Читать книгу The Eye Of The Fish - Luis H. Francia - Страница 11

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IT IS EASY TO STILL BELIEVE IN INNOCENCE and redemption in Kinabuhayan (a Tagalog word meaning “Resurrection”), a barrio on the lower slopes of Mt. Banahaw less than three hours south of Manila by road. With its wooden, gas-lamp lit homes, lush vegetation, and rustic courtliness, Kinabuhayan belongs to another era. Banahaw—the center of millenarian revolts against the Spanish and the Americans—is today the base of many folk-religious sects who, believing the mountain to be a source of mystical powers, view it as sacred, calling it a New Jerusalem. Despite their different beliefs, the sects coexist in remarkable live-and-let-live harmony.

Accompanied by two guides and by Jaime de Guzman, a painter friend who had lived a while up north in the Cordilleran town of Sagada, I visit Banahaw. Despite the difﬁculty, the discomfort, and the rain, the 14-hour trek from Jaime’s farm on the southwestern slopes of Mt. Banahaw is exhilarating, certain views and images indelible: Emerging out of the brush, at the top of a wooded incline, two boys and a girl astride a horse—quiet, polite, full of rural innocence; a farmer and his pregnant wife, pretty and pale, working a small plot of land in a remote corner who provide us with water; the ﬁrst views we have of the village, when garrulous Suelo, one of our guides, remarks as we stand on a high ridge, Naamoy ko na ang Kinabuhayan (I smell Resurrection). To the east loom the upper reaches of Banahaw, clouds rolling across its peak. To the west, the plains of Quezon Province stretch to the South China Sea, smoke billowing from several ﬁeld ﬁres.

Once we arrive in Kinabuhayan, we attend a ritual at the church of one particular sect, Tres Personas, Solo Dios (Three Persons, One God)—built like a traditional Catholic chapel, with cruciform windows. The celebrant wears a bishop’s hat and a white, gold-trimmed chasuble over a light blue vestment, and is attended to by an acolyte who rings a bell often and with relish. Both have beautiful, long raven hair that reaches below their shoulders. Both are women.

Over us drift atonal hymns sung by a choir. The congregation, dressed in white, sits on chairs. After a while, the celebrant turns around to face us. She greets everyone “Good Morning,” enunciates a few principles of right behavior, and declares the mass over. She takes a seat, while prayers are said and a hymn sung before the faithful exit and walk home.

Outside, a slight, middle-aged man starts talking to me. Knowing I’m a visitor, he declares that the sect has essentially the same beliefs as Catholicism but that “Catholics follow the wrong route, going every which way. Our path is more direct. And Christianity came from the Spanish. Our way is truly Filipino.” Intensely nationalistic, the sects regard the country’s revolutionary heroes as ﬁgures akin to saints. The ﬁgure most venerated by Tres Personas, and indeed by all the Banahaw sects, is José Rizal. This thirty-ﬁve-year-old Tagalog, executed at dawn by the Spanish in 1896, was a nineteenth-century renaissance man—doctor/scientist, polyglot, novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, city planner, and fencer—who came to be known as the Great Malay. He also wrote two Spanish-language novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In them, Rizal is a harsh critic of friar abuses; the reforms he envisioned would have kept Spanish rule but with a much reduced role for the church. According to my impromptu informant, Rizal was about to establish his own religion when the Spaniards had him executed by ﬁring squad. The friars had wanted him out of the way to protect the Church’s supremacy, rather than for any role he might have had in fomenting revolution against the civil authorities.

To the residents of Banahaw, Rizal is seen as an avatar of the New Order. However, where the American colonial rulers had exalted the Great Malay as a national hero because of his paciﬁst views—thereby diffusing (so they hoped) violent opposition to their rule—the Banahaw sects have claimed him as a way of reasserting their long-held claims to an indigenous national identity that is inseparable, in their minds, from transcendent spirituality. In this sense they subvert the hold of both the Catholic Church and a government in Manila run by the landed elite and long divorced from any real contact with indigenous sentiment. If in the Cordilleras up north and in Mindanao the strategy had been to resist actively incursions by the Spanish, that of the southern Luzon, in places like Banahaw, was to, seemingly blithely, accept these same intrusions but to recast them in their own image. One could engage in a guerrilla warfare of the spirit without killing any intruder, whether Westerner or fellow Filipino.

I ask the man, why women as priests?

“Women are cleaner. And it shouldn’t make a difference if women become priests.”

