(Follows are excerpts of the speech delivered by Mr. Montelibano during a convocation of Muog Lodge No. 89.)

I had a friend from my high school days, a friend who was very close to me until he died at around forty. For 25 years we ate together, drank together, worked together, fought together, risked our very lives together. And as we both got married, our respective families became as close as us. But when he died so unexpecteddly, only then did I realize that he was a Freemason.  I was helping out his widow, a group of his Brother Masons asked permission to give him a send-off at their Lodge. I was lucky enough to be Invited to that send-off, and it left a beautiful memory.

After that, I entertained the Idea of joining, of knocking, but as fate would have it,  the Freemason through whom I would have asked suffered a stroke and became comatose until his death last year. It appeared that it was not mean to be, my applying to be a Freemason at that time.

Yet, the influence of Freemasonry kept crossing my path, mostly in the person of Boy Fajardo. While be never tried to Influence me towards joining the fraternity, I knew all the time that he was a member. And from the beginning of our friendship, we shared a common interest -- we were both very curious about life, about anything and everything about life. And when mundane matters began to bore us, as   they do quite qutckly, we would move on to unfamiliar territory, to  the speculative, to the realm of probabilities and possibilities. We would examine the universe. We would remain seekers. And in our respective search, our journey to our fulfillment, we came to sense the universal order, the greatt purpose of existence, the directions which life gravitates to, all of which were beyond the powers of man to break or destroy. In this intuitive understanding, we developed the conviction that, indeed, there is a Great Architect who has a divine design, and that man's happiness, or his pain, is absolutely proportionate to the adherence to or the defiance of the divine purpose. It is in this seeking of ours that I traveled the intellectual and moral pathways of Freemasonry without my knowing it.

The sensibilities of Boy Fajardo would not make him reveal Masonic secrets, although through inference I sensed many of them. I could not help doing so, because I have this deep attraction to the biblical person known as Solomon. And I know that all Freemasons share this attraction. It does not take too much imagination to sense what would attract you, as I know what attracted me.

First and foremost, it was his wisdom, or his choice of wisdom over all things. And second, the legacy that he left behind was the temple that he built, a temple that must have manifested his legendary wisdom.

And while Boy Fajardo would not give in to my request for answers to questions about rites and rituals of the fraternity, my curiosity brought me to the Internet and you wouldn't believe what cyberspace can reveal. I have enough information about Freemasonry to sense its essence. I even have enough information, from the Internet and my own understanding of life, to imagine the protocol and forms of its rites and rituals. Rites and rituals, after all do not exist for their own purposes. Like symbols, they stand for something. Like symbols, they promote something. And like symbols, rites and rituals cannot be irrelevant to the messages or values being promoted by the fraternity. The secrets of Freemasonry are threatened with man's unabated urge to know eve rything and the supertools invented by today's technology.

But it is not the revelation of the once unknown, or the once unseen, that threatens society. It is still man's weakness that brings the destruction and pain that has plagued us throughout human history. It is the same weakness that Solomon saw, that Solomo himself succumbed to, that Solomon had to rise above. The building of the perfect temple was prepared along lines that would stand on divine strength and harmony, as if to serve as guide to the humanity that is invited to enter.

Yet today, the temple is covered by the soot of physical and moral pollution, its beauty and sanctity perverted by the preponderance of human greed and lust for power. Never in our history have greed and materialism so dominated human consciousness that evil has become more acceptable than poverty. Religions and governments alike place more attention to the poor than than perverted, to money than morals. The existence of Freemasonry is threatened by the ascendancy of materialism over spirituality, not by its secrets being revealed one by one. Freemason is threatened because Freemasons have become as vulnerable as non-Masons. Never, therefore, has Freemasonry faced such a challenge. In the days of the Inquisition, Freemasons were threatened. Today, it is Freemasonry itself that is threatened. The values on which the fraternity exists are taking a beating on a daiIy basis.

Where is the value of the Square which symbolizes not only things of the earth but also honor, integrity, truthfulness? Where is the value of the Compass, which symbolizes things of the spirit? Where is the value of the G, the Geometry which the ancients believed most revealed the glory of God and His works in the heavens, the God who must be the center of all our thoughts and our efforts? Where is the value of the Gavel, which symbolizes self-control and seIf-discipline? Where Is the value of the Hourglass, which symbolizes the nature of transient time? Where are all of these values in the context of society's addiction to the material above all else? Where, then, would be Freemasonry in a society that stands for everythlng opposite it?

There exits today a challenge to Filipinos, Freemasons or not, to rediscover values that do not dissipate with use, that grow more beautifully with the passage of time, that light the way brightly even in the dead of night. There exists today a challenge to Filipinos, Freemasons or not, to nurture the young, to protect the weak, to feed the hungry, to solace the grieving, in the face of drug abuse, wholesale corruption, and rampant greed. These challenges are for all, as all must build their perfect temple. But who will lead? Who will show the way? Who will be the light, the guide to the Inner Sanctum?

If the challenge to the ordinary Filipino is the rediscovery of traditional values, the challenge to the Freemason is nothing short of pioneerlsm, of heroism. Freemasonry as a collective fraternity is challenged to model a community lifestyle of service, of giving, of reaching out to those in need, materially or spiritually. In today's context, that requires heroic strength. But can Freemasons turn their backs on this challenge? Can Freemasons indulge in ignorance in a period of darkness, indulge in plenty in a time of scarcity, indulge in passivity during crisis, indulge in conformity as morality disintegrates? I say not. I say Freemasons as individuals have no right to stand idly by in times like this. I have not taken an oath to be brought to the light, to die in the body and erect in its place the immortal, the divine. You have, and the society which you are part of cries out to be inspired by your light, your beauty, and your courage.

Reprinted from "The Cable Tow", Vol 75. No. 3