Unding’s good side

AS in past calamities, “Unding” brings out the best in us. With City Mayor Jesse Robredo in the forefront on the first daylight after the typhoon, everyone was in the streets clearing roadways of debris. The City Engineer’s Office came with its dump trucks and so were ENRO’s garbage collectors and the General Services’ maintenance men and electricians. Barangay officials patrolled the neighborhoods and reported to city hall what the people needed most at that moment: nipa shingles, GI sheets and wood boards for poor residents whose frail houses were battered or blown away. Canned foods, noodles and rice came next even as social workers from CSWDO checked out city hall’s rice inventory. The stocks were originally intended for indigent families during normal times and for impoverished pupils’ rice rations in exchange for their attendance in schools. Others were already in the field making ocular inspection of areas, particularly the more depressed barangays, to check whether there were casualties or families who did not have their breakfast yet. Plumbers at the Metro Naga Water District were on their toes, too, receiving job orders for busted pipes and cut off water supply.

The 12-year old mango tree infront of our house was uprooted, with twisted water pipe lines in its wake and rendering our street impassable to vehicles. Other fallen trees, electric wires and cables were strewn all over, as well as GI sheets, crumpled downspouts and broken glass. The narra tree in my backyard also collapsed with its upper trunk crushing into the roof of my neighbor’s home. More tree branches flew at the height of the typhoon, a bulk of them massing into our open garage. In a few hours, the street was cleared for vehicles, thanks to a neighbor’s chainsaw which made the job faster. More of our neighbors joined hands to pile up the cut pieces into a vacant lot. In a short while, the MNWD came to fix my water pipe line while I was out at Plaza Quezon to gather reports how bad “Unding” was. At mayor’s invitation, we proceeded to City Hall to map out quicker disaster management and rehabilitation drives. I texted Sen. Manny Villar’s office for some assistance and got assurance that help would be coming as soon as possible. “Basta para ki Mayor Robredo and the Nagueños, walang problema ki senator,” Leony Fernandez of the senator’s office assured me.

One other good thing that “Unding” brought us was demolition by force majeure of the ugly tiangge stalls at Plaza Rizal, giving back the plaza to the national hero whose misfortune is that he stands on a territory “owned” by the provincial capitol.

My last week’s column on “Da Vinci Code” got mixed reviews from readers with the same passion that the No. 1 New York Times Bestseller elicited from accross the globe. In fact, new books with such titles as “Decoding the Da Vinci Code” or essays such as “The Fallacies of Dan Brown (the book author)” have been churned out and sold like hot cakes, making a wedge between the believers and unbelievers, nevertheless opening up intense debates on religion and pseudo-research. The rippling part of it is that people are beginning to revisit, this time more closely, the great works of Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian genius-painter-inventor nonpareil whose obras maestra include Monalisa, Madonna of the Rocks, The Anunciation, and The Last Supper. The “Vitruvian Man” was also one of Da Vinci’s famous sketches which consisted of a perfect circle in which was inscribed a nude male, his arms and legs outstretched in a naked spread eagle.

In Brown’s novel, “The Last Supper” turned out to be the most intriguing one. As I surfed the Internet on Da Vinci’s original painting of the Last Supper, I could not help but gaze at one of the disciples’ long red hair, quiet eyes and fine hands which Brown’s book inferred as Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ alleged lover.

At his age at 32, Jesus could not have been single, the story says, because Jewish tradition demanded that all males from 22 up should have committed a spouse lest he would be ostracized like a leper.

Of course, Brown’s bestseller is fiction, crafted by man’s fertile imagination. But Brown’s book, described as “many notches above the intelligent thriller”, is made forceful by diligent research, the hard facts though originally unrelated were sewn together to make a patchwork of an interesting thriller.

The heresy, as some over-zealous faithful would call it, follows the mold of Martin Scorsese’s controversial movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ” which portrayed Jesus as man whose flesh had carnal knowledge with Mary Magdalene, the prostitute. While the movie is devoid of facts, many independent thinkers criticized the Church for being arrogant and wrong to ban its showing.

As Jacques Sauniere — one of the major characters in “The Da Vinci Code” — argued, the Church should not be allowed to tell us what notions we can and can’t entertain.

When pressed by his daughter whether he believed that Jesus had a girlfriend, Jacques retorted, “Does it matter?”

As I have said, Brown’s work is a fiction and qualified as such by the Library of Congress. As a true Christian, our faith in God and his good teachings should not be diminished by it. On the other hand, we should be nourished by Da Vinci’s genius as an artist.