Sometimes, in this farflung corner of the globe so far from the hills of Southern Indiana I used to call home, I get a bit nostalgic as my unconscious mind drifts back to days long gone, innocence lost, and paths not taken. Many American ex-pats in Asia and elsewhere fly back to the states this time of year, perhaps on home leave with the tab picked up by this or that multinational or development agency.

Not having such a gig and being essentially left to my own devices to build a business here, support my Filipino family, and otherwise chase Big Rock Candy Mountain come hell or high water, I am not one of those ex-pats. Indeed, I have only been home once the last few years, that emergency trip having been necessitated by the unfortunate occurrence of my late, beloved mother crossing the River Jordan. This, then, marks our fifth holiday season in the Philippines since we made the decision to relocate here.

Given that the Philippines is the only Christian country in Asia, the festivities and accoutrements are in general familiar to Americans and Europeans raised in similar religious traditions. Last year about this time, I wrote about Filipino Christmas traditions like Simbang Gabi, Misos de Gallo, and the Feast of Three Kings (Random Christmas Reflections, 2001 Edition). There's a certain intensity to the way Filipinos celebrate religious holidays, perhaps more pronounced during Holy Week, what with self-flagellations and all, but equally apparent in the various processions and complex rituals of the Catholic Church that occur this time of year. At the family level, Filipino Christmas celebrations always involve plenty of get-togethers, parties, and lots and lots food (something I can attest to as would-be patriarch and host/financier of the annual shindigs for my wife's family).

However, much as in America, Christmas has become commercialized in the Philippines and one has to wonder what became of the true meaning of the yuletide season. The malls are jam packed, everybody's got to have the latest, most popular gizmo, and kids grow up socialized by MTV and derivative icons of American culture. Perhaps I'm more conscious of it at the end of this particular year - this year of the growing clash of cultures, with those Bali blasts still echoing through the Southeast Asian collective unconscious and subtle paranoia rearing its head as we hold our breath and wait for Uncle Sam's seemingly inevitable invasion of Iraq (for my own take on the situation, see last month's Ex-pat Reservations, Asian Trepidations, a column that has gotten me roundly lambasted from diverse quarters and that was even censored on one particular discussion board best left unnamed; I'm almost as proud of that as I once was when I finally managed to get myself barred from the blackjack table as a card counter at some boondocks Nevada high desert sawdust joint, but that's another story (see Blackjack Filipino Style if you're interested in that sort of sin and degradation)).

I grew up in an intensely religious home of the Pentecostal variety. (If truth be told, I come from a long line of holy roller preachers, but that has nothing to do with the tone of these Pearls, I assure you)...

The highlight of the Christmas season was the annual Christmas pageant at church, inevitably a retelling of the events on a certain night in Bethlehem a couple millennia in the past. My father, being a leading member of the congregation, devoted Gideons fundraiser, and lay minister, always played a leading role, pasting on a cheap dime store white beard (or, some years, growing prickly whiskers) and donning an old flannel bathrobe and sandals to play the part of Joseph or (in alternating years) one of the wise men.

The Christmas season itself was an organic part of the year-long immersion in religion, and there was never any forgetting what Christmas was all about. The established ritual, which occurred every night after supper, involved the family (me being the oldest of five kids) assembling in the living room around the coffee table on which sat the Family Bible. Everybody took turns reading verses from the Good Book and answering Bible questions pitched by the old man and my mother (a Sunday school teacher throughout her adult life). (One consequence is that, in addition to my more secular skills such as being able to count cards without calling on the conscious mind and hold my liquor without trying is that I can still recite the books of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, in order forwards and backwards).

Christian ideals were integrated into the family's life, what the Louvin Brothers called "living the Christian life". My parents were always rescuing people in trouble, giving money away to those who needed it, and loaning money to people they knew were never going to pay them back. Dad made part of his living doing taxes, and he made it a strict policy to never charge a pastor for doing his taxes, even if the job was 12 times more complicated than it should have been - which was usually the case given the way preachers tended to show up on about April 13th with a shoe box full of receipts and a desperate look in their eyes.

Reflecting on the above childhood memories from my current historical perspective and with the so-called wisdom of middle age, I recognize that the words above paint an idealized portrait of a world that was far from perfect. Those fundamentalist values also had embedded within them an intolerance and lack of acceptance that led me to serious adolescent rebellion (I left home at 17 and never really looked back) and propelled me into my prodigal adulthood, during which I have lived in Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, Nevada, Thailand, New York, Los Angeles, and points in between. Perhaps it's no coincidence that I ended up in the Philippines, about as far away from Indiana as you can get without falling off the planet.

I should also add, lest first-time readers think I'm a Jerry Falwell clone, that my spiritual background goes beyond the hard oak fundamentalist church pew. Once upon a time in the rapidly fading past, while living on a commune and facing a high draft number in one of Nixon's last lotteries, I banged out a number of rambling essays on my battered Smith Corona, arguing that I was a Buddhist and that killing people was something I just didn't believe in, a straightforward pacifist appeal with plenty of heavy Eastern philosophy cribbed from Alan Watts, who himself had ripped the ideas off from D.T. Suziki via Christian Humphreys, thrown in for good measure. (It didn't work and I ended up in the belly of the beast, as they say, but that's another story).

Later in my checkered life I learned a few things about life (and death, which is after all just the other side of the wheel) from various gurus, including a little old Thai fellow named Sam who used to join me for intense meditation sessions in my hootch in between directing bomb runs into Vietnam from a classified radar site in eastern Thailand (see Ex-pat Lamentations, Oriental Ruminations). A few years later, I survived a rather serious involvement as a graduate student with a Malay princess who, if not particularly devout in her Islamic practice, at least prayed once in a while and fasted throughout Ramadan. (I say survived because of the various subterfuges involved and the fact that her husband put a price on my head for my infidel nerve, but that's also another story). Now I am married to a typically Catholic Filipina, albeit one who studied wicca in Los Angeles and who's just weird enough to accept me as I am.

Anyway, I'm afraid the bottom line is that you can't ever get away from your roots, no matter how hard you try. The past exerts a subtle and ineluctable pressure on the present, today's influences always interact with historical reality, and an unpredictable and sometimes frightening future always looms just over the horizon. There's no escape from the mental landscapes of lore and myth, the various traces created in your mind by earlier generations, or the folly of your own youth. The psychic riverbed winds its way along, existing even when there's no water, providing a well-defined path through which the waters swell and ripple when the rains finally come.

In closing, let me draw a quick parallel, as I did more academically in Modern Manila and Ex-pat Angst, between traditional and modern society. Even in the American heartland the old values are slipping away, and people no longer live as authentically as their ancestors. And, without making sweeping generalizations about Filipinos, I suspect the same is true here (especially in the overcrowded, rats-in-a-cage city of Manila).

Which leaves me a bit at loose ends about how to wrap this erstwhile Christmas Pearl, other than perhaps to mention that I'm starting to feel a bit like Blanchard, one of the original columnists of the Forum, a jaded ex-pat in search of elusive dreams in an environment so very different from one's roots, yet fascinated by Asian culture and trying hard to understand and empathize as best one can (see Asian Christmas Parable). Indeed, given the nature of my rambling in this off-the-cuff column, I suppose one could benefit from reflecting on one of Blanchard's own Biblical reference points: - "...For what does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his very soul...?"