Later, we meet the woman who had presided over the mass, Padre Aurelia Ebreo, a serious twenty-one-year-old with a simplicity that is disarming. She explains that she, like other priests in the sect, has a contract for seven years with an option to renew her contract. Or she may opt to marry. It used to be that being a member of the priesthood was forever. No longer.

“Priesthood?”

“Yes, only women can become priests. And the term, why should it mean only men? In our religion men cannot act as priests or acolytes. And an acolyte can’t become a priest.” What Padre Ebreo doesn’t mention but must have known was that much of the Philippines has a venerable pre-Christian tradition of female shamans, babaylans—healers, sources of power, and repositories of tradition.

She guides us upstairs, into the konbento, or rectory, that is adjacent to the chapel, a large, almost bare room. On the far wall hangs the sect’s banner, patterned after the Philippine ﬂag and with three triangularly shaped mountains representing the trinity. At the bottom are portraits of different revolutionary ﬁgures. Not surprisingly, the largest is Rizal’s. Why the emphasis on these men? we ask Padre Aurelia. She replies, “Our faith is in God and Country, that is why we revere our heroes.”

According to Padre Aurelia, the sect has no sacraments except for baptism and marriage. No one prays to the saints, though they are honored. Mass is celebrated three times a month on the 7th, 17th, and 27th, as the number 7 has mystical signiﬁcance for the group (as it had for Ferdinand Marcos). Maintenance costs are apportioned throughout the community, with most labor given freely. Three times a year, believers from other provinces ﬂock to Kinabuhayan: on January 27, August 27, and during Holy Week, the busiest period for the community, when many Catholics come here as well. All are welcome, Padre Aurelia states.

She invites us to breakfast downstairs in the konbento’s large, austere dining room. Grace is said before and after the meal, though no one makes the sign of the cross. The woman on my left, Estebana, ﬁfty-ﬁve years old and unmarried, started serving the sect when she was twelve years old. Like other women at the table, neither priests nor acolytes (except for Padre Aurelia), she lives here. Some are married, others not, but all are nagseserbisyo: pledged to serve the sect, in roles similar to those of brothers in a Catholic priestly community.

In my mind’s eye, I can see my ate, or older sister, Myrna here, possibly as a babaylan, part of a religious community more solidly rooted in folk beliefs than the Catholic Church and more empowering of her as a woman. I remember attending her twenty-ﬁfth anniversary celebration as a nun with the congregation of the Immaculate Coeur du Marie. The occasion was marked by a renewal of her vows, along with those of six other nuns. On that day, the celebrants, calling themselves “Doves,” released seven of the birds during rituals presided over by ﬁfteen priests and headed by a bishop.

Considered a progressive by the more conservative members of her community, Myrna had evolved a decidedly feminist perspective. And yet what struck me about those proceedings was that ﬁfteen Catholic priests, embodying patriarchal traditions, were giving their blessings to seven women. I have no doubt Myrna was aware of this ironic subtext. In her homily, she quoted Rilke, “Inﬁnite dreams but ﬁnite deeds,” and referred to “a Steadfast Compassionate Mother God who knows where we are going, even if we ourselves sometimes don’t.” In that reference to God as female was encapsulated the part of her voyage that most of the congregation’s other members would refuse to undertake, a voyage that harked back to the sacred iconography of pre-Hispanic times when Bathala, the Divine Principle, had no gender and the ﬁrst man, Malakas, and the ﬁrst woman, Maganda, sprang forth from bamboo at the same time and as equals.

I never imagined my fun-loving ate would one day opt for the life of a religious. Before becoming a nun, Myrna—never a santasantita—had already been working, had had a busy social life, had had suitors. One night, coming home from a party, she had an epiphany and knew she wanted to be a nun. As she prepared for bed, Myrna remembers listening to Frank Sinatra singing these lines on the radio, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day/ You’ve burst your pretty balloon, and taken my breath away/ Now you must wake up…” For some reason, the ballad crystallized her feelings. (I think the worldly Hoboken crooner would have enjoyed this tidbit.)

Her decision made my mother unhappy. Just six months before, Joseph, one of my older brothers, had entered the Society of Jesus, convinced of his calling to be a priest. Partly, my mother’s unhappiness stemmed from the fact that she felt my sister didn’t quite know life yet, hadn’t explored its possibilities. Too, she and Joseph, working in the secular world, had considerably lightened the economic burden of caring for the rest of us, for by then my mother had become the main breadwinner; my father, moored in a castle of discontent and bitterness, welcomed these defections to the Divine. In time however my mother accepted my siblings’ decisions.

