Cabinet of Curiosities

When I left Baguio in 1998 to come to Virginia to take up the teaching job which had been offered to me at my university, my mother gave me a little replica of the statue of La Virgen de Antipolo.

The Cathedral in Antipolo, Rizal Province, houses the original statue (brought to the islands from Mexico in 1626) of The Virgin of Antipolo, otherwise known as Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage. Many pilgrimages have been made to Antipolo-- especially by those embarking on or returning from long sojourns.

I've only been to the Antipolo Cathedral once-- my family had made a trip one summer when I was in high school. All I remember is the cathedral rising like an ornate cake with a round dome at the end of a row of sidewalks where vendors tended their religious wares: rosaries, scapulars, novena cards encased in red plastic; little statues such as the one I now have.

Here is La Virgen sharing space in my lizard-decorated curio cabinet from Indonesia: with a tiny wooden trinket box from India, and an "Emerging Girl" piece of raku-fired pottery I brought back from a visit to Hawaii in 1995. Flanking the cabinet, are two miniature birdhouses handcrafted by my lawyer-poet friend T.

I'm thinking of all this as I ponder various paper and presentation deadlines-- one of these being a piece I've got to prepare for a panel I'm on at the 2011 AWP Conference, called "The Rosary Effect" (on the influence of Catholicism on writers and their work).

Naturalmente, for many of us Pinoys the world over, that experience is very much like this cabinet of curiosities-- comfortably housing both the sacred and the profane, the threads of institutionalized ritual impossibly entwined with and hybridized by indigenous practice.