On Remembering

[This is probably one of the most personal, if not the most personal, posts I will ever have on this blog. This was written in memory of our late housekeeper and family friend, Yaya Ines, who shepherded me and my siblings during our childhood. She died, at age 59, due to complications of her diabetes. Please say a brief prayer for the soul of this remarkable woman, who has  been instrumental in my and my family’s growth for as long as I can remember.]

The memories I have of my childhood are almost always visual ones: the light angling into the boughs of the macopa tree, filtering down to my face as I lay in my hammock in the afternoons; the long trek to the store at the end of the street, with its brown gate and elderly grandmother proprietor; the sight of stray dogs lazing around by the roads, awaiting the arrival of the ice cream man and has pushcart, and in the evenings, the elderly blind man who sold ice buko and the other man, also elderly, who sold balut by the dozen. Nowadays, when I  make the trip to the old neighborhood, I find that a lot has changed: there are new houses now, and old ones with new owners. The blind man no longer walks about by night selling ice buko, and even the stray dogs seem to have diminished in number. The sounds, too, have changed: whereas before a silence that could only be described as rural permeated the atmosphere, today, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and the latest novelty songs compete for supremacy over an increasingly attenuated auditory space.

My constant companion during those innocent times was Yaya Ines, our housekeeper. She first came to Manila from the province in the 1970s—1972 to be precise—which almost coincided with the proclamation of Martial Law. She was a sprightly lass then who had come to the big city in search for a better chance at life. She worked as maid in a few other households before settling on ours, by way of her brother, who studied in the same university where my paternal grandmother taught, and who used to be a bedspacer at their home. I was the firstborn male of the new generation on either side of my family, much to the delight of both sides, and early on, it seems, I was already being groomed to be the breadwinner who would change the fortunes of the clan; we were not wealthy and possessed only a modest fortune (if, indeed, something to tiny and attenuated could even be considered such), a comfortable sum born out of the many years my maternal grandparents spent teaching in the public school system.  My parents both worked nine hour shifts, and since my aunts also had their day jobs, the folks hired us a yaya—maid, in simpler terms, but in the Philippines the term can easily mean guardian, mentor, and even a confidant

She had come to us when I was barely a year old, and, according to my mother, I looked more like a girl than a boy. Indeed, when she first came to us and gave me my first bath, Yaya was surprised to find a penis dangling between my legs. It did not help that my mother frequently made me wear yellow, a color which still carried, then, a connotation of effeminacy. Yaya Ines came to us in 1990; she was a stout woman, who by then had weighed close to two hundred pounds, but that was perhaps what endeared me to her. She would often wake me up at the crack of dawn, whence we would go out for a stroll, and buy taho from the ambulant vendors. Life was simpler then; mine was a happy, idyllic life, which started with early morning cartoons (my favorites were TMNT, Conan the Adventurer, The Incredible Hulk, Popeye, and Superhuman Samurai Cybersquad—Power Rangers were still a few years away), followed by another stroll to the City Hall in the early afternoon (we lived right behind it), then dinner at six. I would already be fast asleep by eight. Simple, like clockwork, and uncomplicated a possible.

On Sundays, my father would drive us to Greenbelt Chapel (aka, Santo Nino de la Paz) in Makati, which was a considerable distance from our place. It was surrounded by a lush park filled with trees and shrubs, where I would often play hide and seek with Yaya when I became too bored at Mass. Today the park is gone, replaced by a glittering, high-end mall, but the chapel remains standing, right at the center. Mass usually ended at 12pm sharp, unless Fr. Anton Pascual was the celebrant, who was wont to be prolix with his homilies and who, if I remember correctly, was a fan of liturgical dance. After Mass, we would walk a few hundred meters and have lunch at Max’s and feast on their ineffably good chicken. We would be home by three, and by then, I would usually have fallen asleep at Yaya’s shoulder. My younger brother would sit in front with my mom, while I pestered Yaya in the backseat with my strange antics and occasional tantrums.

When I started school in 1993, Yaya would always accompany me on the way there in the tricycle. Imagine a motorcycle with a roofed sidecar attached and you have the rudimentary figure of a trike. She would usually sit behind the trike driver in his motorcycle, while I did my homework inside the sidecar. Sometimes, she would sit beside me, helping me fix my things which I just sloppily threw in my bag. But wherever she sat, she would always make sure to keep an eye on me, glancing back every few seconds and saying my name as if to assure me that she was right there all along. The school I went to was, in a word, small: it was scarcely bigger than a daycare, with a total population of sixty two students. She would wait until my first class was over, before going back home to cook and clean. One time, as we were running late for school, our rented tricycle bumped into a blue SUV. Our trike driver, Mang Rene, went down to confront the driver of the SUV; we had the right of way, but the car appeared out of nowhere, and the tricycle had screeched to a halt, scratching the side of the SUV. A burly man stepped out of the SUV; he was the biggest, meanest looking man I had ever seen. And he had a gun, which he  pointed straight at Mang Rene (and this was just outside of the school, too). Yaya Ines told me to stay inside the trike no matter what happened, before she descended from the back seat to lend our driver a hand. Then, she took off her bakya (wooden clogs), and with one swift motion, hurled it at the face of our interlocutor. Angered, the man now trained the gun at her direction; but at this point, the neighbors had all gotten out, and came to our defense. The police soon arrived and thankfully, the asshole was carted off to the station.

I believe I came close—too close—to death that day, but it is only now that I realize how serious it was. Yaya was certainly ready to die; it was on her face, which by then looked as if it were on the verge of tears. I went to class as if nothing had happened, but Yaya made sure to linger an extra hour in the school premises to make sure there was no reprisal of the previous situation. She was panting and sweating, so my teachers gave her a glass of water to calm her down. At around ten, she left the school to go back home; later that afternoon when she came to fetch me, she brought a knife just to be safe. She had entrusted my brother to my aunts, but since he was asleep at least half the day, they had no trouble with him whatsoever.

That was almost two decades ago, and in that time, I had grown up a lot, both figuratively and literally. The soft, scrawny little boy would eventually grow to be not so scrawny and develop an outward façade that sought to radiate collectedness and toughness. Yaya would grow old, too; and in time I began to notice that she could no longer keep up with me when I ran around the mall, or that she began to be hard of hearing and cranky at times. In grade school, I began to grow more independent, perhaps in an early effort to establish an identity for myself. I would begin to deliberately outpace her when we went out as a family, so as not to appear too much like a mama’s boy. And when the car fetched me from school, I told her to wait inside and not bother to come and fetch me. I was big, brave, and did not want nor need to be coddled anymore.  When I entered high school, I became increasingly lonely. Deep down I felt that no one understood me, and even in the conservative Catholic atmosphere of my new school, I was referred to as the “God boy”, who seemed perennially lost in the clouds and who could only talk about God.

Yaya would stay on with us till 2009, and watch me and both of my siblings graduate. But as early as 2001, I could tell she was no longer the invincible protector that I thought she had been; she had become sickly and moody, even fatalistic; she slept earlier and woke up later, and when she cooked, she could no longer taste anything unless it was smothered in a fistful of salt. In 2007, she was diagnosed with diabetes; I remember turning a blind eye when I would notice a long line of ants milling about the toilet every time she used it. I would pretend I did not see her eating the fat off the pork chops we'd eat for dinner, or when she could barely understand a word I was saying, even if I already had my voice raised. Finally, on June 26, 2009, she left our household and returned to the province. In the weeks prior, she would often tell me “Gusto ko na magpahinga” [I want to rest already], and “Ano man mangyari sa’kin, nasa Diyos na iyon” [Whatever happens to me, it is already up to God]. When she left, she looked as if she were on the verge of tears; I gave her some extra money in addition to the farewell gift my father had given her [Php 20,000] and told her to come and visit one of these days.

