The Bearable Lightness of Pain: Crucifying Oneself in Pampanga Julius Bautista

Abstract This chapter describes ethnographic research conducted in Pampanga, the Philippines where, during Holy Week, hundreds of Catholic penitents self-mortify on Good Friday. These rituals, which include flagellation and nailing to a cross, are construed as the extremist, literalist fringe of Filipino Catholicism, where Lenten penitents engage in enacting the Passion of Christ. I will give an ethnographic portrait of how penitents themselves think of and experience pain in the context of religious vow fulfilment. Secondly, I will discuss how clerical perceptions of the rituals reveal differing normative prescriptions about the role of pain in entering into communion with the divine. Finally, I offer some thoughts about how we might be able to think about the limits of the paradigms through which we think of divine pain. What is condemned or even parodied as 'folk' Catholicism at its most 'fanatic' rendition reveals as much about those of us who view and observe the rituals, as it does about the penitents themselves. Key Words: Crucifixion, self-mortification, Catholicism, Philippines. ***** 1. Holy Days of Divine Pain In the province of Pampanga, two hours drive north of the capital Manila, the Christian Holy Week is commemorated through the celebration of the Maleldo festival, which literally means Holy Days. The landscape during that time is dominated by scores of men and women who voluntarily conduct acts of selfinflicted pain in the name of faith. This process normally involves several consociates, either as fellow flagellants or as assistants who make up to 25 small incisions in the flesh of the penitents back. During Maleldo, hooded flagellants swing a purpose-built rope on each side of their upper torso, whipping their wounded backs to a bloody pulp as they embark upon a 5 to 6 k ilometre walk around the streets of the province. Though there are several ways to self-mortify in Pampanga, the ultimate act of self-mortification is to perform Christs crucifixion. Each year since 1962, scores of men and women of adult age have voluntarily submitted themselves to be publicly crucified. With the help of designated nailers, and a small group of assistants, penitents have steel nails driven through each of their palms before they are hoisted up on wooden crosses, typically from between 3 t o 15 m inutes. In 2010, around a hundred men in various parts of the province were crucified. One of

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__________________________________________________________________ these is Jerson, who has been taking part in the rituals for the past 17 consecutive years. The largest and most popular crucifixion ritual is performed as a p ublic street play that dramatizes the final hours of Christs passion. The Via Crucis, as it is known, is a dramatization of the 12 Stations of the Cross during which Christ underwent various ordeals on his way up to Golgotha. The production involves a cast of 40 actors who each perform to a prewritten script that was written by the current directors grandfather in 1955. At 3 o clock in the afternoon on Good Friday, the drama culminates in a purpose-built hill where the nailing of the hands and feet of the man playing the Kristo is performed in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In this large, highly organised crucifixion ritual, there have only been a handful of official Kristos. The year 2011 will be the 25th consecutive year of crucifixion for the current Kristo, a man named Roberto. The rituals that Jerson and Roberto practice are part of a l arger complex of religious commemoration that has, over the course of the last half century, elicited the involvement of government authorities. For their part, the Department of Health has sought to ensure the provision of health care and sanitary facilities to penitents, such as tetanus vaccinations, post-crucifixion anti-biotics, sterilizing agents for nails, and pain relief medication. Yet while government and city officials seek no involvement beyond the logistical and medicinal, the faithful have very specific notions about the moral issues surrounding how Catholics are to relate to Christs pain. For the penitents themselves, to self-mortify in this way is known as an expression of darame: the act of empathizing and physically enacting someone elses predicament. Self-mortification in this context is a ritual that evokes an intimate, and private relationship between at least two subjectivities the penitent, and Jesus himself. Yet from an official theological and doctrinal perspective, self-mortification in Pampanga is viewed as a manifestation of a theological and moral malaise that is far more pernicious than the harm inflicted upon the individuals body. It is to the clash between official and folk experiences of religious pain that we shall now turn. 2. The Bearable Lightness of Pain Pain is central to the founding narrative of Christianity. It is a religion founded upon the belief that Jesus Christ, a divine being, underwent the excruciating torment of state sanctioned torture, thereby enduring the limits and vulnerability of the human body. It is founded, also, on Christs transcendence of pain and the mortality of the body itself. While self-mortification in Pampanga is often described as an imitation of Christ, the nailing that occurs during Maleldo is not, strictly speaking, a crucifixion. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. While ritual nailing does involve this theatre of crucifixion, the impact it h as upon those who participate in it is vastly different. One who is nailed on the cross receives admiration, and even the

