Obenieta: Jamming along the journey

Saturday, January 14, 2012

WRAP it along with a wish to keep it fresh. Staleness and the smell of rot—-such fate is not only for the fish out of water but also for faith.

Doubtless, a religious zeal also imbues the tourism industry’s marketing strategy in hooking the wanderer’s heart back. As far as publicity package goes, this pitch may as well make waves: Blessed are they who are back home.

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Coming in to join the Sinulog festivity, the full tide of “balikbayans” could leave their guardian angels off-duty as long as they are under the wings of the Pinoy Homecoming Hospitality Center in the Mactan-Cebu International Airport.

As the center keeps its “continuing efforts to boost visitor arrivals from the balikbayan market,” the selling point trails off toward “the bigger challenge…to persuade the second and third generation Filipinos abroad to visit their ancestral home and rediscover their Filipino roots.”

Greener may the pastures in other distant shores, but the color of the soil and the sea of one’s origin can never be washed away wherever the native goes. However, the heart is not a lonely drifter. More so, when it holds fast to something as nebulous as belief, as if it is something to keep beyond time.

Nearly five years ago, dragging two young children and weighed down by uncertainty of a new life in the heartland of America, what kept me from keeling over with dread and the stress of an almost interminable trip were the most fragile objects: a small statue of the Santo Niño and a time-worn laminated photo of the Mother of Perpetual Help that my mother wrapped in an old newspaper and tucked in my luggage like an heirloom.

Treasured as such, the icons of one’s innocence endure despite the distance. “Wherever our destinations are, our devotional images are there,” Tito Alquizola writes. “We did not leave those birth-places as empty, unfeeling vessels. We began our journeys carrying a deepening fondness for what shaped us in those places. We brought with us packets of memories.”

And as long as the old cliché—-hope floats—-holds water, we may prove ourselves unsinkable in the end regardless of our individual or racial baggages.

Packed tight with a poet’s wisdom and an ethnographer’s perception, Alquizola’s new book “Journeys: The Santo Niño Devotion Comes to Tampa Bay” is a testimony of Pinoy immigrants’ resilient spirit—-to bloom wherever they are planted despite the weather of displacement and discord.

“To our new homes we brought the multi-shaded selves we had absorbed in the Philippines. For instance, our consciousness of people’s social status, our special hierarchical attitudes towards the rich, the poor, the in-between. Unfortunately, it also influences who we want to pray with,” Alquizola observes as he narrates how a small prayer group among homesick friends evolved into Devotion and later into painstaking communal effort to construct the Santo Niño de Cebu Shrine at St. Paul church in Tampa, Florida.

More significantly, Alquizola also shares the devotees’ individual stories—-rife with alienation and adversity—-and personal anecdotes of miracles enough to drench the readers with adrenaline flowing from the “sensibility of prayer.”

This soul stuff called grace fills Alquizola with wonder: “Looking at our different ways, our tendency to break apart before we get fully whole, we cannot help but ask—-What kept the Santo Niño Devotion intact, if occasionally bruised? Has the desire to pray together become the strong bond? Or have we been blest despite ourselves?”

The answer is hard to ignore as we, wherever we are through the years, return to the rhythm of making ourselves known with a common heavenward call for celebration: Pit Senyor!

(geemyko@gmail.com)