I like to believe my good friend, Howard Tate, brother under the skies because of the great late writer, Socorro Federis Tate, believes there is Christmas. Still, I offer this column to all those who, like Howard, reads, and is conscious of the coming Christmas even as he is bothered by the dam being constructed somewhere in our province. Howard wonders " why some stinking politicians and their rah rah boys are moving heaven and earth for its completion when the Pangasinenses are cursing those people responsible for constructing SAN ROQUE DAM which brought havoc to some parts of Pangasinan a few months back. I'm not being paranoid, but I assume there's a lot of money at stake here not only for the contractor but also for some people who are recipients of what we call SOP. As the saying goes, When money talks, people listen. Dae na bale kung magkaralamos ang mga taga Pamplona."
Christmas is a mouthful of a celebration already but what Howard said is a mouthful really.
I wonder in the cynical (cynicism has its worth anytime) order of the day which part of Christmas and its remembering can be we not talk about the meaninglessness of the human acts around us?
Let me bring you back further: in the colonization of our nation, how did the colonial administrators schooled us in the meaning of this most glorious and most mysterious of the Christian celebration? How did they instill in us the meaning of the Word Incarnate? How did they put across the meaning of the Three Kings and the Shepherd and the Stars?
As an anthropologist, I try to look back to those years and wonder how many of the concepts of God becoming Man got lost in the translation.
I can only think of those that got through. One is the notion that humble people get their rewards first more that than those who are privileged with wealth. This is the story of the Shepherds who, one cold night, followed the path or the light of the great star and found their way to the crib. In some stories, it was a cave; in paintings the site of birth was a place shared by animals. Sometimes, there was a cow, a horse, and a sheep. Sometimes, there was a dove that flutters above the crib.
Where did the Three Wise Men come from? Were they charlatans or magicians? Were they seer or scientists who knew things beyond the stars and their configuration?
In this thick forest of symbols, the early Filipinos found attractive the notion of singing songs as Pastoras. They formed groups built around a capitana and proceeded to capture all the shiny colors in the palette of weavers and cloth manufacturers. Yellow the brightness of bird plumage; red the incarnadine equivalent of the mystery of the season; and the greenest of foliage to wrap up the carnival of faith.
It must have been a powerful message that the poor shepherds saw the Power Baby first. Thus the birth of the Dancing Shepherds in a land where the shepherding never became an industry became a reality. Then it must have been deeply compelling also for farmers to throw their support behind the organizing of dance troupe in their villages to announce to those living in the big town the birth of the Messiah. The boon did not come from the developed Center but from the Exploited Periphery! Now, that makes for a really convincing story, the kind that leads to conversion.
Each year, therefore, do not laugh, when they come upon your gate. They are brightly dressed and they dance these steps that are a cross between the sprightly colonial dances taught by the colonizers and the nimble reenactment of men and women coping with forces of Nature around them.
Their dances will never bring them TV exposure and wealth. Their voices pitched high are not the standards by which we judge good singing now. They seem to belong to another time, another space. In fact, they do not seem to belong to our world at all.
But these Pastoras from the hinterlands or, at least from distant barangays, are the vestiges of how we once saw this strange faith about an infant whose birth was being closely monitored by a cruel mean dictator, tracked by a persistent trio of wise men from the East, mapped by the skies, and finally accepted without any condition by unschooled shepherds one cold night thousands of years ago.
If you find these Pastoras funny, I am not surprised. Afterall our faith has grown from its humble beginning during the first Christmas to this monumental complexity terrifying in its slew of gatekeepers and sacred middlemen and troubled philosophers.
And men like Howard Tate who will light the Christmas candle not for Christmas but for this damned dam that is almost beyond our morals and control.