Friday, October 13, 2006 Acofo: Spirituality a frame of justice By Julio Acofo Seeing With New Eyes
LAST Thursday, I was in Sablan, Benguet, an hour drive from the lone city of the Cordilleras.
I caught Doctor Susan Bitoncol and some women talking about the celebration of the Indigenous Peoples (IP) last October 8 and their schedules on the holding of the Black Rosary. Yes!
The IP as a Christian is just one of the interesting transformation of the IP in Cordillera that can be examined to peek into the spirituality of the IP in the Cordillera region. By spirituality, I refer a level of consciousness and not religion. Although spirituality is usually misconstrued or reduced to a system of beliefs.
Spirituality underlines the aspiration of the Cordillera Administrative Region. The regional vision flows with: "We, the people of the Cordilleras, proud of our culture and heritage rooted in spirituality, shall have a truly autonomous region."
Spirituality here does not mean obscure (not clear) nor enigmatic. One firmly believes that when the leaders of Cordillera put spirituality as a foundation of the Cordillera people's aspiration, their feet were on the ground and their butts felt the heat and hardness of the wooden chairs they were sitting on.
To most IPs, spirituality is real. It is material, livable, verifiable and worth exploring. Spirituality in the text of the regional vision has no allusions to the mysterious. As a thought, spirituality in here is not impenetrable even as it is esoteric.
As said earlier, spirituality to the Cordilleran who lives and continually learns his/her culture is not religion or ritual, nor is it religiosity and worst piousness. Any indigenous Cordilleran open and humble to his/her culture will realize that the savage is equally ethical and follows the morals of a culture even as his/her practices may not be tamed and cultivated compared to his educated and christianized persona that he/she is now (or as most claim to be).
And that's where the rub is! Is being schooled, "cultured" and Christianized makes one less an IP? The answer is obviously a big NO! Something quite discernible among women leaders I met including the women of Sablan.
A transforming IP is one who is grateful for his/her ethnic origin and tribal color, AWARE that as such identity evolves and evolves PROPERLY.
"Rooted in spirituality" in Cordillera vision means that the IP in the Cordillera region can recognize, appreciate (as in analyze), integrate tradition with change and with his/her personal aspiration and with the collective vision. Among the great changes in the life of indigenous peoples in Cordillera is assimilation to Christianity, adoption of formal education and the National Government.
"Rooted in (our) spirituality" means that one does not suffer brokenness which I define as disjunction between being an IP - the core of identity and becoming - the purpose of development.
And example of suffering brokenness is the famous sociological phenomenon known as folk Christianity. Folk Christianity is understood as a severance between cultures - that of tradition and tribal from that of the new -- Christianity.
We can also look at Folk Christianity as an inability to mold a whole identity. The person practices two distinct cultures and suffers confusion in the interior.
"Rooted in (our) spirituality" refers transforming the savage and war-like IP into a Cordilleran who has the capacity and humility to integrate justice as the rule of the savage and forgiveness as the might of the Christian. She/he can forgive not because she/he is less IP but because she/he knows that by doing so she/he allows rule of the Cosmos to take charge. Yes, at the core of the consciousness of the IP is the reality and the laws of the Cosmos. Intimate relations with the Cosmos, billed as the Great Unknown or The Force, have always been a mark of the IP.
Tapping into that consciousness, the evolving IP in Cordillera can forgive without unnecessarily moralizing on and disengaging from a tradition of a savage past -- his/her ancestry.
Today, when much is being done to integrate customary laws, a transforming IP in the Cordilleran dreads to use the premiums of savagery (a very misunderstood core of IPness) as an excuse to "litter" blood (kill) anywhere outside his/her "ili" - his home and ancestral territory. A transforming IP dreads to use the present day confusion of tribal and formal laws to abuse outside his "ili" and runs away to seek refuge in his "ili". It is parochialism at its extreme and cowardice at its peak.
Among the stories we share as IPs over coffee tables are about news on how people have taken advantage of custom laws and practices to complicate and delay the arrest of suspects for crimes committed in places outside the "ili" of the suspects or crime doers.
Many IPs true to their consciousness know IP laws are swift and exact in their punishment. Paramount among the IP laws is the Law of the Cosmos - the law of nature. They know that a criminal may escape responsibility but eventually the Cosmos shall exact cosmic vengeance or execute cosmic justice. A sullied "ili" by the (dirty) act of the wrongdoers will (not shall) suffer. With death comes death. Many an elder know this and are witnesses to how their tribes and "ilis" suffered in the past. Deaths, pestilence, sickness in many ways and many forms if not many times come after a violation of life, codes and inter- tribal agreements such as peace pacts.
In the collective yet barely -- said memory of the IP with Cosmic justice are stories that are almost biblical. They are as graphic and bizarre.
Yes, to a learning IP, the savage's rule of "eye for an eye" is real although not very well understood. To a transforming IP, the savage's "law of eye for an eye" is the law of the Cosmos, the Unknown. It is exact and spares no one.
It sounds unchristian. I say no. It sounds real. The Christian's law of forgiveness is same with the IP's allowing the Cosmic justice to take its course. Look, some tribes like mine impose an allowable time for the family or tribe to carry out an HONORABLE vengeance and that's when the body of the dead is not yet buried. Five days is a long wake. Vengeance after that is not any more honorable. One clear reason is passion cannot take more than a week to consume a person.
As a Christian, I try to understand forgiving as letting go or giving up. "Up" here means literally up to SOMETHING LARGER than man or even life itself. Giving it up is UNLOCKING the LAWS of the DIVINE to take charge. Is it not same as RELEASING and ALLOWING the COSMIC FORCES to its course? Just asking. -- my next column: spirituality as frame of development and growth
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