Myrna’s experiences as a missionary in the Philippines’ remote rural south, then in the Indian state of Kerala, and her studies in Europe, made her see how, in a country as poor and beleaguered as the Philippines, asserting a communal bond with the less privileged was, to her, much more compelling than the traditional route of contemplative isolation. She once told me that living among the ﬁsher-folk of Mati, Davao Oriental in Mindanao, for two years during the Marcos regime “saved me from being a dried-up prune of a nun.”

As an educated urbanite, she initially displayed a smug self-righteousness, thinking she and the American missionaries based in Mindanao had true faith while the peasants only had superstitious beliefs. “My pompousness crumbled upon hearing their genuine faith reﬂections and their from-the-heart prayers. It was a real, liberating experience.” Marcos had declared martial law in 1972, yet the intensity of these peasants’ faith when confronted with an emboldened military opened her eyes “to the deeper realities of my country, those whom I previously never knew nor appreciated as bayani [heroes].”

It wasn’t so much that the ﬁsherfolk performed what would conventionally be thought of as heroic deeds but that in leading ordinary, honest lives, in earning a modest living from the sea, and in trying to make sure that their children’s lives would be better, they had to be brave. And by being part of a Basic Christian Community—where members of a community, especially among the poor, were encouraged to become activist Christians organized around principles of social justice—they often became targets of harassment or worse by the army. In a throwback to a biblical Galilee, the ﬁsherfolk activists Myrna worked with were thought by government agents to be subversive, charged by the army with spreading communist ideology. Myrna remembered the courage of the people she worked with, such as Nang Vecing, a ﬁsherman’s wife. “She was no coward, whether facing priest or police. She said things as she saw them. Jailed by the local military unit, she declared: ‘Maybe the soldiers don’t know the gospel of Jesus and so they confuse Marx with Mark.’”

She remembered too a ﬁsherman by the name of Noy Tonying, who, tagged a radical, was also jailed, his ﬁshing boat conﬁscated. Myrna described him as a tiny “ﬂashlight penetrating the sea of darkness.” This metaphor occurred to her after an unforgettable experience of being with Tonying and some cathecists at sea when their boat began to have engine trouble, putting them at the mercy of the waves. “I had a ﬂashlight which helped to throw light, enough to ﬁx the engine by and get us back to shore.”

I asked her if she felt she had taught the ﬁsherfolk something. “Something for sure. But much, much more have I learned from these mayukmok [ordinary people]. Through their unsung lives and unheralded deaths, they bring in the ani, or harvest, of justice and peace.” The situation there had gotten worse, she pointed out, during the subsequent decade, with even more brutal militarization. “And how is Mindanao today?” she asked rhetorically. “Still bleeding. And its mayukmok are still standing tall, honoring their faith in life even by their dying.”

Would Joseph have ﬁt in, here in Banahaw? Certainly not as the Jesuit priest he once was—not only because that role was reserved for women but also because he had found the urge to start a family more powerful than his vocation. Having been based early on in a remote parish in Zamboanga in western Mindanao—also during the Marcos regime—he would have however liked the tightness of the Kinabuhayan community. He told me that being a parish priest in Mindanao “was a very challenging and fulﬁlling time for me.”

It was a time, he said, when other Jesuits and Maryknoll priests had started a renewal movement to encourage more Christians to be active, so that his work went beyond administering the sacraments to giving seminars in the barrios and laying the foundation for Basic Christian Communities. The military was suspicious of such ideas, but his parishioners were undeterred. Like Myrna, he was surprised by the response from the farmers: “Their simple faith and their activism were very inspiring.” This was part of why he had become a priest, to liberate “the poor from poverty and from the mentality of the oppressed.” There were other reasons too: faith, what he termed “the experience of the transcendent,” and his admiration for the Jesuits, whom he had grown close to in college.

Malangas, the town Joseph had been based in, had a mixed population of Christians and Muslims in an area that historically had largely been Muslim. Still, there wasn’t much tension in town, though ﬁghting would sometimes break out between government soldiers and guerrillas belonging to the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a secessionist group that at the time was advocating independence for Mindanao as a Muslim state. He remembers going through the town’s dark streets at night and running into army patrols on his way to the pier, where machine-gun emplacements faced the sea in expectation of attacks by the Muslim rebels. Of that time, he says, “I felt a great inner peace and didn’t feel afraid at all, even though my konbento was made of wood and could easily have been blown to bits.” The attacks never materialized.

