Think about it
Rizal’s secret formula for greatness
By Jun Velasco
“Is there a love nobler than the love of country? Certainly none!– Andres Bonifacio.
IN our dialogues with Manila students on our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal, we singled out his immense or immeasurable love of country as his greatest virtue.
Many Rizalistas including former Supreme Court Justice Hilario Davide Jr., confessed to this writer he could not tell what of all the hero’s superlative qualities was his greatest. Over a cup of coffee at the Knights of Rizal headquarters, he told us “he was all of the above” – a man of many highest virtues.
Maybe the bohemios around us would pick his charm among women, for Rizal invaded many hearts including pretty foreigners. We doff out heart, not to the sheer number of hearts he had won, but to his gentlest manners to them.
We’ll go back to this later, to his many loves, as our friend Dr. Pablo Trillana, now Knights of Rizal’s supreme commander, titled his best seller, “The Loves of Rizal and other essays.”
While we did our bit to keep alive the life and times of the hero in the consciousness of students in the high schools of Pasig and Marikina, we, along with Dr. Trillana, did not to fail to elaborate on his multiple virtues — writer, artist, doctor of medicine, propagandist, journalist, lover, sculptor, dramatist, sportsman, nationalist, patriot, and others.
Yes, we picked the hero’s immeasurable patriotism, his boundless love of Motherland, as most central to his evolution as the greatest Filipino and the Great Malayan that ever lived in our country.
When we said so with conviction, Dr. Trillana was nodding approvingly. We s thought that to encourage the young to be “great lovers too” – in the sense of Rizal’s love of motherland, we really meant that for them to be great lovers of nation is to become hero too.
By nourishing the heart with love’s overflowing, mystical power, the young would be able to follow in his path in the service of La Patria and become heroes. Why not, who knows?
Our chats with Supremo Davide (we were then editor of Bagumbayan, the Rizalistas’ official organ) deepened our reverence for the hero. Ditto with Trillana, KoR’s council of advisers chair Bert Nanquil, former Supremo Roger Quiambao and many of our kapatid.
Are we not impressed with their unceasing devotion to Rizal even at their twilight years? We saw the students nodding their heads. We said a continuing probe into his mind, his heart and his spirituality would make us Filipinos better persons.
Salute them many of who are already in their 90’s, 80’s, 70’s and including those in the youth council who could not seem to live without imbibing the wisdom of Rizal. Yes, they do it without any prodding from the state and any salary or remuneration. They simply obligate themselves to undertake an ennobling task — teach Rizal to our countrymen and those beyond the nation’s borders in hopes of lifting the nation and humanity to higher ground.
As to our point that it’s Rizal’s matchless love pampering – starting from his mother, Teodora Alonso y Realonda and family to first (and last) love Leonor Rivera and friends from all over – and vice versa for he had loved them back to the fullest culminating in his passionate adoration for humanity – we draw inspiration from the Bible that the greatest of human virtue is love.
In the worldly sense, Rizal loved Josephine Bracken, who was his wife; Segunda Katigbak, Leonor “Orang” Valenzuela, Consuelo Ortigay y Perez, Usui Seiko (O-Sei-San), Gertrude Beckett, Suzanne Jacoby and Nell Bousted.
His romantic affairs, again from Trillana, showed “love’s powerful emotions made for a sharper character, a heightened strength and definition, allowing us to view his entire life as both heroic and human.”
As a lover, Rizal had a parallel in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — “a loving but difficult husband… he would lose his temper with his wife Kasturba, threaten to throw her out of the house.”
“The uncommon thread of sacrifice and chastity ran through his life. Self-control defined his affairs with women to an extent that suggests deep understanding of chastity as a virtue and demand essential to the fulfillment of his mission.
In Leonor Rivera, he had probably seen that kind of woman, having shared with her the feelings and thoughts that were shaping and directing his steps toward his redemptive goals.
Rizal had clearly admitted that Leonor was his only illusion and had educated her to become an ideal companion.”
It undoubtedly clear that the all-powerful of love he was richly gifted in childhood and his countrymen and the whole humanity as needing his compassion, love and passion of the highest order has moved him deeply and in a manner he couldn’t ignore … but act with resolute fervour and heroism beyond compare.
Even if he has to suffer and die for the sake of true love of the highest kind, love of Motherland.
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