Missing the essentials

By JUAN L. MERCADO, juan_mercado77@yahoo.com
January 18, 2013

Tourists, touts, pilgrims to, dancers jam Cebu City Sunday for the centuries-old Santo Nino fiesta. It’s easy to skid into non-essentials. Who’ll elbow the way to first places, in viewing stands? Battling a suspension order, will Gov. Gwen Garcia emerge from Capitol redoubt to shashay with a town troupe? Where will Acting Gov. Agnes Magpale sit?

A “Devotees City” opened to house indigent pilgrims. Hotels are full. The finale will highlight canonization of Pedro Calungsod, first saint from the Visayas. Ms Razini Alexis Gomez, who won as Ms Tourism International, will lead 500 young dancers. “Oh to be 70 again” 84-year old Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sighed when young chicks flitted by.

“Typhoon Sendong, and Pablo caused some of the out-of-town contingents to beg off. But eight others will come. And a hundred boats will trail the launch, bearing the Niño, up Mactan Channel. In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan’s vessels carried this icon on galleons that sailed up this then-pristine strait. (Since 1970, the quality of Mactan water has deteriorated as waste is dumped, University of San Carlos environmental monitoring reports.)

Sunday rites recall the account by Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, Italian chronicler on Magellan presenting the Niño to the newly-baptized Queen Juana. After Magellan died on 27 April 1521 in the Battle of Mactan, the image disappeared. On 28 April 1565, Spanish mariner Juan de Camus, a member of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi’s follow-up expedition, found the statue the ruins of a burnt house.

It is now enshrined at the basilica and over the centuries, draws crowds. Some are curious. Many go for a culture bash. And scores pray for help. Affection for the Child wells up from below. No organizing committee can jerry-rig such gut reaction.

Myths abound. Some nights, an old tale goes: the Child slips away from his altar. He walks the streets: comforting, blessing, curing. Dawn, the Niño’s cloak is sometimes studded with the weed: amor seco (Spanish for “dry love”). Some botanists shrug. Andropogan aciculatus merely proves deforested Cebu is semi arid.

“The Sto. Niño, isn’t about a cute, harmless little boy”, writes Fr. Johnny Go, SJ. We treat him either like a lucky charm that we display in our homes, or like some Catholic version of Barbie doll. The feast recalls reminds us he stayed back in Jerusalem where his questions stunned Temple leaders. “Why did you look for me?, he asked Mary and Joseph. “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s concerns?”

“The Feast of the Sto. Niño teaches us about the courage and faith of a young boy amidst all the uncertainties and the pains that always accompany those growing-up years. Our Lord was beginning to realize that it was time to let go of his own preferences because his life was not his own.”

But is worship sealed off, on a “split level”, from deeds?, the Jesuit psychologist Jaime Bulatato often asked. Indeed, popular devotion “continues to animate the life of the people”, The Third Pastoral Assembly said earlier. Is there a marked dichotomy between faith and life, between worship and activity?

An official who attends Mass, honoring the Child, has no qualms about pocketing “Christmas gifts” from realigned funds courtesy of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile. And some who lighted tapers, in the Niño’s procession, ushered in Cebu’s “hot car miracle”: registrations vaulted from only two in 2006 to 3,906.

The litmus test for devotion to the Niño is how Filipino children fare here. Chronic hunger reduces one out of three into a puny underweight. That’s 9.31 million kids. Another 3.8 are stunted. They don’t starve to death. But debilitating – and preventable – diseases like TB, anemia, diarrhea take their toll. Nutrition National Survey found that, improvement inched forward by only five percent. “At this rate, it will take maybe half a century before we can eradicate the problem of malnutrition”.

"How can the Sto. Niño today become the refuge of families who are landless, jobless, homeless, hungry and who lack basic services?”, asks the Visayas Clergy Discernment Group. “Our celebrations will be like empty clanging cymbals (Amos 5:21-24) if the above concrete realities of the least of the Sto. Niño's brothers and sisters are not addressed effectively.”

Kids can’t wait. “Their name is today”. A recent issue of the British medical journal “The Lancet” found, in a study of the Philippines and 19 other countries, that “undernutrition is to blame for 3.5 million deaths among children aged under five each year – more than a third of child deaths worldwide,” it concluded. Most fatalities “occur in 20 countries, where targeted aid programs could swiftly address the problem.”