Insight

Who is the Santo Niño?

By DORIS TRINIDAD
January 2003

The month of January is a time for celebrating the feast of the Holy Child or Santo Nino, a unique facet of our religious culture.

The manner in which we worship and call upon the Holy Child can take on the aspects of a cult. To some, it can be a turn-off or a curiosity. To die-hard fundamentalists, it is "idolatry." Certainly, some of the manifestations of this devotion can be quite bizarre.

In any case, devotion to the Holy Child is not indigenous nor exclusive to the Philippines. The first images were brought over from Mexico and even now there is extant the Santo Nino del Prado in Spain to whom many offer an hourly novena for cases of extreme and urgent need.

But I do not know where else in the world are there as numerous reports as here, of dancing Santo Ninos, or winking ones, or images which are seen gallivanting at night, to return to their pedestals at dawn with sullied hemlines and muddy faces.

Nor is there anywhere else with so many persons becoming channels of the Santo Nino, or in any case of some playful entity with a child's voice and mannerisms and able to heal or give advice and evince strange phenomena.

I have recently come across a beautiful interpretation of the Holy Child phenomenon which I'm sharing with you.

Is it possible that our predilection for the Santo Nino is actually a manifestation of the child in us, or more exactly the Christ-Child in all of us, a Child who often feels lost and alienated here in the kind of world we created, and longs to return to His Father's home?

Some skeptics give the opinion that those dancing statues that speak, smile, walk about and grow in size are the handiwork of elementals, since the real Son of God would not waste His time evincing such silly, certainly un-Godly phenomena.

But what if all these strange happenings are but projections of our minds (whose power we are only beginning to surmise), nothing but congealments of our immemorial yearning for our childhood home which is heaven?

If you believe there is Christ in all of us, then you also believe there is Christ-as-Child; the sometimes orphaned, lonely, homesick waif in us that cries for warmth and security.

This is why we have have such a cloying, even maudlin devotion to the Santo Nino. This is why people do such weird things to show Him they care, like giving Him food and jewels and fancy clothes. The misplaced, apparently fanatical, "idolatrous" display is nothing more than awkward attempts at cradling the Child in them.

People think they crave for wealth, health, the material blessings they implore the Santo Nino for, when the truth is, it is their innocence which they have lost, or never had, which they yearn for.