The Filipino's Christmas Festivities and His Religion
Autumn Weather--Winter Weather--A Christmas Tree for
Filipino Children--A Christmas Eve Ball--Early Mass on
Christmas--Visitors--Attitude of the Filipino to Religion--His Ideas
of the Fine Arts Formed by the Church--Joys and Sorrows Carried to
Church--Religion Not a Source of Party Animosity--Filipinos More
Likely to Become Rationalists than Protestants.
What with typhoons, earthquakes, talk of insurrection, the novelty
of military life about us, and the effort to comprehend the native,
the days sped quickly by at Capiz. October and November came and went
in alternate stages of storm and sunshine. For days at a time the
fine rain drove like a snow storm before a northeast wind, and it
was difficult to realize that the deluge was the remnant of a great
blizzard which, starting on the vast frozen plains of Siberia, had
swept southward, till crossing the China Sea it gathered up a warm
flood and inundated us with it. We spoke of its being autumn at home,
but we could not realize the fact. When clear days came, they were so
warm, so glinting with sunlight, that it seemed all the world must
be bathed in glory. It would rain steadily for a week or ten days,
and then there would come one of those clear days when every breath of
vapor was blown out of the sky, the heavens were a field of turquoise,
and the mountain chains were printed against them in softest purple.
With the month of December the weather changed, the rain ceased, and
the dry chill winter of the tropics set in. The nights were so cold
that one was glad to nestle into bed under a blanket. The northeast
wind still blew, but fresh and cool from the sea, and hardly a cloud
floated in the sky. We drove often out to the open beach where the
surf came in gloriously, and the great mountain island of Sibullian,
away to the north, hung half cloud, half land in the sky.
Christmas was near at hand, and we began to think of turkey and
other essentials. Presents to home folk had to be mailed early in
November, and after that an apathy came on us. Thanks to Mrs. C----,
the energetic wife of a military man of private fortune, Christmas
was destined to wear, after all, an Anglo-Saxon hue.
The Filipinos do not understand Santa Claus or the Christmas Tree. The
giving of presents is by no means a universal custom of theirs,
and such as are given are given on the festival of _Tres Reyes_, or
The Three Kings, some six or eight days after Christmas. Mrs. C----
decided to give a Christmas festival to certain Filipino children,
and she actually managed to disinter, from the Chinese shops, a box
of tiny candles, and the little devices for fastening them to the
tree. No Christmas pine could be found, but she got a lemon tree,
glossy of foliage. With the candles and strings of popcorn and colored
paper flowers, this was converted into quite the natural article. She
invited several of us to dinner on Christmas Eve, and we went early
to see the celebration.
By half-past six o'clock, when the tropical dusk had closed down, the
little guests began to arrive, each in charge of a servant. There were
twenty-five twinkling, berry-eyed babelets with their satiny black down
hanging like bangs over their eyes, and their tubby little stomachs
covered with fine garments and bound about with gorgeous sashes. They
squatted on their little heels and sucked their little thumbs, and
waited in wondering patience for this strange mystery to occur. As many
American children would have made the air noisy for a block around.
The windows of the house were thrown wide open, and the sliding doors
which pull back all around the base boards were open too, so that
the whole interior was visible from the street below. There a great
crowd had gathered, men, women, and children, beggars, and many of
the elder brothers and sisters of the favored guests within. Nearly
every child was displaying a toy that seems to be the special evidence
of Christmas in the Philippines--some sort of animal made of tissue
paper and mounted on wheels. It is lighted within like a paper lantern,
and can be dragged about. Great is the pride in these transparencies,
and great the ambition displayed in the construction. Pigs, dogs, cats,
birds, elephants, and tigers, of most weird and imposing proportions
they are, and no few feuds and jealousies grew out of their possession.
When the coverings were drawn off the tree, and the candles were
lighted, the crowd in the street waxed quite vociferous, but
the babies merely uttered little ecstatic sighs. They took their
presents and turned the toys over gravely, and sucked gingerly at the
sweets. Then one by one they marched out to join their relatives and
the transparencies.
We had a good dinner and drank to the homeland and a merry
Christmas. Afterwards Captain C---- leaned out of the window and cried
to us to look at the snow. The moon was just overhead, ringed round
with a field of cirrus clouds. They were piled one on top of another,
glistening and cool, with the sheen of real snow by moonlight. I have
never seen such an effect in our own land, and only once subsequently
here.
