Easter to Gaia for May Day

Yesterday in Asia and today across the international dateline, we celebrate the empty tomb’s power before terminus. Today, we also mark Patriots’ Day (giving one’s life on behalf of) and the day after Gaia gets her annual dressing we recognize Professional Administrators who get the wheels of corporate operations, management, research, and development efficiently moving.

I stick with the image of the power of the empty tomb. Heir to the Reformation through the Methodist Church in the Philippines, I grew up in the stark contrast between the barren cross of the Christo Rei resurrected, and the three hour of solemn silence on Good Friday that my Catholic friends observed in subdued postures of penitence, penance, and avoidance of perdition; they cowered through religious obligations and duties Friday onward, while the rest of us downed our wine on Thursday and chased the bunny wabbit in search of colorful eggs early Sunday morn!

Hollywood treats tall tales of high suspense and adventure with the secure knowledge that at the end of the telling, characters that count “live happily ever after.” Most stories have happy endings. We Protestants go through the motions of shedding crocodile tears on Holy Week assured that the pure white lilies and daffodils will grace the altar on Sunday morning. The existential high point in the Catholic liturgy is Friday afternoon when all the lights go off and space is imbued in three hours of the sounds of mystery, while the Protestants get up early Sunday morning to burst into celebrative hymns as they worship looking east at the crack of dawn.

Easter quickly deteriorates into a Pollyannaish stance. I latched on to the symbol of the empty tomb as it does not offer an easy escape into the other Other World where one accumulated brownie points for the chance to wear toga to enter Peter’s pearly gates in the sky in the bye-and-bye, but to be flung back into the wrenchingly fierce arena of authentic life (see you in Galilee) where the meaning of life’s existence resides all along.

I recovered Easter back as a meaningful term when I discovered its Germanic origin of relating to Eastre, the goddess associated with spring. It is fitting that Easter this year is only 48 hours from Earth Day.

A word on spring. I am in the temperate zone in China so we have four seasons, but the common saying in Dong Bei is that we have two days of autumn, two weeks of spring, two months of summer, and all the rest is b-r-r-r winter! In my four years in northeast China, this last one was the longest winter, with the long john still within easy reach. Though the cherry blossoms in the two weeks of spring are blooming and its petals flying freely in the air, dawn and dusk are still stalked by old man winter.

It was in 1969 that the first Earth Day was suggested at UNESCO for a UN Peace Day celebration scheduled for March on Mother Nature’s equipoise in the north. A U.S. senator a year later sponsored a law to hold an environmental teach-in in April, and the Earth Day title added a real definition for Peace as protecting the environment and everything in it.

May Day is also a mid-spring celebration in the northern hemisphere, though it is the first day of summer in warmer climes. The phrase is also used in place of Titanic’s SOS (save our ship), an international code for extreme distress, now a generic call by anyone in trouble. Internationally, May Day is workers’ day, a call on the captains of industries that lowly workers are human beings with innate rights, too. It is in this vein that we match the glory of the empty tomb to the gory state of our devastated planet, and call on global workers, of which we consider our self a part, to save the Earth’s planetary ship!

I zero in on the Keystone XL pipeline that is deemed “not a threat” to the environment from a State Department study (funded by you-know-who) to allow hydrocarbons in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to flow into the processing plants of the Gulf of Mexico. It awaits WH approval, clearly, a decision being considered between “a rock and a hard place”! I am no doomsayer. Yes, the best way of transporting bitumen is through a regulated pipeline, not to mention the labor opportunities in its construction and maintenance. But is that all that is involved?

We heard that the fracking of Ohio shale is related to the recent earthquakes in the region as the tectonic plate responds to the mining involving the literal shaking of the Earth’s foundations. I continue to point to China’s current struggle on petrochemical byproducts (benzene and p-xylene) as wreaking havoc on health and the environment. Our call re the health of the planet is the taken-for-granted-ness of all the derivatives we have come to enjoy for more than a century as perhaps needing a healthy dose of SOS rather than a singular focus on the commercial bottom line before the whole Earthship turns into a story of gloom and doom for the human race.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, said a sage of old. Put a lily in mama Gaia’s ear this week!

Jaime Vergara previously taught at SVES in the CNMI. A peripatetic pedagogue, he last taught in China but makes Honolulu, Shenyang, and Saipan home. He can be reached at pinoypanda2031@aol.com.