The feast of Our Lady of Penafrancia celebrated on the third Sunday Of Sept. is massive if size of pilgrim crowds were to be counted. Her devotees remain fervent and faithful to the end and never miss to rise with both fervor and passion to celebrate her feast. It is no ordinary event: miracles happen and always witnessed to and attested. Most of these miracles do not happen with dancing suns; most often these are mere answered prayers–a cure for illness or a blindness of heart, a dream realised, a loved one returned. Like their own feet, the devotees of the Virigin believe, she walks with them on the muddy dusty grounds they prowl when hungry, sick or forlorn. And when she appears to them to soothe, console, or heal, she is no stranger. What bars them then from touching the hem of her cloak, or from calling endearingly so, “Ina” (mother)? While the feast is held in Naga City in Bicol, southwest of Manila, most devotees scattered in the world celebrate it, too, with a novena and mass and a procession often ending in a pot luck dinner. Here in Vancouver, BC, Bicolanos have been attending the novena and mass at St. Patrick’s Church on Main St., the first parish that welcomed her pilgrim image on a visit in June 1997. The novena ends on Sept. 19th.

On seeing her for the first time two decades ago, I was startled by her piercing eyes. I beat my breast and shaded my eyes suddenly feeling guilty. But I had no time to dwell on sins I could not recall.

            The climb on narrow wooden steps up her throne at the top of the cathedral’s main altar was tight, dark, and hot from the warmth of bodies touching breast-to-back in our wait to kiss the hem of her gold-threaded cape. Each devotee had only a minute of whispered prayer. In front and back of me were men and women breathing their prayers, eyes red and liquid from crying; mine were dry as those of a callous reporter on an assignment to write about this famed festival in Naga, honoring Bicolandia’s Nuestra Senora de Penafrancia. I had to write of the experience first hand.

            I arrived in Naga two days before the altar climb. On my first dawn, my host roused the photographers of the then National Media Production Center’s Philippines Today International and me, to the murmurs in the half-light. We were hustled to stand watch by the gate for a dawn procession.

             By the gate under a canopy of hissing bamboo leaves, we peered at a penitential procession moving toward us like a bouquet of lights floating in the night. Up close, these were the lighted tapers that barefooted women, veiled by the dawn yet cracking, held to their breasts, and now lighting their faces; they prayed trance-like. I felt my hair stand perhaps from the eerie sight. And then, I had goose bumps from a cold gust brushing my limbs.

            By mid-afternoon of the same day, our hosts bundled us up, leading us like blind through a sweaty crowd massed on the sidewalk toward the basilica. We stole into a building and were made to lean on a broken window that opened to the cleared up street. Within an hour, the procession called Translacion, reared a head like that of a fallen beehive that swarmed. The buzz of prayers pitched each time the throng chorused, Viva la Virgen!

            Like hundreds of bees crawling over each other, the men, who alone could join in, bobbed and dived to reach up for the Virgin’s feet or the hem of her cape. From where we watched, the  image seemed to rise and ebb as in a wave in a black ocean of heads wrapped in a haze of dust and hot breath.

              Up close, when the procession came under that window, I made out the swarm as that of hard muscled men whose sinuous arms writhed with longing, their faces contorted with grief or remorse, perhaps. Among us who watched, women were quietly sobbing and softly crying. I kept my eyes on the spectacle, and often shifted my eyes to my feet, embarrassed that I could not wring out a sob from my breast.

           On the ninth day, all of Bicolandia lined the banks of the Naga River. We were packed on the bridge within sight of the cathedral, squinting from the glare of the afternoon sun already floating on the water. Humid vapor rose from the ground after a rain that the folks said always fell when the river was not high enough for this fluvial procession.

           Soon the Virgin was brought down her altar at the Metropolitan Cathedral, sent off the festooned river landing, and set on her pedestal on the garlanded barge. (Today, the procession begins at the Metropolitan Cathedral and ends at the Basilica.) Bands struck tympanis and bells were rung as the barge sailed down. In the distance, I could make out no more than a clump of white blooms with a jewel in its heart glinting in the heat. 

            The river turned into a fluid highway of throbbing lights set on boats more hard-muscled men paddled. They call themselves, voyadores, or the Virgin’s escort on her queenly parade. No woman is said to survive if she were to sneak in disguised. 