There was a ball that night, and we were all going. While we were at
dinner, the waits came in and sang in the hallway just as in merry
England they sing under the window. But if the English waits sing
as badly as the Filipino ones, then the poetry of the wait songs is
gone from me forever. These of ours were provided with tambourines,
and they sang an old Latin chant with such throaty voices that it
sounded as if the tones were being dragged out by the roots.
By half-past nine the local band, or one of them--for most Filipino
towns rejoice in half a dozen--came round to escort us to the
hall. This attention was, as President Harper always declared of the
many donations to the University of Chicago, "utterly unsolicited on
our part," and was the result of a hope of largesse, and of a high
Filipino conception of doing honor to the stranger. Preceded by the
band and surrounded by a motley assembly of several hundred people,
the children dragging their transparencies with them, we strolled up
the quarter of a mile of street intervening between the Lieutenant
and Mrs. C----'s house and the Filipino mansion where the ball was
held. When we entered, the guests all rose to do us honor, and shortly
thereafter the rigadon was called.
The ball differed little in its essential features from other balls,
save that, owing to its being Christmas Eve, the Filipino men,
in accordance with some local tradition, discarded the usual black
evening dress, and wore white trousers, high-colored undershirts, and
camisas, or outside Chino shirts, of gauzy piña or _sinamay_. This is
the ordinary garb of a workingman, and corresponds to the national
or peasant costume of European countries; and its use signifies a
tribute to nationality.
At midnight the church bells began to toll, and the three or four
hundred ball guests adjourned _en masse_ to the church. This building
is larger than any I can remember in America, except the churches
of Chicago and New York, and was packed with a dense throng. It was
lighted with perhaps two thousand candles, and was decked from lantern
to chapel with newly made paper flowers. The high altar had a front
of solid silver, and the great silver candlesticks were glistening
in the light.
The usual choir of men had given place to the waits with their
tambourines, though the pipe organ was occasionally used. The mass
was long and tedious, and I was chiefly interested in what I think
was intended to represent the Star of Bethlehem. This was a great
five-pointed star of red and yellow tissue paper, with a tail like a
comet. It was ingeniously fastened to a pulley on a wire which extended
from a niche directly behind the high altar to the organ loft at the
rear of the church. The star made schedule trips between the altar
and the loft, running over our heads with a dolorous rattle. The
gentleman who moved the mechanism was a sacristan in red cotton
drawers and a lace cassock, who sat in full view in the niche behind
the high altar. There seemed to be a spirited rivalry between him and
the tambourine artists as to which could contribute the most noise,
and I think a fair judge would have granted it a drawn battle.
Mass was over at one, and we went back to our ball, and the supper
which was awaiting us. I shall speak hereafter of feasts, so will give
no time to this particular one. Dancing was resumed by half-past two,
and shortly afterwards I gave up and went home. Sleep was about to
visit my weary eyelids when that outrageous band swept by, welcoming
the dawn by what it fancied was patriotic music--"There'll be a Hot
Time," "Just One Girl," "After the Ball," etc. It passed, and I was
once more yielding to slumber, when the church bells began, and some
enterprising Chinese let off fire crackers. I gave up the attempt
to rest, and rose and dressed. Then the sacristan from the church
appeared in his scarlet trousers and cassock. He carried a silver
dish, which looked like a card receiver surmounted by a Maltese cross
and a bell. The sacristan rang this bell, which was most melodious,
went down on one knee, and I deposited a peso in the dish. He uttered
a benediction and disappeared. After him came the procession of common
people, adults and children, shyly uttering their _Buenas Pascuas_. We
had, forewarned by the sagacious Romoldo, laid in a store of candy,
cigarettes, cakes, and wine. So to the children a sweet, and to the
parents a cigarette and a drink of wine,--thus was our Christmas cheer
dispensed. Later we ate our Christmas dinner with chicken in lieu of
turkey, and cranberry sauce and plum pudding from the commissary. The
Filipinos honored the day by decorating their house-fronts with flags
and bunting, and at night by illuminating them with candles in glass
shades stuck along the window sills.
The church in the provinces is at once the place of worship, the
theatre, the dispenser of music and art, the place where rich and
poor meet, if not on the plane of equality, in relations that bridge
the gulf of material prosperity with the dignity of their common faith.