She departed the world on January 21, coincidentally the feast of St. Agnes—Santa Ines in Spanish—the saint for which she was named. She would have been sixty in April. Diabetes had taken its toll on her, ravaging her body; her left leg had already been amputated in July, and it was only a matter of time before, I’m told, she started going blind. I am told she thought of me and my siblings fondly in her last days; her passing certainly came as a surprise to me, but deep down, a part of me knew that her life was coming to a close. When I look back on those carefree days of my childhood, I can’t help but run through all the memories of the adventures I had with her.  They are now irrevocably locked away in the dim but still luminous caverns of the past, shining unblemished, like stars radiant in the night sky, amidst the rancor and confusion of the present. And perhaps, I now realize, to an extent, why the reforms of Vatican II were welcomed so enthusiastically by the laity: it is because no one can comprehend even briefly the nature of eternity, and the hell that may be attached therewith, without despairing; we cannot bear the thought of our loved ones burning forever in the fires of hell, because they had been guilty of the crime of being born amongst the simple. Yaya Ines was not a regular churchgoer; she even had a slightly anticlerical streak to her. But she also told us, with eyes ablaze and heart convinced, that the Virgin once walked on the soil of their town; that the Holy Child had never ceased to be kind to her. And even when she was already sick, she would make the long commute to Quiapo every Sunday, dressed in the Nazarene’s scarlet, and there attend Mass at five thirty in the morning. And on Ash Wednesdays, she would always be the first to remind everyone that meat was absolutely forbidden, even if she seemed self-righteous at times (and God bless her for it).

And suddenly, I am that young, timid boy again. You realize that you are alone, that you are vulnerable, that you need warmth and protection in the face of the piercing cold all around you. You feel the infinite weight of your own finitude. But behind the gloom and the dark and the storms that rage all around, those memories of my childhood will always shine with a more piercing clarity than the cacophony dancing all around me. And for these, I can only say to our beloved yaya: Thank you. May you rest in God’s peace, and may the angels escort you into the heavenly courts. May God and all His saints embrace you and weave for you an everlasting crown of glory. May you be at peace, and may you find the rest that you have been looking for.

***

I end this post with a final and most blessed memory, untouched by the encroachment of disease or my burgeoning pride. It I 1995 again, and I am in first grade. Everyone still wanted to be a Backstreet Boy and the Power Rangers still commanded a legion of loyal viewers. The bell rings, and we are dismissed; we sing a farewell song to each other in class, and I fetch my brother, eager to return to the confines of our cozy home. The gate opens, and in comes Yaya Ines. She is smiling, and  she has sandwiches for us behind her back, smothered in pimento Cheez Whiz and some Coke in plastic bags for us to drink. We exit the school and board the tricycle: my brother and I in the sidecar, and she behind Mang Rene, healthy and jovial as ever. Finally, he starts the engine, and we are heading home. All is well; it could not be any other way.

McChurch

I was a sophomore in high school when this commercial was released. I'm re-posting this out of nostalgia more than anything, since I'll be 22 in less than a month. That, and I haven't eaten lunch, and I'm off to buy a cheeseburger there. I actually think it's kinda well done. A bit irreverent, true, but it does drive the point rather nicely. A translation of the captions: 0:38, "This Christmas, start each of your days here" [Ngayong Pasko, dito simulan ang bawat umaga]; 0:41 "Then..." [Pagkatapos...] 0:42 "See you there." [Kita-kits]. The church in the commercial is the cathedral of San Sebastian in Lipa.

Brief Notes on a Fiesta

I attended the Fiesta of the Santo Nino in my father's province for the first time in years this past Sunday. Not a lot has changed, but then again, it may also be the case that I just did not pay enough attention to the rites in the past. Unfortunately we had missed the religious procession a week before; like many processions held in honor of the saints in the Philippines, the Santo Nino de Batangan, as the Nino of Batangas is officially called ("Batangan" meaning a place where timber was floated before being collected) was feasted with an elaborate, day-long, water-borne procession. This, of course, involved the use of a boat, which traced the "pilgrimage" of the image from the wharfs right to its present location today.

The Nino is black; some say he, like the Nazareno of Quiapo, was burned in a shipwreck; others claim the fire was caused by slave traders who raided the shores of Batangas then. I confess to being unfamiliar with the whole narrative, but suffice to say, the Nino came to Batangas by the sea. Others have said that it came to Batangas via Cebu, where Catholicism had its roots in the Philippines, and where the Nino has been venerated for more than four hundred years, since Magellan brought the image to its shores, and where it was subsequently worshipped as the highest and most powerful god of the Cebuano pantheon. When we got to the basilica to hear Mass, the image was placed just outside the adoration chapel, where a queue of people had lined up in order to venerate it. The Nino was clothed in a cape of beaten silver; when we arrived, it seemed as if it had just been placed outside, as the line numbered fewer than fifty then. Veneration in the Philippine context, of course, involves a plethora of actions that some might call 'touchy feely': the Nino was smothered by many a grubby hand, molested, even. Many brought handkerchiefs and towelettes to wipe the face and hands of the Child, in the hopes that some of its grasya and birtud would rub off on the cloths. These cloths are then rubbed on one's body, conferring its blessedness on the devotee.

The Mass was celebrated by H.E. Cardinal Rosales of Manila. As truly befits the occasion, the church was packed to the rafters; I estimated maybe ~800 people capable of fitting in the pews. But the side naves were fully packed, too, considering that it was already the third (?) Mass of the day (in many places in the Philippines, Masses usually begin at the crack of dawn, at 4.30 to 5am). The Mass itself was not very long, 80 minutes tops; liturgically, it was a run of the mill, insouciantly reverent pontifical Novus Ordo. Peculiar to me was the music; the Kyrie, Gloria, and Sanctus were all in Latin interspersed with Tagalog, but elegantly sung. Surprisingly there were ladies in the altar party, but all of these were dressed in white with skirts that extended past the knee, and all wore veils. Similarly, the usherettes all wore veils, and there was, in fact, a preponderance of old ladies wearing them. There was one old lady who knelt at the communion rail for the duration of the Mass, who prayed with her arms extended, like the cross.

Like any fiesta in the Philippines, the noise and pollution were overwhelming; as we were walking home to my grandfather's house, what would normally have been a ten minute walk more than doubled in length, due to the sheer number of vendors that crowded the street. Interestingly, a great number of these vendors were Muslims. They offered cheap knock-offs of Italian leather goods (I saw a bag marked "Poochie" [Pucci] and another marked "Frada"), pens that lit up, peanuts, pirated DVDs, karaoke machines, and mass produced estampitas (holy cards) and statues of the Child Jesus, the Holy Family, the Sacred Heart, and many others. Horror of horrors, I even saw a couple of laughing Christs on display.

We finally got home at 11.30; we had stopped by, briefly, at a covered court where a band was practicing (they were kids who were probably not much older than seven). They played a couple of odd ditties, novelty songs, and I think, one religious song, although I did not recognize it. There was a huge spread on the table in my grandfather's house, as per custom in fiestas here. The menu was idiosyncratic: there was Mexican, Chinese, American, and Filipino finger food all mashed together in one syncretic whole. Meanwhile, our family's image of the Nino, with its ivory face and purple robe, was put on a pedestal in the living room. Beside it were flowers, although if these were real or plastic, I was not able to observe.

Photo of the Day

 Still in connection with the recently concluded Feast of the Black Nazarene. The picture shows a typical scene during the procession: ambulant vendors sell silk screened shirts, hankies, and towelettes bearing the image of the Black Christ by the thousands, as multitudes o men dress up in the habit of the Nazarene, at once professing pious belief in its miraculous power while at the same time resorting to less conventional or orthodox means (i.e., the amulet [anting-anting] on his neck). In the background, the beachhead of a procession of a replica of the Nazarene has just entered into view. I think this photo says all that I've been trying to say better than I ever could. Image found online.

Nazareno 2011

There is an intolerable stench that wafts over the streets of Manila every year on January 9^th. It is a highly oppressive smell, composed, it seems, at once partly of the smell of piss and unwashed bodies basking under the glare of tropical heat, mingling with vomit, decay, and seemingly all the grime and grit of the seed underbelly of the mean streets, to form a potent cocktail of truly alarming proportions. It is the kind of smell which seems to simmer in the air, quickened by an inner, smoldering fire, which then seeps into every pore of one’s body. The noise, too, is deafening, a veritable cacophony of shouting and cursing and police sirens and jingles from the ice cream caravan rising in concert with the pealing of church bells and the fervent singing of many hymns.

