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The Sunday Filipino
INCLUDING A SUNDAY in my recent travel schedule
to Manila gave me a fresh glimpse of the Filipino—nay—my
own spirituality.
Eighty-three percent Catholic, nine percent
Protestant and five percent Muslim, Filipinos cling to religion
as the essence of their being. (Notice that our standard public
forms always include the item Religion, which baffles secular
minds like the Japanese.) On Sundays, Filipinos flock to churches,
shopping malls, gymnasiums, stadiums, movie theaters and makeshift
or open-air venues to hear the Word. The number and diversity
of religious services or evangelistic TV and radio programs
are bewildering.
In a country where Church and State are constitutionally
demarcated, political pundits and politicians quote liberally
from the Bible (not surprisingly, oftentimes out of context)
while preachers unabashedly foray into the political issues
of the day using the pulpit’s moral high ground.
In Japan, a prime minister’s attendance
at the Yasukuni shrine ceremonies invariably brings howls
of protest for violating the separation between Church and
State. But in the Philippines, after being photographed genuflecting
inside a church in war-torn Mindanao, Gloria Arroyo gained
enough public opinion ratings to launch her 2004 choir into
an alto.
During my Sunday morning breakfast with business
executives at the hotel, I was asked, by way of an ice-breaker,
what I thought about the Bacani sex scandal.
I obliged to put in my two cents worth by
saying that my understanding of Biblical teaching indicates
that neither holy robe nor hallowed office sanctifies. Because
we are sanctified only through grace in Jesus Christ, which
is unmerited, we should be harsh on our shortcomings but charitable
towards others’. When spiritual leaders stumble, I don’t
allow my world to cave in. Like me, they’re also in need
of salvation from human depravity, and perhaps more urgently
from public verbal lynching. The sin of the flesh is as reprehensible
as that of pride—characteristic of the self-righteous—which
ranks first in the “seven that are detestable” to
God (Proverbs 6:16).
Apparently, it is only in this country that
a person is casually asked an opinion on a “spiritual”
issue as a prelude to a business discussion.
Later in the day, I attended Ed Lapiz’s
SRO service in Makati and was treataed to an ethnic cultural
extravaganza, including Ifugao and Muslim dances, in the Christian
worship service. About 5,000 people enthusiastically queued
two floors to get to the Day-by-Day’s Worship City, which
are two refurbished movie theaters.
“Why”, I queried the maverick preacher
through his representative, “use ‘pagan’ art
forms performed to propitiate deities in a Christian worship?”
In a taped message, he briefly explained that
all creation, including artistic ones like dances and songs
are of and by God. Only God is the Creator. The Devil is a
thief who “cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill,
and to destroy.” (John 10:10)
Like the natural creation including human
beings, artistic creations have fallen into the devil’s
hand only because of the manner and object of use. Culture,
like all other inanimate things, is neutral, incapable of
good or bad. According to the good pastor, this is what the
Bible means when it says that “the whole creation has
been groaning as in the pains of childbirth” to be “liberated
from its bondage to decay,” to be “redeemed”
(Romans 8:22, 21). Man and his culture needs to be redeemed
and used to worship the one Creator.
The Filipino Christian remains detached from
the core of his faith and thus becomes a Christian only in
name, according to the pastor, because in the process of his
conversion, he was forcibly wrenched from his cultural identity,
his personhood.
Unless the Gospel is proclaimed through indigenous
forms—in a way that affirms and not denies the Filipino’s
cultural and ethnic identity—then it will always remain
a surface belief, an enforced replacement of the worship of
trees and mountains, a convenient renaming of Bathala.
This still leaves me the question of how this
Sunday spiritual explosion translates in terms of the Filipino’s
day-to-day life during the rest of the week. What one sees
is anything but glorious. Headlines still scream heinous crimes,
spiritual leaders literally grope in the dark, child beggars
ply busy streets, corruption still stinks in high office.
The Japanese, who do not make much ballyhoo
about their harmonization with the Shinto spirits, maintain
generally peaceful civil and social relations.
The Word has been tirelessly brought to every
conceivable nook in the country, proclaimed in local tongues
and illustrated in ethnic colors. But the challenge still
remains for the Good News to reach the Filipino, nay, me,
where it badly needs to be—the heart.*
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