Filipino halloween should not be scary: bagat 2012 marking the end of the first semester

I would have wanted, if you asked and insisted on it, that we do our evening prayers in the cemetery.  When I was in the FY in Mandurriao then and when morning prayers were individual, I would almost always do my morning prayers in the cemetery.  I would sit in one of the tombs and pray my morning prayer.  Yes I am a little morbid, I have a skull in my room, I am fascinated by the requiem and the dies irae of Mozart, Lully and Verdi and I recommend that you listen to the funeral songs of the Russian Orthodox church especially the litany - a sampler would be the funeral of Boris Yeltsin, once the president of Russia.  These songs are beautiful, heavenly in fact.

But why label this preoccupation as morbid, and why present it as fearful, with howling dogs at the background, and creaking doors, and macabre music and pipe organs?

This bias comes from western movies probably.  It is not Filipino.  Filipino tradition is to invite the souls, to invite them to mingle once more with the living.  That is why my mother, as her mother and mother’s mother did before her, my mother would put a small portion of what we eat during the fiesta minatay for the souls of our ancestors - gamay nga valenciana, gamay nga suman, gamay nga bayibayi, gamay nga lugaw kag palutaw - small portions of everything there on the altar as if telling everyone in our family tree, “come, eat, eat with us, stay with us for a while, and let us eat together once more.” 

We are not shutting them out, we are not driving them away, we are not afraid, nor do we make their coming something scary - no we are inviting them.  I remember asking my mother once - “have they eaten anything?”  And my mother replied, “they don’t eat like us.  They just smell the food and the smell will make them full.”  I remember making a liturgy using this Filipino practice of offering.  It should also be remembered that precisely we cook suman, babayi, palutaw because this is also a harvest festival - we have just harvested rice and the best babayi is always pinipig - new rice pounded on mortar - ginabayo, ginasanlag, ginagaling kag ginahimo bayibayi.  So it is inviting our ancestors who once tilled the same land to come once more to eat with us the same produce they yielded when they were tilling the same land.

Fr. Nonong had a lively discussion once of souls coming back to roam the world they came from.  It is said that they come back only to ask the living to pray for them - but they do not roam the earth as if they have no place to go.  Our belief says they either go to heaven or to hell or to purgatory.  But they do not roam around aimlessly.  But I guess this is one wonderful tradition that we should continue even if it is not taught by our faith.  
But isn’t it correct that when we celebrate the mass we are united with everyone else in the communion of the saints?  And isn’t it that eternity is the absence of time and place as we know time and space?  Do we occupy space when we die, space as we know it?  And what’s wrong with a visit?

And so let us remember our dead, we should not be afraid of them.  May this affair tonight help us to connect with them - we are what we are now because of them.  The Chinese have even a belief that to make you who you are now, to put you where you are now, your ancestors have all contrived and banded together to make this possible.

Let us not be afraid, and let us not make them scary - for that is not very Filipino.

Post Script

I have heard unofficially that is, that there are some members of our community who are leaving us for good or for some time.  We thank them for their presence and their contribution to the community.  They will be missed for sure.  But again this celebration is a reminder that there is an end to everything - even our joys, and even our sorrows.  Life would be more bearable if we have learned to say goodbye. Many times we grieve because we cannot say goodbye and move on.  So to those who are leaving us, whoever you are, goodbye and thank you.