The early morning light seems to bring clarity to what we see. This weekend promises to be as perfect an Indiana weekend as one can want. The sky is clear, the air sweet with new-blown roses and bird songs, the air so light it caresses when later it would smear, and the sun still gentle lords it over all.
In the light it is easier to be brave and see what the dark harbors. I go back to those dark years in Manila in the late sixties to early seventies. The image of La Solidaridad bookstore still beckons to me from Padre Faura Street, a few corners behind the Hilton Hotel fronting Roxas Boulevard and Manila Bay. I'd take the Ermita jeepney from Plaza Miranda in front of the Quiapo church milling with people at all times of day and night. The plaza was the center of the world to me at the time. There color, movement, sound erupted and swirled like the very heart of being alive.
Quiapo Church is formally the San Juan Bautista Church but is better known as the shrine of the Black Nazarene, object of delirious frenzy every 9th of January, perhaps the iconic representation of Manila and the people of the Philippines itself. Chiefly men, but women and children, too, streamed from all over the country to form a sea of brown faces and flickering candles filling every corner of the plaza and the streets through which the statue processes in the same traditional path each year. Men in maroon and orange shirts jostled to take their place and help shoulder the paso or portable altar carrying Nuestro Señor Jesus Nazareno. "Sinisimba ka namin, pinapintuho ka namin, aral mo ang aming buhay and kaligtasan," chants the crowd. We worship you, we praise you, your teachings are our life and salvation.
Throughout the Catholic world black statues of saints are held in special veneration by local people. Why this is no one knows despite many learned books proposing all manner of theories. In France and Spain we visited pilgrimage churches of the black madonna. I have experienced something of the power of viewing these images, a phenomenon akin I imagine to darshan (darṡana, Sanskrit)—"seeing and being seen by God." While I no longer subject myself to religious orthodoxy I can't deny religious phenomena. They are incontrovertibly part of human experience. We have few enough moments of transcendence to lift us from the milling crowd to survey "the whole catastrophe" (as Zorba, the Greek calls it). Maybe we don't need too many. We need to walk the earth with solidly connecting steps most of the time but surely there are times too when we need a liftoff from the planet and get a rest from its incessant demands.
The statue was brought to the Philippines in 1606 by the first Augustinian Recollect friars who vigorously promoted devotion to the image. The suffering Christ and his mother are dominant themes in both Spanish and Philippine Catholicism. Maybe because life in the still largely agrarian country is barefaced suffering, Filipinos flock to churches on Good Friday to partake in the suffering depicted on the images of Jesus, his mother and followers. Participation is catharsis just as attendance at Greek dramas in ancient times provided a similar communal release for Athenians.
I'd get off where jeepney turns from the Luneta into M.H. del Pilar in Ermita. At the corner there of United Nations Avenue was an unpretentious bakery with a screen door that banged behind me if I forgot to grab and guide it gently to the jamb. I tasted my first whole-wheat bread there, an invitation that subsequently lead to my love affair with various breads of the world. I would buy a whole loaf and the baker would slice it on his magical machine to the thickness I wanted. Back at home I would spread a slice with butter. That too was religious experience!
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