Cosmic anthropological perspective and panentheism on the peripheral pious exercises within popular Filipino religiosity

Abstract

Within various expressions of Filipino popular religiosity are found different peripheral pious exercises. Specifically, they are acts of the piety of the people rendered commonly on religious images, such as touching, caressing, wiping, embracing, and kissing them. These pious actions of the people elicited great objection and even condemnation from other people with different religious orientations. From this context, this research was conducted. It intended to present a different perspective on the peripheral pious exercises of the people within popular religiosity expressions.  By applying Ferdinand de Saussure’s dyadic model of sign analysis on collected digital images, layers of meaning about the acts of piety were formed. The semiotic results were translated into deeper but relevant meaning using as a lens cosmic anthropological principle. The peripheral pious exercises were recognized as the unconscious expressions of the panentheistic view of the people. They are expressions of wayless way spirituality that is considered beneficial for progress in the spiritual life of Filipino Catholics. They affirm the very idea that God is found in one’s ordinary life of the believers. They are behavioral symbols identified with and shared by the common people within the Catholic tradition and made Catholic culture more vibrant, colorful, and transformational which affects the inner and outer lives of the ordinary Catholics. They too are expressions of the concept of hiyang that creates some sort of harmony and integration between humans and the divine, which led people to acknowledge their place in the cosmic social order, and that they need to express something to someone whom they can have complete harmony with, God. Finally, they can be regarded as behavioral affirmations of what is naturally true at the quantum level, the interconnectedness of the physical and the metaphysical.