Nazareno: A change of heart, a change of question

Whether on television or in person, the Nazareno festivities in Quiapo, Manila, are nothing but spectacular. The swarms of people from all walks of life accompanying the iconic image of Christ carrying the cross, as it is made to journey back to the church from the Quirino Grandstand, and in many occasions, even trying to commandeer its pre-arranged route, is always moving, even unnerving, an expression of shared religious fervor and an assertion of the potential power of collective movements, both.

As one who used to go to Quiapo on the feast of the Nazareno and considers it formative of one’s creative consciousness and practice, I have always been astonished by how people, the common folk mostly, drove the complex enterprise. There was to behold, of course, the church, designed by Juan Nakpil in the 1930s, and later expanded by Jose Maria Zaragoza in the 1980s, both National Artists for Architecture; and the Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno itself, the fabled miraculous image blackened by fire and time that was brought to Manila from Acapulco, Mexico in 1606. However, it was mainly the people, from near and far, and sometimes in an observably brash and raucous behavior, who made the fiesta. People animate the shrine's very life. 

On feast days, they all sported the trademark maroon shirts hemmed with yellow on the sleeves, usually freshly screen-printed with the likeness of the icon. At times with their children in tow, they carried banners that introduced the names of their balangay or community of devotees and/or replicas of the Nazareno. They walked barefoot, unperturbed by street filth nor blazing heat. Some went as far as pushing into the crowds in order to hold the rope that moved the andas, or climbing onto the vehicle and the other mamamasan or the icon bearers, even to just briefly touch the Nazareno when blessed opportunity allowed it.

Year in and year out, as the first Sunday of January comes, the designated duration of festivities after the Christmas holidays, we hear the same question: why do people keep on going to Quiapo? We must remember that it is not only on feast days that they flock to the church, but also every Friday for the marathon novenas. Fortunately, the Quiapo Parish now maintains a daily social media streaming for those who are distant, infirm, or out of the county. The Parish, too, also deploys Nazareno replicas around the country, many of them carrying pieces from the original icon as they bring the devotion closer to people. What keeps people coming, then?

Thinkers mull over the question and say the same thing over and over: Philippine life remains to be precarious in general, and people resonate with the icon's regal display of suffering, a paradox that endears. A few weeks back, this figure was just an innocent bambino in swaddling clothes, a messiah born in a manger.

Meanwhile, this icon, as it is dressed in a royal robe of red, the color of kings, humbly and acceptingly carries the burden of his mission to redeem his people from sin. People who troop to Quiapo come for various reasons. Whatever their reasons, they all seek the Nazareno and must be seeing in the icon their own human condition, complex and uncertain. The Nazareno is not only one with them, but also one of them. After all, he is the Christ who suffers.

We are also being told about the aptness of the feast’s designation in the first week of the year. It conveniently reminds that one's fate in the new year must be entirely entrusted to God. Also, it liturgically culminates advent and our spiritual anticipation for the second coming, our final salvation. We are being chided to continue changing our ways, to fully emulate the holiness the icon represents. To me, however, a change of heart also requires a change of question. What have we done about our lot?

To ask this question is to look at the Nazareno in some other way, to reconsider this striking image of the Christian passion as a means to deeply examine not only human suffering but more importantly, action. Once, the historian Reynaldo Ileto (1979), remarked that the pasyon, the chanting of the narrative poem of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection in every Holy Week's pabasa, has lent the populace “a language to vent ill feelings,” a literary distillation that helped them awaken from their sorry, colonially repressed state under the Spanish empire.

What has the Nazareno really granted us in our pamimintuho, apart from the promise of answered prayers, of signs and wonders of hope and a better life amidst the prevailing bleakness of the world? It might help to read rather more closely our Nazareno devotion. For a long time, it actually has been calling us to take part in collective action, reminiscent of how early common folk accompanied each other in the preparation of their loob as the revolution against the Spaniards was about to spark. They went to do lakaran, they walked with each other, literally and figuratively, amidst the vicissitudes of colonial life. There is indeed something in the Nazareno pilgrims' often defiant stance as they moved in unison along the streets that we seem to fail to see. 

The Nazareno must be inviting us, now more than ever, to examine our conscience, our budhi. What have we done? What are we doing? It is rather simple to answer for oneself, after all we are naturally self-seeking. What have we done for others? What have we done with others? It’s quite easy to see Christ’s own response to this: he took up the cross and offered his life for friends. Are we, even in our small ways, able to do this? Are we able to liberate ourselves and others from the perils of everyday life and even of history? Some may say that this is all a matter of faith, of pananampalataya. Should it then just be confined to the spiritual realm?

There is something in pananampalataya that helps further unpack the phenomenon. It combines the prefix “pang” to “sampalataya,” and denotes a strong, unquestioning reliance on a transcendent figure or a body of doctrine. Most Filipino dictionaries simply characterize “sampalataya” as faith. Could it be possible that it is also an amalgam of three words, “sam,” “pala,” and “taya”? “Sam” abbreviates isa, one, any person then, while “pala” indicates persistence. Combined with “taya,” risk or gamble, could the word also refer to one who is “palataya,” resolute in taking leaps of faith? Faith-making then is not just belief but also agency. It seeks to manifest heaven on earth.                 

Now, no matter how long the traslacion, the Nazareno always comes home to Quiapo. This pilgrimage, like life, is a cycle. However, in our rumination of this age-old panata, we need not run in circles only baffled by zeal and mystified by spectacle. To only ask why people keep coming to the feast in droves, or why the numbers keep increasing yearly, is in a way only interpreting our world of woes, this valley of tears. The point, pace Marx, is to change it. Ora, prayer, must come with labora, work. Faith that matters is one that genuinely transforms not just the self but larger realities.

Louie Jon A. Sánchez is an award-winning poet, literary critic and historian, and translator. He is an Associate Professor of Broadcast Communication at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman. He is the author of Abangán: Mga Pambungad na Resepsiyon sa Kultura ng Teleserye (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2022) and Ang Drama ng Ating Búhay: Isang Kultural na Kasaysayan ng Teleserye (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2024).