Obenieta: Small world, tall wonder

Friday, January 6, 2012

A POET, in praise of his beloved’s touch, may as well be wet with rapture as he testifies how tenderness packs a force of nature: “Not even the rain has such small hands.”

Claps of thunder, however, can easily drown out a lyrical voice where the weather usually turns wild with its cats-and-dogs cliché, unleashing landslides and floods.

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True, the downpour can move mountains no less forcefully than faith.

Belief may be metaphorically configured best as a boulder, solid and steady even if the river goes berserk. Paradoxically, fluidity is also its characteristic. Even the devotee’s Sinulog dance, for instance, is open to free interpretation. Anything goes.

Nothing’s fixed, not even distance or the borders of doubt.

Faith is a moveable feast, after all. Go ask one of the organizers of the festivity in honor of Cebu’s Holy Child. Why the procession is up for route changes out of the usual way, he reasoned to a reporter: “There are many people who want to experience what it is like if the Sto. Niño passes by their place.”

Lost far away is not anyone’s fate where grace moves with an omnipresent mystery. See how it takes a newspaper from Los Angeles for someone in the Kansan heartland of America to read about an event called “Duaw sa Señor Sto. Niño sa mga Preso sa Sugbo” (Visit of the Senor Sto. Nino to the Cebu inmates) so that prisoners will have the “opportunity to venerate the image.” Out loud with a dance offering, the jailbirds may sing they are just as free as any wind-towed rain cloud.

The same sky, nothing else is common to you and me and even everyone we don’t care to know elsewhere. Home is where hope is, this hardy stuff that finds a harbor to anchor even something as weightless as a prayer, this vessel that defies both gravity and geography. How far does faith go?

Such question could not be a stretch for Tito Alquizola to answer. With his work in psychiatry that found him roosting in Florida for several years even as his writer’s heart remains rooted in his Barili hometown, Alquizola has offered his advice through Facebook to his dislocated friend who’s helping to keep the “Pit Senyor” devotion alive among Pinoy immigrants in Topeka, Kansas. Thus his words wax stubborn and comforting against the painstaking odds of organizing the “Sinulog sa Topeka.”

From his base in Tampa, Alquizola shares how “the organization here also went through serious upheavals” when it started 24 years ago. “Don't worry about birth pangs,” he assures. Carrying the torch for Cebu’s miraculous icon in America, the Pinoy community in Tampa has something to celebrate with Alquizola’s recently published book “Journeys: The Santo Niño Devotion Comes to Tampa Bay.”

In the shore of possibilities, it is always a full tide for sailing onward as Alquizola’s book proves. Starting in 1989 with a “a desire to pray with each other,” Alquizola and his friends have gone a long way from a gathering of Pinoy emigrants in a humble home to a Catholic organization large enough to build the Santo Niño Shrine at St. Paul Church in Tampa. In his book, Alquizola relates “the personal stories of emigrants who, in their search for home, not only founded an organization, but also created a devotional family.”

Unity as an idea may be no more than a childish wish for a miracle. It may be a rain-dampened parade of dreamers. Then again, the poetry of faith continues its outpour of odd-beating merry-makers.

(geemyko@gmail.com)