When I was a child Maundy Thursday was a day so still you could actually cut a chunk from the stillness, eat it, sit down, and hear the earth rotating beneath your body. Today, in Cubao, I hear the P.A. system at Samson College of Science and Technology over the compound fence (some kind of training or orientation session seems to be going on there); people in the streets are walking about as usual, laughing and conversing; music is playing from radios and TV sets; and, even on P. Tuazon Boulevard, there is at least one vehicle passing by every second.

In our neighborhood no one sponsors pabasas anymore. A shame, really, because I love going to sleep with the chanting of pabasas in the air. I love the sound the way I love the haunting, melodic, simultaneous calls to mosque. No one buys woven palm fronds anymore; I recall that I used to buy dozens, bedeck our windows with them, and arrange some in vases, but I myself no longer do that because they are too rustic and end up as dust-catchers. We have no senakulos that go on and on from sunset through sunrise. We have no spectacular Easter parades. My children and grandchildren never had any of these in their childhood, yet I am glad that I did. As a playwright, all of these were what convinced me of the strong correlation between religion and theater.

When a country's theater dies--literary theater, not commercial, stage entertainment--so do its religions.

And so I sit in front of my computer screen, recording these thoughts and waiting to see what happens next.