Tolerance is a good word to rhyme with “reverence.” It is not surprising then that it is a word closely related to it. In the old “modern” times the concept of belief and faith were concepts crucial to the state of personal and collective well-being. The Maker knows the word must have changed in meaning over time. Contemporary humans have become that much more careful with the whole idea of it. Many wars have been fought over and because of faith. The children always lose out. They go to be soldiers and are always the first to fall. The world ought to change if it has not changed already. The world should not afford another religious war. There is good reason for the contemporary human to put just as much reverence for tolerance as faith.
Last Sunday the Maker brought his family for Mass at a local church. It was a Mass with the Flores de Mayo. While the proceedings transpired, his eyes wandered to an awful poster stuck on the church’s right wall. It was an anti-RH Bill poster complete with pictures of dead and malformed babies, quite obviously the author’s imagined picture of the “unborn child.” It came with various text equally as monstrous by quality and scale as the pictures themselves. The words spoke of the RH bill as coming by the same logic of some crazy demagogue of times past who looked at poverty as a disease that must be cured by preventing the poor from procreating. This demagogue was proposed as representative of those who approve of the RH bill.
These claims are clearly misinformation. To an intelligent viewer they only cast a bad light on those who oppose the RH bill. The Maker could only worry how rabid this opposition has become. Indeed, he felt from the poster a clear measure of palpable propensity for hatred and violence. This made him gather in his mind a recollection of religious art, which had guided his art since he had been a child. He wondered if the poster could be read as a contemporary translation of any of these. This contemplation gave him both a headache and a heartache. He was never as sad as this inside a church.
He recalled, of course, the paintings of Raymundo Francia at the parish church in Sibonga town. The paintings by Francia are extremely graphic and distinguish the church by his depictions of the devil. The devil is pictured the same way Cebuanos describe him in words: sungayan, pak-an ug ikugan, in English, “horned,” “winged” and “with a tail.” He is red. He guards the gates of Hell, which is a burning cave. He tempts a dying man with money and a portrait picture of a woman. He is the personification of evil and temptation. But even so, Francia’s devils have a charm about them. They certainly personify evil but not in the same monstrous way as this poster he was looking at. The painter wasted no sympathy for the dead babies. They were simply the monstrous consequence of sin. The Maker thought: “If the babies were killed by abortion, they were twice killed by the poster.”
That might have the been the reason for the Maker’s worry. As a practicing artist he knew that, first and foremost, art always reveals the mind-set of the artist and his or her patrons. What is actually shown, the apparent messages and pictures, only come second. Thus, he could not help but see the poster as a depiction of a particular texture of mind that bespoke of the poster-maker’s universe, his or her world. What must this world look like?
It was a world alien to the Maker. Here was a universe where everything was in black and white, good or evil, alive or dead. There was nothing in between.
No room for doubt. No confusion. Here was a universe where everything was understood simplistically and then translated to slogans, exhortations and sayings about sin and damnation. Finally, it said to the Maker: “If you do not believe this, then you are evil. And if you have friends who also do not believe this, then they, too, are evil. We are praying for all of you to disappear.”
And the Maker wondered what he could say in reply. In the end, he knew the best answer was only silence and a shaking of the head. He counted himself lucky his children did not even give the poster a second look.