So far as the provincial Filipino conceives of palaces and
architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a
church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public
buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful
churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may
find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous
interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their
interiors rich with black and white tiling and with colored glass. The
silver facings of the altars and their melodious bell chimes are the
most patent links which bind the Philippines to an older civilization.
As far as he has ever come in contact with beautiful music, the
provincial Filipino has met it in the church. Nearly every one boasts
its pipe organ imported from Europe, and in the choir lofts you may
find the great vellum-leaved folios of manuscript music, with their
three-cornered, square, and diamond-shaped notes. They know little
of the masses of Mozart, Gounod, or more modern composers, but they
know the Gregorian chants, and the later compositions of the Middle
Ages. Often badly rendered--for nowhere are voices more misused than
in the Philippines,--their music is nevertheless grand and inspiring.
On the walls of churches and conventos too are found pictures in
oil, often gloomy, full of tortures and death, as Spanish paintings
incline to be, yet essentially true art--pictures which it is to be
hoped will survive the inundation of American commercial energy. The
extract-of-beef advertisements and the varied "girls" of all pursuits
have found their way into the Philippines; and the Filipino, to our
sorrow be it said, takes kindly to them.
So far as the Filipino knows pageantry, it is the pageantry of the
Church. He knows no civic processions, no industrial pomp, such as
exploits itself in the Mardi Gras at New Orleans, or the Veiled Prophet
of St. Louis. He is even a stranger to the torchlight procession of
politics, and the military displays of our civil holidays. Neither
the Masons, nor the Knights Templars, nor the Knights of Pythias,
nor the Ancient Order of Hibernians, with their plumes and banners,
have any perceptible foothold in the Philippines. But in Holy Week and
certain other great festival or penitential seasons of the Church, the
great religious processions take place--floats sheathed in bunting
and decked with innumerable candles in crystal shades, carrying
either the altar of the Virgin or some of the many groups of figures
picturing events in the life and passion of the Saviour. Almost every
provincial family of wealth owns one of these cars, and the wooden
figures surmounted by wax heads, which constitute the group. At the
proper seasons the figures are clothed in gorgeous raiment decked
with jewels, and the car is put at the service of the Church for use
in the procession. The floats are placed about a hundred yards apart,
and between them the people form in two parallel lines, one on each
side of the street, every person carrying a lighted candle. When there
are twenty or thirty floats, and half as many bands, the glitter and
brilliancy of it all strikes even our satiated minds. What must it
be to the untravelled child of the soil?
When the Filipinos win a fight or an election, or fall heirs to
any particular luck, they do not express their enthusiasm as we do
in fire crackers, noise, and trades processions. They go sedately
to church and sing the Te Deum. And as we enjoy the theatre, not
merely for the play, but for the audience and its suggestions of a
people who have put care behind them and have met to exhibit their
material prosperity in silks and jewels, so do the Filipinos enjoy
the splendor of the congregation on feast days. The women are robed
as for balls in silken skirts of every hue--azure, rose, apple-green,
violet, and orange. Their filmy camisas and pañuelos are painted in
sprays of blossoms or embroidered in silks and seed pearls. On their
gold-columned necks are diamond necklaces, and ropes of pearls half
as big as bird's eggs; while the black lace mantillas are fastened
to their dusky heads by jewelled birds, and butterflies of emeralds,
sapphires, and diamonds.
The first time I went to church in Capiz and looked down from the choir
loft on the congregation, I could think of nothing but a kaleidoscope,
and the colored motes that fall continually into new forms and
shapes. When the results of the war had made themselves felt, and
the cholera had ravaged the province, this variety of color was lost,
and the congregation appeared a veritable house of mourning. This was
not, however, due to the appalling mortality, but to the Filipinos'
punctilious habit of putting on mourning. When death visits a family,
rich or poor, even the most distant relatives go into mourning,
and they cling to it for the required time.
If the reader will take into consideration all that I have said about
the part played by the Church in Filipino life, and at the same
time consider their insular isolation, their lack of familiarity
either through literature or travel with other civilizations,
he will readily perceive that religion means a totally different
thing in the Philippines from what it does in America, even in Roman
Catholic America.
