The time of year has once more come when conversation may respectably take up ghosts and spirits. TV channels vie with each other for the top rung in spookiness. The buffet is abundant: from subtle suggestions of the preternatural to graphic depictions of the diabolically possessed. And because the Filipino’s humor is irrepressible there is that spoof of a ghost comfortably seated beside a compulsive movie-goer, sharing in her popcorn, obviously with her kind consent!
Philippine studies scholars remind us that the indigenous Filipino was animistic. The world of the pre-hispanic Filipino was one permeated by spirits. Most everything had a spirit. This is the reason that Filipinos in more traditional settings still make offerings of food and drink. Our common fear of ghosts is a vestige, they theorize, of our animistic past. That is all very well. But is there not, in fact, a suspicion, almost universal, that there are realms unseen, dimensions that exceed the boundaries of our everyday, familiar world? On the one hand, we should be credited for the humble acceptance of the limits of human sensibility. In our fear of ghosts, we accept that reality is more than the eyes and our other senses can reach. On the other hand, when we watch our backs for some unseen presence on a dark path on a moonless night, we transgress a salutary rule of thought—the canon of parsimony. Occam forbade the ‘multiplying of being’ without necessity. Bertrand Russell warns against postulating to much, lest the inexistent be posited. Contemporary science for its part has decided that the simpler the theory, the more plausible it is.
“Shades”—that is how ghosts were thought of in Greek and also in Jewish thought. When one died, all that was left of oneself was a ‘shade’ that, together with other shades, inhabited the forbidding region of the netherworld, variously called “Hades” or “Sheol”. There was not much to look forward to in this ‘next life’. In fact, life in the underworld was ‘shadowy’. But why did something have to be left at all? Why not accept that like the flowers of the field that, when rotted, simply cease to be, leaving nothing at all behind, we too disappear forever, having run the course of our lives? Looked at this way, ghosts are paradoxical. One is not comfortable with them; in fact we fear them. But they also represent our refusal to resign ourselves to the annihilation with which death seems to threaten us. The belief in ghosts is somehow a ‘transmuted’ hope that in some way, in some sense, we are still around, even after the inevitability of death!
In fact there is something contradictory in the notion of “seeing ghosts”. Ghosts are spirits, and spirits are, by definition, immaterial and invisible. So seeing ghosts is seeing the invisible—obviously, a contradiction in terms, except that some people insist that they have seen ghosts. My mother insists that as a child I reported to her that I was being beckoned to by an old woman seated on a “baol”, and when she asked me to describe who I was seeing, what I told her matched how her newly departed aunt—my “lola”— looked like! And while one can steep himself in that brand of positivism that has very little patience with talk of ghosts and spirits, there are times, in fact, that one gets that uncanny feeling that one is not alone!
Personal identity, Ricoeur insightfully writes, is ‘narrative identity’: the identity of a character emplotted in a narrative, a story. Of every person a story can be told, and it is this story that constitutes his identity, hence the folly—and the injustice—of “fixing” a person in the image one has of her, flattering or disparaging, and of identifying a person by a singular act of either nobility or ignominy. But really, there are two stories told. There is the story a person is able to tell of himself, and there is the story that others tell of a person. And while all story-telling about another comes to an end with the death of that person, who is to say that that too is the end of the story one tells of oneself? That, of course, is not a completely new insight. Gabriel Marcel, who characterized himself as a “Christian socratic”, said of the human body that it is both body-subject (the living of my bodiliness) and body-object (as object of apprehension and the transitive action of others). While we can say that with the interment or cremation of mortal remains, we have done away with the body-object, what entitles us to foreclose anything further in respect to the body-subject?
One thing is for certain: Ghosts are not what the Christian means by resurrection. Risen Life is the fruition of meaningful bodily life—life unselfishly lived in the goodness that death does not extinguish. Risen Life is a life stamped with such validity that it in fact participates in what the person of faith recognizes as Divine Life. About that kind of life, there is nothing ghostly at all!
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@yahoo.com
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