YESTERDAY?S Inquirer had a front page article by Donna Pazzibugan, with a title, ??Pabasa? is for meditating, not loud wailing.? The article was based on an interview with Monsignor Pedro Quitorio, media director of the Catholic Bishops? Conference of the Philippines, where the bishop clarified that the Pabasa ? a chanted ritual that recounts Christ?s suffering ? was meant for meditation.

?It should be shared because it?s communitarian, but it should not be a forced sharing,? Quitorio was quoted as saying. He also said the Pabasa should not be ?done for show,? and decried the way politicians end up sponsoring a Pabasa, or having people paid. Asked what he thought about the possibilities of using rap for the Pabasa, he said there was no prohibition, as long as its meaning was retained.

A Pabasa rap wouldn?t be surprising, although I can imagine how disconcerting it would probably be for many neighborhoods. The story of Christ?s Passion has found many forms of expressions, across cultures and history. Germany?s Passion plays, enacted in the streets, are probably the most well known. In the Philippines, the Moriones of Marinduque is an innovation, retelling Christ?s Passion from the perspective of one of the Roman centurions.

In our own modern times, we?ve seen several films, many forgettable, about Christ?s Passion. A rap Pabasa wouldn?t be totally new considering that there has already been a ?Jesus Christ Superstar,? done on stage and on film, and still re-staged from time to time.

The Passion plays, and our Pabasa (sometimes also called Pasyon), are not just religious rituals. They are intended literally to indoctrinate the public, which is instilling doctrine. Given how central Christ?s Passion and death are to Christian doctrines, the Pabasa is there to hammer down the messages around Christ?s redemptive act. (Note that there are several versions of the Pasyon, including a Pasyon Henesis, which actually starts with the Genesis, in effect condensing the entire Bible into a Holy Week Pabasa.)

Folk epics

Some years back, the historian Reynaldo Ileto made waves with his book ?Pasyon and Revolution,? where he suggested that the Pasyon played a strong role in Filipino anti-colonial struggles. He proposed that the Pabasa took on the functions of pre-colonial epic poems that were chanted out by village elders. These older epic poems were passed on orally, and took days to complete. The poems were usually stories about a community?s origins, their heroes and heroines as well as villains. The themes were universal ? the triumph of good over evil, the need to respect nature, the gods, the elderly ? but the stories took many forms.

The Pasyon, Ileto proposed, allowed Filipinos a language to express their oppression and suffering, as well as a vision of liberation.

Ileto?s thesis was intriguing. Remember that until fairly recently, Holy Week in the Philippines was extremely silent, with the elders in many places imposing very strict rules on silence, on fasting, on self-discipline (no bathing on Good Friday!), and on the Pabasa reading. There was no escaping the Pabasa?s wailing chants, allowing (forcing?) people to reflect on its messages, and more importantly, to project and relate to, i.e., the suffering peasant could see himself in an agonizing Christ.

?Water Buffalo Theology?

The power of religions and religious rituals lies in the way they relate to people?s daily concerns. The rituals? power draws as well from the way their symbols relate to local culture. The Pasyon was chanted in local languages and its length and cadence as well as story line (Christ being persecuted, executed, then rising from the dead) reminded people of their folk epics.

I wanted to relate all this to the work of a Japanese Protestant theologian, Kosue Koyama, who passed away last week. Koyama is familiar to many Filipino Catholic and Protestant social action activists from the 1970s because of his book ?Water Buffalo Theology,? published by Maryknoll in 1974. I had my own copy, which I think was a local reprint. As good books go, it went around many times, and then never returned, but I still remember many of the themes (with the help of a bit of Internet research, which still couldn?t get me to the entire book but did provide tantalizing, and nostalgic, excerpts from the book).

One chapter title summarizes it all: ?Aristotelian salt and Buddhist pepper.? This was Koyama?s way of saying that Christianity (with its Aristotelian roots) had to be articulated in a culturally appropriate way (for example, looking for symbols in Buddhism, if you were working in Thailand).

Koyama?s own cultural background explains how Aristotle and Buddha came into the picture: he grew up in Japan, converting to Christianity, receiving his theology education in the United States, and serving for several years as a missionary in Thailand.

Koyama said that in the Asian context, symbols like the water buffalo and sticky rice, were important to bring into discussions of religion. He also pointed out the need to look at differences in spirituality. He talked of a ?cool? Asian spirituality and a ?hot? Western Christian tradition. ?Cool? meant a more cyclical view of the world and of God while ?hot? was more historically-situated, more linear.

Some of Koyama?s writings have been mildly criticized as still basically reflecting his own Western training. The idea of a ?cool? and serene Asian religious spirituality is of course a stereotype, as recent visitors to Thailand will attest. The water buffalo, too, isn?t exactly the most appropriate spiritual symbol for Asians, given its association with mud and a hard life. (Note how in the Philippines ?carabao English? connotes inferiority.)

But I still like the water buffalo metaphor, maybe because I?ve always liked the carabao. My dissertation for my veterinary medicine degree was actually on this gentle brute of a creature.

If I were asked to characterize Christianity in the Philippines today, I?d say we have a mix. The Pabasa shows a loud and noisy side that reflects a charismatic tendency to our religiosity ? you know, the need to be filled with the Spirit. On the other hand, I can imagine the Pabasa being chanted (or rapped or rocked) by a group drawn along the road by a carabao, three kilometers (let?s go metric) an hour, okay with sticky rice and mangoes. I?m still drawing from Koyama, who had a book entitled ?Three Mile An Hour God,? to emphasize how God moves at our walking speed. I?d modify that and say, at the speed of the carabao.

During Holy Week and beyond, we plod along on a carabao-drawn cart. It can make us terribly impatient, unless we listen hard to the messages of the Pasyon.