This Lenten season, the Catholic Church is calling on the faithful to give up some of their electronic pleasures, such as text messaging and surfing the Internet as a form of sacrifice. Catholics who are physically and mentally fit and who belong to a certain age bracket are required by their faith to practice abstinence and fasting, or if unable to do so, to perform works of mercy especially during Lent.

Normally, abstinence means temporarily giving up something that we truly love doing or having. For example, Fridays mean we give up pork, beef and poultry. Fasting means we only have one full meal each day. Since for most Filipinos would rather give up pork than stop sending those forwarded SMS messages, this call of the Church to give up the mobile phone or the Internet would entail a much bigger sacrifice than abstinence and fasting would.

Of course, people whose livelihood depends on large part to the use of mobile phones and the Internet are exempted from this modernized form of religious sacrifice just as the not perfectly healthy churchmembers are exempted from their religious duties.

As a Catholic, I intend to heed the call of the Church to temporarily disconnect myself from the electronic network for the duration of the Holy Week. I hope my friends would understand when they start hearing “The subscriber cannot be reached” message each time they would dial my mobile number during the holiest season of the Church.

But come to think of it. It is not necessarily bad, being disconnected for a while that is. After all, there are times when I cannot help but long for those days when mobile phones were only for the ultra-rich.
There is a sense of freedom that can only come from being unreachable once in a while. Sometimes, I look back with nostalgia to those days when each time I would come late to an appointment, I could always soothe the offended party’s ruffled feelings with the line, “I’m sorry I’m late, traffic is heavy on EDSA. And I could not find a pay phone.”

Try using those lines now when you turn up late, and you would surely get a beating. Or a look from the offended party as if you were insane, or came from an alien planet Of course, the “traffic” excuse would still be valid.

Other Sacrifices

For quite some time now, I have believed that Filipino Catholics should be exempted by Vatican from performing sacrifices. I am not saying this to help start a new schism in the Church. But come and look at how we as a people have been living on these islands. Look at the hardships that we have to bear on a daily basis.

Look at the quality of life we have. Discern how backward are the social services that our children receive from the government. Look at how we live in fear each time we venture out of our homes, or even when we are home.

Look at how hard it is to travel from Fairview to Makati and Baclaran. Packed like sardines inside those flying coffins disguised as buses, we pray to all saints and angels as some maniacs with serious death wish drive those buses at near-suicidal speeds.

I truly believe almost all Filipinos go to heaven. After all, we all live a lifetime filled with sacrifices and other forms of suffering.