Why we love Rizal

The author delivered these words as the keynote speaker on Rizal Day in Calamba, Laguna on December 30, 2012

Rizal sang out of tune.

He himself admitted his musical talent was zero. Or perhaps he knew that a hundred years later, Filipinos would be the troubadours of the world and didn’t need any inspiration from him.

I mention what he was lousy at because that was unusual. He excelled in nearly everything else he did. He even died well.

We probably would not be gathered here at this moment if he died instead in an alcohol-induced duel with Antonio Luna in Spain a few years earlier because of a love triangle.

He was our Leonardo da Vinci, a man of mind-boggling talent. But he was also what da Vinci was not -- a nation builder.

His world-class intellect and talent are why we admire him more than a century later.

But that’s not why we love him.

It’s not the God-given gifts that he possessed that have endeared him to us, but the man that he was.

Or the common man that he was, despite his vision and achievements.

We know so much about Rizal, partly because he wrote so much, not just books but loads of letters and diaries and fiery essays under a pseudonym. And despite his extraordinary qualities, there were enough ordinary facets in Rizal’s life for nearly every one of us to identify with him in one way or another, and make him such a compelling inspiration.

For a big part of his life, he was a homesick overseas Pinoy, like millions of others today.

His heart was broken several times (and he broke more than a few himself).

He was a serious student but also enjoyed the occasional boozy night on the town with his barkada, as shown by photos of him carousing and wearing mischievous costumes.

He was a victim of injustice, like many Filipinos too; his family’s land in Calamba taken from them, his mother imprisoned.

He was very close to his family like many of us, and studied to be an eye doctor so he could heal his mother. He grew up a mama’s boy, and when he got older, he was the loyal younger brother to his Kuya Paciano, one of history’s unsong heroes.

And his family had secrets that are still being unearthed. A great grand-daughter of one of Rizal’s sisters shared with me that Rizal’s mother was an illegitimate child, and that Rizal’s youngest sister could have been the product of incest between an uncle and his oldest sister.

And why did this descendant reveal these secrets to me, which were then shared with a television audience?

She said that she wanted others to know that you don’t have to come from a perfect family to be a hero.

Who here can say that they come from a perfect family? Any of you can be a hero, any of us can overcome disadvantages and channel our inner Rizal to do something great in our own realms.

As for me, all I wanted to be was a storyteller, and I feel Rizal has accompanied me from a young age in the pursuit of my ambition.

The very first story I recall hearing as a child was the one my father told me about how Rizal died – about how he spun around as the bullets struck so he would fall facing the sky. That image has stayed with me all my life.

Many years later, I’m here because I have told stories about Rizal on television.

I tell stories about Rizal not only because he was admirable, but because there are so many fascinating stories to tell. He is a storyteller’s dream.

And despite the many books written about him already, mysteries persist about his life and work.

For example: When he was a poor man trying to finish El Filibusterismo in Belgium, he fell in love with a certain Suzanna, who later wrote loving letters to him in Spain calling him “you little bad boy.”

All these years, historians have written that Suzanna was his 40-something unmarried landlady in Belgium.

But when I visited Belgium several years ago, a Belgian fan of Rizal told me, “Do you think Rizal would have fallen for a woman nearly twice his age with so many other options around him?”

Sure enough, his investigation showed that at the time Rizal was living in Belgium, his landlady had a visiting teen-age niece who was also named Suzanna, who signed her letters to Rizal “petite Suzanna,” or little Suzanna. And while living in that boarding house, Rizal had sculpted the bust of a lovely young lass which he sent to a friend in Spain.

When someone finds Rizal’s letters to Suzanna, perhaps we will finally find out why she called him her “little bad boy.”

Aside from the stories that endear him to us, there is something else that makes us think about him on many days aside from his birthday and death anniversary, and that’s his relentless relevance.

Just in the last couple of months, during the debate about the RH bill, lawmakers were talking about the last time the church opposed a bill with so much heat. That was the Rizal Bill of 1956 that would require teaching Noli and Fili in schools.

The bishops then issued a statement that declared reading the two novels was a “sin” and lobbied hard through their own loyalists in the Senate to reject the Rizal Bill. They threatened to punish pro-Rizal lawmakers in the next elections.

The bill, co-authored by Claro M. Recto, passed into law, and hardly anyone now questions the value of reading Rizal.

The debate about the RH bill made us think about Rizal again, and made me revisit his views about faith. From Dapitan, he had a lively exchange of letters with a Jesuit priest, Father Pablo Pastells, in which he eloquently reconciled both his belief in God and his knowledge of science. To him, faith was bigger than any religion, and creation and nature’s laws were more an expression of God than the Bible or any other holy book.

Faith and science did not conflict in his rational mind, and to this day it is still the clearest view of faith that I have ever read.

One final thing about Rizal that shows he was way ahead of his time: He loved to be in photographs. The standard pose at the time was stern and unsmiling, the way portraits were done in paintings.

In group photographs, nearly everyone had a serious, even bored look on their faces.

Not Rizal. He was smiling, as if he knew that more than a century later we would gaze at him and talk about him and remember him with so much love and devotion. — LA, GMA News