Such a confusion of various phenomena could only mean that the procession of the Black Nazarene, more properly known as the Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno de Quiapo, is once again underway. I have written about this procession before, many times in fact over the past few years.  It is a wooden statue of Christ almost as old as the Philippines itself, sent to these islands from Mexico in the Year of Our Lord 1606. As the name suggests, this image of Our Lord is black; legends tell of how the ship carrying the Nazarene caught fire, burning all of its precious cargo but the holy image. Since that time, the image has been revered as miraculous; and over the course of four centuries, it would survive earthquakes, fires, wars, and bombings, most recently in the Second World War. Legends say that when Manila was razed to the ground, and the parish of San Juan Bautista—Quiapo church, where the Nazarene sits enthroned—was all but destroyed, it was the image of the Suffering  Christ on the high altar and the tabernacle alone which survived. The devotion to the Nazarene is intense—highly intense. This year, an estimated seven to seven and a half million trooped to the ancient district of Quiapo to pay homage to the revered image. Such a number is nearly impossible to imagine: it is nearly twice the population of New Zealand, but jammed, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, in a mere stretch of road running all but five kilometers. Three million joined the procession while the rest either packed the streets to hail the Lord in his passing or heard Mass at the church, and as per tradition, the devotees were mostly male, who shoved, pushed, climbed, and clambered upon each other all in the hope of touching, even for a split second, the face of Christ.

They walk barefoot, following unshod the barefoot Christ, braving the filth of the streets of Manila, with all the dogshit, piss, refuse, trash and broken bottles that may line the way. The devotees come, either alone or with their families; the procession calls for extreme humility, and so many of the devotees come to Quiapo, that mystical navel, it seems, of all the Philippines, on their feet. Many of them walk for miles and miles, rising before the dawn and spending the whole day in the procession. This devotion to the Nazarene is as intense as it is humbling: upon reaching the church, majority of the devotees drop to their knees and crawl all the way to high altar, starting from the main plaza fronting the church, into the very heart of the temple itself. Their heads are bowed low and from behind, their feet are dark as soot, in imitation of the dark skin of the Lord to whom they devote themselves. When the Nazarene was exposed for public veneration the day before, the line of devotees stretched for hundreds of feet at a time; and indeed, it is not uncommon for such lines to run a kilometer or two in length. Baking under the oppressive heat of the sun, the devotees eventually venerate the image of Christ, bathed as they are in sweat, in contrast to the fragrant image of the Lord, which is bathed in rose water or wine depending on the occasion. Thirsty lips connect with the feet of the statue even as the next devotee, already toothless and half-senile, slobbers over it, and they do this by the tens of thousands for almost a full twenty four hours. But on the day of the procession itself, this devotion reaches its fullest splendor—or, according to some, its highest irrationality. For the procession of the Nazarene is a highly charged, highly violent (in the sense that it keeps a very frenetic pace, despite the slowness of the parade) event; it requires the steeling of one’s guts and a firm, unbreakable commitment, much like the same that Christ showed on the road to Golgotha.

In the Philippines, it has been said that devotion to God and the saints is seen through a very personalistic lens; the word that most closely approximates this personalism is the panata, or a private vow, which a devotee takes in order to secure blessings and prosperity for himself and for his kin-group. The panata can be any form of devotion, which may or may come after the granting of the blessing; it can be a private vow of making a pilgrimage to a shrine and walking on one’s knees to the high altar, or spreading the devotion to the saint by whom it was secured; it can be the wearing of a particular habit in the saint’s honor, or as in the case of the devotion to the Nazarene, attending the procession in his honor. But like the road to Golgotha, the procession is grueling and nearly impossible to comprehend. This year, the procession took an incredible seventeen hours to finish; it started at seven thirty in the morning and lasted all the way to half past midnight, but in every hour the crowds at Quiapo remained thick as ever. From being battered by heat in the morning to being soaked by the rain in the afternoon, right down to being blasted by the chill January air, the devotees stubbornly remained, determined to see the Lord back in his altar.

The procession is always an impressive sight; but at the same time, it also raises a lot of questions. In the few years that I’ve taken an active interest in the procession, I’ve noticed that it has become more and more anti-clerical. I mean this not in the sense that the devotees of the Nazarene actively participate in the stifling of the voice and influence of the clergy, but in the sense that it is now seen as something that is beyond the influence of the clerics. Many hold that even touching the statue is sufficient in wiping out one’s sins completely, which contradicts the need for sacramental confession. Thus, the Black Nazarene is venerated by thugs and murderers side by side with the desperate and the unlettered, all hoping for some proverbial ‘quick fix.’ That a great number of devotees walk on their knees to venerate the Black Christ, and that it is bathed, dressed, kissed, wiped, and genuflected to, also strikes the catechized as bordering too close to idolatry, and this criticism is often not unwarranted. Many of us middle class, catechized Catholics find such ideas abhorrent, if not downright heretical; but then again, all heresy, to paraphrase Brother William from The Name of the Rose, is but the banner of a reality. For the followers of the Black Nazarene, this is the reality of incomprehensible and inescapable poverty.

The heretic never really cares for the heresy; all he cares for is the hope and the promise that it delivers. In Manila, poverty can be of such intolerable level that one often finds families living under bridges or living in hovels that look (and are often appointed) more like dog houses. This is a kind of poverty that is totally alien to me: it is the kind of poverty that crushes one to barely discernible pulp, that dehumanizes one to previously unplumbed depths. I cannot help but imagine, though, that this kind of poverty approximates the reality of the Incarnation of Christ: from the highest heavens He wills to live amongst the squalor and wretchedness of human existence, with all its misery and sadness and imperfections. It is to us, mired as we are in the existence of sin, that Christ came; and we mobbed Him, followed Him, and pleaded with Him for a chance at a better life. In a sense, there really is nothing new in the procession of the Black Nazarene that has not happened already in the Gospels; like then as now, there are the doubters, who scoff at His miracles as mere parlor tricks, and there are those who remain blind to the love of God. They reason: all the money, time, and attention paid to this old and decrepit statue could better serve man if they were directed at his betterment. In a sense, this is true, and of that there can be no doubt: but, at the same time, I believe this line of reasoning fails to address the problem of dehumanization.

We can work and reconfigure the system all we like, but until the time that this reaching out can be on a ‘tangible’ level, there will always be problems. We can thus see why Christ was seen as a heretic by the religious authorities of His day: that He, a Jew, one of the chosen people of God, should mingle and reach out to the unclean and the impure, is simply an aberration unheard of. The righteous are safe in the confines of heaven, and they take pleasure at the fact that they have been numbered among the elect. And so the outsiders remain proud and arrogant, and they begin to conceive their pleasure in warring against the saints and the Kingdom of God. What Our Lord did was to extend His hand to the dregs of society, tolerating, as it were, their uncouth ways; in the procession of the Black Nazarene, He is once again the ‘heretic’, providing a glimmer of hope to a populace who believes with the sweat of his brow and the quaking of his guts, because he has no other choice but to do so. It is in this sense that I say that this procession is anti-clerical: because it offers immediate, ‘worldly’ hope distinct from the supernatural hope that the clerical Church offers. It gives the simple the bread they need, in order that they may believe more fully.

The Church, because it is also a human institution while at the same time divine, will always have to face the problems of human existence. If She is the Mystical Body of Christ, then She must prepare to undergo the Passion as well: and no greater proof of this are our own times, which have seen a massive curtailing of Her institutional presence all over the world. The flock is straying, and even in predominantly Catholic Philippines, where religion still carries a very strong emotional connection, many are abandoning the faith in droves. I have seen this in my friends and even some relatives who have become deaf, it seems, to the voice of the Church, because it has become too wide and too ‘big’ to pay attention to the cries of the simple. I guess I am lucky, in that I have never had to face these confusions; Church teaching has always been clear cut to me, and defendable, at least on an intellectual level. But as I have told myself repeatedly, I am thankful that I do not have the unfortunate distinction of having been born into a position in which I simply cannot choose whether to follow the Church or not. I suspect many of the devotees of the Black Nazarene would not desire to join such a massive crowd and risk death year after year if they had the option; but as it stands, it is their Calvary to accompany Him in His passion, even if just in simulacrum.

