We Filipinos are all familiar with how one night in Calamba, Laguna, Dona Teodora Alonzo taught the story of “The Foolish Moth” from a children’s book El Amigo de los Ninos to the young Rizal. The story goes that there was once a young moth who was attracted to the flame of an oil-lamp. The mother moth had warned him that to go near it was to endanger his own life. But the young moth would not listen. He got nearer and nearer the light, not heeding his mother’s advice, until the young moth was engulfed in flame… to his death.

But an adult Rizal wrote later on how he took in that children’s poem:

“My mother repeated her warning, but, how curious, the light seemed to me more beautiful, the flame more attractive. I envied the fate of the insects. They frolicked so joyously in the enchanting splendor that their falling into the oil-lamp didn’t cause me any dread. The flame now rolled its golden tongue and caught a moth that fluttered. and was still.

That seemed to me a great event. It stirred my emotion.

My mother’s voice sounded strange and uncanny. I did not notice it when the fable ended. My attention was fixed on the fate of the moth. I watched with my whole soul. It had died a martyr to its dream…How many years have elapsed since then; the child has become a man who has crossed the seas and all the oceans. From experience he has received bitter lessons–oh, infinitely more bitter than the sweet lesson his mother gave him! Nevertheless he preserves the heart of a child: he believes that light is the most beautiful thing there is in creation and worthy enough for a man to sacrifice his life for it!” (Italics mine)

Our life is not our own. There is nothing like gazing at the beauty of the Light and to give it to our people, even if it costs us everything. 

Happy 151st Birthday, Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda!!!

*Photo of Rizal as a young painter at Casa Tomasina, dated 1879.