asked her if she felt she had taught the fisherfolk something. “Something for sure. But much, much more have I learned from these mayukmok [ordinary people]. Through their unsung lives and unheralded deaths, they bring in the ani, or harvest, of justice and peace.” The situation there had gotten worse, she pointed out, during the subsequent decade, with even more brutal militarization. “And how is Mindanao today?” she asked rhetorically. “Still bleeding. And its mayukmok are still standing tall, honoring their faith in life even by their dying.”
Would Joseph have fit in, here in Banahaw? Certainly not as the Jesuit priest he once was—not only because that role was reserved for women but also because he had found the urge to start a family more powerful than his vocation. Having been based early on in a remote parish in Zamboanga in western Mindanao—also during the Marcos regime—he would have however liked the tightness of the Kinabuhayan community. He told me that being a parish priest in Mindanao “was a very challenging and fulfilling time for me.”
It was a time, he said, when other Jesuits and Maryknoll priests had started a renewal movement to encourage more Christians to be active, so that his work went beyond administering the sacraments to giving seminars in the barrios and laying the foundation for Basic Christian Communities. The military was suspicious of such ideas, but his parishioners were undeterred. Like Myrna, he was surprised by the response from the farmers: “Their simple faith and their activism were very inspiring.” This was part of why he had become a priest, to liberate “the poor from poverty and from the mentality of the oppressed.” There were other reasons too: faith, what he termed “the experience of the transcendent,” and his admiration for the Jesuits, whom he had grown close to in college.
Malangas, the town Joseph had been based in, had a mixed population of Christians and Muslims in an area that historically had largely been Muslim. Still, there wasn’t much tension in town, though fighting would sometimes break out between government soldiers and guerrillas belonging to the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a secessionist group that at the time was advocating independence for Mindanao as a Muslim state. He remembers going through the town’s dark streets at night and running into army patrols on his way to the pier, where machine-gun emplacements faced the sea in expectation of attacks by the Muslim rebels. Of that time, he says, “I felt a great inner peace and didn’t feel afraid at all, even though my konbento was made of wood and could easily have been blown to bits.” The attacks never materialized.
Joseph had his own problems with the military as well. In a weekly parish bulletin, he had criticized the town mayor for corruption. The lieutenant in charge of the military contingent was the mayor’s son-in-law. “They called a conference in the municipal hall, with all the barrio captains and town councilors present, and invited me to explain under what authority I did these things.” He was able to defend himself satisfactorily, for they didn’t bother him after that, but according to him “being a cleric definitely helped.”
By the beginning of the 1980s, he decided that the priesthood was no longer for him. Today, married and with a growing family and a job that overworks and underpays him, he is no less burdened, but he is happier, willing to do battle with a less-abstract world.
After finishing our breakfast and thanking our hosts, Jaime and I walk with Padre Aurelia down to the river, where other sect members are at work among the rocks and boulders, sweeping the banks, and picking up leaves and debris, widening the channel into which a hidden spring flows and from which villagers get their drinking water. (We have tasted the waters; what a treat!) The living tableau is wonderful to behold. As the people work, Padre Aurelia, another priest, and an acolyte sing hymns beneath a pomelo tree to which a giant cross has been nailed. On top of an immense boulder, candles have been lit. Against the dark-green lushness of the surrounding forest and a slate-grey sky, the men and women work in harmony, with little talk beyond murmured instructions. Hymns float through the glade, butterflies of graceful sound.
We stand awhile and watch the sect members at work. Then, following the river downstream, we come to Templo, a cave that the sect considers sacred and that is marked by a statue of the risen Christ. Just inside are a couple and their child camped out on a cot, the man, lying down, obviously ill. Perhaps they hope their faith will heal him. A few pilgrims, their faces bright with hope, pray in the candle-lit chambers. Nearby, a much narrower cave leads precipitously into the bowels of the earth—to, sect members claim, the waters of Eden. As we have no lights, we don’t descend, instead emerging from the caverns. At a bend downstream, amidst giant ferns and red dragonflies that skim along the waters, we strip and enjoy a cooling baptism.
In the afternoon, we trek to Santa Lucia, about an hour’s leisurely walk westward, along the foothills. At a crossroads, we drop in on a friend of the guides, a farmer like themselves, who invites us in for merienda (snacks). There is talk of cabbages and coffee, of fertilizer. In the living room, our host’s kids watch a telenovela, following the fictional ups and downs of an urban middle-class couple that invariably plant the seed of desire for the Big City. So there is electricity here, just a mile away from Kinabuhayan, which has none.
Larger than Kinabuhayan, Santa Lucia is the home of various sects, including the largest, Iglesia de Ciudad Mistica de Dios, or the Church of God’s Mystical City. The main temple, an airy edifice in a large compound at the end of a cul-de-sac, has a Dali-esque altar: Wings flank a painted crown of thorns that runs horizontally across the front. In the center is a large triangle, the all-seeing divine eye painted on it. Strewn around are pillows, rather than chairs or pews. Large murals on the whitewashed walls illustrate the sect’s theology, with some, again, featuring portraits of José Rizal. The murals tend toward the apocalyptic and the feminist, emphasizing the role of women in saving the world. A central figure is the Babae-Lalaki (Woman-Man), a Joan-of-Arc-like figure that combines yin and yang and symbolizes transcendence over earthly form. This nonsexist notion of the Divine Principle—akin to the idea of the Divine contained in Gnostic texts viewed as heretical by Rome—is one that the Spanish friars and American Protestant missionaries would have found disturbing.
In the courtyard, some women are working near a huge wooden cross. Responding to our query, one of them directs us to the residence of the Suprema, not far from here. Walking through Santa Lucia’s narrow streets and then up an earthen alley, we come to the Suprema’s residence, the first house in a huge compound that, we are told, has about a hundred families. The matriarch’s comfortable home faces a courtyard and garden. Tied to a post in a garage with three Jeep-type vehicles, a massive rottweiller glares at us. An assistant invites us in, where we sit on a finely cut bamboo settee. Several mongrels come in and out, barking perfunctorily at us. From a room at the far end, the Suprema emerges. She asks one of the helpers to shoo the dogs outside. How many? is my first question. Twelve, she replies, I love dogs.
Olive-skinned, serene, and regal (“She looks like a Mayan princess,” Jaime remarks later on), fifty-three-year-old Isabel Suarez has been Suprema of the Ciudad Mistica since 1963, eleven years after its founding in the nearby province of Batangas by Maria Bernarda Balitaan. Wanting the sect to be in a sacred place, Balitaan and her followers had moved here. Once Balitaan passed away, Suarez, whose father had been an adviser to Balitaan, was chosen by the church elders to succeed her. Only twenty years old at the time, she hadn’t wanted the post. Initially she had wanted to become a doctor, but because she was sickly as a young girl, her father forbade her to go on to college, instead making her work with him and the sect. The elders insisted it was God’s will.
Speaking in beautiful and courtly Tagalog, she tells us about the Ciudad’s beliefs. They believe in God the Father, God the Mother, God the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ. They celebrate mass, and have ministers, both male and female, who help out. They don’t believe in communion, and confess directly to God. In their divine cosmology, they have no saints; heaven and hell exist, but purgatory does not. I ask her about Rizal. She replies, “We respect Rizal as a sublime hero, one embraced by God. Rizal may be the Christ of the Tagalogs,” echoing what the Spanish philosopher