I am not entirely sure if I have posted these pictures before; I probably have, but I like them so much that I thought I would post them again. The picture above was taken almost two years ago, in a rather deracinated cemetery in the middle of a populous, commercial district in Manila called Paco Park. The name 'Paco' was a diminutive form for 'Pancratius', the saint after whom the cemetery was named. The small chapel at the middle of the cemetery is flanked, on both sides, by graves; the arrangement of the cemetery was circular, so that the walls also held the niches, and perhaps owing to this fact (and also because Manila was a very earthquake prone city), the walls were built very thick, like a fortress.

I took the photo in a  quiet little spot behind the chapel. It was the hour of mercy, three in the afternoon, when I came to find it, lost amidst blessed stillness and the  faint din of insufferable traffic outside. According to a caretaker we saw, that spot was a burial ground  for aborted babies and also those who died through miscarriage, and those who died without the grace of baptism. As such, he said, it was probably the saddest part in the entire cemetery. For some reason, I was reminded of the pantaruxada, or la santa compana in Castellano, a ghostly company in rural Galician myth which were said to wonder around the cities in procession at night, dressed in immaculate white, and tolling the death knell: all who see this procession are said to be irrevocably marked for death. I do not know why I was thinking of the pantaruxada at that moment; perhaps, because the unbaptized really have nowhere to go, and that maybe Limbo was a terror more terrestrial than supernatural; otherworldly, yes, but not of a different planet. I do not know.

Ironically, my own parents were married in the cemetery chapel in 1988. In fact, the very reason we went there was to celebrate their twenty first anniversary. I don't really know if either of my parents has a decidedly morbid sense of humor (they always chide me for wanting to buy a coffin bed with the words 'Here lies Arch' carved on it) but I'm pretty sure that they must still be wondering what impelled them to get married there in the first place. As for myself, I am still quite haunted by that abandoned section of the cemetery. The caretaker claims that, at night, he sometimes hears faint cries coming from the old, abandoned sections of Paco Park. He lights a candle to dispel the darkness, and says a brief prayer for the repose of the restless. And yes, those are apparently real skulls on the wall.

Nativitas Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Carnem

The Kalends -- Christmas Proclamation from Rocco Palmo on Vimeo.

Fr. Horacio de la Costa SJ on Hell

In life, Father Horacio de la Costa S.J. was one of the most eminent and celebrated of all Filipino Jesuits, a "gentle genius" who, it is said, once astounded his professors at Harvard with the elegance of his writing. Father de la Costa was counted among the graduates of what many call the most glittering era of the Ateneo de Manila; and not only that: for a story still circulated today goes that the young Horacio once climbed to the top of a flagpole, inebriated, whereupon he was duly reprimanded by his teachers (apparently, the only time it ever happened, too). He died in 1977 from cancer, but the memory of his titanic genius lives on, most significnantly, in the rare but pithy writings he left behind.

From a sermon:

"...It is a peculiar fire, the fire of Hell. Our Lord says that it is like salt. Salt is a preservative. So is Hell-fire. It does not consume what it tortures, it preserves it. Indefinitely. The damned soul is the charred corpse of Okinawa made eternal. But alive; and shrieking."

Joseph, Haunted by Angels

 (Note: I have been very busy with school work as of late and have found little to no time to update this blog. I have also just taken my entrance exams for law school, so please pray for me that I may pass. Thanks! Also, I found this poem on a literary folio I picked up in school, and I thought I would share it with my readers)

Just when things begin
To settle down, be comfortable
I hear wings flapping
Outside my window

I have seen too many flaming swords
Pointed at foreign directions
Far from my patiently chiseled dreams
And carpentered ideas
Of how life should be.

My life is no longer my own.
Each time I carry the Child
Across yet another desert
I wonder if the journey will lead me
Back to the vineyards of home.

But now I am a stranger
Even to myself.
At night I dream
I am deadwood burning
In a holocaust fanned by angels' wings

Yearning to be ashes
Yearning to be dust
The carpet of sand
That shields two tiny feet
On the road to Calvary.

- Christine Lao

Virgen de la Leche y Buen Parto

Our Lady of the Milk and Good Delivery. This image is venerated in Las Pinas, in southern Metro Manila, Philippines. I also found this on a Facebook fan page dedicated to Our Lady under this title:

The image of the Blessed Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus dates back to the 16th century in the Spanish city of Madrid where she is called Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto (Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery). In 1598, the image was rescued from irreverent hands and enthroned in the home of a married couple. The woman and her unborn child was bound to die and her husband prayed intently to our Lady of La Leche to grant his wife a safe delivery. Our Lady heard his prayer and thereupon, his dying pregnant wife and child were saved. Together, the couple spread the news to other families about our Lady’s power with God. Soon after, the devotion became famous throughout Spain. Becoming aware of our Lady’s intercession, King Philip III, who was the ruler during that time, personally undertook the erection of a shrine in honor of our Lady of La Leche.

More than twenty years later, the early Spanish settlers brought a replica to the United States and enshrined it at the Mission of Nombre de Dios in St. Augustine, Florida. It was the first shrine ever to be dedicated to the Blessed Mother in the United States and was established on the very spot where the first parish Mass was offered 55 years earlier. The original chapel, built around 1615, was destroyed by gunfire during the colonial days and later, by a hurricane. The present chapel now houses a replica of the original statue that was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War of March 13, 1936.

Incidentally, I also found this image of the miraculous lactation of St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the same fan page. Here is the story.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the son of Burgundy nobles who after joining the church became an auster cleric and author who forswear wealth and images, is closely associated with the Knights Templar regarded as the author of the Templars rules and was one of the principal forces instigating the Second Crusade.

St. Bernard is also curiously connected to the Madonna or Vierge . There are two existing legends concerning lactation of St. Bernard. The first version describes how Mary appeared in a prayer to St. Bernard, and sprinkled milk from her breast on Bernard's lips. With this gesture she showed him that she is his "mother" and that she is prepared to mediate for him with her son. The second version describes how Bernard falls asleep between a prayer. Mary appeared and put her breast into his mouth in order to receive the wisdom of God.

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The picture is founded in Bernard’s love for and devotion to the Blessed Virgin. It expresses the idea that Mary filled him with graces.

Bernard’s experience is supposed to have taken place while at prayer before a statue of the Madonna nurs...ing the Infant Jesus.

As Bernard prayed, “Monstra te esse Matrem” (“Show yourself a mother”), the statue came to life and Mary pressed her breast to nourish and wet the lips of Bernard, dry from singing her praises. The picture also illustrates the idea that Bernard’s preaching and eloquence were “sweet as milk.”

Holocausto de Corazones al Sagrado Corazon

This painting is found at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico. Clockwise, from top: the Immaculate Heart of Mary; the transverberated heart of Santa Teresa; the charitable heart of San Lorenzo; the ardent heart of San Cayetano; the inflamed heart of San Ignacio; and the most chaste heart of San Jose. At the center, the King of all hearts, the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Image found online.

Confiteor

One would think that the final stretch of the year would tend to bring in a little more peace to one's life, but instead, I find myself stressed--at times, needlessly so-- by too many things. In the three years since I have restarted this blog, I find that I have written a lot about my opinions on things, but not too much about me. Granted, most of these thoughts really spring from my own history, but at this point, I think a little more transparency from me is in order.

First, an admission: yours truly finds it increasingly difficult to practice his faith. This is not due to any intellectual rancor on my part with the Church's positions, but rather, a sense of these teachings being muddled, obscured, perhaps even made irrelevant, by own experiences. When I turned twenty one in February, I promised myself that I would be a more responsible student, a kinder brother, and a better son. Nine months later, I find it hard to believe that I have made any progress in these areas. I remain just as hot-headed, boorish, arrogant, and distrustful as ever. I am pretty much ruled by my loins  nowadays, a disposition which I acquired in high school at the same time that I was learning how to chant the Salve Regina. When I finally confessed, after the longest time, last Friday, the normally smiling Jesuit told me that I obviously had a lot of issues in as grave a tone of voice he could muster. But the most agonizing thing, I think, is how numb I have become to these criticisms. Perhaps it comes with my age, but I find myself, lately, juggling a multitude of internal inconsistencies, trying to find a semblance of an equilibrium by which I could live my life and remain, at least in theory, a good Catholic.