Joseph had his own problems with the military as well. In a weekly parish bulletin, he had criticized the town mayor for corruption. The lieutenant in charge of the military contingent was the mayor’s son-in-law. “They called a conference in the municipal hall, with all the barrio captains and town councilors present, and invited me to explain under what authority I did these things.” He was able to defend himself satisfactorily, for they didn’t bother him after that, but according to him “being a cleric deﬁnitely helped.”

By the beginning of the 1980s, he decided that the priesthood was no longer for him. Today, married and with a growing family and a job that overworks and underpays him, he is no less burdened, but he is happier, willing to do battle with a less-abstract world.

After ﬁnishing our breakfast and thanking our hosts, Jaime and I walk with Padre Aurelia down to the river, where other sect members are at work among the rocks and boulders, sweeping the banks, and picking up leaves and debris, widening the channel into which a hidden spring ﬂows and from which villagers get their drinking water. (We have tasted the waters; what a treat!) The living tableau is wonderful to behold. As the people work, Padre Aurelia, another priest, and an acolyte sing hymns beneath a pomelo tree to which a giant cross has been nailed. On top of an immense boulder, candles have been lit. Against the dark-green lushness of the surrounding forest and a slate-grey sky, the men and women work in harmony, with little talk beyond murmured instructions. Hymns ﬂoat through the glade, butterﬂies of graceful sound.

We stand awhile and watch the sect members at work. Then, following the river downstream, we come to Templo, a cave that the sect considers sacred and that is marked by a statue of the risen Christ. Just inside are a couple and their child camped out on a cot, the man, lying down, obviously ill. Perhaps they hope their faith will heal him. A few pilgrims, their faces bright with hope, pray in the candle-lit chambers. Nearby, a much narrower cave leads precipitously into the bowels of the earth—to, sect members claim, the waters of Eden. As we have no lights, we don’t descend, instead emerging from the caverns. At a bend downstream, amidst giant ferns and red dragonﬂies that skim along the waters, we strip and enjoy a cooling baptism.

In the afternoon, we trek to Santa Lucia, about an hour’s leisurely walk westward, along the foothills. At a crossroads, we drop in on a friend of the guides, a farmer like themselves, who invites us in for merienda (snacks). There is talk of cabbages and coffee, of fertilizer. In the living room, our host’s kids watch a telenovela, following the ﬁctional ups and downs of an urban middle-class couple that invariably plant the seed of desire for the Big City. So there is electricity here, just a mile away from Kinabuhayan, which has none.

Larger than Kinabuhayan, Santa Lucia is the home of various sects, including the largest, Iglesia de Ciudad Mistica de Dios, or the Church of God’s Mystical City. The main temple, an airy ediﬁce in a large compound at the end of a cul-de-sac, has a Dali-esque altar: Wings ﬂank a painted crown of thorns that runs horizontally across the front. In the center is a large triangle, the all-seeing divine eye painted on it. Strewn around are pillows, rather than chairs or pews. Large murals on the whitewashed walls illustrate the sect’s theology, with some, again, featuring portraits of José Rizal. The murals tend toward the apocalyptic and the feminist, emphasizing the role of women in saving the world. A central ﬁgure is the Babae-Lalaki (Woman-Man), a Joan-of-Arc-like ﬁgure that combines yin and yang and symbolizes transcendence over earthly form. This nonsexist notion of the Divine Principle—akin to the idea of the Divine contained in Gnostic texts viewed as heretical by Rome—is one that the Spanish friars and American Protestant missionaries would have found disturbing.

In the courtyard, some women are working near a huge wooden cross. Responding to our query, one of them directs us to the residence of the Suprema, not far from here. Walking through Santa Lucia’s narrow streets and then up an earthen alley, we come to the Suprema’s residence, the ﬁrst house in a huge compound that, we are told, has about a hundred families. The matriarch’s comfortable home faces a courtyard and garden. Tied to a post in a garage with three Jeep-type vehicles, a massive rottweiller glares at us. An assistant invites us in, where we sit on a ﬁnely cut bamboo settee. Several mongrels come in and out, barking perfunctorily at us. From a room at the far end, the Suprema emerges. She asks one of the helpers to shoo the dogs outside. How many? is my ﬁrst question. Twelve, she replies, I love dogs.

