Between faith and pleasure

Where are you spending Holy Week? More likely than not, that familiar question may no longer have anything to do with faith or religious duty but with nothing more complicated than vacation plans at the start of the long and hot summer.

It used to be that most people thought of Holy Week in terms of penance for sins committed and of somber reflection on the purpose of life under God’s mercy and keeping. No doubt there’s still a lot of truly pious folks around, some of them my close friends, but I dare say they constitute a small and shrinking minority.

The majority of those who cross my path equate the most solemn week of the Christian calendar with the unalloyed pursuit of fun and pleasure. They, of course, mean no disrespect or defiance of the faith of their childhood. It’s just that that faith has long become secularized and, I must add, largely taken for granted. Sticking to old practices and rituals would only seem amusing, if not banal.

Another view is that Holy Week had been cast for so long in the darkest and most morbid tones; it was something you dreaded instead of looked forward to in joyous anticipation. It was the exact opposite of Christmas, which, not incidentally, always provoked an overdose of celebration that, in this country, stretches like a four-month marathon from as early as September to January or into the next year. The Philippines is not known as the world’s fiesta and siesta islands for nothing.

For our forebears, to take such unbridled joy in Christ’s birth seemed to dictate no less than an avalanche of grief in His crucifixion and death.

We can’t exactly blame the Spanish friars of the medieval ages who dictated the harsh outlines of what became the Filipino brand of Christianity. Perhaps the lush tropical anarchy of the new colony in the farthest reaches of the world posed such a deep contrast to the arid severity of the Spanish meseta that they had to over-compensate with massive doses of liturgy and pious nonsense.

Like the Polynesians and other island races, pre-Spanish Filipinos were free spirits and notably polygamous. Sex or pleasure they did not associate with sin. Guess who gave them the idea of being nailed to the cross as a test of faith? Guess who imposed monogamy and turned marriage into a prison of repressed desires? Guess who turned concubinage and prostitution into the reviled but unavoidable exhaust valves of a hypocritically upright society? 

It is a tribute to friar persistence that the early Filipinos accepted Lent’s bizarre practices and these endured long after the colonial regime ended. Perhaps the stern habits of 300 years of Spanish rule could not be easily cast off, but hindsight shows that these have been substantially eroded or reshaped over time. What had been cast in cement simply could not endure forever.

The ecclesiastical reforms of Vatican II may have been the precursor of now-irreversible changes. I remember the day in the ‘60s when Mom and all the women stopped wearing veils to church. My favorite aunt, bless her soul, passed from this earth before her lifelong practice of walking on bended knees from the door to the altar of Quiapo Church was finally deemed pagan and passé.       

Flagellation and fasting we are now likely to regard as pertaining to Taliban Christianity. But Filipino fundamentalism appears far from intolerant or murderous. Some zealots appear from time to time, but they’re hardly the kind who would stone non-believers or proselytize beyond provincial comfort zones.

Growing up in the 1950s, I took it for granted that Holy Week would find my paternal grandmother spending hours in the village church chanting the Passion of Christ in blood-curdling Tagalog. The guttural sounds she and her group generated all night and all day drove you nuts until you learned to take it as harmless noise that your youthful willpower could tune out anytime. I accepted that there was nothing utterly wrong about grandma having her kicks while the menfolk and everybody else kept a respectful distance beyond hearing range.

After those prayerful little old ladies passed on to a stereophonic heaven of eternal chanting, nobody but nobody took their places back here on earth. The Wailing Wall of Dad’s Batangas barrio faded into history, only remembered these days with a mixture of horror and fondness we associate with a vanished age.

I know it sounds mean to say this of some people’s faith. But they had it coming because they had unthinkingly dragooned everybody to submit to their fanatical and unbending ways. Tradition can be tyranny and it can provoke a backlash just as harsh and pitiless, although, I must add, we do have the choice of reacting and later looking back with a forgiving light.

My own surmise is that the American establishment of Baguio in the early 1900s was an important step in diminishing the rigid hold of Lent at the height of summer on the Filipino imagination. The gringos simply wanted surcease from the summer heat; the Filipinos saw it as a big leap away from rigid Catholic tradition.

Why stick around in the steamy lowlands when you can cool off up in the pine-scented mountains? Of course, this was an upper-class option that did not become truly democratized until independence and the rise of the freewheeling Philippine Republic.