I find, too, that my heart seems increasingly weighed down by an all-consuming, fiery bitterness. My greatest fault, say my parents, is that I say things too quickly without thinking about their effects on people. And I guess I have to concede that I am quite a hurtful person. There is much anger and malice festering in me that I just can't extricate from my system, as if it were almost a part of my physiology. My judgmental tendencies have grown stronger and more malicious with each passing year, and continue to do so, at a rapidly increasing pace (most significantly in the last few months). And finally, my perennial bane of lust has all but made a complete slave of me. I am subservient to the whims of my loins and have practically given up trying to rectify the situation.

Why am I saying these things?

I guess it has to do, primarily, with being honest. Anyone who has ever met me knows that  I have a tendency to put up a facade: it is the clean-cut, intelligent, articulate, and fully, psycho-socially integrated me that I want to project. In reality, this facade is very thin, only slightly masking the raging turmoil inside. And ninety nine percent of the time, it is the Devil who wins, and not God. If honesty is the best policy, as the old adage goes, the first step I could do is to really face these problems. Creating a facade deflects the light from shining in on the rottenness of my internal processes, rendering it impossible to be diagnosed and rectified.

But the greater obligation here is not to me, but to Our Lord. I cannot beg him for graces I do not need for symptoms that I just make up, just as I could not beg him to give me a better body or a better family. It would simply be ludicrous.  I guess one just has to realize, at one point in his life, what one is being saved from exactly. At 21, my heart is still clouded by so much confusion and noise; but how long before these things become the norm? How long before they define the rhythms of my heart and the determination of my will?

In 1997, I became a godfather. I was only eight, and my cousin, who had borne a son, was only 17. The news of course brought the entire clan together but also polarized it to a suffocating degree. On the one hand, the birth of the boy was welcomed with much delight, especially by my doting grandparents. But on the other, was the practical extirpation of my cousin from family life. Like a cursed vitendi, he was branded a black sheep, disinherited, and generally dismissed by my grandparents and other relatives for his irresponsibility. He would later on sire eight more children, from at least four different women. When my grandmother died in 2004, his sudden arrival at the wake again polarized the family. He was with a woman, one whom I hadn't seen before, and we all concluded that he had left No. 4 and had now moved on to No. 5. I never did get to know, with any certainty, if such indeed was the case; I was too embarrassed, too polite to talk to him ever since.

If my own family had known of my thoughts and struggles, would they treat me the same way? There is a rigidity in Filipino (and, I guess, SE Asian in general) family dynamics that, when fractured, seems almost impossible to piece together again. And yet Catholicism demands the humbling of my ego in order to attain forgiveness. As of yet, I don't think I can tell my family, especially my parents, the sheer extent of the struggles I am having. I am simply too embarrassed, too ashamed to do so. At the same time, I can't stomach living a double life and trying to keep up the illusion of my projected facade all the time. God knows my parents would go ballistic on me the moment they see how much porn I actually have stashed away. And yet there's simply no other alternative.

Please say a prayer for me. I could use one of them right now.

Det Sjunde Inseglet - A Brief Review

I was able to watch last night, after the longest time, The Seventh Seal,  no doubt one of the seminal classics of Swedish or Scandinavian cinema in general. Filmed in 1957  by Ingmar Bergman, the film tells the story of Antonius Block, a knight from Medieval Sweden, who had just returned to his native country after a stint in the Crusades. Upon his return, he finds the land ravaged by plague; worse, he is accosted by Death himself, who has come to claim him personally. Block proposes a game of chess with Death; as long as Block is able to hold his own, he will be allowed to wander freely. And if Block wins, Death would have to leave him alone, completely. The game begins, and Block sets out on a mission to Elsinore to attend the local saint's feast.

Much has been said about the anachronistic, existential angst-slash-agnosticism of the movie. Block is clearly a melancholy, tormented person from the start, and Max Von Sydow does an excellent job portraying the inner desolation raging inside his heart. One of the first things Block does upon his return to Sweden is to seek out a church for confession. That scene, in my estimation, is probably the profoundest, most sublime, most excruciatingly poetic scenes I have ever seen, and sums up the film quite well. In it, a tortured Block confesses his horror at the seeming silence of God in the face of so much suffering and soul-crushing despair scattered about the earth. From the killing fields of Jerusalem to the plague-haunted towns of Sweden, Block's movement is from that of death to death; whatever warm embrace he might have expected from the blessed shores of his homeland is quickly transformed into a futile exercise of avoiding death one last time, only to see it so hideously, powerfully, present in his own backyard. Block confesses that he desires to know, for sure, whether there is a God, and if so,why He remains silent, indifferent, aloof to the woes and cares of His people. The priest, who in reality is Death, answers that there is probably no God--no devils, no angels, no saints-- in the end, only the sepulchral stillness and silence of Death at the end of everything. "Then life would be an inconceivable horror", says Block.

Along the way, Block sees a girl chained outside the church, apparently a witch, to be burned the next day for 'having carnal knowledge of the Evil One' . Eventually, he comes to a village and there meets a local acting troupe, led by a man named Jof, an actor and family man who claims to have seen visions of the Blessed Virgin, among others. Jof's troupe is in town for the local feast; but their performance is suddenly interrupted by the ominous appearance of a penitential procession, apparently done to appease the vengeance of God and withdraw His terrible chastisement upon the land. The procession is a grotesque, macabre, assemblage of sinners from all walks of life; they carry with them skulls and dress in rags and whip each other raw and bloody, a terrible sight to behold, one to make the sinner quake in his boots. The procession seems to bring up two important questions. First, why has God allowed such terrible sufferings to ravage the lands? And second, why does God remain deaf and blind to the supplications of His people? Why does He tarry on, passive and uninterested, at the sight of His beloved children inflicting pain and misery upon each other? Is God glutted, aroused, by such miserable sights?

I will not spoil the rest of the film; Bergman's work really has to be seen and felt firsthand, to take in all the melancholy gravitas and nuances of  his direction. Some observations: Bergman's film is almost catatonically silent, the kind of silence one associates with a brooding menace, or a specter of overbearing despair waiting to crawl out of some suffocating shadow to rest upon the souls of men. There is an uneasiness that comes with watching it that I have not felt in many movies. It must also be said that the film is beautifully shot: the cinematography is perhaps as close to perfect as I can think of, and the beauty and poetry of it contrast sublimely with the coldness and melancholia which otherwise infect the narrative of the film. It is well-known that Bergman was the son of a very strict Lutheran pastor, who would often lock him up in the closet for such minor offenses like wetting his bed. The young Bergman further confesses that he lost his faith at the age of eight, no doubt influenced by the trauma he suffered under his father. And indeed, much of his work wrestles with the idea of faith and its role in the human experience. What is probably most striking here is how The Seventh Seal construes God: He is not the benevolent, personal, and loving Creator of the Gospels, but almost blind and idiot, an impersonal, nigh-Lovecraftian terror Whose aloofness and distance from the created world presents itself as a living menace, and Whose monstrous appetite for power continuously roars and lusts for blind and total submission. I realize this may sound caricature-ish, and as the son of a pastor who frequently discussed matters of God and theology on the dinner table, I imagine Bergman might see his vision in a more nuanced light than I; certainly, it is quite a complex film and much of its genius really lies in its ambiguity.

In contrast to noble, doubt-ridden Block, actor Jof is an optimist, if rather naively so. He lives for his family, for his craft, and wants his son to be an acrobat just like him. Even in the face of terrifying mockery and ridicule (the scene at the inn with Jof is distressingly powerful; Nils Poppe, the actor who plays Jof, I think, did an incredible job), Jof could not but end up in high spirits. He claims to see visions of angels and of the Blessed Virgin, in spite of the unbelief of the people around him. In a way, Jof functions very much as the anti-Block: the former is carefree and naively ignorant of the specter of Death, while the latter is almost consumed by doubt and fear, and the possibility that all human life-- and especially the violence often done by man against his fellow man-- ultimately serves no purpose, no direction, not even to entertain the wicked caprices of God and the Devil. The inconceivable horror that Block mentions in the the confession scene is precisely this: that man is damned to be free, and he is powerless to overcome its terrifying vicissitudes, and, most poignantly, that he cannot help but be violent. There is no rationality, however capricious and self-serving it may be, that governs the universe, only Death.