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__________________________________________________________________ adulation of his consociates. But most significantly, while darame is painful in terms of the bodys biomedical response, self-mortification is often described as being maginhawa, a great sense of emotional release characterised by a lightness of being. This lightness with which pain is thought of and experienced needs to be understood in the wider context of religious vow fulfilment. Both Jerson and Roberto associate their continued penitence as a fulfilment of panata: a promise or vow made between oneself and God that is enacted through the literal and voluntary consociation with Christs passion. In almost all cases, panata is made in petitioning for, or in gratitude of, receiving Gods grace. For Jerson, it was the recovery of his wife from a debilitating disease. For Roberto, it was his miraculous survival of a life threatening accident. Both these men believe that having themselves nailed to the cross is the only commensurate response to Gods magnanimous act of touching their lives. In many cases, vow fulfilment is embedded in great emotional turmoil, particularly in the days leading up to the event. Jerson explains to me that he undergoes an overwhelming sense of anxiety, which torments him to the point of irritability and despair. The sheer heaviness of his gratitude (mabigat ang loob, a heavy sense of interiority), and the weight and depth of feeling that he undergoes in thinking about his relationship to God, is a pain that cannot be relieved through any biomedical or psychotherapeutic means. Only by going through the extreme pain of darame can the overwhelming heaviness be addressed. None of the penitents I spoke to go into trance or altered states of consciousness, as perhaps might be the case in other self-mortification rituals such as the Tamil Hindu Thaipusam or Tang-ki spirit mediums. Neither does being nailed result in a s elf-effacement, or a l oss of oneself in a u nity with a g reater reality. As Jerson and Roberto explain, far from imitating Christ to become him, being up on the cross brings fourth an emphasised sense of their own subjectivity as a recipient of Gods grace. To be sure, they certainly feel pain in a biomedical sense of nociception. Jerson identifies this experience, however, as a lightness that makes the pain bearable. It is precisely and only in the severity of a physical sensation of biomedical pain that the emotional torment he experienced in the days leading up to his crucifixion could ever be alleviated. Extreme pain is meaningful and in that sense bearable because it f acilitates the expression of multiple religious and cultural meanings that are saturated with deeply felt emotions. Ironically, it was in my attempts to make sense of this pain, to subject it to categories of logic and rationality, that prevented me from understanding it. My questions to Jerson and Roberto revolved around the sensation of the nails going through his palms, about whether the weight of his body puts strain on his wounds, about his respiration on the cross, about the sensation of the burning sun, and the effectiveness of medication in his recovery. All these questions were answered politely and dutifully. However, Roberto advised me that I ought to rethink my

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__________________________________________________________________ approach: Everyone asks me about that kind of pain he said, with a slight sense of exasperation, But its not about the pain on my hands, but the pain in my heart. What he was telling me was that my line of inquiry was symptomatic of my own presuppositions about the notion of pain as a somatic ordeal. The pain that is central to crucifixion is not the physical reaction of the body, but the torment and heaviness of the promissory transaction of panata. The penitents body is the site at which he crafts a particular kind of religious subjectivity, which relates to specific circumstances in his life that cannot ever be defined by clerical authority. Entering into the final moments of Christ is not about the dissolution of ones identity either in trance or in a no-mind state. Rather, the pain of his body itself reiterates this subjectivity as engaged in reciprocation of his contract with God. Had I persisted in asking questions based on a biomedical sensation of pain, I was told, I would not be much different to those others (which include documentary film makers, and curious tourists) who would condemn his practice as the fanatic and even masochistic actions of illicit Catholics. Robertos exasperation points to wider socio-cultural discourses through which selfmortification is conceived of in the country. Most Filipinos would describe the real-life crucifixion and flagellation in terms that relegate the practice as the preserve of the common folk, who reside out there on the temporally and spatially distant fringes of the metropole. It is to the tension between illicit and proper ways of being Catholic that we shall now turn. 3. To Enter Deeply Into the Final Moments of Christ How are Filipino Roman Catholics meant to experience and understand Christs pain? What do the custodians of the Church, the official clergy, say about the experience? There are several references in the historical archive that attest to friar-sanctioned practices of self-mortification as modes of pious disciplina. 1 Religious authorities had not only introduced the practice of self-inflicted pain, but endorsed it as a sign of an exemplary expression of religious piety. Today, the faithful are still encouraged to appreciate the full extent of Christs painful crucifixion, but in strictly vicarious, and not literal ways. In 2004, for example, the Archbishop of Manila encouraged all Filipinos to see the controversial film The Passion of the Christ which the faithful were to approach it as if you were entering a period of meditation: mind and heart open to enter deeply into the last hours of Jesus... The vicarious witnessing of Christs ordeal is meant to prompt a transcendence that can only be achieved by placing oneself in a heightened state of meditative consciousness. To enter deeply into the last hours of Christ is to relate emotionally to his divine Passion in the way described by Benjamin Fink (2010) in the conference proceedings of the 1st Making Sense of Pain conference:

Julius Bautista Empathic pain, feeling the pain of others as pain. Empathic pain might lack the incorporation into one's own body image, but shares the negative evaluation and a need to act upon, while still being a sensation. 2

