Religious Traditions practiced in the Philippines

The week that has gone by is a busy one for the residents of this region. The Christians celebrated the Holy Week, while the Muslims focused on the Islamic traditions of Ramadan. Last week in particular deviated from the heavy traffic that local people complained of, and instead were faced with almost empty streets, few activities in schools and offices, and surprise (!), even commercial establishments complain of the few customers who needed their services. To make more impact on the celebration of these two important events –starting Thursday until Monday of Holy Week was declared by the national government as non-working holidays. That makes 4 continues holidays with the April 9 celebration of Araw ng Kagitingan thrown in as the 5th to give more time for those who have gone to the province to relax and organize family reunions.

Lets look at how the two very important religious events were celebrated in this region. The Christian Holy Week started on Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, also called Passion Sunday, is the final Sunday of Lent. It is the day when the faithful remember and celebrate the triumphant arrival of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem as Savior and King. Waving palm leaves or Palaspas is a reenactment of Jesus’s entrance to Jerusalem.

On the other hand, Muslims started the Ramadan with the sighting of the moon. Seeing the moon signaled the start of fasting season. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim year, when Muslims do not eat between the rising and setting of the sun. Most of the activities are held during the night.

In preparation for the breaking of the fast, several areas in Cotabato City were opened to those who would like to sell food and other merchandise. However, this year, the areas open for festivities were too many. It could be a throwback from last year’s Ramadan when the planning was too limited for the demands of people. This time, it exceeded the city’s expectation.

The Catholic church has been critical of Filipinos who use the Holy Week to soak up in the beaches, or attend family reunions. But some may look at these traditions as their opportunity to practice some religious rituals which cannot be done in Metro Manila. Some of these rituals are the following:

Participating in “Pabasa ng Pasyon

Some devout Catholics practice the “pabasa” by constantly chanting the “Pasyong Mahal,” a 16thcentury epic poem narrating the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Visiting seven churches during ‘Visita Iglesia’

The Seven Churches Visitation or commonly known as “Visita Iglesia” is a tradition that dates back during the Spanish time. Considered to be one of the most common practices when remembering Christ’s passion, Filipino Catholics visit seven churches on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Staging of Senakulo

Senakulo was derived from the Spanish word cenáculo which means the “place where Jesus Christ celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples.” And in the Philippines, it’s already part of the Lenten tradition to stage a Senakulo, a play depicting the life and passion of Jesus Christ. This is practiced in the Tagalog provinces which I had the opportunity to witness. After the Senaculo, those with statues that corresponds with the stations of the cross are paraded around the town. MC

Afterquite a long while, this writer attended the Easter Vigil Mass last Black Saturday evening with my wife at our local parish church.

As is tradition, it started with the blessing of the new fire and the preparation, lighting, and procession of the paschal candle followed by the sung Easter Proclamation or the Exsultet. The readings during the Liturgy of the Word, which are more in number than the usual, starts with one from Genesis, how God created the heavens and the earth, all living things on land, in the air, and in the waters, including man and woman, and how “he found it very good.”

The reading was followed by a reading of Psalm 104 proclaiming the goodness and greatness of God’s creation, and asking him: “send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.”

We have always been taught that Lent and the Holy Week are times to reflect on our lives, recognize our sinfulness, pray for forgiveness, and make amends. We are also reminded that our actions have both personal and communal consequences, that these actions not only impact our personal life but the community as well. That Black Saturday evening at the Easter Vigil Mass, listening to the creation story from Genesis and Psalm 104, this writer can only agree: we need God to send his spirit and renew the face of the earth for we have changed it so much to the point of disaster with our ways.

The recent report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body that advises the United Nations on rising temperatures, has a dire message: “the world is approaching irreversible levels of global warming, with catastrophic consequences becoming inevitable.”

The IPCC report warned that “every increment” of global warming will escalate multiple and concurrent hazards: more intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall, and other weather extremes which further increase risks for human health and ecosystems; people dying from extreme heat; increased climate-driven food and water insecurity. Other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, would make the situation unmanageable, the IPCC report warned further.

Mark Howden, a climate change professor at The Australian National University, who was a vice-chair for a previous IPCC working group and review editor for the current synthesis report said: “We’re actually leaving a world behind us that is actually less safe than the world hinking A loud

THEfamily of Atty. Datu Michael O. Mastura invited me to the launching of his book, The Rulers of Maguindanao in Modern History 1515 – 1903: Continuity and Change in a Traditional Realm in the Southern Philippines.

Pagana Kutawato’s Convention Hall was fully-booked on Thursday and attendees were “intellectually full” two hours to Iftar time with messages pouring in from scholars and primarily from the author himself—of a “longue durée” work both in terms of coverage in historiography (388 years) and the decades of its making from 1973 with all the intervening events stalling or rerouting plans and activities, 50 years in the process. (longue durée Fr. Means, long period).

Carlos C. Bautista caloyb@gmail.com which we inherited, people of my generation.”

