The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia

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 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.”

      WHILE EDUCATED PEOPLE TEND TO dismiss the Banahaw sects as atavistic, such groups have existed throughout Philippine colonial history, largely as a way to endure oppressive conditions and to keep alive their own aspirations. This is a country continually on the lookout for saviors; more than a yearning for a pre-history, the populace seems to want to escape the straitjacket of a history of defeat and colonialism. Part of the Catholic Church’s appeal has been that it offers figures ranging from Jesus and His mother Mary to a pantheon of saints, all of whom are capable of negating that history. Nationalist traditions also offer their pick of heroes, with José Rizal at the top of the list. And then there is Bernardo Carpio, a mythical Filipino hero-king, said to be buried deep within a mountain (many believe this to be Banahaw) and whose resurrection will herald the salvation of all Filipinos. In this, Carpio seems like Godot, however: eternally awaited, eternally elusive.

      Ferdinand Marcos shrewdly drew on this longing by casting himself as a heroic figure who would lead the masses from a benighted present to an idyllic future. And as expert and adroit as he was in steering the body politic, this native son of Batac—a town up north in the Ilokos region—has proved equally adept in death in employing politics of the body, following a macabre tradition that includes Napoleon being returned to Paris nineteen years after his demise on St. Helena, and the 1976 internment of Eva Peron in Argentina, twenty-four years after dying abroad. In this overwhelmingly Catholic country, where ritual and symbol figure prominently in the national pysche, and where animist ancestral and spirit worship thrives under the guise of folk Catholicism, Marcos brilliantly manipulated both the collective consciousness and its superstitions. He defined the modern Filipino through speeches and ghostwritten books, recast history to fit his story, and appealed to nationalist pride by seeming to stand up to the Americans (though in reality his regime was propped up by Washington). In the process, he succeeded in projecting the aura of a man in charge of a whole nation’s destiny. Indeed, a film bio he had commissioned about himself is titled Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Decreed by Fate).

      Ferdinand’s 1964 official campaign biography by Hartzell Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, goes so far as to describe how, though a devout Roman Catholic, he had a talisman—embedded in his back:

      Among [the talisman’s] virtues, it permits its holder to disappear and reappear at will. It has other supernatural attributes, one of them being that under some circumstances the use of it can restore the dead to life.

      At Bataan, men knew that to go on patrol