The carosas of Lent

Holy Week here involves not a small amount of showbiz. This is only to be expected. The cultural practice after all seeks to retell the narrative of Lent with a wide choice of events one might consider to witness and join: the Visita Iglesia, the Seven Last Words and the processions with their carosas to embellish everything with their strange beauty. These whole train of traditions speaks a lot of the local culture and its peculiar way of interpreting what was once thought of as universal and catholic.

They remind us immediately of local horror vacui, the fear of emptiness that must be filled by all the resources of sensation. Some cultures might urge silence, to be alone with God. But there will not be much opportunity for that at this time unless one thinks in terms only of small moments. If Lent has been thought of as the Christmas of our salvation, the local Lent certainly encapsulates that fact with the small difference only of the absence of fireworks. But who knows? There may be places where they might have that as well.

If you think of festivity as an opportunity to gather at the plaza square to do one particular something after which to sit together to “break bread”, so to speak, then Lent certainly qualifies, even if literally and figuratively a veiled one. In this case, the particular something universally tells of Christ’s passion and death. Whether in Dumanjug or Baclayon, the centerpiece is always people with candles singing and marching after the carosas rising just high enough above their heads to give visual form to particular events leading to Christ’s death on the cross.

San Pedro, always leads the march reminding us that all these are linked ultimately to the very concept of Pope and the one single universal church. Expect a rooster to be somewhere close. The story of Lent cannot be told if it does not contain also the irony of denial and betrayal, of sin and repentance. San Pedro inevitably looks upwards mirroring always the look of Mater Dolorosa, the grieving mother. San Juan is not far behind. He stood at the foot of Christ’s cross with Maria Magdalena who has her very own carosa at the Baclayon procession in Bohol province along with Veronica and a procession of other women. In Baclayon, you will see more or less the same number of male and female icons.

But all over you will see a wealth of Christ figures from the passion narrative, Christ at the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ condemned by Pilate, Christ at the pillar before he is whipped; both in Dumanjug and Baclayon, “Jesus de la Pasencia”, the seated Christ hand on chin contemplating all these as he patiently waits for the inevitable. Then of course, you will have Jesus Nazareno, Christ bearing his cross, which is the iconic centerpiece of the whole procession. But it is not the most important if one think in terms of metaphysics. The most holy of holies is the Santo Intiero, the dead body of Christ, whose importance is marked by its glass enclosure.

It is important to realize from all these that the Lent we celebrate as a people has peculiar differences from the universal narrative. In Baclayon, Jesus Nazareno is guarded by a soldier holding a bloodied spear. He is not a Roman soldier as one might expect. Instead he is Moorish complete with shoes whose toes curl upwards. This tells of the provenance of our own peculiar Catholicism and the mindset which decorated it in the past as it must do so even now.

And it might interest you to know one of the reasons the flowers from the carosas of Lent were always taken home by the faithful was because they were so holy, shamans once added them as ingredients for the making of magic oils. And then there is the fact that we once believed that Christ was actually dead between 3 p.m. of Black Friday until he is found at the Sugat, the dawn of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. And we once believed that between those times, one should not bathe otherwise black spots would  grow on our skins and any wound would  take longer to heal.

Lent presents to us a good cultural picture of how much we have changed culturally over time and how through the years we moved from the literal towards the more figurative interpretation of all these. And it is all a rich dynamic interplay of reality and symbol.

And if it seems now like so much showbiz, we should not worry. Things are only as they always have been. One must not forget that Lent is the consummate artistic-cultural practice. We still speak of true passion and death even though we drape it in the most colorful fabrics and bedeck it with flowers. Beauty speaks to and for us even when it tells of betrayal, suffering, sin, repentance, death and salvation. And of course our colors are quaint, peculiar, inevitably local. And truly, we have taken this foreign narrative and made it entirely our own. It has grown all the better for it.