A Bloodless Atonement

On this day in 1977 and 1978 I first witnessed a religious fervor that introduced me to fanaticism. I’d heard extreme “devotion” verbalized before and had seen media accounts of over-the-top followers of this or that religion, but I hadn’t personally experienced it, literally, in flesh and blood. Then I went to the Philippines for two years. On Good Friday in 1977 and 1978 I saw an array of penitential actions by devoted Catholics who were marking the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. The Republic of Philippines is 95% Catholic so the Passion Week was in effect a national observance.

I saw a remarkable number of people carrying large crosses, reenacting Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. I’d occasionally seen someone do the same thing in the U.S., but not in large numbers. It was interesting to see that most of the people doing this were either young men or older women – a Jesus and Mary connection.

More than a few of the young men carried the cross while “walking” on their knees. Before long, blood began to seep through their pants. At a well-known place in Zambales women would crawl on their hands and knees up a steep mountain side to a shrine where they would ask forgiveness for their sins. By the time they got down that mountain their hands and knees were bloody pulps; they could barely stand and walk.

Blood was the order of the day. I saw one young man after another flagellating himself with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Some wore no shirts; others had flogged their shirts into shreds. The object was to shred their backs into a bloody mess. Some of the whips weren’t just adorned with knots; some had sharp objects tied into the knots. The flesh was torn and blood ran freely, soaking into the tops of their pants, occasionally down to their knees. These young men would walk up and down a street, doing this for several hours. Some did it for the length of time that Jesus was on the cross. I saw a couple of instances where one man was whipping another man while the second one carried a cross.

In 1977 I first heard about what might be the ultimate act of penitence. There were several young men in various places in the Philippines who would be crucified each Good Friday. One of these sacrifices occurred about 50 miles from where we lived. This man’s story was that his mother had been ill with a terminal disease and he prayed to God and promised that if his mother was healed he would have himself crucified for 10 consecutive Good Fridays. Whether miraculously healed or otherwise, she lived, and her son kept his promise. On Good Friday 1978 I went to witness this event, which was the seventh year of his 10-year promise.

With the help of friends, he laid down on a cross and large nails were driven through the palms of his hands. The scars from previous crucifixions were clearly visible; they served as the mark for each year’s nails. His feet were not nailed, but rested on a block of wood nailed to the cross. The cross was lifted and held in place for all to see for as long as the man could take the pain, about 10 minutes in 1978. Blood trickled down the side of his hands and dripped slowly into the dirt. The pain was obvious on his face. When the cross was lowered the nails were removed and a doctor began attending to the sacrificial lamb.

A large crowd gathered to watch this event. People prayed or said the rosary out loud; others cried; others just watched with a mix of pain and solemnity on their faces. I took a camera with me; but I couldn’t bring myself to take pictures. The media was capturing the scene in photos and on film. But, I was somewhat overwhelmed, and not in any good or spiritual way. I was stunned and saddened that the day had been twisted beyond recognition by good and decent people trying desperately to signify their devotion to God and their savior.

This scene came to represent something else to me. It signified the extent to which religion can overcome the rational mind and cause people to do things the rest of us can never understand. Every religion produces some analog to what I witnessed.

More importantly, on that day I began to doubt that God would employ blood sacrifice as a means of atonement. The idea that God, as our Father, would mandate that the only means for his children to return to his presence was by having his son nailed to a cross to die in agony as a blood sacrifice, simply began to ring untrue. It began to ring as merely an extension of ancient rituals of sacrificing animals on an altar, a seemingly logical extension made naturally by the leaders of this new Christian sect, almost all of whom were Jews who had been imbued with a belief in the absolute need for blood sacrifice. In their world, God had always required blood atonement; so God would always require blood atonement, from one lamb or another.

Once a Christian takes a step or two back from the cross, things begin to look and feel different. Other forms of man’s desperate need to signify devotion to God start to become apparent. A twisted sense of sacrifice in the name of God or under the mandate of God starts to make no sense whatsoever. Things change, including Good Friday.

For me, this day became a symbol of a bloodless form of sacrifice that we are all called upon to make, one in which we devote ourselves to sacrificing for the well being of other people. We are called upon to give of ourselves, to our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, fellow citizens, and our brothers and sisters around the world. We are asked to give our lives in the service of others, notably the poor – the poor in wealth; the poor in health; the poor in spirit. We, too, are asked to love others enough to bear their pain; enough to bleed for them, figuratively, if not literally. We are asked to nail our ego to a cross and let it die, so that we all may rise and live better lives.

It is in these ways that we come into the presence of God; it is through our love, service and sacrifice that we atone and become “at one” with God.