We walk by faith and not by sight. (St. Paul)
Lord, open my lips, that I may sing your praise. God, make haste to help me. (Breviary prayer)

Sharing by Eduardo S. Canlas, BCBP New York, Nov 27, 2021

I was a fourth grader in Lingayen Pangasinan when this saying, “Be honest, when others are not Be honest, when others cannot.Be honest, when others will not, became concretized in my life. I was never good at math and for me, solving fractions was like, well, solving fractions. I knew I was at risk of failing the class and that the only way I could make it was to copy from others, which was what everyone was doing.

It would have been the best solution to my predicament but even at 9 years old, I decided to be honest. As expected, I failed and got in trouble not only with my teachers but more so with my parents who were very focused on our education.
That small decision became an invisible shield and a “cross” that I was to carry all my life. My deficit in Math did not hinder me from pursuing higher education, even a PHD. I know it was God’s grace that got me through.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added unto you.”

This scriptural passage is written in my heart and is very real to me. After college my first job was at Xavier University. I felt this was where God wanted me to be. I was already free from small town Cagayan and was now in big city Manila, when Fr Masterson recruited me to return. I had to make a choice and I am grateful that God helped me make the choice I made. I am a witness to the love, truthfulness, and faithfulness of our God who took me in the palm of His hand and led me into paths He had planned for me. God gave me a small piece of land whose returns provide for me and my family even in my old age.

In 1966 I met the woman that I know was ordained by the Lord to be my wife. Like me, she was God fearing, and in that same year we got married. The book of Proverbs, says
“When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls. Her husband, entrusting his life to her, has an unfailing prize. She brings him good and not evil, all the days of her life.”

Life was not easy for us, but our bond continued to strengthen as God blest us with 8 children. We both worked but our salaries were never enough. Yet together we stood on God’s promise that if we seek Him first, everything else will be added on to us. Somehow, we managed. The Lord provided us with a warm home, food on our table, tuition fees to Catholic schools, and even a small Beetle VW that sometimes stalled and had to be pushed, causing profound embarrassment to our kids who pushed the car in their pink school uniforms while their classmates and friends watched.

In 1963 I was sent for a year’s study in Nova Scotia. That was the first trip I made out of the country and was a great experience and a fulfillment of a long-time dream. For when I was but 10 years old, I had a conversation with the Lord. I said “Lord, can I see your world”? For someone who didn’t have money, and lived in a rural town, that would have been an impossible dream but today, at 83 I can tell you that indeed the Lord heard me, and I have now travelled and have seen so much of the world that never in my wildest dreams could I ever have imagined. Definitely my simple question to God was not uttered in English, nor do I recall whether it was in the dialect of Pangasinan or in proud Tagalog, but I knew that God listened and understood.

In 1973 I was accepted to pursue a PHD in at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. I spent over 5 years there with my wife and 4 of my 8 children. This was a gift from the Lord and an answer to my prayer. What should have been a four-year course took longer basically because I still struggled at Math. I could not pass the exams. I played basketball before every all major exams because basketball helped me relax and put my nerves at ease. I was continuously knocking on God’s door asking Him to help me and by His grace, I finally graduated. Again, I could see God’s hand in the situation. My wife worked at the university and my children were able to go to school here. Another blessing. But when they got home they could not speak Pilipino. But no prob. All is well.

“Give thanks with a grateful heart, give thanks to the Holy One”

We give thanks to a God revealed to us by Jesus, the God of justice, the Lord of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth. The Absolute Mystery who lives in a place we call “heaven,” which we can never locate unless he shows us where it is.

In 1976 we decided to drive to New York City for Thanksgiving. The family crowded in my VW Variant hatchback and off we went on I-71 North and I-80 East. It was a nice, clear morning day, and the colors of the trees now gold and red. It was in that stretch of highway at Breezewood, Pennsylvania, that small place where our journey could have ended forever, when our car started to zigzag headed towards the tip of the railing. I grabbed the steering wheel to prevent the car from hitting the metal rail but the rear fender caught the rail anyway, causing the car to spin towards the opposite railing, smashing it on its side.

The rear door flipped opened and 3 of my kids who were all asleep in the folded back seat flew out and were strewn on that black, cold highway. This unfolded in the blink, or a few blinks of the eye, when time went on like a slow motion movie. But, by the grace of God, and with help of one of His angels, an angel whose name we know or knew, was literally there too to help us,

I bolted out to gather every single one of my kids, they who, though bruised, and now wide awake and staring at the blue sky, were all miraculously safe but with cuts. I couldn’t save them from falling out of the car but the God who has been faithful to us in our lives, protected them, protected us, with His providential love and care. This is the God who loves, who saves, who intervenes.

