As the new year unfolds, millions of devotees all over the country prepare for the feast of the Black Nazarene. Every Jan. 9, people from all walks of life gather to join the largest annual procession in the country. The procession almost always results in injuries or casualties as devotees try to make their way near and touch the life-sized, wooden statue of Christ, believing that it would serve as atonement for their sins—or hoping for some miracle. Most of them belong with the masses who have been through the hardest times; a few are pretty well-off who have been going through a lot of sufferings or could be there out of desperation.
Whatever their reason may be, the fact is the feast of the Poong Nazareno has become a mass gathering of people united in faith, though driven there by various, separate individual interests. Yes, the poor, who have nothing but their faith, may chant, “Viva Señor!” in unison while walking barefoot for miles. But at the end of the day, they need to go back to their shanties with their families and endure the basic social problems all by themselves.
For a country ravaged by hundreds of years of direct colonial and at present by neocolonial oppression and deception, the Black Nazarene feast is of no use. We don’t really need something that will only further enslave us to our past. What the masses need to understand, so that they would know where and how they can use their energies collectively to change their impoverished conditions, is that their predicament is caused by the very socioeconomic system they live in.
This year’s media coverage of the feast of the Black Nazarene will once more be broadcast to the world and show how faith is really our “bread and butter” even as most of us neither have bread nor butter nor anything else on our plates. The exceptional devotion of the Filipinos will once again headline the news, and I just can imagine how glad the ruling class would be.
—DANIEL ALOC, tierra.giya@yahoo.com