For a Catholic nation, apparently we don’t understand our Religion and Faith, at all. Take this campaign made by the awesome folks at Ogilvy Philippines:

Ogilvy was not allowed to use the tag “Give Us This Day” on public billboards and has been asked to cease the campaign. The reason? It was Blasphemous.

Seriously?

MLQ3 recently praised this ad campaign in his post The Right Fight, The Wrong Time. He said:

“No one has pointed out what a remarkable image, and what a remarkable campaign, this was…”

he goes on to say:

“Here in one image, all the the things that people think matters to people (including themselves):

1. Faith and Hope

2. Perseverance of the Underdog

3. The will to win of the Champion

4. Community & Solidarity

5. Material Success & its Manifestations

People were given the option of adding their personal “prayers, wishes or dedications” for Pacquiao. In one fell swoop, popular instincts were marshaled and put on display:

1. The Community Spirit

2. Patriotic Feeling (versus Nationalist Chauvinism)

3. Racial Vindication

4. Individual Empowerment

5. Religion’s Role in Everyday Life”

Now, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why the tag “Give us this day” could be blasphemous. The Lord’s Prayer is etched in people’s minds so strongly that it is part of everyday life. And why shouldn’t it be, in this predominantly Catholic nation?

A quick google points us to this BBC post on religion and ethics. And it talks about the Lord’s Prayer:

Rivers of ink have been spilt over the exact meaning of “give us this day our daily bread”, because the word that’s used in the Greek is a very, very strange one that you hardly find anywhere else.

It probably means daily, it probably means the stuff we need to survive, but at least come people in the early church understood it to mean the bread we want for tomorrow or even the bread of tomorrow; “give us today tomorrow’s bread”.

And they thought that might mean “give us now a taste of the bread we shall eat in the Kingdom of God”: give us a foretaste of that great banquet and celebration where the universe is drawn together by Christ in the presence of God the Father.

And so that connects for a lot of Christians with Holy Communion. Of course, because Holy Communion is, at one level, bread for today, it’s very much our daily bread – the food we need to keep going – but it’s also a foretaste of the bread of heaven, a foretaste of enjoying the presence of Jesus in heaven at his table at his banquet, as the gospels put it.

So lots of meanings there, lots of layers. But I don’t think there’s one meaning that we just have to settle down with. The simple meaning keep us going, give us what we need is all we really need to go on. And yet as soon as we start unpicking that, we ask: well, what do we really need?

We don’t “live by bread alone” says Jesus himself, “but by every word coming from God’s mouth”.

We don’t live just by having our material needs fulfilled, we need something more: and one of the things more that we need is hope, hope for tomorrow.

And so perhaps that ghost of an idea, that shadow of an idea that this is also bread for tomorrow and tomorrow’s bread, can come in somewhere.

Now if the ad campaign had Anne Curtis in a seductive pose wearing only her birthday suit with the tag, “give us this day”, then it would neither be fit for an ad campaign nor public viewing and definitely not appropriate for the tag.

Not that any warm blooded male would mind such image.

There is nothing on this ad campaign that says it was blasphemous. In fact, it shows Pacquiao— and by extension, Filipinos’ religious devotion and how prayer and God is part of just about any Filipino endeavor, even prayer in public schools. It shows that we don’t live just by having our material needs fulfilled. We need something more.

As awesome as this campaign by Ogilvy is, apparently it will not qualify for a local creative award because of the cease order. It is vexing to waste such campaign. If I had to choose an ad campaign that depict the Filipino in all his fault and all his glory, at this particular junction in time, this would be it. For a Catholic nation, we ought to be proud of this rare and intelligent ad campaign. This campaign does not fall under the category of what should be censored. To think such image blasphemous is not only un-Filipino but only shows how myopic some people’s perspective is. The Filipino is far smarter than that, why do people insist on dumbing him down?

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