“May mga penitensya pa ba sa Pilipinas?” emailed a friend, an Ateneo graduate, living abroad for many years now. As a child she used to gawk at them in her hometown in Pampanga. She commented that these
“masochistic flagellants” reflect a pervasive sense of worthlessness that infects the national consciousness which in turn keeps the country in stagnation. This friend (who has a yen for psychoanalysis) thinks Filipinos are “used to suffering” and enjoy being victims, thus they have endured centuries of injustice to their own detriment. She sees poverty and ignorance as the main culprits in the country’s state of affairs and thinks the solution lies in educating the people and eradicating graft and corruption. Of course, I emailed her a piece of my mind as well. It follows:
I observe that the flagellants come from the lower socio-economic echelons and would not be in a position to analyze their penchant for blood-letting in the same way an Atenean probably would. Yes, they looked at the forsaken Jesus and probably identified with the man on the cross but—I would venture a guess—not out of a deep sense of victimhood as a people. Their horizon is within arm’s reach, or baranggay-wide in some cases, and they wouldn’t be bothered by history, let alone link their present condition to a past of indignities the colonizers subjected their great great great grandparents to.
As a growing girl and later on as mainstream media person I myself had been privileged to get acquainted with a handful of them. That’s practically all I’m basing my observations on—person to person contact. Most, if not all of them, live a notch above or below poverty line. They can barely make both ends meet but they can always persuade Aling Belay at the corner sari-sari store to spare them a bottle of “lapad” or “quatro cantos” (read “ Marka Dimonyo ”) at the end of each harrowing day. And for them every godforsaken day is harrowing. When you are poor and ignorant, it is hard to believe you have any choice.
But their self-immolation is a choice, their choice— Vatican pronouncements notwithstanding. They flagellate themselves because it’s a panata, a vow to be honored year after year as their way of expressing remorse for their sins. They are happy that way. They may feel worthless in their sinfulness but not hopeless in their blood-letting. Being whipped and nailed on the cross is for them reliving the pasyon ni Hesus— peculiar, perhaps, but it is their imitation of Christ .
These Holy Week “masochists” are by no means the sole barometer of our national spiritual climate. It would be myopic—not to mention unjust—to say that Filipinos bear in their collective psyche the “sense of worthlessness that has made them endure centuries of injust
ice … and that keeps the country in a perpetual state of stagnation.”
Let me ask you: How many flagellants do we have every year? Hundreds? How many get “crucified”? Two? Three? For every penitent bleeding himself clean during semana santa, how many pleasure-seekers troop to the beaches oblivious of the pasyon? If we have “masochists”, we also have “hedonists” by the thousands; is it a feeling of worthlessness that drives them to escape the dour Holy Week spirit? For every dozen who choose holiday over holy week, how many hundreds of thousands of Filipinos stay put in the city—flocking to the churches for the Seven Last Words, going on a visita iglesia with families and friends, attending the Easter vigil vibrating with anticipation, as though awaiting the very birth of Christ itself? Can you honestly say that we as a people have in our core this “sense of worthlessness”? Is progress elusive because we are “used to suffering”? Gotcha!
As a people, we are where we are—and no president or Poncio Pilato can save us—not because we are used to suffering but because we are afraid to suffer for Christ ’s sake! Sa totoo lang, tita, we run away from the Cross! Those who are already suffering from poverty and ignorance are caught in a rut because those who are in a position to help them out are unwilling to suffer with them. Our concept and practice of charity even tends to perpetuate the status quo when do-gooders help the poor to placate their conscience while the poor use their poverty as an excuse for their slothfulness. That’s the real picture: rich and poor alike, educated or not, refuse to walk the extra mile to unite and improve things for the country! People are too comfortable in their own little worlds to bother looking at the big picture, much as less to work towards building the Kingdom of God !
So you see, even though poverty and ignorance is our problem, it is a mistake to think that money and education alone can liberate us from these twin evils. We still find in all economic levels people who are never satisfied with the money they are making—they feel impoverished if they cannot have more, more, more. We have more and supposedly better schools now than our grandfathers who were raised on caton ever did, and yet we still encounter soul-searing ignorance even among our Ph Ds.
Thanks to Lea Salonga and Manny Pacquiao, our masses can now proclaim they are “proud to be Pinoy”—we’ve come a long way from “feeling worthless,” haven’t we?—and yet our flagellants have remained with us for centuries now, like indelible footprints of a bygone era. And in our collective ignorance we blame anything but ourselves for the moribund state our country is in.
We are in the dark and we do not know it. The solution to the problem of poverty and ignorance is not a flawless political system, a better economy or even more education. What we need is: illumination. Illumination to dispel the darkness of ignorance and to enable us to see the divine behind our material poverty. We need illumination from the empty tomb to see our own sins before those of others.
