Application For Admissiom to F.Y.J.C Class For the Year 2009-10
REMEMBER how one could casually say, “I think it’s going to rain,” then it rained?
A 1910 author, Mary Helen Fee, wrote “A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines” which is fiction but based on her experience in the country. From the casual remark about rain, she’d continue:
“Then the weather thickens, and a fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by…Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year.
Again it stops…Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the rain is driven like spikes…It may increase to an absolute hurricane…with great loss of life…”
Farmers need rain and would probably see it differently from Fee. What harm will it bring to pray for rain?
In the recent drought up north in Luzon, I bet a lot of prayers were sent up to the Highest, as in the prayers of farmers in Bontoc during drought, for God “to open the sky and allow raindrops to water the rice terraces and the mountains.”
Supplicants in this ceremony called Manerwap climb the mountain for the ritual and fasting. This could be for two days and two nights, also with the gongs beating.
But even the Manila Archbishop led the people in a prayer called the “Obligatory Prayer to Request for Rain,” to break the dry spell that killed the crops in Luzon.
Then it rained.
And the strong rains are here, at least in Luzon, and here as though to pour forever, commented a friend in Manila.
But there’s no harm to say a prayer for rain to stop, even as in the recent heat, there was the prayer for rain to pour.
Another friend talked about rain makers which are said also to stop rain. She said she had a couple of rain sticks and told her playful boys one summer...