Our very own Catholic Bishops have said the same of our own situation in the Philippines in a pastoral letter they released in 1998. They recalled how the Philippines before: “a country covered by a blanket of trees, with over 7,500 species of flowering plants, not to mention animals, birds and insects; beautiful islands surrounded by blue seas, fertile mangroves and enchanting coral reefs, were a world of color and beauty with fish of every shape and hue darting in and out around the delicate coral reefs.”

But our forests, have since been laid waste; our seas and rivers are either dying or already dead due to erosion, chemical and other forms of pollution, and dumping of mine tailings; all “in the name of progress.”

According to independent think-tank Ibon Foundation, the current forest cover of the Philippines is only twentythree percent of land area, below the fifty-four percent needed to sustain its ecosystem. Added to this, land and soil quality is severely degraded, 5.2 million hectares of agricultural lands have been eroded, water stress level ratio is at twenty-nine percent which is way above the thirteen percent global standard.

We truly need God to send His spirit and renew the face of our common home, our mother earth, if we and those coming after us are to survive and inherit a safe future. And that spirit of God will best work in us and through us, every human being. Change us and change the way we relate to the world around us.

In his May 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis said: “Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home…. All is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good and making a new start.” is published

Let us pray that God’s spirit fills us this Easter with the courage to choose again what is good and make that new start.

Fr. Rogelio Tabuada, OMI, Chief-Executive-Officer

Eva Kimpo - Tan, Editor-in-Chief

Edwin O. Fernandez, News Editor

Gemma A. Peñaflor, Administration and Marketing Executive

Julito P. Torres, Circulation Officer

Karl John B. Daniel, Graphic-Layout Artist

COTABATO CITY / ARMM CORRESPONDENTS

John M. Unson, Ferdinandh B. Cabrera, Charlie C. Señase

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CARTOONIST

Lourd Jim Diazon

In his new book, Datu Mike truly succeeds in harmonizing the difficult-to-mix blend of conventional historiography vis-à-vis the traditional Tarsilan and the Luwaran Law of the “agama court”—the kind of scholarly work that western thinkers would not even dare explore 70 years after the American colonial government had stored Dr. Najeeb Saleeby’s Treatises on Moro Law, History and Religion.

Indeed, no other scholars could ever match that; not in my time and in many lifetimes. For one, the antique Tarsilan inherited by Datu Mastura (who later was anointed Sultan Hjaban Mastura in 1926) did not accidentally fall into the author’s hands being a direct descendant of one of the most successful leaders in Southeast Asia—Sultan Muhammad Dipatuan Kudarat.

But like Saleeby, Datu Mike has decoded the ancient traditional documents (Tarsila and Luwaran) from their original Kiliman texts—under high risk of incurring respiratory disease from microscopic dusts generated in centuries by termites, literal bookworms.

One might see a good stop in there on a thought of having a perfect harmony of the rare mixture of history and the Tarsilan. But sail on to find the “Treasure of Magindanao”: The book’s “third section” is the virtual annotation of the Muslim law, the Luwaran of Magindanao, as applied and imposed by the rulers of Magindanao in the traditional agama court in 380 years.

The book evolves on multidiscipline works that delve beyond historiography, through its rare presentation of Magindanao’s societal aspects from the viewpoints of cultural anthropology and political anthropology

I borrowed the words “Treasure of Maguindanao” from the foreword of Dr. Patricio Abinales, professor of history at University of Hawaii-Manoa), and author of the book “Making Mindanao, Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State.

Datu Mike Mastura’s son, MP Atty. Ishak V. Mastura says Saleeby’s works (The History of Magindanao) served as an “overview,” but that the main material-based sources of his father were the traditional materials.

Ishak recalled during the launching that their family, he and his older and younger siblings, Datu Dustin V. Masrura (administrator of The Sultan Kudarat Islamic Academy) who is a year older, and their youngest sister (now Prosecutor Mariam Bai V. Mastura), lived on subsistence from their father’s scholarship grant in the 1970s.

Journalist Carolyn O. Arguillas, editor in-chief of MindaNews recalls having the original manuscript (which saw print in 1984, The Muslim Filipino Experience: A Collection of Essays). Trying to convince Atty. Datu Michael O. Mastura to get the materials published Carol recalls having declined the original manuscript in favor of a photocopy. Mrs. Lourdes Hadji Salama Veloso Mastura, Carol said, delivered the photocopy to her office in Davao. The author said it was Carol who encouraged him to have the works published—and later it came into a matter of choice between the UP Press and the Ateneo de Manila University Press. He chose the latter that his two lawyerchildren went to in their law studies.

Just as Carol noticed with her usual diligence for raw copies, I was cautioned by Datu Mike about spots of typographic error that went unchecked at a staff level too busy in 1979 (doubling as proof-readers) and attending to main tasks in all his many diverse fields of engagement. Among his staff-members were Pat Buencamino, Ms. Sanchez, Malinumbal Siti Mariam Salasal, Elena Damaso, and Monicam Nakan-Mamogkat