and the people were on a journey, the people whom Moses led from slavery in Egypt complaint against God and him, yelling, “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is neither bread nor water here and we are disgusted with the tasteless manna!”
God sent fiery serpents. They bit the people and many died. The people then came to Moses and said, “We have sinned speaking against God and against you. Plead with God to take the serpents away.” So did Moses. God instructed Moses to mount a serpent on a pole and whoever has been bitten and looks at it will live.
In a similar passion, when one is almost dying because of sin but turns away from it and focuses his gaze on Christ at the wooden cross will live. This is how the change came into Shirlee. She is now a believer of the agonizing Christ on the cross. She felt she has change a lot when began to fix her attention upon the Lord who suffered for humanity in order to inherit a place in Heaven and have a more meaningful existence while on earth.

The basic question is whether we will keep stagnated with our old communities where there are no clear streets and access roads as houses were erected adjoining with each other, set apart by party walls with no space for passage ways. The lack of access roads had been detrimental to our lives and a huge roadblock to development. This is a time for us to reflect on the message of super typhoon Yolanda, that perhaps God afforded us a good opportunity to reconstruct our communities and rid ourselves of our greed by taking so much of our properties based on our vested private interests without giving due consideration for the greater good of the greater number and for the general welfare of our people and our barangay.
People fence their properties because, indeed, those are private properties. But we never gave a damn considering that our actions had placed us to great inconvenience and danger, without passable access roads where vehicles and people could pass freely. We never thought of emergency situations when our lives would be put on great peril when for instance an ambulance could not pass to conduct an emergency patient or a fire truck could not reach a house on fire because passage ways are blocked by fences and houses that were erected on lots that should have been allocated for roads.
We cannot deny that our forebears owned privately the public places and streets that we have, as ownership of land during their era was based on occupation, the one who is strong and industrious to clear areas would occupy and become the owner of the land. But they surely were selfless in giving up what would have been their private property for their family generations to succeed for the welfare of the people. We enjoy the use of plazas, school sites, church lots and community centers mainly because our forebears generously gave up what they privately own for the good of the community.
Our generation is unquestionably better off than that of our forefathers in terms of education and capabilities. Ironically, we have miserably failed to follow the beginnings they left to us, allowing our greed to overcome our sense of community. There is no question that we have owned as private and appropriated as our own the lots of our communities. But to become greedy and insensitive to the needs of our fellowmen to have good access because we want to grab for our own what we consider as privately ours, is certainly a social mistake that we all were made to pay the price too costly. The number of fatalities in many communities may have been less if there are good roads that would allow people to flee than by breaking walls and fences.
It is perhaps the will of God that our communities were cleared of all greedy obstructions to allow us to reconstruct our places the way our forebears had envisioned. We have the capacity, we only need to muster our willpower to abandon our old communities and reconstruct a new one where we would live with contentment and a peace of mind that we are safe and that we will leave a legacy of a well reconstructed community.
The need to reconstruct our communities is urgent as it is at this time that the areas had been cleared by the force of nature. No human power or will could have done what the super typhoon accomplished in terms of giving the community and its people a rare chance of a lifetime to reconstruct our communities. Establishing a good road network had been brought to the fore by the resultant effect of the super typhoon. It is all up to the people if they want to remain greedy by still thinking just for individual goals, opting to rebuild our houses and fences along what must be roads and passage ways. We too have the power to choose to reconstruct our communities and make it a better, safer and progressive place to live for our and the many generations to come.
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