WHEN some of my troubled friends, especially those abroad, tell me their faith is weakening because of problems, I usually tell them to come visit Cebu in January for the feast of the Sto. Niño and participate in the Sinulog.
Through the years, I have formed the conviction that seeing the devotees throw themselves in heart-felt devotion to Señor Sto. Niño would be enough to get a strong stimulant for one’s faith, no matter how sagging that faith may be.
Regardless of the impurities that surround the celebration, it cannot be denied that the germ of faith is active there. It’s faith in the raw, unedited and unexpurgated, that spontaneously expresses itself in mass piety.
Yes, there had been claims that the celebration has been marred with commercialism, superstition, irrationalities, or that it's just staged and all contrived. But to me, these ought to be expected. Even a good seed sown in good ground cannot avoid weeds when it starts to sprout.
Thus, these gatecrashers can only mean the faith celebrated here is real. Nothing is perfect in this life. Good and authentic things attract bad and fake things. This has been the law of our life ever since we fell into sin.
Rather the perfection resides in one’s heart, when it tries to understand and cope with the abject reality of things the way our Lord understood, coped and loved everyone in his earthly life and even up to now.
It’s a matter of discerning and reconciling, forgiving, drowning evil with an abundance of good. Perfection is in charity, expressed and lived in all aspects of our life.
I would say, let these expressions of popular devotion be. We can try to regulate the peripherals of the celebration, making them more theologically sound, socially attuned, respectful of the demands of peace and order, etc. But there’s nothing we can do to regulate the core of such devotion.
The heart of this expression of popular piety, irrespective of its human and natural limitations, is a mysterious and supernatural event. We cannot fully define it. We can only describe it, but that’s going to be an endless process.
It’s a heart that is vitally in contact with God, ever breaking new frontiers, ever emitting fresh insights and experiences. Relevant to this point, Pope Benedict once said:
“The adventure of Christian faith is ever new, and it is when we admit that God is capable of this that its immeasurable openness is unlocked for us.”
This is what happens in the celebration of the feast of the Sto. Niño in Cebu!
How can you explain a massive turnout of people, in the most diverse conditions, sinners all with earnest desires to be holy, all of a sudden turn “religious” and pious in an organic way, drawn in trance-like fashion to an image? It’s as if the great multitude is just one body.
For sure, there are psychological, social, cultural and historical factors involved here. But we would be sorely missing the point if we just stop there, and we make them the primary elements to explain the phenomenon. No, there must be something deeper.
There’s a spirit that moves us together, and thanks to the way we, the Cebuanos, are in general, this spirit thrives because the people are largely a people of faith. We as a people are not stuck in the purely human and natural level.
We believe more than we understand. Our deepest knowledge of things is based on faith more than on our reason. We still are largely an innocent and simple people, because we stick to faith more than to our thinking.
Innocence and simplicity are no mere absence of knowledge, as happens in a little child whom we describe as innocent and simple. They are a matter of having God rather than us as our ultimate guide and source of knowledge.
Thus, innocence and simplicity are compatible with having great knowledge of things, including knowledge of evil. But it’s a knowledge derived from one’s link with God, and not from one’s own idea only.
Let’s thank God that we have this popular piety when we celebrate the feast of the Sto. Niño. It only unravels the kind of people we are.
We can have all sorts of defects and commit the whole gamut of mistakes. But we have faith. And we correspond generously to this gift God is giving us.
No comments:
Post a Comment