“Relic fever”

AN ACCIDENTAL traveler these past months, I’ve learned to quickly pass airport checks by putting my phone inside the bag and leaving home the scissors in my pencil pouch.

But there’s something in my jeans pocket that sometimes merits a probe by airport police.

In the most recent incident, the female security staff asked me about the bulge in my pocket. I showed her a small leather pouch, which she asked me to open.

I shook out the contents on my palm: a jade bi, a wooden cross on a string, a wooden rosary, a woven bracelet and a red handsewn pouch. The officer picked up the pouch.

When she pressed it, I knew she would hear inside the cloth the crackle of paper wrapped around powdery substance: incense blessed by a saint in a temple I visited with a friend.

But from the viewpoint of someone trained to spot guilt and crime, the substance could also be something else. This thought flashed quickly in my mind when the officer asked me to identify the red pouch.

I answered without dissembling: “anting-anting.” The officer instantly gave back the pouch and waved me through.

When I told my older son, he commented that it was a good thing the incident took place in the country, not overseas where an amulet would require more than a literal translation.

That exchange at the airport is intriguing on other levels. The officer and I are trained to be professionally speculative: she in the line of detection, I in academic and journalistic inquiry.

Yet, in the presence of “anting-anting,” we both reacted against type. A culture we shared was more powerful than education or discipline. A talisman against danger or misfortune, an “anting-anting” is an item so personal, some are even buried in people’s bodies to prevent loss, theft or contamination.

But what can be one person’s lucky charm may only be a fetish or idol to unbelievers. So perhaps it is not only accidental that many “anting-anting” are small enough to be hidden from sight or covered by clothing. Rebuking religion and science, amulets exist like the subconscious running beneath the surface of our avowed beliefs, the biases we repeat like a mantra, we no longer question them.

Yet, these seemingly contradictory streams are more parallel than divergent. Occasionally, these streams even coalesce. The twin canonization today has brought relics into focus. “Relic fever,” particularly for anything associated with John Paul II, started long before news broke out about his canonization. The Associated Press reported that the Vatican fueled the boom as soon as he was beatified in 2011 although the tradition is to venerate an item as a relic when it came into physical contact with or was physically part of a saint.

John Paul II, reportedly the “world’s first globe-trotting pope,” left many mementoes associated with him in his travels. Watching in 2013 a TV report about the plate, utensils and table napkin that is displayed, unwashed, in a Manila restaurant where John Paul II dined on fish and shrimp during his 1995 visit, the uncle mumbled to me, “Kalokohan,” a judgment he must have passed not so much on questionable hygiene as much as on the inexplicable encroachments of faith on reason.

Umberto Eco wrote in his novel, “The Name of the Rose,” about a saint whose foreskin pieces were venerated in so many monasteries in Europe, a monk speculated that if all these relics were put together, the saintly organ would be as high and prodigious as the Tower of Babel.

Throughout the ages, skepticism hardly threatens belief perhaps because it is human and universal to seek a prop for invincibility, some shelter, no matter how flimsy or insubstantial, from the unknown. When the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño belfry toppled during the October 2013 earthquake, many of the faithful asked those guarding the area to give them pieces of the rubble in exchange for snacks or meals.

Recently, a friend showed me a piece of grey rock, part of the belfry and the 1735 construction in hard stone. He said it was given to him by a friend vending outside the Basilica. He keeps the rock inside a leather pouch that was the scrotum of a kangaroo, one of those legally harvested in Australia to prevent overpopulation.

Before my friend explained, I was curious about the leather pouch but not the rock. When I knew, I gave back his “anting-anting”. No more explanations needed. Some things, like faith, are personal.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 27, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

House rules

THE RECENT separate reports of demonic possession make me wonder: Is the craving to communicate with the unknown just a novelty for the young or a preoccupation among those already pierced by the twinges of mortality?

I watched on the news several people restrain youths after they played spirit of the glass or the coin. Male and female students of different schools located in different parts of the country, the youngsters shrieked, rolled their eyes and talked unintelligibly when a cross was pressed against different parts of their body.

According to a schoolmate who backed out at the last minute, the Cebu-based students made a pact to play the Ouija board at noon in an empty classroom. This is a sheet covered with letters and signs, which players “read” after a spirit, summoned by them, enters and moves around a downturned glass to deliver a message.

What can the living learn from the “beyond”? Curiosity about Anne Frank (Does the spirit grow older after dying? Was she working on a follow-up of her memoir?) made our book-loving group plot to play spirit of the glass on seniors’ night in high school.

However, after making sure the coast was clear of teachers and monitors, we realized not one of us brought an Ouija board or could draw one from memory. So we settled for spin the bottle, giggling after crushes were dredged up and pushed away all desire to command to “tell all” the soul of a young Jewess murdered in a concentration camp.

The fount of youth is not a fabled elixir but the arrogance to keep death at a distance, between the pages of a novel or six feet beneath a moss-encrusted grave marker. My immunity ended six years ago when my father died.

