The Nazarenos were out in force today as the clock winds down to the 9th of November.
It goes without saying that the Black Nazarene inspires a religious fervor that baffles many. Social media, for instance, is awash with people alternately calling the devotees idiots, to smart asses pointing out that the procession of the Black Nazarene is just so much idolatry and that Catholics are hypocrites for tolerating the traslacion.
They miss the point.
Consider how the Nazarene being pulled around town isn’t even the original – by now, it’s just a cobbling together of various body parts, all covered by flowing, brightly colored, robes. And yet, this composite statute still commands the same sort of devotion and zeal as though it were the very one brought over from Mexico in the mid-1600s.
The persistent devotion indicates that the homage being paid to the image has little to do with the statue itself and more with what it represents. Early Christians used to say that the honor paid to the image went beyond the image and reached back to the deity that inspired the image.
In the light of modern understanding of how the mind works – with symbols and all that – this interpretation makes perfect sense to me. Not that it makes a difference to the people who are going to go barefoot all day joining the Nazarene during his progress thru the narrow streets of Manila. For these people, the faith is all that matters. Not the intellectual underpinnings of what they’re doing, nor the people who gawk at them and turn their religious expression into a freak show.
In the end, I have to wonder who the fools really are in this picture. The people who impelled by faith, voluntarily subject themselves to hardship? Or those who, because of their lack of faith, feel themselves permitted to laugh?