“masochistic flagellants” reflect a pervasive sense of worthlessness that infects the national consciousness which in turn keeps the country in stagnation. This friend (who has a yen for psychoanalysis) thinks Filipinos are “used to suffering” and enjoy being victims, thus they have endured centuries of injustice to their own detriment. She sees poverty and ignorance as the main culprits in the country’s state of affairs and thinks the solution lies in educating the people and eradicating graft and corruption. Of course, I emailed her a piece of my mind as well. It follows:I observe that the flagellants come from the lower socio-economic echelons and would not be in a position to analyze their penchant for blood-letting in the same way an Atenean probably would. Yes, they looked at the forsaken Jesus and probably identified with the man on the cross but—I would venture a guess—not out of a deep sense of victimhood as a people. Their horizon is within arm’s reach, or baranggay-wide in some cases, and they wouldn’t be bothered by history, let alone link their present condition to a past of indignities the colonizers subjected their great great great grandparents to.
As a growing girl and later on as mainstream media person I myself had been privileged to get acquainted with a handful of them. That’s practically all I’m basing my observations on—person to person contact. Most, if not all of them, live a notch above or below poverty line. They can barely make both ends meet but they can always persuade Aling Belay at the corner sari-sari store to spare them a bottle of “lapad” or “quatro cantos” (read “ Marka Dimonyo ”) at the end of each harrowing day. And for them every godforsaken day is harrowing. When you are poor and ignorant, it is hard to believe you have any choice.
But their self-immolation is a choice, their choice— Vatican pronouncements notwithstanding. They flagellate themselves because it’s a panata, a vow to be honored year after year as their way of expressing remorse for their sins. They are happy that way. They may feel worthless in their sinfulness but not hopeless in their blood-letting. Being whipped and nailed on the cross is for them reliving the pasyon ni Hesus— peculiar, perhaps, but it is their imitation of Christ .
These Holy Week “masochists” are by no means the sole barometer of our national spiritual climate. It would be myopic—not to mention unjust—to say that Filipinos bear in their collective psyche the “sense of worthlessness that has made them endure centuries of injust
ice … and that keeps the country in a perpetual state of stagnation.”Let me ask you: How many flagellants do we have every year? Hundreds? How many get “crucified”? Two? Three? For every penitent bleeding himself clean during semana santa, how many pleasure-seekers troop to the beaches oblivious of the pasyon? If we have “masochists”, we also have “hedonists” by the thousands; is it a feeling of worthlessness that drives them to escape the dour Holy Week spirit? For every dozen who choose holiday over holy week, how many hundreds of thousands of Filipinos stay put in the city—flocking to the churches for the Seven Last Words, going on a visita iglesia with families and friends, attending the Easter vigil vibrating with anticipation, as though awaiting the very birth of Christ itself? Can you honestly say that we as a people have in our core this “sense of worthlessness”? Is progress elusive because we are “used to suffering”? Gotcha!
As a people, we are where we are—and no president or Poncio Pilato can save us—not because we are used to suffering but because we are afraid to suffer for Christ ’s sake! Sa totoo lang, tita, we run away from the Cross! Those who are already suffering from poverty and ignorance are caught in a rut because those who are in a position to help them out are unwilling to suffer with them. Our concept and practice of charity even tends to perpetuate the status quo when do-gooders help the poor to placate their conscience while the poor use their poverty as an excuse for their slothfulness. That’s the real picture: rich and poor alike, educated or not, refuse to walk the extra mile to unite and improve things for the country! People are too comfortable in their own little worlds to bother looking at the big picture, much as less to work towards building the Kingdom of God !
So you see, even though poverty and ignorance is our problem, it is a mistake to think that money and education alone can liberate us from these twin evils. We still find in all economic levels people who are never satisfied with the money they are making—they feel impoverished if they cannot have more, more, more. We have more and supposedly better schools now than our grandfathers who were raised on caton ever did, and yet we still encounter soul-searing ignorance even among our Ph Ds.
Thanks to Lea Salonga and Manny Pacquiao, our masses can now proclaim they are “proud to be Pinoy”—we’ve come a long way from “feeling worthless,” haven’t we?—and yet our flagellants have remained with us for centuries now, like indelible footprints of a bygone era. And in our collective ignorance we blame anything but ourselves for the moribund state our country is in.
We are in the dark and we do not know it. The solution to the problem of poverty and ignorance is not a flawless political system, a better economy or even more education. What we need is: illumination. Illumination to dispel the darkness of ignorance and to enable us to see the divine behind our material poverty. We need illumination from the empty tomb to see our own sins before those of others.
Easter is upon us. We say Allelujah! to the Risen Christ but do we really believe in Him? Believe in Him enough to want to make ourselves channels of His light and love? We say “Peace be with you!” but are we willing to wage war on our inner demons, to mean what we mouth in order to spread the peace of Christ all over our land?
In this “only Christian nation in Asia ,” there are poor people among the moneyed, ignorant ones among the schooled, and greedy ones from rich and poor alike. Which reminds me of Jeremiah 6:13-14, For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain, and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace.
Peace will come upon our land when the illuminati—those to whom more is given—take up their Cross, follow their Master, and bring the light of the Risen Christ to the people not by the words they are saying but by the life they are living. It may appear that hoi polloi are still in flagellation mode, stuck on the level of the pasyon, but the true illuminati know in their hearts that whatever is happening is the best that can happen at the moment, for nothing escapes the compassionate eye of God. And that’s the truth. END
(NOTE: The above article first came out in the author's column, "And that's the truth", which comes out regularly in The CBCP Monitor, the official publication of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. It is written by a Filipino for a Filipino audience)
