Musings on holy weeks past

Black Saturday, 23 April 2011


As a child living in a rural area during the early 80s, I have witnessed and even partook on some of the old customs practiced by people in a Catholic country like the Philippines when the Holy Week arrived.

Before transferring to the housing compound in an aquaculture research facility where my parents worked, our family stayed in the center of a small town in a small municipality populated by die-hard Catholics and a small congregation of Seventh Day Adventists. It was a town where everyone knew each other, and was predominantly composed of old folks well over the age of 50. In our neighborhood alone there were a total of more than five people my parents addressed as either 'Tay' or 'Lola', titles of respect for elders.

Our elderly landlady was an Adventist who owned an impressive gallery of illustrated children's biblical books I enjoyed browsing and reenacting to everyone's amusement (Especially the David and Goliath duel. I tried fashioning a makeshift slingshot that ended up shooting a large rock straight into the Adventist church's glass window next door). At least in these books, a clear demarcation of good and evil existed and illustrated clearly enough for a 5 or 6 year old to understand, simply by looking.

Sitting on the wall of the Adventist Church, early 80s

Somehow all that Biblical reference balanced whatever fears I had about the reality of supernatural evil that I also found in great abundance in my father's equally vast comic book collection (I was five. Imagination runs rampant at that age.) that featured creatures you won't find in any issues of Kerygma or Bible Weekly anytime soon. Jesus Christ was up there with Knight Rider, Luke Skywalker, and The Incredible Hulk as the defender of truth, justice and the safety of your very soul before being relegated regrettably, many many years after, more as an expression of exasperation.

That knowledge somehow made me one of the most devout Catholics during that time, complete with prayers before meals as well as bedtime. And when Holy Week arrived, I also observed the proper protocols. That meant no boisterous noise from activities like outdoor playing, loud music/TV, and abstinence on eating meat. I even opted for not actually taking a bath on good Friday but my mother, an academician that leaned towards liberal thinking forbade it. All these activities because the elderly told me that Christ is dead at this time: and that the forces of darkness are at full power because of this.

Talk about absent security. I spent the next few years always armed to the teeth with a crucifix, wooden stake, cloves of garlic and salt during Good Friday and Black Saturday. A little dose of paranoia never hurt anyone. 

All of that information I had gathered from either our house maid, my father's stories on what his terror of a grandmother forced upon him and his siblings during the Lenten season, and the people on the streets I asked as to why several people were being paraded on the road torturing themselves by flailing their backs with a nasty barbed object that produced tiny rivulets of blood every time it hit bare flesh. 

It was a surreal experience. Shirtless men with covered faces and bloody backs; I think it was the face covers that actually did it: a hood totally covering the entire face and makeshift crowns made out of assorted leaves and branches that were no doubt inspired by Christ's thorn-version he wore all the way to Golgotha.

Flagellants in the Philippines, uncredited photo

And it was always a big deal. People were actually lining up along the road, waiting for the penitents to pass by, and some of them were actually carrying huge crosses where they'll be crucified, no doubt. God knows what kind of sins these people were so desperate of purging from their system that they believed they needed to resort to extreme acts like this. But who am I to question a Judeo-Christian tradition that existed thousands of years, anyway. To each his own method of appeasing the soul. 


Now that I'm an elderly cranky old man I am highly dubious of these people's motivations in doing what they do. Somehow I suspect it's not too far off from some Christian fundamentalists' suck up stance toward salvation ("Do you love God?! I have accepted Christ! I am saved! I am loved! Hello Julia!"). Yeah, nice try in accepting the savior only to smirk at hell-bound sinners who does not share your sentiments. Nice display of tolerance and compassion.


The brutal penitents, in the meantime, are probably shady characters with too much religious conditioning on the brutal God of the Old Testament that demanded equal suffering to crimes committed against his fellow man. Not that everyone who does that is actually some homicidal maniac or a thieving pederast but one has to wonder about the motivation behind such agonizing self-mutilation. 


One thing about them though, is that they actually put a lot of conviction to the term 'penance'. Not a lot of people with that kind of intense single-minded determination nowadays.