When Faith is Really Grand Enough

Now, that the dust and smoke have all been dissipated and a certain quiet has descended upon our town-city, we look around and start to account for the things that might have been and should not have been.

The statistics of 2 to 3 million people arriving in our small city seem beyond our imagination. But it did happen. The world seemed much bigger then in those two weeks of September. But if there is a lesson in those nine days, it is that "People make the faith." Not the extrasomatic signs, not the statues or grand arches.

But we have now an arch and it goes by the name of Porta Mariae. Words have it that the structure cost a fortune. Millions of pesos.

What were the considerations for this monument? What could the monument achieve that churches and shrines are not able to? And, how long will the Arch?

For those familiar with famous monuments, the Porta Mariae recalls in shape, perhaps not in volume and certainly not in grandeur, the Arc d'Triomphe in Paris. There are many other structures - commemorative and triumphal arches they are called. There is the iconic Bradenburg Gate in Berlin. In London, there is the Wellington Arch. In Asia, we have the Patuxai or Gate of Triumph in Vientiane, Laos, and the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang in North Korea.

Cursory research will bring us to one fact about majority of these arches: they are commemoration of material victories. The triumphs denote respectively a proclamation of a victory of a nation over another nation in a war and not in peace. Which is understandable, arches are always monumental monuments. They are grand perorations of narratives, a retelling of the stories about bravery of men and women over other brave men and women. The tales always have two sides: the bravery and cowardice; strategy and blunder; destiny and destruction. In other words, every arch set up has two stories: the victor's spoils and the vanquished whose lives have been spoiled.

These arches register along the physical and material. The soul of patriotism related to those who fought for their nations may touch the spirit but there is nothing spiritually uplifting about nations expanding boundaries through violence as well as usurpation.