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 Unamuno had said about the martyr.
I ask her why there are no crucifixes, only crosses. The reason she gives resembles Islam’s interdiction: “We do not use portraits for God forbids it. No one knows God’s true visage.” Like the other Banahaw sects, Ciudad is a cooperative endeavor where members help one another, especially the less fortunate. Most of them live by farming rice and vegetables, and by raising pigs. As we sit there in the living room, we hear singing. A small procession is winding its way through the compound. The believers—a motley crowd of women, men, and children—enter the Suprema’s home, bearing a cross and singing Tagalog hymns. They proceed to the other rooms, then exit, still singing. After we enjoy a simple but hearty supper with the Suprema, Jaime remarks on the presence of other sects in town. She emphasizes her group’s ecumenism: “We don’t think ill of any group. We do not interfere with any other faith, and we respect the rights of others. There is only one God, and all people were created by God.”
IT IS EASY TO STILL BELIEVE IN INNOCENCE and redemption in Kinabuhayan (a Tagalog word meaning “Resurrection”), a barrio on the lower slopes of Mt. Banahaw less than three hours south of Manila by road. With its wooden, gas-lamp lit homes, lush vegetation, and rustic courtliness, 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
