On behalf of my brothers and our families, we want to thank all of you for your gestures and words of sympathy over the last couple weeks. We especially want to thank Tita Thelma, Christine, Tony, Kalesi, Tita Mila, and others who were a part of my father’s life here in Nevada. We are deeply grateful for the love, care, and affection you gave my dad in his last years. Today, I hope to take a few minutes to celebrate my father’s life by recalling his many achievements and good works, but also perhaps reveal what I have come to understand about his inner life.
Nicholas Llanes Rosal was born on Oct. 31, 1928 during the American occupation of the Philippines, studied in the seminary during World War II, and completed his training not just a cleric of the Church, but a theologian, and not just a thinker, but a priest committed to apostolic life, my father arrived in the U.S. in 1962 during the Civil Rights movement and a full three years before the Asian Exclusion Acts were replaced by the Federal Immigration Laws of 1965, the former of which locked out Filipinos from emigrating to the U.S. for more than 30 years. He met and fell in love with my mother, Simeona (Mimi), in Chicago. My father stayed in the Midwest, and my mom left for Alberta, then Toronto, to give birth to my brother, Nicholas Anthony. And my parents began the immense challenge of forging a family and raising a child apart from one another on either side of the Canadian border. Having read my dad’s letters during that time, I know those were profoundly difficult years for both of them for many reasons. They were aliens—officially and figuratively. After the priesthood, my dad wrote a good deal about the cruelty he experienced in America, but he also wrote—and thought—about the complex, but abundant generosity of many individuals he met along the way.
He put his thought into action in his many years of service at Perth Amboy Board of Ed, where he directed high school equivalency, night, and continuing ed programs. Over the years he volunteered at the hospital, worked as translator and conflict moderator for the local court, hosted a radio show, and was a member of the Middlesex County Civil Rights Commission. Throughout the 1960s my dad preached and administered sacraments in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast, working under Fulton J. Sheen’s Propagation of the Faith. He had received a full scholarship to the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain, but chose instead to study at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. Previously, his doctoral dissertation at UST focused on the Philippine Independent Church founded by Gregorio Aglipay, close kumpadre of the brilliant scholar Isabelo de los Reyes. My father opposed Father Aglipay and Mr. de los Reyes theologically, but all three shared an immense affection for Ilokandia, the beloved land of their language and birth. Moreover, my dad was a great admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Aristotelian, who set out to prove the existence of God by logic, by syllogism. But I believe my dad shared more with St. Augustine, their temperament of passions, which could make him a difficult man to be around, those closest to him can attest. More importantly, my dad had an Augustinian desire to tell personal stories with unflinching self-scrutiny as a way to achieve God’s grace. Like Augustine, my father was a chronicler, and my dad must’ve written thousands of pages about his own life, family, culture, and history in multiple genres. Perhaps his proudest literary achievement is his book on Ilokano.
But he was also a musician. He composed original works and arranged religious, secular, and folk songs for piano and organ. This is a man who loved music. And music is yet another way to chronicle, another way to remember. What most people don’t understand is: when you listen to a musician, like my father playing Schubert or “Pamulinawen” or one of his own compositions like “Un-Unnoy,” you are not just listening to a man playing; you’re listening to a man listen — very, very deeply. Of course, my dad was an extrovert. He loved to chat up strangers, argue, flirt, provoke, make people laugh. However, this card-table charisma, this family-gathering garrulousness, was stored and replenished in reserves of his solitary (and therefore virtually invisible) but intense listening. He understood that prayer was not just reciting a memorized supplication or declaring one’s faith or silently making requests of the Almighty. My father conducted his private life in a way that suggests he understood prayer as a kind of listening. I was in the room with him and saw his downcast gaze, when he received the call that his brother Antonio had died after Katrina, how my dad hung up the phone, turned to me, and wept. Listening may be the moment we become most vulnerable, most human to anyone. This is no different in one’s relationship to God, one’s listening to God, one’s vulnerability.
For my dad, much of this lifelong contemplation was an agony, in the Classical Greek sense of “struggle,” like Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. By listening—however imperfectly—my dad struggled toward forgiveness. Not forgiveness in the abstract, but in the two principal scriptural modes: God’s forgiveness of us; and our forgiveness of one another. This is a man who wanted to forgive and be forgiven.
Sure, this was a man who burned oatmeal to a crisp on a cookie sheet; a man who spoke four languages and delighted our Italian barbers with his Latin; a man who was not great at mahjong or betting ponies; who would come down from his bedroom at 3am to greet my friends who would be playing spades in the basement, telling each of them to make sure they go to church; a man who took his granddaughter Remi to the Chinese buffet after school; a man whose rage could flood a whole house, ebbing only after weeks, months, even years. I say, remember the charmer, the lively talker. Remember the irascible grump. But also, remember the man trying to get closer to God, clacking away at a typewriter late at night, studying at the piano, the man with a scarred violin held beneath his chin or a cheap flute poised at his pursed lips, the man closing his eyes... his listening, a gift, a failure and gorgeous prayer all at once, a stillness, an attention, an intention, a devotion, an extension of love itself, a testament to mercy, both human and divine.