San Juan is related by us to water. It usually falls on a day of the year when the tide is quite high. The beaches teem with people and for good reason. The sea takes on a cerulean blue color inviting all who come near to jump in and swim. It makes perfect sense that it should partner with the saint who baptized Jesus. It also makes perfect sense that on this day we conspire to get ourselves wet somehow, somewhere.
But we are on a trip through Northern California and have been these past few weeks guilty of being less than faithful with our religious duties. On Saturday we left on a car-trip which would bring us through wine country via the picturesque town of Solvang with inhabitants who keep alive their Danish roots. Our first target is Salinas where our cousin Jaime Lozada resides. He has prepared a steak dinner for us. Lunch the next day will have for its main course, "Binas-uy". This fare is based on "Bas-uy" a broth known only to Visayans of especially fine and uncommon taste.
It is made of a mixture of tenderloin beef, heart, liver and the thinner intestinal lining of beef, which we call "libro". The true Bas-uy contains beef-blood squeezed and ground by hand. The secret is to hold in one's hands strands of lemon grass. But this dish will work only if the blood is extremely fresh, which is why it is served only near slaughter houses. This is also why they call this food "Kilawin" in Antiquiera, where last I partook of it at that town's wet market.
Except for the fresh blood, you can find most of those ingredients here in California where they are sold in Mexican and Filipino grocery stores. The Dumanjuganon Binas-uy does not include blood. Thus, it is of particular significance here in the United States whenever and wherever we congregate and feed. To this special lunch which
Cousin Jaime and wife Lynlin shoo us away to have the time and space to prepare this special fare. It was a Sunday and so it was only fitting that we should include in our itenerary the Mission San Juan Bautista Church. It was worth a visit, we were told, as it would have a bit of a similarity to the Baclayon church in Bohol where I and Estela, to whom I am married, once, many years ago joined a church restoration project.
Indeed, Mission San Juan Bautista was a beautiful little church, wonderfully restored and 200 years old. But the grace of serendipity came with the fact that when we got there we found to our joyful surprise that we were on time for the Sunday Mass and that it was the mass to officially celebrate the town-fiesta in honor of Saint John the Baptist. After mass, they had a procession of town's people including young kids in native costume dancing something very much similar to our Sinulog.
This mission church is set in a great expanse of plains disappearing into the horizon dotted only with small hills not so unlike what we see in Bohol. It is mostly grazing land disturbed only by farms growing vegetables and fruits, including grapes. This was undisturbed native-American land until the Franciscans came to establish this Catholic colony centuries ago. Now, the religion has incorporated into the local economy bringing in tourists and holding together the communal bonds. And yes, that does remind us of home.
Indeed, We were surprised to attend a Catholic mass here where the church was actually packed with people who obviously kept for themselves a reverent faith and enjoyed an obviously functioning social-religious life. In a sense, that cannot help but reinforce inside us our own sense of faith and establish our own connection with these people, obviously strangers in a distant land yet so similar. They prayed the same way and in a sense we share the same past.
The church indeed reminded me of Baclayon Church in the sense of it being a building which is part of our heritage. But I also thought about people, especially Catholic people and how they still persist in a time where faith and reverence seem almost ill-fitted in the inexorably changed and changing world. Where is all these going to? Where are we headed? Do these questions have to do with the very concept of baptism?
Well, For us travelers anyway, this Sunday has acquired for itself all the necessary symbols which point us to the idea of death becoming renewed life: the drum beating which summons the old beliefs now re-enacted by children in towns planted across the globe, even the story of the broth we will be eating for lunch and its components, the blood and the water. These remind us of John wandering in the wilderness, and on the banks of sacred river finally coming across the man who would be saviour to us all. He baptizes him with water.
I do also miss the sea and how beautiful this day would also have been back home. June **, 2009, Kinutil/CDN
No comments:
Post a Comment