But perhaps no one understands better these seemingly irrational movements of the Divine than the Divine Itself. When Christ hung upon the Cross and cried out, 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani', He did so to confess His own absolute terror and abandonment before God. For Bergman though, the sacrifice of Our Lord seems to have little to no effect; we are, as we were, estranged, expelled, and barred from any conceivable sense of meaning or direction in life. On the contrary, it seems to confirm his idea of God as a bloodthirsty tyrant, Who scourges, flays, and nails His Son to a wooden cross 'out of love.'

As I have said, The Seventh Seal is a difficult film to master. Like a medieval tapestry it runs a veritable gamut of different physiognomies, and this is evidenced primarily in the faces of its characters. Von Sydow's Block is impassive, stoic, and tinged with a quiet but deep despair; Poppe's Jof is hopeful, expressive, even foolish-looking at times. Towards the end of the film, as Block and his squire Jons encounter the witch a second time, the latter asks (and I paraphrase), 'Who watches out for that girl? God? The Devil?' As the witch is slowly consumed by the flames, she looks in wide-eyed horror at Block and Jons, two sitting ducks powerless to divine the meaning of the act unfolding before their eyes. But Block's own refusal to give in too easily to Death suggests that he has yet a spark of hope in his heart, although it seems to have been all but extinguished absolutely. "Faith is a burden", says Block in the confession scene, which demands of the believer an almost blind assent-- a conviction, no matter how foolish--even in the midst of an almost oppressive, overpowering silence. Block's time with Jof and Mia, and their son Mikael, shows him at his most tender-- a smiling, laughing knight,a far cry from the guilt-wracked man who returns to Sweden. Still, Block eventually allows Death to win the game, apparently resigned to the infinite silence of God.

Perhaps the point here is that faith, like love, is meant to hurt-- but this hurt is not just an emotional hurt, but one which wounds the soul at a deeper, more fundamental level. To make a stand, to stake oneself for a single conviction, is to face the absoluteness of the terror of not knowing, and often this may just be a matter of plugging one's ears and shouting loudly at the top of one's lungs in an attempt to drown out the withering tide of doubt. In a world without meaning or truth, it seems that the only thing that can save it is madness, that of love. Block ends the confession scene by giving a monologue on his hand-- a hand that 'pulses with blood', which he nevertheless uses to play chess with Death. He laughs, with apparent irony, that such a thing pulsing with life is stuck in such a macabre position. Having danced with Death itself, Block still comes off unsure about God. In all honesty, I feel as if Antonius Block's questions could very well be my own. Block's tenderness with Jof's family leads us to think, albeit momentarily, that he has forgotten much of his wrangling with his questions. But Block  ultimately refuses to budge, and the silence he feels all around him gets the better of him.

Family Matters

I got an email from my uncle recently. Seven long years after completely disappearing from the face of the earth, he suddenly pops up on Facebook, to the delight of my mother and the rest of my extended family. In 2003, whilst studying for a doctorate in San Francisco, my uncle was robbed point blank by a gang of thieves, taking with them all his documentation-- passports, green card, and all-- thus leaving him, legally, without any identity.

I've never gotten to know my Uncle as well as I would have liked, even if all my aunts, even today, liken me to a spitting image of him. Walking into his room in my grandmother's house, where he stays wherever he's home, I would often scan his bookshelves for reading material.  His bookshelves were really my first  exposure to high culture and science. When I was younger and still planned on becoming a scientist or a doctor, I would leaf through his hundreds of volumes of 'Scientific American', 'Nature', and 'National Geographic' for fun. They sat, arranged according to date, at the bottom of a huge mahogany shelf in his room; the upper tiers were reserved for volumes on the arts and the humanities. I still vividly recall sifting through some of the most beautiful books I had ever seen in that room; he was a voracious reader who made me look like an inconceivably pretentious amateur. He had books on Greek and Latin grammar, Egyptology, philosophy, and a good selection of theology books, among others. I would be lying if I said I didn't have some of those books with me at the moment. His love for books was matched only by  his love for music. He  had a whole shelf built onto a wall, some 10ft tall by 12ft wide, full of records which he had collected from the 70s and the 80s. My mom tells me that he would often visit a local radio station that played only classical music, to ask for recommendations as well as buy any old records that the station was willing to sell.

At the same time, my uncle was probably one of the saddest people I've met, a fact which I've only come to realize recently. My late maternal grandfather was a strict disciplinarian who lived and suffered through the war. He was also a man, unfortunately, who was prone to violent acts, and who had a verbally abusive streak. I've always suspected my uncle might be gay; it was obvious from the way he walked and the way he talked that there was something different about him. My grandfather saw this as well, and he would often beat my uncle for this. My mother recalled to me one time, tears in her eyes, how my grandfather would throw ice cold water at my uncle every morning before dawn to get him to wake up. The abuse did not end there; he would also beat him black and blue at times, in front of my aunts and my other uncle. This cycle went on for years, even well into my uncle's college days, until he finally had  enough, and moved in with a few friends.

It is always disheartening to hear of such anger and sadness in one's family. When I was younger, maybe 14 or 15 years old, I held my family sacred and blemish free. We might not be too wealthy but we made up for it by dint of moral superiority. But with age comes the destruction of naivete and the inevitable realization that one is stuck with drunkards, sycophants,  the hopeless, the dreamless, the wayward, the agnostic, the irresponsible, the fiscally irresponsible, the arrogant, the belligerent, and, at times, just plain assholes.  In the same way, the Church is also a  collection of misfits with histories just as long and as scandalous at times. Maybe the family is still sacred, but not by dint of being a spotless image of Heaven above, but because it contains, at once, the familiar and the otherworldly. I can choose to love these misfits, my fellow sinners, and perhaps that is what makes the difference.

Twenty three years after my grandfather's death, I am reminded of the fact that it was my uncle-- the same who had been the object of his cruel maltreatment-- who, in the end, had him buried. Grandpa was laid out in a plot of land in one of Metro Manila's most beautiful cemeteries, all paid for by my uncle. Today, I realize that I still have a lot of unresolved issues; I am lustful, I am proud, but most of all, I have a tendency to despair. I can only pray that I would have the same strength and moral fortitude to love, forgive, and maybe even forget, everything wrong that has been done to me, at the very end.

The Santo Entierro

It was close to midnight when we arrived at our parish.The light rain had just ceased, and the sepulchral silence of Good Friday hung about the night like an invisible cloak. Above, the moon glowed eerily behind the clouds, casting a corpse-like pallor on the earth below. The church was dark inside, but there were still people praying the rosary or just sitting contemplatively inside. I caught a boy I went to school with give his girlfriend a slight nuzzle on the cheek, while outside, in the church's small garden, where plaster statues of Our Lady of La Salette and several other saints were illuminated by candlelight people milled about. A few penitents meditated upon their serene faces.

"When you see the Lord, remember to kiss His wounds," my aunt whispered to my seven year old cousin. She gently put on a small lace veil on her head, the kind that covered just  the crown of the head, and went forward, in silence, to the bier ahead. There, the image of the Dead Christ lay in repose. Locked inside an elaborate wooden box with glass panels all four sides, it was a life-size depiction of the Lord, His eyes half-closed, and whatever trace of the violence done to His sacred body hidden under a pall of violet silk embroidered with gold. On the Lord's breast lay a silver book, and on top, an effigy of a Lamb, also in silver, a cross tucked under its bent legs. A silver crown of thorns lay in front of the book, and within the crown, were three silver nails each the size of a paring knife. I gazed at the Dead Christ for awhile, feeling the weight of a tradition hundreds of years old sink into me, albeit in such a parish as suburban as ours. We missed the procession of the bier earlier in the day; such events always necessitated a marching band and the entirety of the Catholic community's participation. My grandfather thought it was bad luck to miss it at worst, and an impolite omission at best. "Mama, Jesus is inside the coffin, I can't kiss Him." My aunt shushed the boy, and, with a gesture, urged him to do as  she did. She produced a white handkerchief from her pocket, a rather frilly, lacy thing, probably with her name stitched in a fancy cursive letters. She took the cloth, and dabbed one kind on her lips; it was a kiss. "Do this after me," she said to the boy. Gently, delicately, she wiped the handkerchief on the glass sides of the wooden bier, every now and then pausing to cross  herself with the cloth; she did this for three minutes, before telling my cousin to pull up his shirt. Then, she took the  handkerchief and rubbed it on his small, fat back, before ruffing his hair with it. "Francis, 'wag kang malikot!". She issued a stern warning to my little cousin to keep still; life any boy his age, I imagine he wanted to explore the darkened church in the hopes of finding some adventure, or an escape from the dreary silence.

