Pamalandong in Palo

Photos by visual artist/professor Dulce Anacion

In my hometown Palo, in Leyte, Good Friday is commemorated by a reenactment of the “Passion of Jesus Christ.” Some of the menfolk wear robes and pointed hoods ala Klu Klux Klan — they frightened one of my brother’s barkada who had just come back from the US, that day he visited and these men stopped him in his car — but that’s how penitents dress up in some parts of Spain, where this practice must have been adapted from by some Spanish friar who got assigned to Palo a long time ago.

Aside from going around with bare feet, these penitents also help manage traffic — that’s why they’re lined up along the sidewalk in the photo above. They clear the path for the seminarian/actor who volunteers to play Jesus and carry a big cross around town to reenact the Stations of the Cross, with other townsfolk playing the minor roles or as crowd extras (but all dressed like they walked right out of a Cecil B. DeMille movie set).

The whole reenactment (called Pamalandong, or Meditation) ends right at the top of a stage (transformed into a tropical Calvary), where they make a switcheroo right before the religious crowd. Just as the actor lies down to be nailed to his cross, he slips down a trapdoor on the stage, and when the cross is raised up the crowd sees a wooden statue (but with movable parts) of Jesus nailed to the cross.

The reenactment lasts for about three hours — from Jesus’ capture by Roman centurions (like those in the photo above) to Jesus being taken down from the cross — and while the crowd waits out Jesus’ suffering (complete with the statue raising its head to the sky above, or twitching in pain) on the cross, they listen to the Siete Palabras or Seven Last Words delivered by priests and lay people in sermons.

Soon after Jesus is brought down from the cross and interred in the sepulchre (that the religious later queue up to rub their handkerchiefs on the figure of Jesus or to kiss its wounded hands and feet, as it lays in a special  carriage inside the church), the more fanatical among the crowd rush up to the stage to grab a branch or a leaf they believe has been endowed with healing powers because it was used during the whole reenactment. Dulce is right, when she quotes Constantino saying, that we have “Filipinized” Christianity.

Maundy Thursday reflection

Maundy Thursday commemorates Jesus’ act of washing his disciples’ feet. In my hometown, the church holds a senakulo or reenactment of the “Passion of Jesus Christ.” As I recall, it begins with a ceremony where the man playing Jesus (usually a seminarian from the local theological school) literally washes the feet of his “disciples” (usually played by the lay people of the church).

I’ve always interpreted this action as being Taoist as well as Christian. Or is it because I’ve been reading my copy of The Illustrated Tao Te Ching (A New Translation and Commentary by Stephen Hodge; Godsfield Press, 2002)?

I’ve always been fascinated with Chinese culture, and Chinese philosophy in particular. There’s something in the poetry of most Chinese writers I’ve read that somehow strikes a chord.

Perhaps it’s something like what Stephen Hodge says is the “enigmatic line” of the Daodejing that, like other classical Chinese verse, “has continued to intrigue, inspire, and perhaps mystify” (7).

But what made me buy this version of the Daodejing was its claim to provide a new reading of the classical text. This new reading comes as a result of earlier excavations at Mawangdui and Goudian in south-central China that “has now revolutionized our understanding of early Daoism” (8).

The Mawangdui archaeological excavation of a tomb dating back to 168 B.C.E. revealed a collection of manuscripts, including two versions of the Daodejing — that scholars henceforth labeled Mawangdui A and Mawangdui B.

Prior to this find, studies on the Daodejing “were based on the standard text that had been finalized in the mid-Han period with its division into 81 chapters” (Hodge 29). The Mawangdui manuscripts surprised scholars because

[despite] being close to the text of the traditional version, they were both slightly different in content … [and] to be different … in the wording and in the order of the individual short chapters. Additionally … the two major parts of the text, the Dao section and the De section … had been reversed. The discoveries at Mawangdui helped scholars realize that our standard version of the Daodejing was finalized only during the mid-Han period and that several different versions must have been in circulation before then subtly differing in content and order. (Hodge 29)

The discovery of 730 inscribed bamboo slips in the 1993 Goudian excavation of a tomb dating back to 300 B.C.E. bolstered the scholars’ new findings. Of the 730 bamboo slips, 71 contained sayings from the Daodejing. Moreover, scholars “found the remains of three independent versions of a ‘proto-Daodejing,’ though they contained only a total of 31 chapters from the standard version … In other words, it seems clear now that there was actually no standard version of the Daodejing in circulation just prior to 300 B.C.E.” (Hodge 30).

