Eulogy for a dear Brother Noli Enriquez

I first knew Noli Enriquez as a neophyte. In the turbulent 1967 when I applied to become an Upsilonian in my sophomore year and shortly after my trip back from China which was at the height of its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was a member of Gari Tiongco's Fellowship Council. He was a humble brod, not known to boast and at times almost reticent, preferring to enjoy the conversations that went on around him. He was a good listener by all accounts. But when he spoke, his face was animated, and he spoke with much intelligence and insight. As officer, I had the impression that Noli measured every word he spoke, as if he rehearsed what to say beforehand so that its import and impact would be that more dynamic and effective. Perhaps, it was this kind of measured speech he made before the brods when he persuaded them to accept me as applicant during my presentation. You see, there were brods who thought I was a commie plant, some red agent commissioned to infiltrate the greatest fraternity in the world and learn its secrets. My Chinatown haircut didn't help of course, and my recent trip to China where I was invited to observe the hail of propaganda about the alleged success of their cultural revolution certainly brought suspicion, not to mention my very Chinese surname. Noli had learned that there was a move to reject my application. I am grateful that there was Noli who stood up for me, believed in me and in my potentials.


Predictably, as we each went our own way meeting Dstiny where we were sent, we lost contact after graduation. I got glimpses of him from other brods, stories really – secondhand accounts of his sightings. He was in Japan. He was in Canada. He became a successful entrepreneur. And like any red-blooded Upsilonian, he had his army of female admirers. As for his being an entrepreneur, it was no surprise to me. In U.P., his creative leadership potential was very evident, and it was my hope that he would pursue more studies in UP, take up law perhaps, and become a Most Illustrious Fellow of the fraternity. While I might not be entirely accurate, I believe he chartered planes, organized tours, and managed travel packages and found favour in Lady Fortune's eyes. I am told he led a life of leisure, finding time to pluck the plums out of the tree of life, see the world, and perhaps pour out the occasional stream of measured wisdom and simply bask in the joy of listening to brothers telling much. Because he was witty, he enjoyed the wits and banters of the brods.

I saw him again at the Otso-otso reunion in Toronto. Aside from gaining a few pounds, he was the same old Noli, with that same cheerful glint in his eyes, with that same humble willingness to listen to others speak, even if they were merely Mon Abad’s non-sequiturs, or Angelo Castro’s aesthetic evaluation of Canadian women, or the mocked sound and fury of his fellow travellers pitching editorials at the quality or pretensions thereof, of Canadian wines. Bottom-line, he was a gentleman and a good company.

We will miss him, our fellow Noli Enriquez, a tried and true Upsilonian. But like all Upsilonians who went before us, we will see him again when we are united for that Great Banquet in the Hereafter, when we toast each other to say, “We’re Upsilonians. For this title we proudly bear. Through tears and laughter, we are one everytime, everywhere.”

And the years, and even the mortal separation, will not break us, because we had heard each other. When I see you, Brother, in the Sun, I shall tell you much.

The end of Koinos

Saturday marked the end of our Koinos 101 course. Those of us who persevered were handed our Certificates in Christian Foundations. It was fun while it lasted, this once-a-month encounter with theologians giving the ‘amateurs’ some perspective on theological thoughts. Each now bears the weight of knowledge back into the existential challenges of our congregations, wondering how we can use what we learned. I leave with my wallet a little bit lighter. It was difficult to restrain Stella from buying the pile of books, which were hard to come by in ordinary circumstances - scholarly books being what they are sometimes find the indignity of being ignored in your café-latte ambience of your Chapters and Barnes and Noble. While I am still catching up with the reading and lament my wife’s exhuberant purchases, I could not disagree with her: they are great treasures. I took the added burden of paying a bit more to earn credits towards a Masters degree. This required me to submit five book reports, do 750 pages of readings, and a final integrative essay in addition to attending the seminars. My final essay entitled Perichoretic Phronēsis: The Role of Theology in Church Life ended up at 38 pages with 2 pages of bibliography. “It might seem presumptuous of me to title my essay with the words, Perichoretic Phronēsis, as if I fully knew what the words meant. I am using the words in the humility of someone who has the joy of learning at the feet of trained theologians, and in their simplest meaning,” I began. Taken together, perichoretic phronēsis means the abiding reciprocal practical wisdom of theology in the service of the church. If there is one single lesson I took out of this course, it is this idea from Jonathan Wilson, “To address the church’s failure to critically examine its own faithfulness, theology is a prophetic call to return to the foundations of ministry in the biblical narrative and historic witness of the church. It seems we who are the church do not have a clear sense of what it is that we are to do as the church or why we do those things as the church.”
The course ended with a seminar with Miriam Adeney, Regent College Professor of Anthropology and Missions who gave us some perspectives on World Christianity. Her Theology of Culture speaks to my need to understand that not all aspects of culture are wicked, that the idea of imago deo exists in the goodness and wisdom of all culture, but we must also oppose the idolatry and exploitation of cultures.

