Kinabuhayan belongs to another era. Banahaw—the center of millenarian revolts against the Spanish and the Americans—is today the base of many folk-religious sects who, believing the mountain to be a source of mystical powers, view it as sacred, calling it a New Jerusalem. Despite their different beliefs, the sects coexist in remarkable live-and-let-live harmony.
Accompanied by two guides and by Jaime de Guzman, a painter friend who had lived a while up north in the Cordilleran town of Sagada, I visit Banahaw. Despite the difficulty, the discomfort, and the rain, the 14-hour trek from Jaime’s farm on the southwestern slopes of Mt. Banahaw is exhilarating, certain views and images indelible: Emerging out of the brush, at the top of a wooded incline, two boys and a girl astride a horse—quiet, polite, full of rural innocence; a farmer and his pregnant wife, pretty and pale, working a small plot of land in a remote corner who provide us with water; the first views we have of the village, when garrulous Suelo, one of our guides, remarks as we stand on a high ridge, Naamoy ko na ang Kinabuhayan (I smell Resurrection). To the east loom the upper reaches of Banahaw, clouds rolling across its peak. To the west, the plains of Quezon Province stretch to the South China Sea, smoke billowing from several field fires.
Once we arrive in Kinabuhayan, we attend a ritual at the church of one particular sect, Tres Personas, Solo Dios (Three Persons, One God)—built like a traditional Catholic chapel, with cruciform windows. The celebrant wears a bishop’s hat and a white, gold-trimmed chasuble over a light blue vestment, and is attended to by an acolyte who rings a bell often and with relish. Both have beautiful, long raven hair that reaches below their shoulders. Both are women.
Over us drift atonal hymns sung by a choir. The congregation, dressed in white, sits on chairs. After a while, the celebrant turns around to face us. She greets everyone “Good Morning,” enunciates a few principles of right behavior, and declares the mass over. She takes a seat, while prayers are said and a hymn sung before the faithful exit and walk home.
Outside, a slight, middle-aged man starts talking to me. Knowing I’m a visitor, he declares that the sect has essentially the same beliefs as Catholicism but that “Catholics follow the wrong route, going every which way. Our path is more direct. And Christianity came from the Spanish. Our way is truly Filipino.” Intensely nationalistic, the sects regard the country’s revolutionary heroes as figures akin to saints. The figure most venerated by Tres Personas, and indeed by all the Banahaw sects, is José Rizal. This thirty-five-year-old Tagalog, executed at dawn by the Spanish in 1896, was a nineteenth-century renaissance man—doctor/scientist, polyglot, novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, city planner, and fencer—who came to be known as the Great Malay. He also wrote two Spanish-language novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In them, Rizal is a harsh critic of friar abuses; the reforms he envisioned would have kept Spanish rule but with a much reduced role for the church. According to my impromptu informant, Rizal was about to establish his own religion when the Spaniards had him executed by firing squad. The friars had wanted him out of the way to protect the Church’s supremacy, rather than for any role he might have had in fomenting revolution against the civil authorities.
To the residents of Banahaw, Rizal is seen as an avatar of the New Order. However, where the American colonial rulers had exalted the Great Malay as a national hero because of his pacifist views—thereby diffusing (so they hoped) violent opposition to their rule—the Banahaw sects have claimed him as a way of reasserting their long-held claims to an indigenous national identity that is inseparable, in their minds, from transcendent spirituality. In this sense they subvert the hold of both the Catholic Church and a government in Manila run by the landed elite and long divorced from any real contact with indigenous sentiment. If in the Cordilleras up north and in Mindanao the strategy had been to resist actively incursions by the Spanish, that of the southern Luzon, in places like Banahaw, was to, seemingly blithely, accept these same intrusions but to recast them in their own image. One could engage in a guerrilla warfare of the spirit without killing any intruder, whether Westerner or fellow Filipino.
I ask the man, why women as priests?
“Women are cleaner. And it shouldn’t make a difference if women become priests.”
Later, we meet the woman who had presided over the mass, Padre Aurelia Ebreo, a serious twenty-one-year-old with a simplicity that is disarming. She explains that she, like other priests in the sect, has a contract for seven years with an option to renew her contract. Or she may opt to marry. It used to be that being a member of the priesthood was forever. No longer.
“Priesthood?”
“Yes, only women can become priests. And the term, why should it mean only men? In our religion men cannot act as priests or acolytes. And an acolyte can’t become a priest.” What Padre Ebreo doesn’t mention but must have known was that much of the Philippines has a venerable pre-Christian tradition of female shamans, babaylans—healers, sources of power, and repositories of tradition.
She guides us upstairs, into the konbento, or rectory, that is adjacent to the chapel, a large, almost bare room. On the far wall hangs the sect’s banner, patterned after the Philippine flag and with three triangularly shaped mountains representing the trinity. At the bottom are portraits of different revolutionary figures. Not surprisingly, the largest is Rizal’s. Why the emphasis on these men? we ask Padre Aurelia. She replies, “Our faith is in God and Country, that is why we revere our heroes.”
According to Padre Aurelia, the sect has no sacraments except for baptism and marriage. No one prays to the saints, though they are honored. Mass is celebrated three times a month on the 7th, 17th, and 27th, as the number 7 has mystical significance for the group (as it had for Ferdinand Marcos). Maintenance costs are apportioned throughout the community, with most labor given freely. Three times a year, believers from other provinces flock to Kinabuhayan: on January 27, August 27, and during Holy Week, the busiest period for the community, when many Catholics come here as well. All are welcome, Padre Aurelia states.
She invites us to breakfast downstairs in the konbento’s large, austere dining room. Grace is said before and after the meal, though no one makes the sign of the cross. The woman on my left, Estebana, fifty-five years old and unmarried, started serving the sect when she was twelve years old. Like other women at the table, neither priests nor acolytes (except for Padre Aurelia), she lives here. Some are married, others not, but all are nagseserbisyo: pledged to serve the sect, in roles similar to those of brothers in a Catholic priestly community.
In my mind’s eye, I can see my ate, or older sister, Myrna here, possibly as a babaylan, part of a religious community more solidly rooted in folk beliefs than the Catholic Church and more empowering of her as a woman. I remember attending her twenty-fifth anniversary celebration as a nun with the congregation of the Immaculate Coeur du Marie. The occasion was marked by a renewal of her vows, along with those of six other nuns. On that day, the celebrants, calling themselves “Doves,” released seven of the birds during rituals presided over by fifteen priests and headed by a bishop.
Considered a progressive by the more conservative members of her community, Myrna had evolved a decidedly feminist perspective. And yet what struck me about those proceedings was that fifteen Catholic priests, embodying patriarchal traditions, were giving their blessings to seven women. I have no doubt Myrna was aware of this ironic subtext. In her homily, she quoted Rilke, “Infinite dreams but finite deeds,” and referred to “a Steadfast Compassionate Mother God who knows where we are going, even if we ourselves sometimes don’t.” In that reference to God as female was encapsulated the part of her voyage that most of the congregation’s other members would refuse to undertake, a voyage that harked back to the sacred iconography of pre-Hispanic times when Bathala, the Divine Principle, had no gender and the first man, Malakas, and the first woman, Maganda, sprang forth from bamboo at the same time and as equals.
I never imagined