My dad and I followed next, with my grandfather teaching Francis some last minute catechism. I think he was disappointed that the boy had started jumping around in church, and in front of the Dead Christ even, committing a grave faux pas which would have merited the belt in his days. My dad and I stood and silence in front of the image for awhile, but lacking the handkerchiefs to partake of the blessed contagion, we were content to simply kiss the glass sides of the bier. A strong wind blew inside the church, carrying with it the sweet smell of lagrimas, a fragrant flower in the Philippines often associated with funerals. I took note of the arrangement of the Dead Christ one last time, before noticing a purple band tied around His jaw. Such things were often used in the old days to keep the mouth of the deceased shut, although for what purpose, I still do not know (perhaps to keep the soul from being claimed by the Devil?). Our devotions done, we retired momentarily to the pew, to sit and meditate. Behind me, I could hear the lachrymose singing of at least two old ladies, singing, perhaps, a song of lament for the Lord.

It was decided that we would pray the Via Crucis, which I was to lead. I pulled out a copy of the prayerbook I had gotten from school. It was a neat little book which contained Latin and English prayers, and some reflections from the Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva. "We adore You, O Christ, and we bless You, because by Your holy cross You have redeemed the world." Forty minutes later, we ended our prayer; Francis was already asleep, my grandfather was irascible, and the church, by then, had already completely emptied. Only the night watchman remained, who sat in the back pew of the church, half-awake and half-asleep, but thankfully not snoring.

Inside the church, the candlelight still burned brightly before the bier of the Lord. We came forward again, as a family, to give Him our farewells. My aunt shook Francis from his sleep in order to impress upon him a final act of piety. We knelt for awhile, and for a moment, it looked as if she were banging her forehead on the base of the bier, as if the bier and its Contents were some sort of scapegoat, and that it was not too late to rush the absolution of her sins post factum the Crucifixion. Under the light of two, tacky incandescent bulbs inside the bier, I observed, for the first time, the hand of the Crucified, which the pall had not covered. The hand was locked as if in the early stages of rigor mortis, with a rather gruesome circular indentation at the center, where the nail was hammered into place, and later pulled out. The level of detail was, to say the least, almost fetishistic, and perhaps, most disturbingly, one could even discern a small, raised, ring of bloodied flesh that emanated from the center of the wound, simulating the disturbance of the divine flesh when the nails were pulled out. I pondered over this detail for a moment, lost in contemplation.

Then, my aunt moved to the foot of the bier, and saw that the glass had been unlocked, making it possible to kiss the feet of the Lord. Slowly, she bent her back forward, and pressed her lips on the wounds at the center of the feet, mimicking the same level of gory detail of the hand. This time she dipped the tip of the handkerchief into the wound, in imitation of soaking up real blood, and pressed it to her lips, before signing her forehead, lips, and breast. "By the sign of this holy cross, deliver us from our enemies, You, who are our God." And again, she smothered Francis with the cloth, who, by then, had already grown tired and sleepy. Finally, we left the church. I said goodbye  to the boy from school, who had apparently noticed me on my way out and called me out. He gave me a wink, for what, I don't know. I turned to look back once more at the empty church, while the Dead Christ rested serenely inside His bier.

Taal Basilica

I visited the majestic basilica of Taal, in my father's province of Batangas, six months ago. The town is old, rustic, and crammed full of history. Traditionally, Taal was known as the home of the aristocracy of Batangas; it was home to mestizos and Spaniards, the cream of the crop in the highly stratified Philippine society of the 19th century. Many old houses survived the ravages of the War and are still extant in the town, although signs of decay have taken root as well. Case in point: the plaza that fronted the basilica now has a rather ugly and ill-maintained basketball court. Still, the basilica remains noble and stoic, like a grand old dame crusted with age and yet still wielding an awful majesty. Not for naught was it once held as the biggest church in all of Asia.

We arrived in Taal fifteen minutes before five in the afternoon. Apparently, the anticipated Mass was due to start in a bit; we saw altar boys in burgundy cassocks and lace surplices hurrying back and forth to the sacristy, carrying with them the ciriales-- two silver torches and a venerable old processional crucifix. The crowd was very thin-- the basilica can probably hold a thousand people at least on any given day, but there were only fifty at most present at the Mass. I was later told that anticipated Masses were abhorrent to the generally conservative outlook of the Taalenos, who still preferred to worship at first light of dawn.

That done, we then proceeded to a smaller church, also in Taal, the Shrine of Nuestra Senora de Caysasay. Local legend holds that a fisherman once fished the image of Our Lady-- which was all of a foot tall-- from the sea and decided to bring it back to town to honor it. The Lady, however, was said to have disappeared; the locals still say that the Virgin of Caysasay likes to take walks in the town of Taal at night, mirroring many popular legends of miraculous images in the Philippines. By the time we had reached the shrine, though, it was already sunset, and I was not able to take enough pictures.

Rather curiously, the shrine of Our Lady is connected to the Basilica itself by a secret stair that descended from the grounds of the Basilica at the top, and wound itself along a hidden road, till at last it reached the little shrine below. Historically, this may be attributable to the fact that Taal was once divided between the town proper-- the area above, where the old money families lived-- and the so-called 'labac', the 'lowlands', where the common folk lived. Older Batanguenos still say that the old folk of Taal guarded their privileged status with a vengeance; they suffered none of the Chinese working class to enter the premises of the town proper, and any who did so almost always met certain death, by way of the balisong (Filipino fan knife).

It is said that the Virgin of Caysasay was once brought to the basilica; whereupon it escaped, and disappeared for some time. Years passed before two sisters discovered the image of the Virgin in a tree; and henceforth, it was decided that the Virgin would stay in the Labac. The locals eventually built a small shrine in honor of the equally small-statured Virgin. The old money families of Taal have long since fallen from their untouchable positions, and their fortunes gradually eclipsed by the industrious Chinese-Filipinos. But I am told that the Chinoys would still rather worship at the little shrine beneath the majestic basilica.

Some Brief Thoughts

The remarkable thing about the Catholic imagination is, I think, its ability to rehabilitate and reconfigure symbols, ideas, and objects according to its own vision of the world. We see this quite clearly in the most popular expressions of Catholic doctrine; we revere the symbol of a crucified man on a cross, in addition to images of Him being scourged and almost flayed to the bone, as well as images of His infancy (and if you're familiar with Hispanic Catholicism, you may have come across the Santo Nino del Pasion-- the Child Jesus contemplating the very cross on which He is to die). The gruesome character of these images is right to disturb us; the fact that they are revered, blessed, and displayed in our homes might even smack of a bizarre neurosis to some people. Yet Catholicism not only esteems these depictions of its central tenets, but also holds them to be holy.

Perhaps it is a product of purely modern times that we have come to bifurcate the holy from the sacred, not always consciously, but at least in practice. While we may have an understanding of holiness as a kind of moral value par excellence, we fail to see its menace; the holy then, becomes more akin to a celestial ball of fluff than something to be revered, let alone worshipped. At the same time, Catholic doctrine can hardly be said to be 'nice'; Hell remains a metaphysical certainty despite the introduction of pastoral concerns into the present discourse, for example, and no amount of doctrinal wrangling can ever devalue it to the level of mere opinion. Perhaps this is one reason why I am fascinated with Folk Catholicism; it is in its imagination that the colors of the Catholic religious imagination remain most vivid, terrifying, and poetic. The image above is from the Good Friday procession of Procida, a small island to the south of Naples in Italy. It is particularly striking in its depiction of the sacred and the profane in the same tableaux. At the fore of the wagon sits the figure of Death riding a horse, seemingly riding through the desolate waste of a temple. Behind death are the figures of demons, ready to tempt and seduce man into perdition. And behind, the silent, muted, figure of the Dead Christ, ministered to by His angels and surrounded by a golden aureole.