In a text message I received from my daughter Susan at the time of this sharing ( Nov 27, 2021), was 40 or so years from the incident, she writes: “I once dreamt about the car spinning vigorously. I believe it was a memory of the accident. I was then sitting on your lap ( in the passenger seat of the car) and I recall the trooper asking us through the window, “if we were all right”. I was afraid to tell him that I had a stomach ache.”

Susan was about 4 years old when this happened, so this recollection of hers is both dream and imagination and reality. She was indeed sitting with me in front when the crash happened. But when it happened I bolted out the door to see if the 3 others siblings now on the highway were ok. At that instant, Susan must have been outed from the car too.
The trooper’s conversation must have been her post-facto imagination. But the rest are true.

The trooper brought us to a small hospital on a hill close to a white American Church. At the hospital, we found out that my eldest daughter had suffered a cut to her neck that was dangerously close to the big vein that could have cost her her life.

My daughter Maya, now in her 50’s texted this to me from Australia, also after this Sharing:
“Dear Mom/Dad:
Just passed your sharing to my family and finished reading it myself. It has dawned on me that Our Lord saved me twice: On Thanksgiving Day in November 25, 1976 in Pennsylvania, and
on November 26, 2021 here in Towoomba, Love, Maya”

Just so you know. Maya’s car was T-boned in Australia, one day before this talk was to be delivered in NY, a full 35 years after our accident in Pennsylvania. USA.

We all believe in God. But do we also believe in angels?

I do believe in angels, and our family angel has a name. Her name is Ann Marie Cristina, baptized by Fr. Renato Ocampo on the night before she died, barely 2 days after she was born I believe that she is our own family angel in heaven.

She saved us in Pennsylvania, and she also saved her younger sibling, Maya in Towoomba, a city in Australia.. She was such a tiny cherub of a baby girl with that angelic smile, when in her small and hastily assembled and crudely painted silver gray of a shoe-box coffin, I laid her to rest that morning, with full Catholic blessing by Fr. Cicero Cebrero, my wife’s uncle. Her Mom, Lita, my wife, who still in recovery, never had a chance even to breastfeed or cuddle her first born girl who now resides in a place we call “heaven,” the place where the absolute mystery we call God, resides.

Many things in our life are simultaneously literally true and imagined. That the Absolute Mystery we we call God pardons us our sins and our transgressions, and therefore saves us from being outed from His infinite Love is literally and theologically true, yet must be imagined because it is in the real of spirits.

Give thanks with a grateful heart. Give thanks to the Holy One.
And to Jesus Christ his Son.”

Since our car was a wreck so we had to continue our trip on Greyhound. We were all stunned but grateful that all of us survived that moment y Fr. Renato Ocampo, Today, most of my children serve God in their own special way. That event is forever encoded in the CPUs of our souls.

After I received my PHD in 1980, we all went home to fulfill my obligation. We could have stayed in the US where opportunities were abundant but again, just like the boy in fourth grade, I again, chose to be honest.

In 1986 I was appointed by President Cory as a state college president in Cagayan de Oro. I was faced with the challenge of eradicating the systemic corruption in the school. In my effort to clean up the system, my life was threatened, my family was not safe, but we stood on God’s word:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added unto you.

At this college I went through many trials and tribulations, but the details do not belong here. Allow me to just say that when I reported for duty on Day 1, I was already met by signs and placards, among which was one which said “Jesuit boy, stay out of this college.” The fact that a grenade was lobbed into the residence of the priests there on the night I had a debate on campus with my wannabe rival speaks much of the tension in the college. In that dark period on campus, a high school girl there handed me a small note which read “Sir, you are not fighting flesh and blood but are against principalities and powers”

It was also about that time when I read a passage from Gospel of John which said: “ With me you will find peace, but with the world you will find trouble.” Needless to say I found peace there during my term and despite the turmoil, intrigues, etc. I survived my term there, alive. The president two or three terms down the road after me was not so lucky. Until today they have not yet solved his murder.

Indeed, our God is a God who saves us in more ways than we can ever imagine. This God who did not spare His only Son to save us from our sins, sins that could separate us forever from His love. “The presence of this fundamental fact of salvation as God’s free, unique, historical act in all of human history (including our own personal histories) is, according to Rahner, “the foundation of Christianity.”

In 1993 I was appointed president of Camiguin Polytechnic State College. 

In 1990 on our 25th anniversary Lita and I went to Cebu to go on a retreat and to look for folks in the Opus Dei whom we planned to join. 

My high school buddy, Dr. Romeo Du, met us at the pier and that same evening, after dinner brought us to attend their BCBP Action Group meeting in a house in Lahug and to my/our great shock and utter amazement we saw them praying out loud and maybe even praying in tongues and reaching out with their outstretched hands high up towards God and high up to the heavens.  
   
