The aging priest remembered it had been too long since he celebrated Mass here at this small chapel on a high plateau up in the mountains of Gingoog in Northern Mindanao. To get here from the closest road he had to cover a distance that would have taken an ordinary trekker the better part of a whole afternoon. The locals take less than three hours. He gets here in the shortest blink of an eye. The mountain dwellers speak of a power he has. They say nobody walks faster than him if he ever walked at all, for they never saw him walking up or down the trail. They tell instead of a quick shadow that weaves past them along the trail at odd times among the bushes. They take this as part of the power of his God.
After so many Masses, so many sermons, the priest still loved the Mass. At the altar he always forgot who he was, his fears, aging and death, his frustration with the whole issue of government and the institutional church. The President might have been delivering his State of the Nation Address, his Sona, somewhere else in these islands but this hardly mattered. To the North he could see in the distance the seas off Mindanao and the islands beyond. To his left, the mountains of Bukidnon rising and dipping into the clouds. This sight enhanced his feeling of well-being, of doing something for a people who needed him. He felt the pure pleasure of it. Everything seemed simpler to him as he went about the ritual that was central to his religion as well as to his person.
After all, the Mass was an inherently miraculous ritual. The bread and wine transform into the physical presence of Christ Himself whom the people partake of in communion. He did not mind if his faithful now totaling 20 called it magic not unlike the magic they regularly saw in the rituals to summon their other gods. He never missed including Datu Juan in the counting of his flock. Despite the fact he always sat to his right with his back to the altar one leg set up on the bench, his right knee set almost to his chin in that noble stance of the seated native.
Datu Juan always attended his Masses. The datu looked as old as him. He had a scar running almost the length of his face from his left eyebrow down to his chin. The priest wondered what battle marked him this way closing permanently his left eye. He wondered if he would ever know. Datu Juan never spoke to him directly. He always spoke through his family and kin who were all baptized Catholics. He would have thought him arrogant for sitting through his Masses this way but he knew better. Indeed, he respected this distance and took it as just another facet of Datu Juan’s obvious nobility. He knew he listened intently to everything that was said even if he listened with the back of his head. After all, he was the village head, the keeper of the native culture and belief system, therefore also the traditional religious leader. It made sense to the priest that he should position himself this way, as if equal to the priest’s God or at least as a saint of His church. He did not mind if the old datu felt it part of his leadership-obligations to face the same direction as this God hanging from a wooden cross.
Despite all that it lacked, this village was fortunate because of its inaccessibility and its mountainous terrain. It had only a few hundred square meters of flat land. Everything else was cliff and ravine, which gushed forth springs. Were this flatland, some rich person or corporation would have come along already with a title or declaration or lease to the land. The bulldozers and 6×6 trucks would have come to cut down trees for lumber and transform the land into sugarcane or corn fields. The villagers knew nothing about the law and land titles. They would have had no way of stopping it unless with guns. The village would have been scattered long ago losing all that they had, their beliefs, their religion, their culture. They would have been driven to the large cities to become beggars in the streets or live in its slums.
The old priest always saw the irony of it. For this had also been the most typical process of Christianization. In the cities, they would eventually be Christianized for this was the only way they could adapt to the world about them and partake of whatever benefits they had coming. Perhaps their children would eventually be educated enough to become domestic helpers or become contractual laborers if they were lucky. They would simply rot from poverty if they weren’t. Those who had been visited by this tragic misfortune earlier in the life of their village and family would have been luckier by far. They would have adapted to their loss by now. They would become perhaps the very same people who would watch the slums from their middle-class subdivisions and say to themselves, “These people are poor because they are uneducated and lazy. They do no work. They pay no tax.”
The old priest knew all these because in his long arduous life he had said Mass everywhere. He had said mass for a village that had been erased from the earth the way he described. He had said Mass at ritzy subdivisions, in city slums. He had even said Mass once at a mall just for the heck of it. From his high perch in the mountains of Bukidnon he thought to himself, “There are Masses and then there are Masses.” From the bottom of his heart he thanked God for this Mass. (To be continued on Sunday)