Good morning every one. Let me continue my last part of this article.
How can the poor and the deprived make any headway in this life? Together, they will just increase their misery. Misery piled on misery becomes a heavy baggage obstructing their way to decent existence. Surely, the medieval habit of penitential flogging appears ludicrous in this age of technology, but floods and rice shortage and joblessness have created interesting alternatives, like living on the rooftop of your half-buried house in Baguio or searching for food in trash cans. The poor, under these circumstances, have practically no chance, “for the world,” “which seems/ to lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so nest,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain .” Perhaps, but only in a world devoid of spirituality. Here, even the poor consider poverty a temporary setback. What you sow you shall reap, and you are simply asked to sow the right seeds.
While candlelight flicker in the tombs, while prayers rise to the sky, while flowers perfume the dead’s memory, the living, whether rich or poor, are humbled by the thought of the body’s frailty. The graveyard is a great equalizer, and a purveyor of hopefulness. The departed re the living in repose. The dead, ‘were woven of human joys and cares,/Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth,/The years had given them kindness. Dawn was there,/And sunset, and the colors of the earth./These had seen movement, and heard music; know/Slumber and waking; loved;gone proudly friended;/Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;/Touched flowers and furs and cheeks.” To die in order to live. To live in order to die. The bell tolls as much for the dead as for the living, for they are one and the same.
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