Olive-skinned, serene, and regal (“She looks like a Mayan princess,” Jaime remarks later on), ﬁfty-three-year-old Isabel Suarez has been Suprema of the Ciudad Mistica since 1963, eleven years after its founding in the nearby province of Batangas by Maria Bernarda Balitaan. Wanting the sect to be in a sacred place, Balitaan and her followers had moved here. Once Balitaan passed away, Suarez, whose father had been an adviser to Balitaan, was chosen by the church elders to succeed her. Only twenty years old at the time, she hadn’t wanted the post. Initially she had wanted to become a doctor, but because she was sickly as a young girl, her father forbade her to go on to college, instead making her work with him and the sect. The elders insisted it was God’s will.

Speaking in beautiful and courtly Tagalog, she tells us about the Ciudad’s beliefs. They believe in God the Father, God the Mother, God the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ. They celebrate mass, and have ministers, both male and female, who help out. They don’t believe in communion, and confess directly to God. In their divine cosmology, they have no saints; heaven and hell exist, but purgatory does not. I ask her about Rizal. She replies, “We respect Rizal as a sublime hero, one embraced by God. Rizal may be the Christ of the Tagalogs,” echoing what the Spanish philosopher Unamuno had said about the martyr.

I ask her why there are no cruciﬁxes, only crosses. The reason she gives resembles Islam’s interdiction: “We do not use portraits for God forbids it. No one knows God’s true visage.” Like the other Banahaw sects, Ciudad is a cooperative endeavor where members help one another, especially the less fortunate. Most of them live by farming rice and vegetables, and by raising pigs. As we sit there in the living room, we hear singing. A small procession is winding its way through the compound. The believers—a motley crowd of women, men, and children—enter the Suprema’s home, bearing a cross and singing Tagalog hymns. They proceed to the other rooms, then exit, still singing. After we enjoy a simple but hearty supper with the Suprema, Jaime remarks on the presence of other sects in town. She emphasizes her group’s ecumenism: “We don’t think ill of any group. We do not interfere with any other faith, and we respect the rights of others. There is only one God, and all people were created by God.”

Accompanied by two guides and by Jaime de Guzman, a painter friend who had lived a while up north in the Cordilleran town of Sagada, I visit Banahaw. Despite the difﬁculty, the discomfort, and the rain, the 14-hour trek from Jaime’s farm on the southwestern slopes of Mt. Banahaw is exhilarating, certain views and images indelible: Emerging out of the brush, at the top of a wooded incline, two boys and a girl astride a horse—quiet, polite, full of rural innocence; a farmer and his pregnant wife, pretty and pale, working a small plot of land in a remote corner who provide us with water; the ﬁrst views we have of the village, when garrulous Suelo, one of our guides, remarks as we stand on a high ridge, Naamoy ko na ang Kinabuhayan (I smell Resurrection). To the east loom the upper reaches of Banahaw, clouds rolling across its peak. To the west, the plains of Quezon Province stretch to the South China Sea, smoke billowing from several ﬁeld ﬁres.

Once we arrive in Kinabuhayan, we attend a ritual at the church of one particular sect, Tres Personas, Solo Dios (Three Persons, One God)—built like a traditional Catholic chapel, with cruciform windows. The celebrant wears a bishop’s hat and a white, gold-trimmed chasuble over a light blue vestment, and is attended to by an acolyte who rings a bell often and with relish. Both have beautiful, long raven hair that reaches below their shoulders. Both are women.

Outside, a slight, middle-aged man starts talking to me. Knowing I’m a visitor, he declares that the sect has essentially the same beliefs as Catholicism but that “Catholics follow the wrong route, going every which way. Our path is more direct. And Christianity came from the Spanish. Our way is truly Filipino.” Intensely nationalistic, the sects regard the country’s revolutionary heroes as ﬁgures akin to saints. The ﬁgure most venerated by Tres Personas, and indeed by all the Banahaw sects, is José Rizal. This thirty-ﬁve-year-old Tagalog, executed at dawn by the Spanish in 1896, was a nineteenth-century renaissance man—doctor/scientist, polyglot, novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, city planner, and fencer—who came to be known as the Great Malay. He also wrote two Spanish-language novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In them, Rizal is a harsh critic of friar abuses; the reforms he envisioned would have kept Spanish rule but with a much reduced role for the church. According to my impromptu informant, Rizal was about to establish his own religion when the Spaniards had him executed by ﬁring squad. The friars had wanted him out of the way to protect the Church’s supremacy, rather than for any role he might have had in fomenting revolution against the civil authorities.