Wow. I said to myself. How can they do that? Why do they do that? Are they holier than us? Are they more knowledgeable about God or the bible than us? How can they do it?

On that evening in Cebu, during this BCBP prayer meeting, God introduced me and my wife to a type of prayer and a way of praying that was to change our lives forever. 

That night we witnessed the practice of some of the charisms or gifts of the Holy Spirit: namely, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, gift of tongues and interpretation of tongues. (1 Cor:12). St. Paul described these gifts from God to the small village of Corinth 2 thousand years ago in a land later to be known as Greece. But this is Cebu! And it was now 1990 !

St Paul says he does not want us to be uninformed.

That these charismatic gifts are to be thanked for because they are meant for building up the church. And more important: They are for all. “Earnestly desire the spiritual gifts.” St Paul says: Or, plain language “Go for it”

Are the Charismatic Gifts then for everyone? Yes, they are for everyone.
Jesus said:

“Ask, and it shall be given to you. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it will be open to you.”

And so, after Cebu Lita and me came home to Cagayan as changed persons. “Puede pala,” I told myself. “Yanon ka, or mayaman ka, mahirap ka or pobre ka, bobo ka or bright ka, puede pala. Puede palang lumapit sa Panginoon ang lahat.”

So, on the boat ride home, I was already literally doing air travel in my mind, thinking who to recruit, who to invite, who would be most suitable or not, or who are the big shots or the small ones we might or we could recruit to this charismatic way of life. Since our city was then but a town, the year when Magtajas was mayor and Tuquib, the Archbishop, and Fr. Varela the Xavier Chapel chaplain and when the city had only two bridges, we travelled through the town with our mind’s eyes, “flying” as it were, through them street by street , checking out who lived where and in what houses, and do we know him or her, and who might be the right ones to recruit, etc;

That was the plan, and that is how it all began or should begin, I thought. But the Holy Spirit had other plans. When I chose a certain person, it turned out that it was not that person who would later join the BCBP but his brother.

When I selected someone to succeed me as Chapter Head, the entire assembly was in uproar and would not allow it. When I finally brought my successor to Bohol so he could be informed that he was to be Chapter Head. he wept unashamedly, explaining that he was a sinful person. When someone who thought he should have been the one chosen but learned that he was not chosen, he also wept like a child, in private, with me.

When I delivered a specific word of God to a brother, who was in deep prayer in the chapel, praying about his infidelity to his wife, he also wept and returned to the Lord, telling me, in the process “Ed, para akung tinamaan ng martilyo sa ulo”
Translation: “ The word of God was like a hammer blow to my forehead”

When an outsider stumbled into our group in our worship assembly and prayer, the outsider commented, “Who is that genius who formed this group?”

From the first group was to come many who hold or who held positions of responsibility in BCBP, including one who pioneered BCBP USA.

When the Cebu BCBP leaders like Sadi Saguisag, Rene Almendras, Larry Veloso, Nap Polotan, Ed Lising and Romy Du, et al prayed to discern who might be the contact person in Cagayan, Dr Du, said “Ed Canlas, my classmate.” Little did he realize that that same Ed Canlas was already on a boat heading to Cebu with his wife, Lita.

After more prayers they asked who could be the Mission Head and the name “Lazarus,” came to the mind of Romy, who, blurted out, “Ed Lising!” True enough Lising was appointed Mission Head.

The first Breakfast was then set and everything went well. Except for one detail:
I, together with everybody sat fidgeting in the Manresa classroom, waiting for the speaker. But the speaker who was in his hotel room was also waiting for me, the designated driver, to pick him up! Fortunately, in those years, Manresa traffic was still somnolent.

In 1991 God formed the first BCBP Community in Mindanao and it was composed of all kinds of people. BCBP Cebu was ready to come when Typhoon Ruping struck. They planned another mission when Col. Noble and the long haired, rag tag mutineers marched into Cagayan, which delayed the mission. But did not stop the work.

Eventually BCBP Cagayan was formed and is part of history. And so today, four decades later, we remember our members, baptized in the Lord, and baptized in the Holy Spirit and by virtue of their baptism, washed of their sins, and are now with the Lord in heaven, as He promised.

Ordinary men and women who served the Lord and repentants all. They who served God and their fellow men in the best way they could and did. And so we praise God for his personal love for us, for His Mercy, and for His care for His people, His self bestowal of himself and most of all, for His salvation. This absolute mystery that we call God, through His Son Our Lord Jesus, and The Holy Spirit, this is the God that today we testify to you as the One who loved us, who intervened in our lives, who did not stop knocking until we opened our hearts and our families’ hearts to him.

“Come Holy Spirit, we need you. Come Holy Spirit we pray. Come with Thy strenght and thy power. Come in Thine own special way.”