Of a martyr and a messiah

‘I ONLY thought of saving my soul. Now I think I saved my country’s soul.”
Hallelujah! Good tidings of great joy, the birthing of a new messiah at that bastion of elitism that is La Salle (Greenhills) during the weekend was hailed by both the high and the lowly, led by the once-sainted President Cory.
Now-better-known as Kris Aquino’s mother, Cory was quick to appropriate the oh-so-hallowed “Hindi ka nag-iisa” mantle of martyrdom the Filipino people bestowed upon her husband Ninoy Aquino and passed it on, as though a family heirloom, to Rodolfo Lozada, Jr.
In one fell swoop, the celebrity of the hour just past his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame has assumed the fullness of life of a martyr. Ah, to what lengths could we deceive, nay, delude ourselves.
Ninoy’s was a life of struggle for the liberation of his people, from ignorance and want, in his early years from mayor to governor, from the scourges of graft and corruption, as a crusading senator , from tyranny, as a prisoner of conscience in Marcos’ gulags of Laur and Fort Bonifacio.
Even in exile, Ninoy did not let up in his struggle to free his country, telling America and the world of the oppression of his people – even at the time the US President was entrancingly waltzing with the home-grown dictator.
To his last breath, Ninoy lived his article of faith: “The Filipino is worth dying for.”
Thus, Ninoy assumed the phenomenon of martyrdom. That which William James observed in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as:
“No matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this way or that, if yet we cling to life, and he is able “to fling it away like a flower,” as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.”
As martyrs go, Ninoy “escaped the need to live,” so to speak.
How fares Lozada beside Ninoy?
Ninoy did not even aspire to be a martyr. Martyrdom claimed him.
Lozada, by professing he has “saved his country’s soul” had laid full claim to being a messiah. Nay, he had anointed himself the messiah. Christ Jesus!
The crying probinsiyanong Intsik got us all emotionally involved when he revealed himself – in the holy company of nuns and priests at that! – as the light of Truth in the darkness of lies of the ZTE-NBN scandal. Emotions we mistook for some stirrings of our very soul that in Lozada’s epiphany we so believed that we came to witness in it Saul’s very own conversion at Damascus’ Gate!
Faithful suckers as we are – remember the national ecstasy over the La Union apparitions produced by one Joedel some years back? – we get so blinded as to discern Truth from the Lozada hearsays.
Thus the most unreliable “narinig ko po” and the most astounding “sa palagay ko po” that Lozada’s so-called testimonies (?) are punctuated with, we take for Gospel Truth. St. Augustine’s “Seek not to understand in order to believe. But believe in order to understand” we have stretched to incredulity here.
The Christ’s own warning about false prophets we disregard here.
A matter of opinion easily contested has become for us a dogma of faith that cannot be questioned, that can only be believed. This is Lozada’s chronicles.
Even as Lozada unravels – with more chinks and cracks in his “moral” armor showing: the expensive Wack-Wack golf playing rights; wheelings, dealings and nepotism at his Philippine Forest Corp., flashy cars, etc.; even as his once-persecuted posture has morphed to that of an avenging aggressor, still we invest all our faith in his Truth.
Really now, where has our reason gone?
A self-proclaimed messiah? Lozada is -- to me -- more like that which Horace referred to in his Ars Poetica as “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” The mountains are in labour, a ridiculous mouse is born.
A mouse for a messiah? You believe this? Suck.