I ask the man, why women as priests?

“Women are cleaner. And it shouldn’t make a difference if women become priests.”

“Priesthood?”

“Yes, only women can become priests. And the term, why should it mean only men? In our religion men cannot act as priests or acolytes. And an acolyte can’t become a priest.” What Padre Ebreo doesn’t mention but must have known was that much of the Philippines has a venerable pre-Christian tradition of female shamans, babaylans—healers, sources of power, and repositories of tradition.

She guides us upstairs, into the konbento, or rectory, that is adjacent to the chapel, a large, almost bare room. On the far wall hangs the sect’s banner, patterned after the Philippine ﬂag and with three triangularly shaped mountains representing the trinity. At the bottom are portraits of different revolutionary ﬁgures. Not surprisingly, the largest is Rizal’s. Why the emphasis on these men? we ask Padre Aurelia. She replies, “Our faith is in God and Country, that is why we revere our heroes.”

She invites us to breakfast downstairs in the konbento’s large, austere dining room. Grace is said before and after the meal, though no one makes the sign of the cross. The woman on my left, Estebana, ﬁfty-ﬁve years old and unmarried, started serving the sect when she was twelve years old. Like other women at the table, neither priests nor acolytes (except for Padre Aurelia), she lives here. Some are married, others not, but all are nagseserbisyo: pledged to serve the sect, in roles similar to those of brothers in a Catholic priestly community.

In my mind’s eye, I can see my ate, or older sister, Myrna here, possibly as a babaylan, part of a religious community more solidly rooted in folk beliefs than the Catholic Church and more empowering of her as a woman. I remember attending her twenty-ﬁfth anniversary celebration as a nun with the congregation of the Immaculate Coeur du Marie. The occasion was marked by a renewal of her vows, along with those of six other nuns. On that day, the celebrants, calling themselves “Doves,” released seven of the birds during rituals presided over by ﬁfteen priests and headed by a bishop.

I never imagined my fun-loving ate would one day opt for the life of a religious. Before becoming a nun, Myrna—never a santasantita—had already been working, had had a busy social life, had had suitors. One night, coming home from a party, she had an epiphany and knew she wanted to be a nun. As she prepared for bed, Myrna remembers listening to Frank Sinatra singing these lines on the radio, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day/ You’ve burst your pretty balloon, and taken my breath away/ Now you must wake up…” For some reason, the ballad crystallized her feelings. (I think the worldly Hoboken crooner would have enjoyed this tidbit.)

I asked her if she felt she had taught the ﬁsherfolk something. “Something for sure. But much, much more have I learned from these mayukmok [ordinary people]. Through their unsung lives and unheralded deaths, they bring in the ani, or harvest, of justice and peace.” The situation there had gotten worse, she pointed out, during the subsequent decade, with even more brutal militarization. “And how is Mindanao today?” she asked rhetorically. “Still bleeding. And its mayukmok are still standing tall, honoring their faith in life even by their dying.”

In the afternoon, we trek to Santa Lucia, about an hour’s leisurely walk westward, along the foothills. At a crossroads, we drop in on a friend of the guides, a farmer like themselves, who invites us in for merienda (snacks). There is talk of cabbages and coffee, of fertilizer. In the living room, our host’s kids watch a telenovela, following the ﬁctional ups and downs of an urban middle-class couple that invariably plant the seed of desire for the Big City. So there is electricity here, just a mile away from Kinabuhayan, which has none.

Larger than Kinabuhayan, Santa Lucia is the home of various sects, including the largest, Iglesia de Ciudad Mistica de Dios, or the Church of God’s Mystical City. The main temple, an airy ediﬁce in a large compound at the end of a cul-de-sac, has a Dali-esque altar: Wings ﬂank a painted crown of thorns that runs horizontally across the front. In the center is a large triangle, the all-seeing divine eye painted on it. Strewn around are pillows, rather than chairs or pews. Large murals on the whitewashed walls illustrate the sect’s theology, with some, again, featuring portraits of José Rizal. The murals tend toward the apocalyptic and the feminist, emphasizing the role of women in saving the world. A central ﬁgure is the Babae-Lalaki (Woman-Man), a Joan-of-Arc-like ﬁgure that combines yin and yang and symbolizes transcendence over earthly form. This nonsexist notion of the Divine Principle—akin to the idea of the Divine contained in Gnostic texts viewed as heretical by Rome—is one that the Spanish friars and American Protestant missionaries would have found disturbing.

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