Facing reality

The most beautiful thing that you will ever have is what you have, right now.

It is true that Rose of Lima stood in the streets and cried: “there is only one way to God, and that is suffering!”. . . But she also believed that suffering was a beautiful gift of God, the source of peace, happiness, love.

Every life is filled with mountains and valleys, sunshine and shadows, laughter and tears.

Many Filipinos are poor. Seventy percent of our people are living under the poverty line. And with poverty comes trouble, hardship, pain. . . But out of the trouble comes peace. Out of the hardship comes courage and strength. And out of the pain comes love.

This world is the only place where we find that beautiful human mixture of joy and sadness.

I have been working on the galley proofs of “Mama Mary and Her Children”, which will be launched on February 2, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I started out just to tell 32 true stories about 32 real people. But now, looking at the finished product, I am amazed that there is a definite pattern in each story! A pattern I did not plan, and did not even think about! Every story begins with trouble, hardship, pain and ends with peace, beauty and love!

The father and brothers of my great grandmother sent her out of Ireland to New York, to break up her romance with a Protestant boy named Tom. She prayed to the Virgin Mary, saved every penny that she earned in New York, and sent “the passage money” to Tom in Ireland. He came across the Atlantic. They were married, and what started as a troubled romance ended in the beauty of a family.

My Grandmother had a son who was “living in sin”. She prayed for him, saying the rosary every day for 30 years. He came back to God on his deathbed.

In the Japanese prison camp at Los Baños during World War II, there was a girl with a very bad reputation, named Shanghai Lil. But she carried a small piece of a broken rosary. During the bloody battle of liberation she was kneeling at the altar, in the middle of a line of nuns, receiving Holy Communion.

The Japanese in charge of that prison camp we called Konichi. Almost all of the 2000 internees hated him. But the nuns prayed for him. Immediately after the war he was tried and convicted of war crimes. But during his trial he asked to become a Catholic. At 4 in the morning of his execution, at the foot of the gallows, right in the place where we were prisoners, he was baptized and made his first Holy Communion. Then he was hanged. Baptism remits all the guilt of sin, and all the temporal punishment due to sin. So Konichi went straight to heaven, without even a stop over in purgatory.

The answers that the Virgin gives to prayers are amazing! Patrick Peyton was cured of tuberculosis, after the doctors had given him up. A young man who was hooked on drugs broke the addiction. A woman, desperate for funds, found a buyer for her house as soon as she prayed to Mama Mary ‑ though the house had been up for sale for three full years, with no takers. A young wife, barren for seven years, prayed for a baby, and conceived within the next month. The baby was born with all of the qualities she asked for ‑ complete to the last dimple.

When I look at “Mama Mary and Her Children”, it really seems to be the beginning of a documentary to prove the truth of the prayer we learned as children “Never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection or sought thy intercession was left unaided.”

God has given us a beautiful world to live in. He has given us all those we love, and all those who love us. And he has given us his mother, to watch over us as her own children.

Reality itself is beautiful. When you face reality, you are confronted with the love of God. And when you pray to Mama Mary, you are overwhelmed with the human love of a human mother.