The Feast

Problems.

Who doesn’t have them.

Problems are all I seem to be having these days. Chief among them is my wanting Peace for myself, which I keep telling everyone within earshot. Thank you all for listening. Haha.

It’s funny though, because those whom I seek to talk to- they all seem to be pointing me to Him. You know, Him.

Which is funny because, if I were more wont to, I'd be saying that He’s been talking to me a lot this past week, through them.

So I got to talking with my very good friend B16 and s/he tells me that s/he has this big problem; I say that I have this big problem too. S/he says that we could maybe go to this gig on Sunday. It might help ease us of our burdens. I say, “Okay.” (Maybe I could check my schedule.)


The night before the gig, Rebs of Hohums asked me to call. She was apparently very happy these days and she wanted to share it. Okay. I don’t know if it’s morally right for anyone to share his/ her happiness with another person who was depressed, but I called anyway. If I got to slitting my throat while she’s gushing smileys on my phone- I’m pinning everything on her.

Anyway, like I said, I called. (Rebs texted me her number just so that I won’t have any excuse not to.)

“Hello?”

“Oli! I’m so happy!”

I grabbed my knife. (Here we go.) “Talaga? Why are you happy?”

“I found Him.”

And she went on and on and on and on….

And I got around to wondering….

I don’t believe in signs, or rather, I don’t like believing in signs. Signs are for the lazy, those who don’t like thinking things through before they make a decision.

But I do believe in probability. When my whole life, I haven’t gone through a whole week where different people keep on talking about this one same thing, and this week, that exact same thing happens, then maybe I should be suspecting that something’s up. Something very odd is up.

All week long, people have been telling me that they’re happy because they found Him. And these are intelligent people. Something was very odd. Something was up.

So I decide to go to the gig. (I had nothing to lose.)

The gig is the Kerygma Feast, a monthly Fellowship held in the Camp Aguinaldo Theater.

B16 and I initially thought that the whole thing was only going to be a series of lectures. Turned out that a mass will be celebrated… there was also some singing… and, finally, there was Bo. We didn’t mind the mass (we were going to catch one of the masses at UP, anyway). We didn’t mind the singing. It’s just that we only went to the Feast because we wanted to hear Bo speak. And we did. Wow.

Bo is Bo Sanchez, the EIC of the Kerygma magazine. He’s also the Chair of Good Shepherd’s Voice Publications. And, finally, he a pretty damn effing good speaker.

Before Bo went on stage, there was much singing. And before that, the mass. But the singing is worth mentioning because, well, the mass is just a mass, while the singing, well- let’s just say that my initial reaction was: cripes, we have a theater-full of people on dope.

So people were singing, and some of them were jumping up and down while singing. Not a few were raising their hands and swaying while singing. Meanwhile, it was suddenly becoming clear to me that this was the so-called opiate of the masses. (It’s an entirely different animal when you experience it.) I hunkered down and thought, “What am I doing here?” I had a good mind to throttle B16. S/he said there was only going to be a talk.

But the whole thing was harmless. First of all, I wasn’t a stranger to prayer meetings and fellowships because my mother, who is a very religious woman, used to bring us to a few of them in the hopes of getting one of us hooked. None of us ever did. And anyway, Bo would later explain that the singing was to get all of us in the mood. It's there so that we can get into a happy mood. The reason for the joyous singing. Who wants to go to a somber prayer meeting? Okay. That made a lot of sense.

Then Bo went on stage.

I’ll leave out the details of his talk. Bo is better experienced than told of. God is better experienced than spoken of.


I went to the Feast in the throes of depression. I went out of it with renewed hope. We should do it again, sometime.


God is bigger than your problems. God is always with me.