The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Lavished with unabashed emotion as if she were our mother, and crowned twice in the only way humans know how, we have been profuse with gestures to honor her, our Heavenly Queen.
Among those who feel quite like daughters, as in the years I belonged to the Peñafrancia Shrine Restoration Foundation, we would fuss about flowers for her altar, colors to spangle her throne, and lights to illumine her tiny dark face—often checking her aureole for dust.
Whirling like tops around her, we would wonder if she minded how in our chats we would weave her in, our Ina, with a kind of presence more than real, as we shared “little stories of faith”—the miracles she drops as she breezes in and out of lives, including ours.
of Bicolandia.
Personal and even intimate, certainly these would fail the process “of validating the authenticity of a miracle,” which the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints oversees with stringent requirements.
Still, such “sudden and welcome events” about which, in our despair, are “inexplicable by natural and scientific laws,” cannot but be for us and thousands of Filipinos long tangled in a web of uncertainties, through her intercession—“the work of a divine agency,” a miracle.
Yet, it could be something as ordinary as rain to a farmer’s family facing the horror of losing more of everything during an extended drought, or a labandera/tagaluto job to a widow with five growing children in danger of penury, and for many, a working or caregiver’s visa to Hong Kong or Canada.
To hapless parents, why would not the sudden turn of an only child’s undiagnosed high fever be otherwise miraculous, as well, a teenage daughter given-up-for-dead’s return, or a pregnancy years after a diagnosis of infertility, and, on the other hand, a father’s conversion after years of rejecting God.
As witnessed in a thin booklet I had helped gather into “Little Stories of Faith,” no one knows when a “miracle” happens or when she hears a plea.
Could it be during her feast—celebrated this third Sunday—that begins with a penitential dawn procession of barefoot women nibbling at unanswered prayers? Or, perhaps, during the climb up the narrow steps to her throne at the cathedral’s main altar to kiss the hem of her cape and a minute of whispered agony?
Maybe she catches each quiet sob through the buzz of prayers in a swarm crammed into narrow windows, if only for a glimpse of her image while en route from her shrine by the river to the cathedral during the Traslacion, a procession only for men (like that of the Nazareno).
Possibly, she scoops tears that fall with the rain, which always fills Naga River just right for the fluvial procession, and from her barge—navigated by voyadores, another all-men retinue—breathes in the vapors of more supplications from lit candles along the length of the riverbank to the Basilica.
Yes, she even listens to cries of despair in wanly lit hospital rooms as far away in Manila, like one I know where the late Felix N. Imperial, II, the architect who designed the restoration of her shrine, whose spirit, burdened by failed hopes unknown to me, his wife, and an impending massive stroke, had been mulling over his end.
But at dawn, hours before his scheduled MRI, Ina breezed in on her palanquin and floated to the sides of his bed, especially where he would swoon if he raised his head. He later wrote for his small booklet how ordinary her presence felt, “no blinking lights, nor blaring trumpets,” just a tender utterly overwhelming sense of love.
Like many others Ina has healed or blessed, Felix did not turn into a saint; lifted off despair, his faith simply reverted him to childlikeness, the same quality that I believe she does not mind behind how we treat her as our mother.