I just finished watching a YouTube video of last January's procession in honor of the patron saint of Quiapo in Manila, El Señor Nazareno. The statue of a black Jesus dressed in purple and carrying his cross is carried through the streets from the Luneta back to the Quiapo church, an event that can take up to 12 hours. Devotees begin to camp out on Plaza Miranda the night before just so they will have a chance to carry the paso or portable altar bearing the statue on their shoulder, their feet bare, their heads bound by a white cloth signaling a bana-ad, a vow to do this act of oblation and faith every year. The vow is often for a favor received not by the devotee but some loved one. Many fulfill a vow taken by a parent or grandparent, such is the devotion of these people whose example those of us in the West can only marvel at or be mystified by. Growing up in the islands I know the fervor of belief still manifested there today in the age of flat-screen digital television and High Definition movies, Internet, email and texting. I can't summon any more the intensity of belief-based perception and action. Among believers, acts like these must lift their lives from the ordinary struggles of daily life, lifting them out of meaninglessness to something luminous or at least transcendent.
Santos, the wooden statues of saints that are so much a part of the religious life of Filipinos, have fascinated me since I was a child. Then they exerted the power of faith in the sacred, in the mystery that religions bestow upon human lives. Now they are works of art but more than just that, too. They outward signs of an inner experience that however materialistic we become still hovers just above our heads or under our feet, beyond arguments or dialectic, beyond reasonableness or practicality. If religion is opiate for the masses, maybe opiates are not just illegal brain-changing drugs but something that transcends what we know or can know about the brain. Maybe mind contains paradises beyond the wildest dreams we can have about the seemingly infinite galaxies the twinkling stars above suggest to us exists beyond our little heads, beyond this speck of earth where we begin and end our lives.
Below is a photo of a religious plaque taken from a church or private residence, now at the museum in Iloilo. As art we might see it as belonging to the category of folk art but when familiar with the language of symbols and associations, the image suggests to me what the most sublime art can not produce in the beholder. Then again I might be splitting hairs. Religious feeling or feeling for the beautiful may really be more than the words or conceptual categories we assign to it. Words and even ideas, like the Zen finger pointing at thus-ness, are mere attempts to express something ineffable because it is neither localized nor couched in the language of any tangible experience.
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