True Son of Heaven

I finished reading a book called True Son of Heaven in which the author talked about how Jesus actually fulfilled the Chinese culture. The book, while sparse in some aspects, especially about the richness and complexity of being a Chinese, was a good primer about the 'inscrutable' Chinese mind. In my review, I made the following interesting observation:

In Chapter Eleven, “Spooks, Bandits, and Power Saws,” Marshall talks about the significance of walls (and by corollary, doors) to the Chinese, noting that “Every Chinese defines who he is by which doors he sees from within and which from without. (p. 153).” As a member of a Chinese church (with its overly protective wall over its ‘lingua franca” – in my case, the Fujian dialect), I appreciate this wall mentality all so well, when more often than not, our board of elders and deacons deal with church matters the way the Qing mandarins would deal with state affairs – “What the ordinary members don’t know is good for their spiritual well-being.” It seems that transparency is a concept totally alien to most Chinese, Christians or not). The power of walls is even evoked in the West when we use the term, “Chinese Walls” to describe a need-to-know system of confidentiality and disclosure. The Great Wall is more than a great monument to a tyrant’s paranoia; China sees this as the defence of the civilized against the savage; and there is, with the Chinese’ bitter experiences of nomadic raiders like the horde of Genghis Khan and more recently, the Europeans’ humiliation of China during the Opium War, a reminder of foreigners as the savages. The wall, in the Chinese psyche, becomes its solid emblem of xenophobia. Although I agree with Marshall’s assessment that China is now changing and the unreasoning fear of outsiders is subsiding, my own personal experience in Beijing during the Great Cultural Revolution in 1967 indicates that outsiders are still not quite welcome and certainly not to be trusted with information about Chinese events. At the park, together with my Filipino student group which had been invited by a government-regulated Shanghai youth organization to enjoy the sights of China’s “flourishing” of a “Hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend, (their slogan for the Cultural Revolution),” I inadvertently walked into ZhongNanHai Park across from Tiananmen Square, where we were rudely confronted by a group of angry, screaming red guards. What we thought was a short walk to burn off our sumptuous dinner turned into an accidental incursion into a “study camp” where the red guards were doing some forceful lectio divina of Mao’s little red book, a collection of his quotations (more like his revolutionary aphorisms), perhaps with the re-education in mind of some bourgeois-revisionists whose dunce caps marked the nature of their disgraced status. Through my somewhat broken Mandarin, I succeeded in convincing them that we were friends (‘peng-you”) of the great proletarian society and that we did not hear anything nor see anything (sometimes the monkey’s “no see, no hear, no talk” works), but not after we were pushed around a bit. Back at the hotel, someone commented how we were seen immediately as outsiders. Perhaps, I replied, still somewhat unnerved, my Beatles t-shirt with Ringo Starr in his mop-head hairdo, might have given us away? In 1967, almost all Chinese wore those drab olive Maoist uniforms. 1984 came early in China. The next day, at BeiDa (Beijing University), I recognized a few of the red guards I encountered the night before. This time, after one of our members made his rousing speech about how the Filipino proletariats were united with the Chinese people in the overthrow of imperialists and capitalists, these same red guards came over and hugged me like a long lost cadre.

A Hospitable Trek

During the first weekend of February, a few of my batchmates in the Upsilon Sigma Phi made a joyous trek to visit a brother who is suffering from prostate cancer. When they finally assembled, there were a total of 40 brothers, from different batches, and Sigma Deltans wishing the visited brod a hearty hello. The brod who lives in Las Vegas had been undergoing chemotherapy for his cancer and was moved to tears by the well-wishers. A DVD was shown in which other Upsilonians in the Philippines unable to come gave their greetings to our ailing brod. I unfortunately had not been able to go, and regretted not having the chance to tell my brother face to face about how much I care for him and of my constant prayers to ask God’s mercy for him. The batchmates, a total of about five together with our ‘Tatang’ who was the Most Illustrious Fellow when we were initiated into the fraternity in UP Diliman, stayed over-night at the brod’s place, camped out in their sleeping bags, re-enacting the last anxious night before their ‘finals.’ With the short email narration from a batchmate who was there, I too relived that fearful night knowing that the next day we would face the trial of our young years, when we were shown the rites and secrets of what it meant to be Upsilonians.

To my ailing batchmate, we sent our collective encouragement, “Hold on, when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, ‘Hold on!’” right out of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If which we had all committed to memory during the barrage of neophytes’ suffering we all experienced in 1967.

I am sure there were continuous exchanges of stories and anecdotes, told in the laughters and tears of those who shared a life committed to the ideals of brotherhood. “When I meet you in the sun, Brother, I shall tell you much” never had been as truthful as when we all participate in our narratives which make strong construal of our selves as tried and true Upsilonians. Sometimes, I wonder if we were a dying breed, that last school of “salmon” swimming against the currents to reach some unknown destination, where we fiercely hanged on to our archaic value of brotherhood and camaraderie. While we seem to be overwhelmed by the tide of postmodern scepticism and fragmentation, there is yet an indifference on our part as to how strong the opposition is to our ideals, surrendering to the simple fact of our almost fanatical stance to acknowledge each other as brothers, raising our collective cry against loneliness, stronger than we are as a brother to another brother. We sing, “One case of beer for the all of us. We thank the Lord above there ain’t no more of us… for we are members of the Upsilon Sigma Phi…”