I am honestly confused by the iconography here, but at the same time intrigued. In another float, shown below, we see the Pieta, and on the foreground of the image, a crucified skeleton. I imagine such a juxtaposition of the sacred and the monstrous would send many a finger wagging in disappointment, or else raring to pull the trigger of the flare gun of heresy. I myself am disturbed by it. Then again, I am reminded of the many stories I had heard from my parents and grandparents about Good Friday, and the various superstitions associated therewith. Come twelve noon up to three o'clock, all noise was discouraged under pain of sin. Jumping, smiling, laughing, and speaking were expressly forbidden; God was dead, and all creation ought to weep for His passing. Any sudden or quick movement was seen as an affront to the earth, which housed the body of the Lord; it was reasoned that jumping up and down, for example, caused the earth to press down upon the holy body of the Lord (apparently, He had been swallowed up by the earth), disturbing Him from His rest. These taboos also prescribed on Good Friday a double-faced reputation: on one hand, it is the holiest day in the universe, but at the same time, the most malevolent. Witches, sorcerers, demons and heretics were said to prowl about the world looking to sift the elect as wheat and throw them into everlasting fire. It was also thought to be a most propitious day to cast curses, since, with God dead, there would be no one to punish those who would commit such deeds.

This is probably one reason why the image of the Dead Christ-- the Senor del Santo Sepulcro-- was traditionally thought of as one of the most powerful "avatars" of Our Lord; it represents, simultaneously, the concreteness of man's salvation, the debt to sin having been paid in full by His perfect sacrifice, and at the same time, the powerlessness of man to parlay with the Divine. The destruction of Christ's human body reminds us of our own mortality, but also of the necessity of this destruction, leaving man, effectively, in a double bind: he abhors, and yet needs, perhaps more urgently, the wonderful virtue effected by the sacrifice, and as represented by that particular archetype.

And we have, too, the Anima Sola, the lonely soul of purgatory usually depicted as a beautiful woman, wrists bound by chains, her eyes gazing heavenward, looking for a respite from the burning flame which consumes her body. While we are certainly familiar with the idea of praying for the souls in purgatory, asking their intercession and protection seems alien. Perhaps, to the outside observer looking at this particular facet of Catholic devotion, it might almost look as if one were praying to a soul condemned to burn for all eternity in hellfire. Or worse, a devotee making a plea to some foul succubus to spare himself from damnation. Not just heretical, but also malevolent.

I have remarked before that our present age tends to see God and the celestial Hosts as a collective, cosmic Justice League-- a noble, bland, and thoroughly non-threatening assembly ready to fight our battles for us at the drop of a hat. While I certainly subscribe to the Church's teachings on the matter, one has to wonder if such a desensitized, de-fanged Catholicism would work well enough to save us. The genius of the pre-Vatican II Catholic imagination was how it incorporated all of human existence-- even the tragic and the terrifying-- to paint something coherent. The idea of Hell is admittedly quite terrifying, especially for me, sinner that I am. But, I would rather it be included in the Church's metaphysical horizon than letting me figure out, on my own, what Catholicism is; it is not so much a matter of distrusting my own God-given talents to figure things out, but a matter of realizing how woefully insignificant I am in the grand scheme of things. If we balk at the idea of our own insignificance, it would seem, at least to me, that we have forgotten how to be properly self-centered.

Anima Sola

All Hallows' Eve, and it's raining outside. Nights like this, when I was a boy, always necessitated the telling of ghost stories, which I and me siblings readily devoured. We are much older now, though, and are admittedly harder to scare. But the tradition, thankfully, remains.

I remember one story my father told me some years back. It was 1982, eleven years into Martial Law, and the Marcoses were at the peak of their chicanery. Dad was a senior then, studying in one of Manila's oldest universities, and he was right smack in what is called, around these parts, the U-Belt-- short for 'University Belt', owing to the fact that the area was home to at least three universities. Today, U-Belt has the unfortunate distinction of being known more for its seedy underbelly rather than its education; Recto Street, for example, is quite near it, a street infamous among many for its single most popular ware: fake diplomas. There are stores in Recto, for example, which allow one to wait for the diploma, much like one of those photo studios in the mall that only seem to be there because of the demand for ID pictures. Despite the notorious traffic, however, Dad lived in an apartment well outside the U-Belt. He lived with his sister and a roommate, a rather naive provinciano named Joey, who, I'm told, had a peanut-shaped head.

It happened that, one chilly December night, Dad and Joey were heading back to their apartment from school. The semester almost halfway done, and Christmas break just looming a day away, it was only natural that excitement would get the better of them. And so my Dad, dorky Math major that he is, decided to go out and have a drink with Joey and the gang. The place was a seedy, dilapidated bar (of course, he would leave out this detail whenever he would tell us the story back then)where one could 'table' some girls for a paltry sum. It's one of those places where the dances are badly choreographed, and the music selection is tacky, at best, excruciating at worst. Being the son of my grandmother that he was, though, my dad opted not to partake of the carnality of it all; so he and Joey decided to leave early and head back to their apartment, where my aunt would be waiting.

The distance from U-Belt to West Avenue in Quezon City, where the small apartment was tucked away in some half-forgotten street, could scarcely be said to reach 10km, yet the time of the day (or night, rather) made it difficult to hop on a jeepney too easily. After about fifteen minutes, they found the right vehicle, and, stopping it in the middle of the street, hurried up to enter it. The ride took twenty minutes, and the windy Decemcontrolfreak214@hotmail.comber night carried the soft lilting of Christmas songs in the background as the faint, luscious smell of piping-hot bibingka wafted into the steel confines of the jeepney.

The ride ended, and Dad and Joey alighted from the vehicle. The light from the sole lamp post by the apartment complex was the only thing illuminating the street at that dead hour. And the light, dim as it was, suddenly revealed a figure that hid in the shadows, a tall, slender, and sleek figure. Joey's eyes were drawn to the right, as even then, he contemplated this sudden apparition that had hitherto lain in the dark; it was a woman, clad all in black, as if she were a widow fresh from her husband's funeral. Her sable clothes contrasted greatly with her pale skin; a pair of dark glasses-- at night!-- buried her eyes. Long, black hair, reaching almost to the back, fell on her shoulders. Lips, redder than strawberries-- or blood, if you wish-- were pursed tightly on her face. My Dad and Joey turned to her, despite being unnerved. Then the woman moved forward, and spoke in a velvety, yet hollow voice.

'May I ask if this is the residence of General Ito? Please help me, it is very important I see him.'

Either my Dad or Joey spoke next. 'I'm sorry, but there is no General Ito here. Maybe you're looking for Mr. Tansingco? He is Chinese but often gets mistaken for Japanese.'

The Lady remained still, mulling the words, until at last she spoke again. But this time, her voice betrayed an inner turmoil; and the Lady's voice was cracked and nervous, as if she were on the verge of tears. 'Please help me! I don't know what to do anymore. I really have to see the General, it is a matter of life and death!'

At this point, both men had already grown uneasy, and were resolved to call upon their landlord, an ancient gentleman who was probably at least eighty years old then, to help resolve the situation. 'Hold on a second miss, we'll call the landlord, he might be able to help you.' They fumbled with the key, trying to unlock the gate as quickly as possible, driven in part by fear, and by a sense of pity; whoever this woman was, she clearly needed to see this Ito fellow. And yet, there was no Ito resident in any of the apartments; and more, the Lady's clothes seemed too old-fashioned, as if they had been made, sold, and worn in another decade, one considerably older than the 1980s. The lock resolved, Joey turned around, renewing his effort to help the mysterious Lady.

The light, however, revealed the stranger's figure no longer; and in the span of a seconds that both of them fumbled with the lock, it seemed as if the Lady had disappeared all of a sudden. Eyes frantic and filled with fear scanned the streets looking for any sign of the sable-clad Lady, but no trace of her was to be found. Then, suddenly, from the corner of his eye, my Dad spied a curious movement in the middle of the street. The faint light revealed it to be a snake, slithering from one side of the street to the other; and in that faint, hazy light, the snake's black skin glistened. The chill wind blew once more, and it carried with it the howling of dogs, which masked the cries of many an anguished soul.