            The crowd on the riverbank had thickened by then. Women and children seemed to have sprouted like some strange growing flowers whose roots were deep because they held up straight as reeds on the incline. Where the barge of the Virgin passed, the crowd would bend as if brushed by a breeze. Shouts of Viva! would explode in the air, and then fade out. 

            In the crowd, I saw cupped hands dip into the water where the barge was passing; and as in baptism or cleansing rites, the blessed water was doused on a child, a sick adult, or on the sorrow-filled breast of whose hand dipped. Our host whispered to me, as if it were a secret that hundreds of healings happened this way and prayers granted, too. I hurried through a prayer I cannot now remember; I was merely tagging along, riding on the passion of the crowd whom the Virgin held in her mysterious sway.

             The fluvial procession took three hours. By the time the Virgin’s barge crept to the landing by the side of the Shrine, the day had fallen on lighted candles that made of Naga an upside-down star-pierced sky. Thousands and thousands of prayers and blown kisses by this time littered the river. The crowd had dispersed, sweaty and sunburned, to the bus and train stations for home. No one has been known to drop like lead from fatigue; the Virgin is said to revive and strengthen each devotee who came to Naga for her.

 Ten years later, I was back at the Virgin’s Shrine still an onlooker. By some uncanny twist, I had signed in to help raise funds for the restoration of the shrine. My late husband, architect Felix N. Imperial, Jr. had given his services for the restoration plan; it was, for him, a spiritual homecoming and homage to the province of his ancestors, a land he never chanced to visit or call home.

             Pushed face-to-face with the Virgin again, I realized how tiny she was – not even two feet tall. Her body is of beaten silver, the face and hand propping the Child Jesus, of polished ivory. A golden cape hangs stiffly from her shoulders like wings, and an aureole frames her face.

             Her skin is shaded like that of the native cimmarones, the bandits or outcasts of the time. Legend says it was for them that the Shrine by the river was built; they asked for it. In this way, they could steal in to pray, and sneak out just as fast. At that time, a chapel was being planned not by the river, and the image was being carved from a picture a young priest, Fray Miguel de Covarrubias, carried, a send-off gift from his parents when he left his province, Pena de Francia in Spain. According to legend, the sculptor killed a dog and used its blood to color the Virgin’s skin.

             The legend goes on: Fray Miguel is said to have prayed to the Virgin to help bring the dog back to life, begging her with the same innocence and fervor his parents did when as a boy, Fray Miguel once lay dying. And the dog did swim back to the banks from where it was tossed lifeless. From these folks who are said to have seen the miracle, and declared to have experienced healings too, began the devotion to the Lady of the River.

             Among Bicolanos other non- Bicolano friends and I worked with for the restoration of the Shrine, we would be lost in their talk about someone they called Ina like she lived and walked with them. It seemed she wove in and out of lives, dropping miracles like soft rain on desert patches. Not all her miracles seemed life-turning twists; most that I gathered were a child’s wish, a plea for a son’s passing the board exam, a civil case resolved, a hoped-for trip made to come true, a recurring illness gone, a prodigal son come home, and a father’s peaceful death. 

            In five years, my husband and I would speak of her like the Bicolanos, and call her Ina, most times choked with emotion recounting that dawn in 1991 in a room at Manila Doctors’ Hospital, when she came floating in to tell Felix not to despair or feel abandoned because she will always be there, and healing him of a near-fatal stroke. By then, I had turned into one of those I had watched unmoved in that coverage of her feast ten years ago: each time I would get near her uncanny life-like presence, I would get teary, whimpering like a child. 

            So like a kin, the Virgin of Penfrancia has been lavished with unabashed show of emotion. So like a queen, she has been crowned twice in the only way humans know how. Her feasts are celebrations profuse with gestures to honor her. And among us who feel quite like close kin, we would fuss about flowers at her altar, colors to spangle her throne, and lights to illumine her tiny dark face. We would work like whirling tops below her throne where she remains standing on her tireless small feet, gazing through the vigil lights and on the faces turned up in prayer with her unblinking, compassionate eyes. No one knows exactly how or when this queen, this mother, comes down from her heavenly chair yet unseen, to touch and heal and say, I’m here. Yet, thousands who had come to her or called for her swear she never fails.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Alegria Imperial