On the night my father suffered cardiac arrest, the medical staff was responding to another Code Blue on another floor. This private hospital had only one team to respond to such cases. The time it took for the staff to stabilize the first patient and rush to my father’s bedside was crucial: my father graduated from being an emergency to a case for resuscitation and then life support.

When he passed away days later, I was conscious of the weight of his displeasure. All my calls—from bringing him to a private hospital when he preferred the public one he served for 30 years as a surgeon to allowing his medical resuscitation when he didn’t believe in extreme measures—were opposed to what he wanted.

In death as in life, my father could nurse a grudge. In the years immediately after his death, I dreamt variations of the same speechless, sinking horror: standing outside his hospital room, the dread of anticipating what lay beyond the door crushing me; or looking down at his body, unable to tear myself away.

I don’t know when but in time, my father lightened up. He still visits me in my dreams, but we’ve moved away from room B-552. He’s often in his faded shorts, with his favorite accessories: a cold bottle of beer and his second or third pack of cigarettes. Sometimes he’s reading the news or rudely butting in while his favorite commentator blares from the radio that’s never switched off when he’s at home.

Where he is now isn’t our old home. I don’t know where this is because my old man has become unusually restless. I’m always following his stooped figure down a strange street that looks oddly familiar. We visit family but other folks I don’t know. Sometimes, I wish he wouldn’t overdo this socializing. I have to work in the morning.

And can he talk. We never had to talk to understand what each other wanted, but in these recent dreams, my father is positively garrulous. When I wake up, I don’t remember a thing he said, only that I never say a thing. After having everything go during those last years—his teeth, his eyesight, his memory, his hearing, his appetite, his independence, his daughters—my father’s back in the driver’s seat and I’m a grayer version of my school girl self, sitting beside him, dutiful and silent, occasionally coughing when the wind wafts cigarette smoke my way.

In the spirit world, the living must remember that we’re only guests.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 28, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

To an unknown god

THIS is an interesting tale for these confusing times.

Standing northwest of the Acropolis in Greece is a stone hill where believers and unbelievers, if we heed the stories, meet and sometimes end up not parting ways.

The ancient Romans named this hill the “Areopagus” because this was the “pagos,” or hill, where Areios was tried and then acquitted by the gods for murdering Poseidon’s son.

Areios came from Ares, where so many murderers hid to escape retribution, a temple was erected to appease the Erinyes, also known as the Furies.

With heads seething with serpents and eyes, dripping blood, the Furies embodied the vengeance of the dead. The terrible trio—Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera ("grudging") and Tisiphone ("avenging murder")—sprang from the blood dripping from Ouranos, castrated by his son, the Titan Cronos. Some Romans even believed the Furies came from a darker source, Nyx (“Night”), and were not limited to three but were beyond reckoning.

For bringing murderers and other lawbreakers to justice, the Areopagus became a city-state known for investigating the corrupt. When Paul and the apostles entered it in 63 A.D., they found Stoics, Epicureans and other philosophers who lived for nothing but to listen to and discuss the latest ideas.

Unlike other places where the apostles were nearly stoned for worshipping their God, the Areopagus accommodated all ideas, all creeds.

“As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship,” Paul wrote in Acts 17:23, recounting his speech to learned Athenians gathered in the Areopagus to hear the apostles expound on this latest of ideas, “I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”

What was unknown to the ancient Athenians has become a familiar figure to anyone following the aftermath of the sinking of the mv Princess of the Stars.

Though unnamed, this seems to be the same god invoked by Coast Guard officials and Sulpicio Lines executives and owners to explain why the ship was allowed to leave Manila, only to capsize when it ran into the full force of typhoon Frank, leaving most of its nearly 800 passengers and crew dead, unrecovered or missing.

The cited reason: miscommunication about the government policy barring sea travel during a storm.

This same, unknown god hovers over the frequent appeals of the ship owners for understanding, patience and order from several parties. First, from frantic families and friends made to wait or scramble on their own for information about their loved ones days after the sinking.

Reason: information must be verified before the ship executives or owners can act, an irony lost on a company that seems to have neither an organized system nor a sense of moral culpability even after causing four other major sea tragedies within a 21-year practice, including the sinking of the mv Doña Paz, considered the “world’s worst peacetime shipping tragedy,” with its 4,341 dead.

This same god, Reason, forces local governments to split their limited resources to help traumatized ship survivors and searching families, along with other typhoon victims. To prevent health risks, the government has to bury bodies in temporary graves and suspend the recovery operations after the mv Princess of the Stars was found to carry a toxic cargo.

Reason: no information has been volunteered by Sulpicio executives or owners if it will pick up the tab of local governments in “cleaning up” after the sea tragedy or if there are other cargoes endangering the search and retrieval team, nearby coastal communities, or the marine ecosystem.

In the presence of this god—pat and empty Reason—one is tempted to imitate the pagans and summon the Furies to teach every Sulpicio executive or heir a lesson in karma.

Or one can listen to Paul.

Addressing the Areopagus, historic center of reason and human justice, the apostle said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious… Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth… He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.

“He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:22-31)

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 29, 2008 issue