What man shall live and not see death ?
– Proverbs 89:49
Today is All Saints’ Day, a Catholic feast day or solemnity, intended to honor the saints or martyrs of the faith. It is celebrated every 1st of November and is an official public holiday in the Philippines, a country that prides itself in being the only predominantly Catholic country in Asia, whatever that means. It possibly implies that we as have one leg up on salvation compared to our neighbors. But this is a highly debatable point and I digress.
However, All Saints’ Day in the Philippines is not for celebrating and emulating the saints of the Church but rather for honoring our departed loved ones, friends and family, and is an occasion for family reunions and, at times rather inappropriately, unruly revelry. We have it confused with All Souls’ Day, November 2, which is the day set for prayers and remembering our faithful departed. It doesn’t matter. Any excuse for a holiday is as good as any in this country. This year, we look forward to a 4-day weekend as Friday, November 2,ordinarily a working day, has been declared a special holiday.
As I heard it expressed more than once, it’s a sort of a family roll call before the enforced gaiety of the Christmas season. In some families, those who don’t show up had better have a good excuse or they won’t get any gifts in the coming holidays.
The eve of All Saints’ Day being Halloween, an American tradition increasingly gaining ground in the Philippines, specially in the more affluent communities of the urban areas, some have started carousing the night before. In fact, Halloween or not, those honoring their dead often spent the night before November 1 in the cemetery, eating, drinking, gambling, singing and sometimes fighting. Violently enough to add to the permanent population of the cemetery. Thus, in recent years, alcoholic beverages, weapons and karaoke and videoke machines have been banned from the premises. Cops and bomb-sniffing dogs are all around the place, what with the threat of terrorism of the non-Halloween kind. All Saints’ Day has therefore been recently characterized by more solemnity than I had been used to.
On this day every year, at least (not counting Ash Wednesday and Good Friday), Filipino Catholics are forced to confront their own mortality. And what do they do ? They make it a fiesta and grab the chance to catch up on gossip.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad; whether its a form of denial or it’s a healthy way of relating to death, as just another part of life. I suspect it’s the latter. With recent events being what they are, death has been very much at the foreground of most Pinoys’ minds, whether here or abroad. You go to the mall, even an upscale one, and you get blasted to bits by a clogged septic tank and/or faulty design, construction and maintenance. With malls like the ones run by the Ayala corporations, who needs Al-Qaeda, Jamaya Islamiya or the Abu Sayyaf Group ? One votes at the recent barangay elections and may be beaten up or shot in the process. Death, specially the sudden kind, is really part of the Filipino experience.
“Hora incerta, Mors Certa.”
– Hour Uncertain, Death Certain. Read the rest of this entry »