Holy Week reading

Historians read differently. While most people start with the so-called “Front Matter” (Title Page, Introduction, Table of Contents, etc.) historians usually start at the back of a book; checking out the Bibliography or the list of sources (manuscript, printed, oral, and digital) used in the writing of the book. Historians judge a book not by its cover but by its “Back Matter.” While normal people will consider reading a dictionary as penance for the sins of the past year, I find it an absolute joy browsing through early vocabularios or diccionarios of Tagalog from the 17th to 19th centuries. Added to my unusual taste in reading matter are bibliographies (lists of books or sources, often annotated, that form the basis of a given subject). Bibliographies published in the early 20th century from the likes of Wenceslao E. Retana, Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, and James Alexander Robertson enabled me to talk authoritatively about books I have not read fully nor handled physically.

Last Palm Sunday, I was invited by a friend to a “pabasa” in his garage in Cardona, transformed into a “kapilya” with an altar dominated by a crucifix and three life-size processional images of saints with their heavy beards and equally heavy velvet vestments embroidered with gold and silver thread. Instead of flowers, the altar was festooned with “palaspas” in many various designs. There was a long table with people reading from, and chanting, the Pasion text in old Tagalog. Christ was being mocked and beaten when I arrived around 1 p.m. and if I cared to stay on until the evening I would hear the burial of Christ, chanted with accompaniment by the town band.

Four decades ago, during my first immersion into Philippine Studies, I assisted a visiting ethnomusicologist who recorded an entire Pasion in Angeles, Pampanga, over two days. At the time, I learned to distinguish different tones and tunes utilized by the readers. There was plain chant, there was one that was lilting, another was used when a penitent or flagellant entered the chapel. We were told that in the Malolos passion play or “sinakulo,” music that accompanied the scene of the death of the Virgin Mary was a rowdy drinking song like “roll out the barrels” that was replaced by “Anchors Aweigh!” when the Virgin ascends into heaven. For the Resurrection, “Lupang Hinirang” or the national anthem. This is the charm of our folk religiosity that is more Filipino than Roman Catholic, when the foreign was “indio-genized” and made our own.

At the Cardona pabasa last Sunday, I told people at lunch that this time I focused more on the words rather than the tune, fascinated by the unusual turns of phrase in Tagalog difficult to translate into English. The Pasion text in Cardona reminded me of the first time I heard the short-cut passion and death of Christ in a chanted novena during a wake in Poblacion or Old Makati. I heard it again, in the background, while on the phone with a classmate at a wake in Malabon. Of Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, the novena prompt for a response was “Hesus ko, alang-alang sa masaganang dugo na iyong ipinawis nang manalangin ka sa Halamanan.” When Jesus was slapped on the face, “Hesus ko alang-alang sa tampal na tinanggap ng iyong kagalang-galang na mukha.” When he carried the cross on the road of bitterness, “Hesus ko alang-alang sa paglakad mo sa lansangan ng kapaitan, na ang Cruz ay iyong kababaw-babaw.” When he was stripped of his garments, “Hesus ko alang-alang sa damit mong natigmak na dugo na biglang pinaknit at hinubad sa iyong katawan ng mga tampalasan.”

Included in the novena is the Litany of the Virgin Mary that rendered, “Mother Most Chaste” as “Inang Walang Malay sa Kahalayan.” Most complicated was “Rosa Mystica,” translated as “Rosang bulaklak, na di mapuspos ng bait ng tao ang halaga” (A rose whose worth cannot be known by human reason). Tower of Ivory was rendered as “Torreng Garing” while “Singular Vessel of Devotion” became “Sisidlan ng mahal at tangi na makusaing sumunod sa Panginoong Diyos.” Mother Most Admirable became “Inang Kataka-taka.”

My Holy Week reading was “Pasyon Genealogy and Annotated Bibliography” by Rene B. Javellana, SJ, published in 1983. It lists 31 texts from the earliest extant by Gaspar Aquino de Belen “Mañga Panalañging Pactatagobilin sa Calolova nang tavong nag hihiñgalo: Ang may catha sa vican Castila ang M. R. P. Thomas de Villa Castin sa mahal na Compañia ni Iesus. At ysinalin sa vican Tagalog ni d[on] Gaspar Aquino de Belen. At ysinonod dito ang mahal na Passion ni Iesu Christong P[añginoon] Natin na tolá; at ypinananagano sa cataastaasang poong Iesus Nazareno” (1760), to the most popular that can still be bought on Shopee today being the “Pasion Henesis” because it has an account from Genesis. It is also known as “Pasion Pilapil” for Mariano Pilapil, not the author but a priest who wrote preliminaries to the text “Casaysayan nang Pasiong Mahal ni Hesucristong Panginoon Natin na Sucat Ipag-alab nang Puso nang Sinomang Babasa” (1814). Javellana provides a road map to all these old texts, a real penitence to the uninterested but engaging to the scholar.

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