By Sylvia L. Mayuga

When Howie, the investigative journalist married Ipat, the environmental lawyer, their wedding memento was worthy of two visionaries – a tiny Sto. Niño, right hand raised in blessing, lying on shiny coils of sinamay fiber tucked into a festive native basket.

This Niño was not only portable. Its basket-nest gave it the look of an egg –-a symbol of new life so devoutly to be wished it could land only at the foot of the household Sacred Heart, its grown-up version.

Then one day a baby girl abandoned by her mother landed in this household – and quickly discovered the Niño’s playtime possibilities. No one ever stopped her from picking up “the baby” for an afternoon tea party with Winnie the Pooh, Big Bird and Elmo, or giving Him echo seminars on the alphabet. Can you think of a better prelude to adult discovery of love divine than a dear and intimate playmate?

She’s growing up Pinoy. The Niño is a very old spiritual lodestone among us. Spanish chroniclers say it all began when the queen of Cebu took a shine to the first Sto. Niño ever to land in our islands – an enamored first encounter with God-as-infant that led to her christening as Queen Juana, the mass baptism of her husband Humabon’s fiefdom, and the beginning of four centuries of Filipino Christianity.

The endurance of this magnetic attraction into the Third Millennium can no longer be attributed to eloquent Spanish friars or armed conquistadores. It’s turned out to belong to a child’s psyche –- never more exuberant than when Pinoys celebrate the Niño’s birthday in what must be the longest Christmas season in the world.

Pinoy faith is an onion of many layers. Academics are still trying to arrive at its core – the question of why it centers in a Holy Child and His Mother. What we’re surer of is how Filipino Catholic devotion to this Child cuts across all classes and lifestyles.

Mainstream media peddles the impression that the Niño dressed in velvet and gold thread, sleeping on silk and satin in the homes and shops of gay fashion designers, antique collectors and wealthy matrons is somehow worthier of heaven’s blessing. This has never stopped the farmer’s wife, jeepney and truck driver, owners of beauty parlor, turo-turo and sari-sari store from enshrining the Niño in humbler family altars, atop a cash box, or swinging from a rearview mirror.

Once in the early 80s, as the Marcos regime grew old ungracefully, this unique relationship with the Holy Child was trotted out in an unforgettable parade down Roxas Boulevard. It had the Niño sleeping, tumbling, dancing, laughing, winking and blessing the crowd –sailing past on floats as farmer, fisherman, doctor, Boy Scout and, if memory serves, junior fireman and guitar player.

The Sto. Niño as lightweight boxing champion, global billiard player, chess master, mountain climber, OFW and call center hire were not quite there yet, but give it time. Nothing Pinoy is alien to the Niño – and vice-versa.

As discontent with martial law progressed to roaring protest, strangest of all was the story of a female NPA cadre who never went anywhere, military encounters included, without both her rifle and Sto. Niño. There was nothing her Marxist-Leninist political officer could do. The kauban (Cebuano for the Tagalog kasama and the English comrade) had spent more years of her life with farm folk. As the historian Milagros Guerrero tells us, many still fertilize their fields with the Niño’s bathwater.

The same folk imagination in the streets and mosquito press instantly overlaid the Passion and Death of Christ on Ninoy Aquino in the electrified aftermath of his assassination. “Santo Ninoy,” his first secret appellate in those days, quickly became a pun – “Santo Niñoy,” the youngest war correspondent, mayor, governor, senator and president-we-never-had.

Were we getting closer to the core of the onion? Do Pinoys love the Niño with a temperament that prefers new life over constant peril unto death, but will not back down until the forces that took a Niño’s life are booted out of rule? Is this because a many-layered psyche has always known, even before the friar came, that love and faith are never more fertile than in a child’s willing embrace of future annihilation – death of individual ego in a larger whole, the taproot of divinity? You might be surprised to find answers in certain legends and epics of our oldest Philippine tribes.

Meanwhile we remember well: it was a children’s crusade that openly challenged the autocrat Marcos in the First Quarter Storm, provoked his declaration of martial law and, at the cost of the best and brightest, mounted the strongest challenge to his government –the CPP/NPA/NDF. A decade later, a Left-influenced generation on the march saw that dictatorship end. Today that original movement is aging fatally in a dead end of materialist dogma, reduced to marauding for survival.

As the NPA gives the military an excuse to be as ugly as it has become in a chicken and egg situation that has a nation devouring itself, a whole new generation is asking questions and stumbling on answers. Slowly, painfully, a new movement is being leavened to a long overdue new way of being nation. Those who have escaped the heat and scattered in the world now return home in endless cyberspace reunions.

What history could be saying is that the Holy Child is the closest we’ve come to a perfect template for our continuing struggle for nation, beginning with the individuals that compose it. The Niño is us, or who we’d like to be – our ideal self. To dress Him in gold thread and leave it at that would be a colossal waste of who we really are.

Instead a dive into our own forgotten oceanic depths the way we make music and break into dance – in awareness as full as we can muster, with a sense of oneness (yes, divine) with the whole of life– could be how we will indeed meet and finally hail this, our truest self.

Remember that winning female athlete, who helped us harvest medals at the last SEA games then touched our hearts to the quick when she named her guiding dream? She had vowed to dive deep for gems to gift a nation – far too long under the rule of corrupt adults who have impoverished, despoiled and humiliated its children’s grace and innocence.

That could be how we will all finally embrace our Sto. Niño of nation in joy triumphant – no longer a martyr past and present but a Child of Infinite Possibilities.

Happy 23rd anniversary of your liberation, Ninoy. Help us to remember.

Respond to: slmayuga@yahoo.com

Article originally posted on INQ7.

Sylvia Mayuga is the resident gadly of INQ7.net’s “Global Nation”