Take note that beginning in the conservative ‘50s, air travel to Hong Kong presented yet another desirable option for those escaping the inherent harshness of Lent. Throw in the irresistible lure of shopping in a duty-free zone and you can imagine why the then-British crown colony became the favorite honeymoon, Holy Week and Christmas destination of the Filipino elite.

In Baguio, there were conspicuous paeans to tradition. A pseudo-gothic cathedral and such concessions to piety as the Lourdes Grotto were built. Theoretically, up there you could observe the time-honored rituals but you need not wear dolorous faces or pretend you’re atoning for your sins. You dined at Pines Hotel, munched foot-long hotdogs at John Hay, strolled in Burnham Park and basically spent a grand vacation in between pro-forma prayers and novenas.

A decade later in the 1960s, some enterprising types opened the glorious beaches of La Union. You could drive down in the morning for a swim and be back for late afternoon Mass. Eventually, the lure of the Ilocos region farther up north would be impossible to resist. This could be justified as a pilgrimage route of all those old stone churches, but the secret of this appeal was soon out: the white beaches of Pagudpud. The Marcoses showed the way by spending the entire week at Mansion House, supposedly in spiritual retreat with cabinet members, before dashing off to waterski in Paoay Lake.

But Baguio and the Ilocos, not to mention Hong Kong, were not the only escape hatches for the rich, powerful and upwardly mobile crowd. Let us make a quick count of their playgrounds beginning in the 1970s when the quest for fun turned Holy Week into ill-disguised farce: Tagaytay, Nasugbu, Puerto Galera, Boracay, Mactan, Palawan, Bohol, El Nido, Amanpulo, Calatagan, Punta Fuego, etc.

At first, only the elite of elites could run away. The poor masses were stuck in steamy Metro Manila twiddling their thumbs in the face of forced solemnity. The middle classes trooped to their provinces to engage in non-stop eating and excursions to the nearest body of water.

Mass tourism, of course, has come of age over the last 10 years, thanks to Cebu Pacific, Zest Air and Airphil Express. The tourist moguls came up with unabashed promotions like “Wow Philippines!” and “It’s More Fun in the Philippines.”

In short, the government has conspired with the bullish travel industry to turn Holy Week into a most unholy and unapologetic pursuit of fun and relaxation.

And why not? Lent’s concluding week actually counts as the first salvo of the annual vacation season that, until recent years, was masked as a mandatory interlude of piety. Today, there’s no more need to be so coy or hypocritical. More and more people no longer feel they have to make a big deal of their faith. They can well observe the necessary rituals and take a break from the daily grind at the same time.

Still, some efforts to appease the conservatives cannot fail to amuse even jaded souls like me. A few years ago, I ventured out to Tagaytay in the company of some friends who were bent on marking the week within the confines of proper worship. We went on a dutiful seven-church “Visita Iglesia” round on Good Friday, only to be caught up in a humongous traffic jam.

Everybody was on that two-lane highway between the Tagaytay Rotunda and the Vista Lodge. The place had turned into the country’s biggest parking lot. You can imagine a hundred thousand nerves fraying and tempers rising as those of us trapped in Pajeros and SUVs resorted to novenas and rosaries to turn pagan rage into instant exercises of grace under pressure.

“If we just stayed home,” one friend mused, “we would have all of Metro Manila to ourselves. We could pray in Intramuros and Forbes Park, drive anywhere with ease and dine in the five-star hotels that are never closed. We could watch the DVDs we’ve hoarded for months but have had no time for.”

I could not help but point out that Holy Week has long been blissfully truncated to less than two days and falling — from noon of Thursday when the malls close to Saturday morning when everything goes back to normal. You only need to suffer Friday, but there’s cable TV to keep you engaged or somebody’s pool to pass the time away.

You can almost hear the inevitable post-Holy Week regrets: Boracay was crawling with wall-to-wall people. NAIA was a sordid mess as usual. Prices have soared to the stratosphere.

But what can I say? Neither today’s schizophrenic mass pursuit of fun nor yesterday’s wave of religious conformity may be good for the body and soul of Christians who just want to be left alone and do not wish ill of others. A little moderation, common sense plus a dash of luck could do wonders this Easter as we navigate the tricky shoals of a most demanding faith and the earthly pleasures we cannot resist.