Sometimes it's better to just leave some historical places untouched

he prayer garden of Saint Martin de Porres was an outdoor chapel on a small plateau by the side of the road as you enter the Dominican Hill heritage park. Built on top of the highest mountain within the city proper, it had a commanding view of the city and a sweeping vista of the northwestern side of Baguio facing San Fernando bay (La Union). Although appropriate for the purpose, it was rarely used to hold masses or other Roman Catholic sacraments. Nevertheless, it was a favorite venue for other solemn ceremonies--outdoor weddings, ordinations, formal dedications and such. It was a little-known tourist attraction because it was not a staple item in many city tour itineraries. The most likely reason is its "sister shrine" the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on adjacent Mirador Hill sucked much more of the tourists' curiosity. Besides that, one has to admit, in a contest of drawing power between the universally-venerated Mother of Jesus  and some obscure person of color who loved dogs, "Mama Mary" wins hands down

God's Ten Commandments--the summarized version of
it, at least--adorns one face of an A-frame building that
now stands where St. Martin's prayer garden used to
be. Said to be the largest "tablet" of its kind, it's actually
just a mural painting, so it's claim to fame may not be
too secure.

    I had no particular interest in Saint Martin de Porres until work crews demolished the garden honoring him sometime in 2010. In its place, an odd structure was erected that later lay claim to being the "biggest Ten Commandments tablet" in the country. I was instantly skeptical  of the claim, because as "tablets" go this was no single piece monolith made of granite on which written characters were carved. This was just a mural in latex paint brushed onto an exterior wall. This wall belongs to a building that is not even large, by any stretch.  There must be thousands of buildings with wider mural space to offer. So even if its claim was arguably true in the beginning, it won't take a dedicated artist with two brushes and two large gallons of black and white paint a gargantuan effort to retake the title. As a matter of fact, it will take only minutes for a computer plotter to print an even more awesome  likeness of Moses' tablet collection on tarpaulin. Hang it over that wall by the corners and you'll have the biggest foldable Ten Commandments poster in the city.

   As a young boy growing up in Baguio in the 60s and 70s, I would always wind up in this prayer garden with a few other little boys my age.  Usually, it's at the end of a daylong "hunting trip" for small birds which we shot with our home-made rubberband slingshots--called palsi-it.  I know it's not politically-correct to brag about such exploits today. But in my defense, no endemic bird populations were yet endangered in 1967. Add to this I must have been a cross-eyed little twerp back then because in reunion chats with friends 50 years later none of them seems to remember me ever hitting prey. I might have clipped one or two on the wing but not badly enough to ground the little critters who always managed to flay away. 

Not quite Rembrandt but this early oil
rendition of the likeness of Saint Martin
de Porres could have you claiming he
must have Filipino blood. But in fact, 
he's from Lima, Peru--the bastard son of 
a Spanish nobleman and a black woman
who was a freed slave.

   Lack of success in bird hunting was, in fact, one of the main reasons why "summiting"  Dominican Hill and making it onto Saint Martin's prayer garden was consolatory. You had no bird in hand, but you can fill your stomach with wild red berries from heavily fruit-laden shrubs around the garden. On a precarious ledge a few steps off the escarpment to the west also grew some succulent masaplora (passion fruit) trees that must have been planted there by the Dominican seminarians. I can't think of anyone with little faith who would amble down that precarious escarpment just to plant alnos and masaplora . They must know that  one small slip of the foot and they'll end up in Crystal Cave a thousand feet below. 

  Full to our stomachs on wild red berries, we would stretch out on the many outdoor pews in front of Saint Martin's statue, gazing up  to the skies counting as many animal cloud shapes as we could recognize. It was a healing time, too, as we took stock of how many  little cuts we had  on our bare hands and legs, bushwhacking through thickets of talahib or runo--a local woody shrub with long bladelike leaves. A few crushed leaves of bitter marapait (local wild sunflower) was a little boy's first-aid kit. The juicy poultice applied to open cuts stung really bad but, believe it or not, instantly stopped any bleeding. Are you paying attention, Pfizer Laboratories? 

