The Myths of Eternal Return

Last Friday, the city woke up to a whole day of "Traslacion." The day and the week promise - or threaten - to bring about more changes to old practices. Some of these acts and gestures gathered through accretion, some by introduction from outside, and other by sheer power of local or native culture.

The waving of handkerchief is a fairly new practice, brought in by priests who have travelled to established pilgrimages like the Fatima in Portugal. The dousing of water is a then-and-now impulse. The confetti is a collective outburst, a charming way to let pass a most admired Lady. In many of these practices, the belief in the tiny symbol of faith is given a heady material component.

I do not know if the evangelists ever thought of transforming the image of the Lady of Peñafrancia into a local deity or a maternal symbol, Ina. If they did not, then this is the triumph of people interpreting a devotion and making it their own. The change in this case is not radical and even conforms to the writings that abound regarding the Marian Image. The Mother of the Church is the Mother of the Community.

But "Ina" is not a neutral term. Language being never neutral and always normative, the selection of a language to denote one's core belief is even more an in-your-face statement. I choose this language because this language is mine. We have determined that the image of the Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia is not our "Senora" (a lady of gentility) but our Ina, respected but not elevated to the point of divine athambia, the state of not being beyond disturbance.

Is this appellation the reason for our near demented obsession to be tactile to her? In the Flipino household, the relationship between the sons (for these are male devotees) and the Mother becomes tactile during moments of crisis, and times of desolation. In this universe of symbols, the father is the distant authority, the "Señor" we plead to during the Perdon.

Last Friday, the tug-of-war between the holder of meanings in the institutional Church and those who harbor other meanings continued again. The "voyadores" who all remain male by sheer strength and by a history that is historically male-ordained were lost in the catechism that required them to behave and in the collective unconscious of their ancestors who received the image of the Virgin because She respected their likeness. At a certain point in the Mass, during the Communion, when the priests were concentrating on a most important aspect of the ritual, some voyadores jumped out of the invisible line that separated them from the clerics. In the circle of the Virgin, they started grabbing the image and touching her. Some attempted to embrace the stand that propped Her up. It took awhile before the contingent of soldiers could rush to protect her. But protect her from what and for what purpose? In the answer to these two questions lies the power of conversion.

I believe we will see more of these, acts of believers that are perceived to be contrary to what the Church authorities would want them to accept as valid and proper ways of believing. Still, during those few moments, I sensed only urgent acts of ardor, blooming out of passion that may appear to be uncouth and totally improper now but may have been the point of access by which the early missionaries triggered the attention of the infieles.

When the new religion came, there were the powerful deities to be disenfranchised. There was this devotion to be enthroned. Whether this is flattering or not to what we are as believers, power and faith were two dimensions of the histories of our land, before and after the colonizing.

A lady announcer was asking a priest over the local TV why the people would crowd now and elbow themselves and even suffer physical pain only on designated days in September. The whole year, the image of the Virgin is sheltered up there behind the main altar of the Basilica and the original shrine. Anyone could quietly walk up the stairs and, on quiet days, even stay there for long minutes.

Why be "improper"in September?

All cultures have this myth of eternal return. They are the beginning of everything. Because we cannot return to the birth of our universes and the dawning of religion, we need rituals that have the efficacy to symbolically bring us back the origin of things, to the wellspring of the divine, when power was undiluted. In the pre-Spanish universe of the Bikolanos, there was the Bakunawa demonized by the discourse of the missionaries. If the Bakunawa indeed swallowed the moon or the sun during eclipses, that was an explanation that made sense to everyone. The Babaylanes who were not all female but were, in many communities, invididuals who created in their body the dual energies of the male and the female, did not see evil in the act of the Bakunawa, but just the natural order of the cosmos. They had the power to perform the ritual that would bring back the light. And yet light was not Good as Darkness was not Evil. That was the Western discourse, the discourse of the missionaries.

In September, some devotees see the power of the Virgin as again pure from the moment She is taken out of her Shrine. She is in a sense unsheltered and Her strength are there for the taking. We jump at Her and fight for those flowers, for those golden tensils dangling from her cape. The representatives of the Church shove us away and look at us shocked at how improper we have become again.

In September, some of us are claiming Her as our own, at each turn, at the street corners, when the authorities are not looking, when the soldiers get tired, and when the rains pour down on our world. It seems in that momentary space, there is but one compromise we seem to have no difficulty agreeing on: the label of Ina. That should be the beginning of the new conversion.