The day James returned to our Savior

St. Joseph became my favorite saint starting when I was in third grade. That was toward the end of the school year and I had lost a magnet that we used in a science project.

I prayed directly to Jesus and not to any particular saint. I should have sought the intercession of St. Anthony of Padua, who, his devotees claim, help find missing articles if you pray to him. But I didn’t know that then, being only nine years old.

Just when I was about to give up my search, I found the magnet in the pocket of my khaki shorts two days later — on March 19, the feast day of St. Joseph. From that time on, I’d pray to Jesus’ foster father for special favors.

In the family altar, we had a small statue of St. Joseph in plaster of paris. But his image was part of the Holy Family. When I would pray to him, I’d focus only on his image and ignored the Blessed Mother and the Child Jesus with him.

In fifth grade, my family was invited to a get-together at the house of my baptismal godfather, Justice Manuel Pamaran, who had earlier earned for himself this reputation as the “hanging judge” because he had sent a number of convicts to the chair. No wonder, his house had its own security guard to watch over him, his wife and their children (all girls).

It turned out that my godfather was also a devotee of St. Joseph and it was in the Pamaran house that I saw for the first time another depiction of the holy carpenter who was given the special task of raising Jesus on this earth. Instead of the more popular image showing him carrying the infant Jesus on his arm and with a cane that had a white lily on the tip, St. Joseph was in his deathbed and knelt before him were the grieving Jesus and the Blessed Mother.

Some 11 years ago, I asked a Laguna-based relative of the in-law of entertainment columnist Jojo Gabinete to carve a three-foot wooden image of St. Joseph with the Child Jesus. By then, I had also moved to another neighborhood and I was delighted to discover that the patron saint of my new parish was St. Joseph. This is the Santuario de San Jose in East Greenhills.

Every March 19, I say special prayers to mark the feast day of St. Joseph — and even wait for the procession in his honor to pass by near my house and I watch from the window. One time, I lent my St. Joseph statue to the church because they had decided to hold an exhibit of his different images.

Last March 19, no thanks to dizzying deadlines — for this paper and other projects — I got my calendar mixed up and I just woke to Toni Rose Gayda’s text informing me that her younger son James Lim had died.

I shed tears, especially when I talked to Toni myself, but immediately rolled up my sleeves because there was a huge task ahead of us. First on the list was to make a strategy on how to deal with media: To our relief, everyone behaved properly and stuck to the guidelines we set for them to follow and I’m sure this was their way of showing their respect to Rosa Rosal, who had been helping fellow Filipinos for the past six decades through her Red Cross projects.

You want respect? Then be respectable. That is the one dictum Rosa Rosal had always adhered to since she became an actress in the very late ‘40s.

On the evening of March 19, I was on standby at home and was ready to take that short drive to Santuario de San Jose. All that I waited for was word that James’ cremated remains had been brought to the church’s mortuary chapel.

Upon reaching the church, I saw several carrozas in hammered silver and there were firework displays and that was only the time I realized it was the feast of St. Joseph. The flurry of events that day had made me forget that it was the fiesta of my favorite saint.

Rosa Rosal and family, of course, are born-again Christians, but once upon a time they were also practicing Catholics and in the words of Toni, “We had so many religious images at home before that they could convene a cabinet meeting among themselves.”

For some reason, I can never take out of my mind this association of Rosa Rosal to St. Joseph because of a Holy Week episode of her old TV series, ‘Yan ang Misis Ko. In the story, her husband in the show, the late Ronald Remy, had flown to Davao and the plane had crashed. But he came back alive because he missed the flight — having given his seat to an old man they believed to have been St. Joseph.

James Lim returned to our Savior on March 19, which was also the death anniversary of Rosa Rosal’s mother, Gloria, who passed away in 1981. Rosa Rosal takes comfort in the fact that her beloved James was welcomed in heaven by no less than his great-grandmother.

As a Catholic, I find consolation in the fact that that James, our Baby James, went straight to the bosom of Christ our Savior on the feast day of St. Joseph, who is regarded as the Patron Saint of Peaceful Deaths.

I believe in that because St. Joseph was kept company by Jesus and Mama Mary in his deathbed. What could be a more peaceful way to go than to breathe your last between the Blessed Mother and Christ the Redeemer?