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 Mi Ultima Adios, 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Ed Agnir's account of his life is nothing but a bundle of recognizable reality to this reader.   We coasted leisurely down memory lane.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 sine qua non 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. 

 

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 sans 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.

 

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.

 

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!"

 

I enjoin readers to read the book.  I hope those who read it respond by writing their own as well.  The book is titled When God Calls, a Faith-Journey Autobiography, by Rev. Dr. Federico I. Agnir.  It is available from Amazon.com, or directly, email Ed at agnir@juno.com for details on how to get a copy.