Filipinos celebrate Holy Week with a pagan passion.
On Holy Monday eve, under a sky the color of congealed blood, barefoot men
drag a dark-wood image of the Cross-bearing Christ through streets smoky
with candle-flame in old Manila's worker-district of Quiapo. Bigger than
life, the baroque Black Nazarene crossed the perilous Pacific in a galleon
from Spanish Mexico over 200 years ago. Gaunt and wracked with pain, a
crown of silver thorns on its brow, it wears purple garments hemmed with
gold. Women in purple gowns, with wreaths of vine on their heads, follow
the Christ, jostling to kiss its musk scented feet.
Philippine Catholicism disdains the bland, sweet myth of the Nativity -
preferring the stronger emotions of the Passion and the Resurrection.
Christmas is an American, cultural import, laden with overtones of
commerce. Lent is taut, austere, inexorable - satisfying the tragic sense
of peasant folk still living close to the cycle of the seasons.
Ash Wednesday brings down the searing heat of summer. The whole earth
writhes under the white-hot sky. The warm wind blows scented with withered
herbs and ripening grain. "The odor of Cuaresma," the old people call it,
sniffing the air in anticipation.
In many regions, the peasants still come in water-buffalo carts from their
farms to spend the holiday with their landlords. Beside the patron's house
is built a little chapel of bamboo and palm leaf; inside it is set up a
little altar. Readers take turns chanting the Passion, reciting rhymed
verses from ancient texts in the local dialects. This recitation goes
on all day and through much of the night, the mournful voices rising and
falling like the tide.
In many other ways is the martyrdom at Golgotha objectified. In some small
towns, morality plays are still enacted around the Agony in the Garden and
the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. Again and again Pontius Pilate washes his
hands. The fearsome Jews scourge the Savior at the pillar. And then he
stumbles his way up Calvary, to the dirge of the town brass band.
As Good Fridays nears, the sense of impending tragedy quivers in the air.
On Passion Sunday eve, the church images are hooded with purple cloth.
From then on, no work is done; folk belief is that the universe shares the
Lord's agony, and a hoe struck at the soil would evoke shrieks of pain
from the very earth. Children are forbidden to laugh and to play with
sticks or other sharp toys. Their elders sit all day on woven 'straw mats
to pray and meditate, stirring only to eat or drink.
Only the pious who chant the Passion in their little chapels and those
others who prepare the town carrozas for the Holy Week processions keep
busy. These are owned by the most substantial residents; and these
notables compete to deck their holy possessions. Each carriage hull is
plated with beaten silver. Set in a blaze of blown glass and candlelight,
its image glitters with jewels. Family retainers heave the carriage along.
Behind it solemnly tread the master and his extended family, trailed by
musicians playing Spanish regimental songs.
At three o'clock on Good Friday, the whole town dies. The fierce sun
empties the streets even of the prowling dogs. Windows are drawn shut.
Families kneel before household altars to recite Spanish litanies. In some
Luzon towns, fanatics still flog themselves to fulfill vows of penitence.
At a fishing village called Masuko, along Manila Bay, many of the men folk
annually submit to ritual flagellation on Good Friday afternoon. Beneath a
wreath of shrubs or vines, the penitent wears a hood of white cotton cloth
that covers his face down to the chest. His brown back he leaves bare. His
trousers he binds with thongs at thighs and legs.
A verdugo, or torturer, scourges his back four times with a ladleshaped
wooden beater faced with bits of broken glass. Then the flagellant walks
off to his own Calvary, swinging a whip of bamboo sticks against his
bleeding back. Passing a chapel where the Passion is being chanted, he
makes a sign of the Cross on the ground, drops
heavily on it and arranges his body in the gesture of the Crucified
Christ. Then he picks himself up and goes on.
Holy Saturday's mood is lighter. Judas, the traitor, is hung in effigy
from the tree nearest the churchyard, his miser's bag filled with Chinese
firecrackers. To the pealing of church bells, he is set afire and blown up
and his papier-mache limbs dragged off by raucous urchins.
Easter Sunday wears the color of rejoicing. The dark shrouds on the church
images are lifted; and the priest puts on his white vestments of purity
and joy. Another pageant takes place at dawn: The Risen Christ meeting his
Sorrowful Mother. The two images come from different sides of Main Street,
the Christ
home by male devotees and the Mother by the parish women. From an ornate
arch spanning the street, a little girl, dressed as a cherub, descends on
a pulley to pluck the black veil off the Virgin Mother's face as the
throng sings "Hallelujah" and the incense smoke floats to a pale gray sky.
In middle-class Manila, Holy Week has become just another bank holiday to
spend on the beach or in the mountains. For what would people on the
threshold of affluence want with a prickly season of penance? Even the
rhetorical fury of the preachers at the traditional sermon on the "Seven
Last Words" on Good Friday afternoon cannot rouse the faithful from their
comfortable lethargy.
At a village in Pampanga Province, Good Friday has become a street-theater
for tourists - with multiple crucifixions and a cast of thousand
flagellants. At Mount Banahaw, southeast of Manila, pilgrims from
mock-Christian sects worship at caves, pe'aks, rocks, waterfalls, streams,
pools and springs - much as their Malay ancestors had done.
It is in the Philippine hinterlands that the folk enact the Passion in its
oldest mythic form. Soon after Holy Week ends, the peasants return to
their hill-farms, to bum the forests for the new planting. In every field,
a crude cross is shaped of branches. At its foot is killed a white
cockerel, the blood spurting on the ash covered ' loam. Then scented herbs
and bits of iron are buried in the earth, to ensure the rice grains grow
fragrant and heavy.
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