Blood Ritual

The white, burnished body of St. Sebastian, bound to a tree and riddled with arrows. He was startling to look at: sinewy, tightly coiled, naked save for a loincloth knotted loosely about his waist. His head was thrown back in agony, or his head was thrown back in pleasure; it seemed the ambiguity was the point. In my world he was what passed for a hero in a storybook, a glossy entry in my first book of saints. This was in the early aughts, in Catholic school in the south of Manila. Religion, whether or not one subscribed to it, was the most durable thread in the social fabric. I spent my days professing God’s love but believing in his wrath. I was seven.

Difference, deviation, felt inborn. In the Philippines, where Catholics make up 80 percent of the population, my Protestant family was an anomaly. Protestant — the very word broadcast rebellion. “It’s idolatry to pray to Mary, to pray to the saints,” my father said. “The Bible tells us to pray only to God.” Still, because most schools were Catholic, he permitted a degree of assimilation. I learned about idols and how to worship them, learned canon law and how to pray the rosary. My school was run by the Lasallian Brothers, an order of men who weren’t quite priests but took vows of celibacy and wore habits. We heard Mass every first Friday. Each noon the Angelus would spill out from the campus speakers, and for a minute we all stopped what we were doing, fell silent.

Later in the day, I came home to a tradition most of my classmates had never even heard of. Catholicism was too entrenched in the culture, the scar of three hundred years of Spanish rule. Ours was a newer faith, a legacy of American colonialism introduced to the islands at the end of the nineteenth century. Though my mother was born into a Catholic family, she joined my father’s evangelical church after marrying him. At home, ritual and tangible implements of worship were not so enshrined as the content of scripture. As a corrective to the compromise he made on my education, my father enforced his religion as though it were besieged on all sides. We never missed Sunday service. Every night, my parents, my brother, and I had a Bible study session. Good praxis seemed to entail aesthetic abstinence: my family’s church, where my father was a founding member, had no paintings, no statues, no images. There was only an aluminum cross at the altar, no Christ hanging from it.

And so I craved a rupture in the banality of my world, or as the faithful call it, an apparition from heaven. I wanted to measure the dimensions of the divine, trace its shape, know its color. The book of saints brought me closer. It was a requirement for class — a paperback volume, compact and sturdy, with glossy pages that caught the light when I turned them. Inside was a litany of lives the Catholic Church had deemed holy, a procession of long-dead believers who, through selfless devotion, had distinguished themselves from the rest of the flock. Each saint was accompanied by a full-color image, usually a painting by one of the old masters. They were classed according to how they lived: bishop, virgin, confessor. But