MEDIUM RARE
I, too, have a story to tell about the image of the Black Nazarene of Quiapo church.
Watching last Tuesday’s TV coverage of the Traslacion, or procession of the miraculous image from Quirino Grandstand at Luneta Park to Quiapo church, I could not help remembering how my mother walked on her knees to pray from the church door to the altar for nine consecutive Fridays. She prayed for my little brother who at age four was already wearing thick glasses for myopia, besides which he was under medication for a host of what was euphemistically called childhood diseases.
I don’t know or remember what he was sick of, only that because of my mother’s novenas, that brother outgrew those ailments and today in his 70s he lives the good life as a retired banker in Toronto, Canada.
Most people who have not had direct or actual experiences of what believers call “miraculous” or “near-miraculous” healing would attribute the getting-well to luck, chance. In my little brother’s case, my mother did not stop at praying. She consulted Western-trained doctors, just in case they knew of some quick cure. At the same time, she forced her young patient to drink horrid, bitter-tasting Chinese medicines compounded of herbs, seeds, and goodness knows what else.
When I fractured my ankle playing games with my cousins, I don’t recall Mama going to Quiapo to pray; instead she went to Binondo to ask the medicine man with an office in Ongpin to prescribe a proper diet for me. Which he did: turtle soup and turtle meat. And with twice-a-day therapy (mostly massage), my leg was saved from further scrutiny by doctors, Western or Chinese traditional.
By the time I got to college, the name Quiapo had acquired an underground meaning. Quiapo was where to go for peddlers selling herbs to prevent getting pregnant. For more good news, one could pay 10 pesos to one of many fortune tellers there.
Eventually the Quiapo of my youth outgrew those myths. For one, it just became a busy, traffic-choked center of commerce. It was fate that on my first day behind the wheel of my Volkswagen, I found myself in the thick of traffic on a Friday on Quezon Blvd. Fastest way to learn!