Hodge’s own classification of the sayings is broken into six parts: (1) language and guidance, (2) cosmology and the guiding principle, (3) personal training, (4) dealings with society, (5) the art of governing, and (6) warfare.

This classification and translation of the Daodejing also makes this text less “mystical” and more humanistic. I prefer this one as it makes the classical text accessible because it does not try to make the sayings as something “sacred” and “holy.”

Which I think was the point Jesus was trying to make to his disciples. He was more the Son of Humankind than the Son of God. And he was showing his disciples that the way (daodejing) to serve God was to serve humankind, and sometimes in the most humbling of actions.

Anne Rice’s Christ

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Found a copy of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2006) in the local bookstore. I’ve been curious how the author, popular for her novels of vampires and witches, would tackle the subject of Christ. Would she portray Christ the human being or would she depict him as the Son of God?

The blurb on the back cover says this much:

With the Holy Land in turmoil, seven-year-old Jesus and his family leave Egypt for the dangerous road home to Jerusalem. As they travel, the boy tries to unlock the secret of his birth and comprehend his terrifying power to work miracles. Anne Rice’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel, based on the gospels and the most respected New Testament scholarship, summons up the voice, the presence, and the words of Jesus, allowing him to tell his own story as he struggles to grasp the holy purpose of his life.

So it’s going to be Jesus narrating his own story. Hmmm, interesting. Reminds me of The Vampire Lestat. But how would the voice of this boy Jesus sound like? And so I turned to the first page. And what do you know, right at the novel’s beginning, I read about how Jesus kills a boy. A few pages later, of course, he brings this boy back to life.

But with this incident, which we later on learn from her “Author’s Note” that she got from the Apocrypha, Rice proceeds with the premise of a child Jesus not fully aware of his supernatural powers. It is this secret or this mystery — that his family keeps from him, presumably to protect him until he is ready to face his destiny — that becomes Jesus’ quest.

So even as the family journeys from the safety of exile in Egypt to the turmoil in Jerusalem, Jesus embarks on a venture to seek the truth of his birth. The journey as rendered in the book tends to be plodding, with descriptions of the Jewish life taking up most of the book’s 317 pages. But then the story is told from the point of view of a seven-year-old Jesus, just out of exile, who finds Nazareth a foreign and strange land.

But then, the Jesus we meet in the novel seems to be a pensive boy. He seems too passive, too contemplative for a boy that age. It does not help, too, that the language Rice chooses for Jesus to tell us what’s happening reveals a consciousness that is, according to Melvin Jules Bukiet’s review in the Washington Post:

repetitive as well as uninformative. Meeting cousin Elizabeth for the first time, Jesus notes, “I thought her face pleasing in a way I couldn’t put into words to myself.” Then he describes himself as having “the mind of a child who had grown up sleeping in a room with men and women in that same room and in other rooms open to it, and sleeping in the open courtyard with the men and women in the heat of summer, and living always close with them, and hearing and seeing many things,” none of which he shares with us.

Bukiet also says of the linguistic style employed in the book:

Worse still, clumsy and outright ungrammatical prose infects every page. For instance, we’re told, “Joseph and Mary were cousins themselves of each other, that meant happiness for both of them.” Presumably aiming for the resounding echoes of biblical syntax, Rice is merely redundant, so much so that the 300-plus pages of this book feel infinitely longer. Here’s a sample of dialogue. Mary says, “Think of all the signs. . . . Think of the night when the men from the East came.” Then Joseph says, “Do you think anybody there has forgotten that? Do you think they’ve forgotten anything. . . . They’ll remember the star. . . . They’ll remember the men from the East,” to which Mary replies, “Don’t say it, please. . . . Please don’t say those words.”

What kept me going, however, was curiousity about how Rice would make Jesus confront his destiny. I was not disappointed in that crucial scene with the old priest inside the Temple of Jerusalem. That makes me want to read the more mature Jesus in Rice’s sequel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.

Human being/doing/having

Whirling Dervish (WD) sent me an SMS this afternoon, asking if I could join her and Douglas in their YM conversation. Since I didn’t know how to figure out the conference settings for such a setup, with them online on their PCs and me on SMS mode, I begged off. Also because I was doing some laundry.

To which WD quipped that I’m more a “human doing” rather than a “human being.” Adding that that was better than being a “human having.”