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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"><b>An autobiographical
faith-journey</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">The romantic in us inclines to picture Federico Agnir, a pastor
and educator, stage artist and cancer survivor, sharpening his quill as he pens
his bio epic. Though we do not hesitate
to line him up with Lolo Pepe pouring out his poetic mind on his <i>Mi Ultima Adios, </i>suspicion nags us that his
writing environment was a bit less confining and more mundane. Still, we image him as solemnly reaching for
his trusted old Mont Blanc, or his wife's Cloisonné pen on the dresser, as he buries
his head under a Florida study lamp.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Our imagination often gets ahead of us, and in this case,
after finding out that Ed mastered the keyboard of the Underwood at an early
age in his narrative, we settled down to the picture of a hacker on a desktop or
laptop recalling his memoirs as he fingers the keys. So we leaned back to let his story unravel rather
than impose our imaginings ahead of his chronicle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Winston Churchill once commented that all of history is
autobiographical, and he had a point. Conceptual
analysis after wading through statistical probabilities is still dependent on
whether readers find accounts to be genuine.
Authenticity of factoids precedes the efficacy of image. Artifice gets on the way of clarity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Ed Agnir's account of his life is nothing but a bundle of
recognizable reality to this reader. We
coasted leisurely down memory lane.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">We waded through an easy read across geographical territory
familiar to us, of political and cultural empathies we shared, and on intellectual
terrain peopled by personages who sat at one time or another in our respective meditative
councils.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Our common geography are places in Northern Luzon
Philippines through Laoag and its provincial High School, to the nation's
capital Manila/QC and UP, to Silliman University by the sea in Dumaguete, a
Protestant institution that academically compares with the rigors of RC Jesuit
training, to the UP university chapel in Diliman, and to the wild frontiers of
Davao City in Mindanao of the 60s.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">I recognized from the Ines-Agnir household's drive for
excellence, a post-WWII Filipino value that saw a way out of feudal elitism in
education, to a venue of meritorious achievement. As a fellow political activist, we too were
not happy with the direction taken by one named Ferdinand Marcos. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Ed's recognition of premonitions and intuitive knowledge,
e.g., the fate of his Uncle, the death of his father, a shaking drawer with a
letter needing to be sent, are right down the alley of acceptable cultural
metaphors of our generation and those who preceded us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Both Ed and I are ordained clerics, he of the Congregational
branch of the United Church of Christ, and I in the Protestant branch of the
United Methodist Church. We both had one
foot in our respective religious communities, and the other, on the secular
world we inhabited; he as a consummate learner-educator-artist in the
Philippines and the United States, and I as a geographically delimited community
development worker among the marginalized.
We conversed with the likes of the volatile Voltaire, the irreverent
Brit Bertrand Russell, and the process thinker Alfred North Whitehead.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">As students dabbling in the arcane study of theology, we
kept company with the demythologizing program of Rudolf Bultmann that promoted
a non-idolatrous relationship with sacred writ (a widespread disease), the
acceptance as grace of the transcendent-immanent Ground of Being as <i>sine qua non</i> to existence in Paul
Tillich, of transparent but contextual responsibility in obedience and freedom
in martyred Dietrich Bonheoffer, and the ethical realism of the Niebuhr
brothers. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Ed practiced pastoral counseling, exercising the patient
discipline and art of reconciliation.
Though differing in methodologies, we both shifted paradigms in our
respective audiences. His sensitivity <i>sans</i> moralism is revealed in his treatment
of a botched exposure to same sex expression of affection, his handling of a
bully, and the divisive GLBT crowd needing to be mainstreamed in his religious congregation
in the US northeast.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Ed wrote his witness not as a treatise to the wonder and
majesty of his God, or the sanctity of his calling; rather, he relates a
journey simply taken replete in precious texture and human quality, and fun in
the telling. The faith in a calling that
began as a maternal vow during a difficult birth delivery actively became the
authors very own. His message to me is simple:
life as it is given is trustworthy,
unconditionally. Live it. Transformation occurs even at the personal
level. Be the change you can be. Freedom is a birthright; it is yours. Exercise it to the hilt. Church-ing is joining others to demonstrate
with one's life the truth of the message.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">The tone at the end of the narrative is invitatory, an altar
call after an impassioned sermon on a warm summer vesper service. It is as if he is saying, "this is my
story, what's yours? So I've told you, now, go do likewise!"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">I enjoin readers to read the book. I hope those who read it respond by writing
their own as well. The book is titled <i>When God Calls, a Faith-Journey
Autobiography, </i>by<i> </i><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:">Rev. Dr. Federico I. Agnir.
It is available from Amazon.com, or directly, email Ed at <a href="mailto:agnir@juno.com">agnir@juno.com</a>
for details on how to get a copy.</span><i></i></div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 13px; clear: both;">Jaime Vergara<br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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