Contrary to what a number
of people believe, there is no connection between Juan de la Cruz, the
symbol of the Filipino people, and St. John of the Cross -
San Juan de la Cruz in Spanish - whose feast day the Catholic
Church marks today.
Juan de la Cruz -
a long-suffering farmer in native costume became a symbol for the Filipino
people in the pages of the prewar Philippines Free Press.
According to Frederic S. Marquardt in his book Before Bataan and After,
the farmer was dubbed Juan de la Cruz because that name occurred so often
in official documents from rural Philippines.
Juan is a very common name
in Latin countries, just as its variants, like John, Ian, Ivan, Jan, Sean
are common elsewhere. The Philippines, however, is the only country
where De La Cruz is a common name - and one plausible explanation
brought forward is the anecdote that Spanish civil registrars invariably
gave the De la Cruz family name to illiterates, who could only sign themselves
with a cross.
If Juan de la Cruz is to
be considered illiterate, or at best, semiliterate, this fact makes him
even more different from St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who elegantly
recorded his visions and his thoughts in the book The Dark Night of
the Soul.
The Catholicism of St. John
of the Cross springs from the same Spanish well at which the Filipino Juan
de la Cruz has imbibed. It appears, however, as if the two had drawn
water from different depths the Filipino at the surface, St. John of the
Cross from the deeper waters that nourished other Spanish mystics, such
as St. Teresa of Avila.
The struggle between flesh
and spirit - at times illumined by faith, at times threatened
by existential despair - is something that is foreign to the
Filipino. The cry of St. John of the Cross, Todo y Nada
- an attempt to fuse everything and nothing - was echoed
afterwards by existentialist philosophers like Miguel de Unamuno.
It is not the kind of cry, however, that will well from the Filipino Juan
de la Cruz.
Where St. John of the Cross
would make what Soren Kierkegaard described as a leap of faith, the only
leaps made by Filipino Juan de la Cruz are the many short jumps that he
uses to avoid being caught in the clash of competing interests and ideologies
- a charming process of evasion and noncommitment that novelist N.V.M.
Gonzales tried to catch when he described us Filipinos as "bamboo dancers."
No, we Filipinos do not
think in terms of any dark nights of the soul. Juan de la Cruz is
not wracked with the kind of fear and trembling that emanate from faith-related
anxieties. His fears are more material and elementary. The
concerns of Juan de la Cruz are the fears that come with a life of quiet
desperation. These fears stem from the basic problem of keeping body
and soul together - and more of the time, keeping the body
together is such a problem that he forgets about the soul altogether.
It should therefore come
as no surprise that St. John of the Cross, even though he is the namesake
of the symbol of the Filipino nation, remains almost totally unknown to
us. He is so different, so totally foreign, that there is no way
the Filipino can identify with him, much less look up to him as a patron
or protector.
It is far easier for the
suffering Filipino to identify with the suffering Hesus Nazareno; for the
child-like Filipino to worship the Sto. Nino; for the despairing Filipino
to appeal to St. Jude, the patron of hopeless cases; and for the ever-needy
Filipino to run to our Lady of Perpetual Help - who "has never
left unaided" anyone who fled to her protection, invoked her help, or sought
her intercession.