The Mission

From where he sat in a theater in Heaven the late former congressman Ysmael Bukad could not help but laugh. The issue of the bishops and their SUVs had become like fly paper catching anyone who touched it in its sticky grip. When the news came out of how Mikey Arroyo and Willie Revillame had become main donors in the drive to buy replacement SUVs for the bishops, the issue became finally the circus that it was. It became a game show.

But it was a show that was meant to hide more than reveal the truth. Claims and assertions were flying everywhere and it was coming near to impossible to find their common thread. But from where he sat it seemed clear to Bukad that the bishops had unwittingly become a convenient basin of cleansing water over which the most guilty could wash off their guilt. Just like everyone else, Mikey and Willie now lay claim to being good if not better Catholics than their opponents. But now we would have to wonder: What does it mean to be a good Catholic? Does it mean, to be against the RH bill? To not question the bishops ever? To be silent despite? To look the other way?

For Bukad, looking the other way was not such a bad idea at that point. Thus he moved to another theater where was showing the life of an aging priest. He espied him earlier a bit away from the bishops. He had at his feet something familiar to Bukad. It was something which looked very much like a dark shadow at the priest’s feet. It looked very much like his sigbin.

As it turned out the priest worked in the most inaccessible villages in Northern Mindanao. These were villages not even the newest Pajeros or Monteros could go. To get there one would have to walk and climb. There were horses but they were not for riding. They were for cargo. They were for bringing down coffee beans and other produce that the villagers exchanged for rice, canned food, dried fish and alcohol. The alcohol was not a luxury. It was a necessity. For these were some of coldest places in the islands. They looked down over everything and everywhere else including the clouds.

These were as close to Paradise as one could ever hope to go in these islands.  But it was a poor person’s paradise. There was not much to eat besides camote, no medicine, no doctors, no government other than what the people recognized for themselves. There was only culture, rituals for thanking the spirits and seeking their guidance, rituals for marriage and burying the dead, rituals for remembering the past. But the loggers were coming ever closer, so too the war between government and the New People’s Army, NPA. The priest wondered whether he was, like them, also an encroaching threat. But he wanted to do some good. And the locals had very little by way of that.

And so he came on some Sundays to say the mass when he could. When he could not, there were those he assigned to say regular prayers in his stead. When he could come, he always brought with him medicine and some food for the children. He came to baptize, to teach and talk to whomever would listen. But his work covered a huge unimaginable geographic space, a system of villages scattered at odd nooks and crannies all over the Bukidnon mountains.

It seemed to the priest at first as if the locals did not take their religion seriously. Missionaries from other Christian denominations also came regularly. Over time he observed that when the Baptists came the locals had no problem at all attending Baptist services. So too with other denominations. For them, all missionaries came under a single category, Christian. Beyond that, there was only the local practice, the local rituals which by mainstream Christian definitions would have fallen under the category “pagan”.

“Yawa” was the original Bisayan word to mean “pagan”. This, according to the list of Bisayan words and their meanings recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s chronicler. It tells something about the inherently subversive nature of words that by now the word has come to mean the Christian devil, Satan. This evolution of the word and its meaning encapsulates the long narrative of how we were colonized. It is not altogether a happy and guiltless story.

Indeed, it came always as a test of his faith whenever the priest contemplated his religious mission against the social fabric of the people he was trying to convert. It was impossible for him to take their conversion simplistically. In time, he began to realize how important the animistic rituals were for holding the people together so that they could collectively make sense of their world. They believed because they needed to. By contrast, Christianity for them served only a peripheral purpose. The missionaries brought with them a story of what the world looked like “down there”. From time to time, they brought necessary medicine and a bit of food. But it was a “visiting” religion. Left to themselves they had no concept at all or even an inkling of a “one-true-god”. To imagine the concept, they would have first of all to accept themselves as “pagan”, or as Pigafetta would have them call themselves- yawa. And the priest always wondered if it was right for him to change them that way. (Continued Wednesday)