To the complacent Protestant evangelist who smacks his lips in
anticipation of the future conquest of these Islands, I would
say frankly that there is no room for Protestantism in the
Philippines. The introspective quality which is inherent in true
Protestantism is not in the Filipino temperament. Neither are the vein
of simplicity and the dogmatic spirit which made the strength of the
Reformation. Protestantism will, of course, make some progress so long
as the fire is artificially fanned. There will always be found a few
who cling ardently to it. But most Americans with whom I have talked
(and their name is legion) have agreed with me in thinking that it
will never be strong here.
The attitude of the Filipino Catholic is at once tolerant
and positive. It is positive because without any research into
theological disputes the ordinary Filipino is emotionally loyal to
his Church and satisfied with the very positive promises which that
Church gives him. It ministers not only to his spiritual but to his
material needs on earth, and it promises him in no circumlocutory
terms salvation or damnation. It either gives him or denies him
absolution. He believes in it with the implicit faith of one who
has never investigated. On the other hand, he is tolerant with the
tolerance of one who has in his blood none of the acrimony begotten
by an ancestry alternately conquerors and victims through their
faith. The Filipino Catholic is far more tolerant than the Irish or
German Catholic. But the Philippines have known no battle of the Boyne,
no Thirty Years' War. When the abuses of the friars here led to revolt
and insurrection, the ultimate outcome of the struggle would have
been probably a religious secession from Rome, as well as political
severance from Spain, had not the accident of the Spanish-American
War precipitated us upon the scene, and settled the matter by the
immediate expulsion of the Spanish Government. The only real point of
infection left to create a sore in the new body Filipino--the friar
lands--was fortunately so treated by Secretary Taft that it ceased
to menace the State or threaten to mingle religion with government.
The Filipinos are tolerant of Protestantism because to them it is
still a purely religious and not a civil influence. They have not
killed or been killed for religion; for it they have not burnt the
homes of others, nor seen their own roof trees blaze; they have not
gained power or office through religion; they have neither won nor
lost elections through it. They have the same tolerance in religious
matters that they have in regard to the Copernican Theory or Kepler's
Laws. Religion, as pure religion, unrelated to land or land titles,
property or office, is no more the source of party animosity to them
than to us. Secretary Taft was wise enough to see that, and eliminated
the cause that threatened to make religion a vital question.
But if religion is not consciously vital to the Filipinos, as they
themselves would conceive and act on it (and I make the assertion in
the assumption that the reader understands as I do by _consciously
vital_ that for which the individual or the race is willing to die
singly or collectively), the unprejudiced observer must admit that
it is vital to their ultimate evolution, vital in just the sense that
any function is vital to one who is in need of it. As I said before,
they are not essentially a religious people; but the early Spanish
discoverers prescribed religion as a doctor prescribes a missing
ingredient in the food of an invalid, and the Filipinos have benefited
thereby, Roman Catholicism is just what the Filipino needs. He has no
zest for morbid introspection, he does not feel the need of bearing
testimony to cosmic truth, and in his lack of feeling that need is just
as helpless as the man whose system cannot manufacture the necessary
amount of digestive juices or red blood corpuscles; he is an invalid,
who must be supplied artificially with what his system lacks.
I am quite sure that the Catholic clergy, as represented by
the American Archbishop, bishops, and priests, are certain that
Protestantism holds no threats for the Church in the Philippines
other than that it may be the opening wedge in a schism which will
send the Filipino not only out of the Church, but to rationalism of
the most Voltairian hue. When danger really threatens the Church in
the Philippines, it will be no half-way danger. The Filipino will be
orthodox as he is now, formally, positively orthodox, or he will be
cynically heterodox. As God made him, he might in time have arrived
at the philosophy of Omar, "Drink, for ye know not why or when,"
or the identical philosophy of Epicurus, "Let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die." But the Church found him, and recognizing his
peculiarities artfully substituted her own phrase, "Eat and drink in
peace, for to-morrow you die in the full knowledge that pertains to
your salvation." Let no proselyting evangelist delude himself with the
idea that the Filipino has the mental bias which leads him to think,
"Let me neither eat nor drink till I know whence I came and whither
I go." That is the spirit of true Protestantism, which discovers a
new light on faith every decade and still is seeking, seeking for
the perfect light.
But if the Church in the Philippines is in no real danger from
Protestantism, it is in more or less imminent danger from two
sources--the necessity for reform in the Church itself, and the
growing national sense of the Filipinos, which leads them to demand
their own clergy, and to resent to the point of secession a too firm
hold by the new American clergy.