Sunday, January 13, 2008 Sunstar Essay: Worship of touch By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star Essay
THERE was this sick woman bleeding who came up behind Jesus in a crowd, touched “the tassle on his cloak” and was healed, according to Luke, Chapter 8.
“Who touched me, Jesus asked.”
The believers were pressing on him but he noticed most of all the gentle touch of his cloak by the woman. She then “came forward trembling,” saying she was sick and had been healed right there and then.
And Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”
Oh, for a healing touch!
It’s this need to touch which solves and creates certain problems during the fiesta of the Black Nazarene of Quiapo. Especially last week on Jan. 9 in the devotion’s 400th anniversary of its arrival in the Philippines when perhaps many were healed and are healing, but sadly, with two devotees dead and a number injured.
My memory of the feast is the possible no-class day for students living in the south side who couldn’t cross to UST through Quiapo without being stuck there. To go to school on normal days, I’d be coming from Taft Ave., past Quiapo, on to the north. A professor one day after the procession told us that he was on his way to our journalism class during the Black Nazarene feast but couldn’t cross because of the traffic deadlock, so he went to see a movie in Makati.
A curious Cebuana, I finally convinced a Manilan friend one day to come with me so I could see the procession at closer range. We stayed to the side of Carriedo St. and from there waited for the procession to come out from the church. When it did, it was like one whole sticky block of humanity oozing out of the church into its procession path. And there I saw the phenomenon of worship the Filipino way.
I was startled into realizing that from where we stood, at the edge of the procession along the sidewalk beside variety stores, the crowd was catching up on us as the carriage carrying the Nazarene (and everyone who was trying to get on it), lumbered along. I could swear we were being snatched into the web. I shouted to my friend for us to get out from there. But we were pressed like putty into a crack on the wall.
“Let me pass, please!” My friend shouted at the man beside her but he wasn’t looking. No one was looking at us, even while my friend was almost screaming. Everyone’s eyes were on the Nazarene, their hands reaching out for life to the carriage. Their faces were telling the truth---as though they were saying, “I’m weak, I’m small, I’m petty, I’m wrong, I’m penitent, I’m at your feet!”
Mostly guys, who would dare to fight their way in the menacing crowd, they, perhaps were neighbors, or families, and smoking, drinking friends across their streets.
Neighbors, some guys working at offices, or the factory, fathers of happy, normal kids, also smoking, drinking fellows across the street, or any street.
Somehow, we were able to run out of the crowd after a while and we went straight back to the boarding house without speaking, feeling sorry for what we were and weren’t. The Black Nazarene had struck us!
It’s a life-sized statue carved by an Aztec carpenter in Mexico. It is black because it caught fire in the ship which sailed from Mexico to the Philippine islands in 1606, turning the statue dark-skinned.
The devotion to the Black Nazarene is recognized by the Church as uniquely Filipino. Innocent X in 1650 in a Papal Bull established the Cofradia de Jesus Nazareno and Pope Pius VII in the 19th century granted indulgence to those devotees who prayed before the image in Quiapo. And the devotion, to Filipinos, is one of prayer and touch, in order to heal.
And so last week on the Black Nazarene’s feast, about two million devotees were in touch not only with the famous black image of Christ but with each other as part of a tremendous heart-beating pack of warm bodies that doesn’t stop amazing the onlookers.
In ancient pagan worship, Filipinos turned to gods and to each other to keep safe from harm, to have peace, to be happy. Nothing much has changed.
