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.
A Rich Cargo of Fruit on the Way to Market
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?
A Family Group and Home in the Settled Interior
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.