Holy Week offers Puerto Rican society the possibility of a much needed pause to reflect on the stormy times we live in and identify the essential attributes of our nature as a people that can serve as a guide in the midst of turbulence.
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Lee este artículo en español.
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Real and commercial wars, raids and deportations against immigrants, with or without documents, funding cuts in many cases essential to Puerto Rico, official operations against diversity, equality and inclusion policies, plus the persistence of social violence and the instability of our electrical grid are some of the storm clouds that may cloud the mood of Puerto Rico’s residents during the Holy Week.
However, in this, as in any other time, we Puerto Ricans can summon our resilience, our legendary solidarity and fighting character to separate the wheat from the chaff and do our part so that we, as well as our fellow man, can overcome, and even advance, in this time of difficulties. This is not the first time that we as a people have faced difficulties. We have always overcome them by holding hands and this time will be no exception.
Christianity, whose emergence after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth we are commemorating these days, has a very important ethical component that contains everything we fundamentally need to navigate in complicated times such as the one we are going through at the moment. Christianity, for example, calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be in solidarity and empathetic with the needs of others, to receive, welcome, protect and feed the homeless, the sick and the weak and, in short, to live in the light of the teachings of the one who said, in the Gospel of St. John, “by this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”.
Of course, these are universal values that do not apply only to those who practice Christianity. But given the fact that we are in Holy Week, and that the Puerto Rican people are almost totally Christian, we believe that these days are good to reaffirm the values that define us, more than as a people, as human beings, which are exposed, in words that do not admit double interpretations, in the teachings of the founder of Christianity.
To what, if not to be a force for good for our brothers and sisters, did the Nazarene call us when he said, in the Gospel of Matthew, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me”? What more guidance do we need for these difficult times?
Holy Week, we cannot forget, is also used by many to vacation, take a walk, visit the beach, and gather with the family. We invite, then, to exercise caution and prudence, so that the days of such solemnity are not marred by deaths due to alcohol consumption or drownings on the beaches for not following the precautions.
Any reason is good to get together as a family; it is important, however, to do so with caution and, of course, without losing sight of the meaning of these days, from Palm Sunday, symbol of the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, to the next, Easter, which is the central feast of Christianity, which 2,000 years after its emergence continues to have so many and such relevant lessons for humanity.
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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.