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While Church authorities generally promote a vicarious, empathic pain that lacks incorporation into ones own body image, modes of pain of the sort that reflect literal forms of orthopraxy should be condemned and disavowed. Highranking clerics I spoke with were careful not to condemn self-mortifiers outright, but reiterated the importance of correcting their misguided overemphasis on Christs crucifixion and death. There are two main reasons why this correction is needed. Firstly, the theological master narrative of Christianity that Christ endured pain for the redemption of all sins with finality renders individual selfmortification redundant and unnecessary. Secondly, focusing too much on Christs physical pain on Good Friday diminishes the appreciation of the redemptive message of his Easter Sunday resurrection. The Archbishop of Pampanga, with whom I spoke, expressed concern about seeing the darame being thought of as a substitute for Church sacraments of confession and communion. For the Archbishop, the literal appreciation of Chriss pain constitutes a dysfunctional theological sensibility that is poorly aligned and superfluous. This is not to deny the theological value of Christs pain, but to channel it intellectually towards understanding the fullness of the Christian soteriological episode. Proper Catholics outside of Pampanga may find it d ifficult fathom the penitents acts of darame because they do not feel personally implicated in its soteriological significance. The clergy may not be able to fathom why their actions are even necessary, particularly since Jesus pain has already achieved the ultimate salvation of the faithful. Yet for those like Jerson and Roberto, the physical enactment of Christs pain is the only real way of overcoming the pain that really matters: the emotional torment that accompanies the quest to fulfil ones panata. And for this, they would defy Church edicts in seeking their own entrance into the last moments of Christs life, even at the risk of being branded illicit Catholics, or not Catholics at all. 4. Making Sense of Pain What I have presented is a discussion of a ritual in which pain is inflicted upon oneself for the purposes of achieving a higher communion with the divine. I do this to encourage a problematization of any causal link between pain and suffering, set against the backdrop of competing religious discourses between a community of faithful, and the institutional authorities that seek to govern how divine pain is to be experienced. In this respect, some points of consideration can be offered.

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__________________________________________________________________ Firstly, the rituals of Pampanga encourage us to examine the limits of conventional paradigms for describing pain. Much has been said about the inadequacy of the International Association for the Study of Pains 1984 definition of pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Religious vowfulfillment is another context in which people think of and experience pain in ways that lie outside a biomedical paradigm. Rather, we might see the pain in terms of how it is constitutive of religious subjectivities, in this case within highly personalised notions of pain as lightness and heaviness. Anthropologist Talal Asad sums it up well: Always, it s eems, pain has been associated with guilt, with error, with sickness with the condition itself, or with its determination, or with its treatment. But the association has mutated several times, producing profound and profoundly different social and psychological effects. The economy of pain and truth developed in monastic asceticism (as analysed by Foucault) was a critical moment in these mutations. Further investigations of such moments should help one to understand better how the social is constructed through the disciplined formation of subjectivities. 3 Secondly, the rituals encourage us to think about pain as embedded in oftenconflicting systems of meaning-making, in this case between folk and official Catholicism. In Pampanga, the persistence of ritual self-mortification in spite of Church injunctions against it shows that there are parallel semiotic ideologies that operate in the Filipino religious landscape each of them strands that constitute the interwoven fabric of Catholic penitence and piety in Pampanga. Finally, it is not simply a matter of arguing that pain is socially and culturally constructed, or for promoting a cultural relativism in trying to make sense of pain. What I propose is a hermeneutics of suspicion and introspection in subjecting our own fixations and assumptions about pain to analytical scrutiny. When people like Jerson and Roberto are asked why they self-mortify, they are not simply being asked to detail the contours of their pain experience. They are also being asked to account for the pain that the questioner vicariously feels when we as spectators squirm, cringe and recoil at the confronting act that they conduct in front of us. Given that this pain for the penitent is described according to a bearable lightness of being, when we view ritual crucifixion in Pampanga, perhaps it is important to ask who is really suffering?

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Notes
Nicholas H. Barker, The Revival of Ritual Self-Flagellation and the Birth of Crucifixion in Lowland Christian Philippines, Discussion Paper No. 63 (Nagoya: Nagoya University, School of International Development, 1998). 2 Sasha Benjamin Fink, The Ambiguity of Pain, in Making Sense of Pain: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jane Fernandez (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), 5-6. 3 Talal Asad, Notes on B ody Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual, Economy and Society 12.3 (1983): 287-327.
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Bibliography
Asad, Talal. Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual. Economy and Society 12.3 (1983): 287-327. Barker, Nicholas. H. The Revival of Ritual Self-Flagellation and the Birth of Crucifixion in Lowland Christian Philippines. Discussion Paper No. 63. Nagoya: Nagoya University, School of International Development, 1998. Fink, Sasha Benjamin. The Ambiguity of Pain. In Making Sense of Pain: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jane Fernandez, 3-12. Oxford, UK: InterDisciplinary Press, 2010. Julius Bautista, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.