   So I felt a little sad for Saint Martin as I watched the transformation of his garden. I felt sorry for myself too for waiting this long to even get curious about who he was and what he did in life.  Apparently, Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican order. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a woman who was a freed slave of African-Native American descent.

Although not among the superstars
in the pantheon of Vatican saints,  
St. Martin de Porres is nontheless
popular in Latin and North America,
earning a panel in the glass-stained
windows of St. Dominic's Church in
Washgington,

   Being a person of color and illegitimate, he was prohibited by Peruvian law from being ordained. He was admitted  to the Dominican order as a donado (unpaid househelper) for the simple honorific of being allowed to wear the long robes of a Dominican monk. But his status remained as a slave, which he embraced with humility and charity. During a long season of hardship when the monastery had no more money to buy food to feed its hungry monks, he pleaded with the head monk "please sell me" during the height of the Peruvian slave trade.  

   The supreme offer of self-sacrifice so touched the other monks that they decided to defy Peruvian law and made him take his priestly vows discreetly. This forced his personal ministry underground as he embarked on a daily struggle to keep a low profile in a cat-and-mouse game with church and government hierarchy. 

   Back in the day, no person of color is permitted to rise in fame. This proved difficult in his case because he made performing healing miracles so commonplace. He brought his healing outreaches to underprivileged communities who, having no money to give him, could not keep their mouths shut with thousands of eyewitness testimonies of his miraculous works. In time, even jealous white monks shed all pretenses of godliness and openly resisted his rise to prominence, calling him nothing but a celebrated black dog  (I often wondered why there was a black dog standing beside his statue!). 

The thing with not having a very active
historical and cultural conservation body is
that it becomes too easy to lose historical
landmarks out of sheer ignorance of their
significance and relevant to the community.
Erecting modern architectural monstrosities
is easy, but recovering lost priceless heritage
is almost impossible.   

   You can say Saint Martin is the earliest voice of Black Lives Matter. He fearlessly broke quarantine rules during the Black Plague to care for colored communities. People of color showing symptoms of the bubonic plague  were often  corralled in  medical concentration camps denied all forms of medication that were reserved for the white population. 

   It is said that Saint Martin endlessly went in and out those heavily-sealed human containments with some obvious divine intervention because locked iron gates flung open on his approach. The plague took a heavy casualty toll on whites just as it is said that hardly anyone succumbed to the pandemic in the rejected communities that Saint Martin visited. 

   To believe the accounts of his many other miracles--such as being engulfed in flames during prayer, bilocation or being in two places simultaneously--for some agnostics may be a bridge too far.  But that a man named Martin de Porres actually lived is factual history. And after a long deliberative process in the cloistered innards of the Vatican, he was finally beatified  in 1837 by Pope Gregory XVI and canonized as a saint on May 6, 1962 by Pope John XXIII.  Interestingly, this beatification is recognized not just by the Roman Catholic church but also by the Lutheran Church and the Anglican Communion.  He is assigned the feast day of November 3--my own father's birthday. 

We lay on these stone pews in St. Martin's prayer garden
after we had gorged on wild red berries that grew around
the yard. Sadly these pews are gone. The garden iself
is gone.

   How uncanny it is, I thought, that in this day of simmering racial unrest and another viral plague, the memorial statue is gone of a man who symbolized triumph over both social and physiological adversities. It's enough to make one  pause and ask how much has really changed since the 16th century? Racism is still tearing at the seams of our society, and an intractable virus is still ravaging our bodies.  

    If the Prayer Garden of Saint Martin de Porres had still been around today, it's straight where I'm headed to medidate and ponder some more. And to look if any of those wild berries were still around...

Note: Recently, I launched a YouTube channel and I featured some of this material in a short video, which you can watch by clicking the image link below:

 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON