OUR THANKSGIVING STORY November 2024

A talk given by Ed and Lita Canlas,

Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals

Via ZOOM, 2020

“O Lord, open our  lips, that our  mouths  may proclaim your praise. O God, make haste to help us.” Invitatory Prayer 

Ed: Today we recount the story of God’s goodness and his salvation in our  life. But this is also a story of the men and women who walked the BCBP byways with us. They all struggled too, yet they believed, and had faith in the Lord. This, truly, is their story as well. This story may not be complete but I promise you that by the end of this recounting, you too will see the invisible hand that guides you, and the Spirit that inspires you. 

It was in ca.1949 or so when, as a fourth grader in Lingayen, Pangasinan, that our own BCBP slogan “Be honest when others are not; Be honest, when others will not; Be honest, when others cannot,” had already in a  retroactive sense become very real in my young life. I had seen in the old Baltimore Catechism an illustration which shows a boy’s heart spotted with black before confession, and a completely white one after confession and so I figured deep, that a white heart is something I preferred, rather than a black one. This was just one way I passed the byways of my life: from boyhood to high school to college years to manhood, to marriage and family years and mature years. God was always somehow present in those segments of my life, despite the darkness I went through. Like Romano Guardini once said: “We, like members of the Church, are sinners who want to be saints,” or something like that.

In Grade 4 I knew I was at risk of failing a math test and I knew that the only way I could pass was to copy answers from others, which was what everybody else was doing. 

Cheating would have been the best solution but even at that age, I decided I was going to be honest. I chose to “fail” rather than to copy. That small “cross” had become a “given” in my life. This, however, did not deter me from getting my PHD, even at Ohio State University.  I know it was God’s grace that helped me through a very difficult and long academic journey.

When I returned to Cagayan after my doctorate in the US, many asked why I even bothered to come home to Xavier, while others said, “What took you so long?” I could not tell them, “Wala mo kuyapi? Hapit gani ko dili ka pasar.” To seek first the kingdom of God, so everything else can be added unto me, became for me a way of life. I was happily married and content, the children started coming and I could play basketball. Ce la vie’. Life was good. But not always. 

In the 1960’s  I worked at Xavier where I felt God wanted me to be.  I had to make a choice because working in a small college in a small town was not glamorous, but I am grateful that God helped me make that choice. Because, decades later, God gave me a property which today still provides for me and my family here in the US. 

In 1965 I went to Nova Scotia.  It was an answer to my dream. For when I was young I had prayed “Lord, can I see your world?” This simple prayer was not in English, nor was it in Pangasinan or even in Tagalog. The fact is that I do not even recall how I said it. But say it, I did and I know that  God listened and understood.

At 83 years old, I can tell you that indeed the Lord heard what I prayed for because I had traveled and have seen so much of the world that at some point I even had to ask God for a respite from my travels.

After Nova Scotia I met a new graduate, God fearing Theresian woman who, today, 59 years later continues to pray daily with me, praying for our children, praying for our grandchildren, praying for friends, and praying for others whose needs are brought to our attention. 

Lita: 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.”

Ed:In 2003, after my retirement my wife and I traveled to the US as a tourist.

We had no plan to stay but things just happened. Now in 2022 we know better. Things just don’t happen because God intervenes always.

Together, my wife and I stood on God’s promise that if we seek Him first, everything else will be added on to us: A US citizenship, including a new life and a family reunited in America, and even finances to build our own home.  

In 2004 I became a Visiting Professor at Ohio State. Something to brag about, yes? But not really, because the position was an honorary one, without pay. I could have worked from home, (for all they cared) but I decided to go to my office and do my research assignment, day in and day out, because staying at home and doing nothing could really drive anyone crazy, especially here in the US. You know what I mean.

At this state college I went through many trials but the details do not belong here.(Refer to my book).  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 was that a grenade was lobbed at Xavier’s Loyola House on the evening I had a campus debate with my wannabe rival. Thankfully the grenade did not explode, but was reported by Fr Millar to the police. 

I call this blessing a “negative benefit,” because instead of being paid, I had to be the one to pay, reporting to work on a daily basis, and often crying silently inside and sometimes with real tears. Tears became my wages.

I then asked my family to pray Psalm 115 with me:

Lita:

  “Those who fear the Lord trust in the Lord

   He is their help and their shield.

   The Lord remembers us and will bless us.

   He will bless the house of Israel.

   He will bless the house of Aaron…

   May the Lord bless you more and more

   Both you and your children

   May you be blest by the Lord who made heaven and earth.

   Heaven is the heaven of the Lord.

   But  the earth he has given to the children of men.(Ps 115)

Ed: And so it happened: Citizenship, check. Family together, check. Everything, check. It took a while: legal hurdles, bureaucracy on both sides of the Pacific, check. Everything, check. God answers prayers. We just had to trust and to wait, because God’s negatives are really positives in disguise. 

We had lived in Columbus, Ohio before, for my studies in the 1970’s, and it was from that city, when on one wintry, 1976 November Thanksgiving Day weekend that my young family’s journey almost ended on highway Interstate 80, in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, halfway between the city of Columbus and New York City.

It happened when a lapse in judgement caused our Volkswagen Variant to zigzag uncontrolled towards the cold, gray tip of the highway metal railing.

So while I was holding our little 3-year old Susan on my lap at the passenger side, I reached out with my left hand to correct the driver’s steering wheel because the car had zig-zagged and was headed towards the tip of the side metal highway railing.

At 55 mph, we narrowly missed the deadly steel, but not completely because our rear fender hooked on it, causing our car to spin across the highway, and crashed us on the opposite railing, effectively stopping the vehicle, smoking now. But the impact had flipped open the rear door and spilled Maya, Ronald and Myra, who were all sleeping in their blankets in the folded, flattened rear area, spilling them out on to the hard, cold highway, cut and hurt and stunned and bleeding. But otherwise spared from tragedy. I jumped down and scooped my children in my father’s puny arms. But nothing I could do, or could have done at that moment, or, any tears I could have cried, would have saved them. For God and his angels had already saved them, they who, in their sleeping states had flown out of the back of the car’s opened rear door, with their blankets and all, with nothing but sleep in their sleepy states, but with the love of the God who saves, the God that we pray to often in our family prayers, the God we do not really know, but whom we believe in, because we were taught when we were young to pray to Him, the God whom we prayed to in Spanish when we were younger and in English, later in our years when the American era dawned in our country, but who had just now “cushioned” the “flight through the air” by our three of our four children, saving them from unspeakable harm, saving them from only God knows what. “Lord, we thank You for your great love and mercy to us and our family.” 

God had saved them, He saved all of us.

Traffic and passing motorists came by seconds soon after and they threw us pillows and blankets and stuff, things coming from the generous hearts of the Americans. One blanket of which, tattered blue and green, became so beloved by Susan that she would not part with that blanket when the time came for all of us to come home to our islands. That blanket is seared into her memory. 

By the grace of God, and with help of one of God’s angels, one angel whose name we know, was literally there also, to help us on that highway. Now we can say that God had intervened.

Lita: Susan, on the day of this sharing, texted this: “I once dreamt about the car spinning vigorously. I believe it was a memory of the accident. I was then sitting on your lap, and I recall the state trooper asking us through the window, “if we were all right?” I was afraid to tell him that I had a stomach ache.”

This trooper brought us to a small hospital near a white chapel on a hill and there the doctor told us that our eldest daughter Maya had suffered a cut to her neck that was dangerously close to the big vein that could have cost her her life. This is a miracle. Indeed our God is a God who saves us in more ways than we can ever imagine. 

Psalm 91: “For to his angels he has given command about you, that they guard you in all your ways. Upon their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.

Ed: We all believe in the Absolute Mystery we call God. But do we also believe in angels? I do believe in angels, and our family angel has a name, the Angel who ventured to rescue her family when there was great danger in a terrifying but beautiful Pennsylvania landscape.

57 years ago, our first born Ana Marie lived only 2 days, and was hurriedly baptized in the Lord, in the night before she died to be with God in heaven.

When our pediatrician told me of the seriousness of her “blue-baby syndrome,” I went to Fr Ocampo so she could be baptized, and he baptized her that night, before she died.

Fr. Cebrero arranged the details of the burial and she was interred the following day, she who was “asleep” in that little, gray wooden casket, dressed in her white baptismal dress, a dress symbolic of our belief that our baby has “put on Christ,” and has become by the sacrament of baptism, truly a child of God. 

Events like these have a way of hiding deep in one’s subconscious.

Because in that moment of death, I simply was not able to find neither the tears nor the grief as I performed a father’s duty of burying my daughter..

But no matter: she is with God. But I had no clue that my personal pain was deep and profound. But eventually the gravitas of that “little death,” was to surface my heart,  four decades later, on a “Father’s Day.”

Casually I had asked ” Lita, how old do you think Ana Marie would be today,  if she were  alive?” I could not, at that moment,  understand why our own ”angel” Anne Marie became so vivid and so real to my mind, as a one grown woman of forty, of an age a year older than Maya, the sister who replaced her as eldest. This vision brought me sobbing to last minutes. “Ed,” my wife said, “You have just been greeted a ‘Happy Father’s’ day by Anne Marie” Yes, indeed. Our angel, named Anne Marie, was there too, on that fateful Thanksgiving Day in Breezewood, Pennsylvania in November 1976.

In 1980, after my PhD studies we all went home. We could have stayed in the US,  but then again, just like the boy in Grade 4, I again chose to be honest, to honor my commitment to Xavier U. I had worked 25 years there when in 1986 President Cory appointed me  a state college president.  Although much of the college is clean, there still remained  the challenge of systemic corruption. In my effort to clean up the system, my life was threatened, and since my family was not safe, we had to evacuate to a safe house somewhere. But we stood on God’s word to be honest.

Seek first his kingship over you, his way of holiness, and all these things will be given you besides.”  Mathew 6: 31-33

At that time, John 16 had caught my eye: “ With me you will find peace, but with the world you will find trouble.” Needless to say I found that peace, and it showed apparently in my demeanor during these turbulence in the school. The college auditor, Mr. Nieva saw this and told me so. It was as if God had thrown a protective invisible blanket over me. At one point, when Dito Dela Cerna, Wewell Sison and Jong Tiro and my police bodyguard were with me in the president’s cottage, the demonstrators burned stuff outside the house, otherwise doing threatening things, forcing my bodyguard to say “Anyone who enters the house will be mine.” I survived my term there, alive.  But a succeeding president, two or three terms down the road after my tenure, was not so lucky. Until today, they have not yet solved his murder.

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

I asked Congressman Romualdo why he requested that I be transferred to Camiguin and he said, simply: “Because I heard you are clean.” “OK,” I said, I will come to your college.

There is a deep mystery in coming to an island. One feels that one is coming to a place of quiet or rest, leaving behind the hustle and bustle of the world. I did not tell him that I needed such an island to rest in. As I crossed the sea, I begin to understand that indeed I am going away from men to God, to rest in His silence, to pray at His feet. My task here is to recollect myself ( nurse my wounds) so that tomorrow I might return to them, to love them and to serve them for Christ’s sake, for God’s sake.

I begin to realize too, that I have yet another task to perform on my island: I must set my mind at rest and quiet my heart: detaching it from all created things in order to turn it to God, the Creator and Lover. This is what islands are for. Not everyone has an island to live on, to come from, to go home to.

But all of us must make our own islands within our hearts. Islands where fear cannot dwell, islands where we can cross over the bridge of our days to rest at the feet of our Beloved, to drink of His silence, to be made whole again and ready for the battle of tomorrow. I thank God everyday for my island.

It took me quite a while to be “healed” on my island. Years earlier, when I had fallen in love with my island, I thought that it was just a passing thing, of no moment. That must have been sometime in 1989, and I mentioned it to Gov. Nieto Gallardo, when we visited Barangay Ytum at the foot of Mount Hibok-Hibok, where he was reforesting the mountain.

When I finally lived and worked in Camiguin, in my heart I thanked God for honoring my yearning for more solitude and quiet. Because, you see, when I was recovering from my experience in that state college in Cagayan de Oro, after my family and I had evacuated to a safe house in front of St. Mary’s School; after I had “lost” the power, the perks, the prestige, etc., I now walk down that hill, instead of being driven by my personal driver, in my presidential car, so I walk down forlorn and utterly alone, and I cling tightly to my brown leather office bag, and not knowing what to do or where to go, and I then simply and quietly and possibly in tears, asked Our Lord: “Lord, where are we going now? What are we to do?”

For you see, I had reached not only the bottom of that hill but also the bottom of my life and I had to decide: “Should I turn left? Or, right?” And so I asked Him, “Lord, where do we go now?” The Lord was silent, as usual. He always is. Like when I asked Him when I was in Grade 4: “Lord, can I see your world?” Or, when I was on board an American Airlines jet from New York to LA, in 1963 after my studies in Nova Scotia, when I asked again, “Lord, why me? Why did you choose me?” Or, in 1967, when I saw my bride walking down the aisle and I said, ” Thank you, Lord, for giving my Angelita to me.”

Ed: On our 25th anniversary my wife Lita and I went to Cebu to go on a retreat and to look for 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 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 about the bible than us? How can they do it?

Lita: It was on that evening in  Cebu, during this BCBP prayer meeting, that God introduced us to a charismatic type of prayer and a way of praying that changed our lives forever. 

That night we witnessed men and women exercising the practice of the gifts of the Holy Spirit: word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, gift of tongues and interpretation of tongues. The same spiritual gifts St Paul talked about thousands of years ago in Corinth.

1 Cor 12:4-11  Brothers and sisters, there are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit.

There are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone.

To each individual, the manifestation of the 

 Spirit is given for some benefit.

To one is given, through the Spirit the expression of wisdom, to another the expression of knowledge according to the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit.

To another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit; to another, mighty deeds.

To another prophesy; to another, discernment of spirits.

To another, varieties of tongues; to another, interpretation of tongues.

But one and the same Spirit produces all of these, distributing them to each person as he wishes.

.

Ed: So, on the boat ride home I was already literally doing air travel inside my head, in my mind, mulling who to recruit, who to invite, who would be most suitable or not, or who are the guys that we could possibly recruit. Since our city then was but a small  town, the years when Magtajas was mayor and Tuquib, the Archbishop, and Fr. Javier the Xavier U president, and when the city just had only two bridges, and so in my own  mind’s eyes, I travelled, “flying” as it were, through the city like a bird, street by street, house by house, block by block, eyeballing who lived where and in what houses, and do we know him or her, and should we recruit him or her? etc, etc. And that was how the Holy Spirit helped me in the work he had cut out for me.

That was my 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  he who would  later join the BCBP, but his brother, etc.etc. 

So when I personally selected someone to succeed me as Chapter Head, the entire assembly was in total uproar and would not allow it. When I finally brought my successor to Bohol to meet Manny Bannigan and Sadi Saguisag so he could be informed that he was to be Chapter Head, he wept so unashamedly, and resisted, explaining that he was a sinful person. 

When someone who thought that he should  been the one chosen but learned that he was not the one chosen, he also wept like a child, in private, in my house, with me. He was to face more trials in his life. But eventually he was chosen as head. God was at work.

When I delivered a specific scripture message to a brother, who was in deep prayer in the chapel, profoundly remorseful and repentant about his indiscretions, he also wept, saying “Ed, para akung pinukpok ng martilyo sa ulo.” (Translation: “Ed, it was like God had put a hammer to my head”)  God was at work. I remember quoting these words from Sirach to him: 

“Give no woman power over you to trample upon your dignity. Be not be intimate with a strange woman, lest you fall into her snares. With a singing girl be not familiar, lest you be caught in her wiles.” 

The death of that member, early in our BCBP days was like  the cement that glued and bonded our group like never before or since, and I personally consider him a “martyr for BCBP Cagayan”, one sinner among many sinners who repented, of whom Jesus had said “would go go to heaven even before the righteous ones.”  

One of my buddies who became a part of our pioneering group also  told me that before BCBP he had thought that Jesus was someone who came from one of the planets like Mercury or Pluto or Mars. His own life was so changed radically that after his death, his own daughter was so inspired by her Dad,

Inspired enough to become herself a nun.

When an outsider stumbled into our group in worship assembly and prayer, the outsider commented, “Who is the genius who formed this group?” I could have said: “Genius, no. Holy Spirit, yes.”

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

But way back then when Cebu BCBP leaders gathered to plan and to  discern who might be the contact person in Cagayan, Dr Romy Du, of Davao said:  “Ed Canlas, my classmate.”  Little did he realize was at that same moment Ed was already in the sea, on a boat, MV Cagayan, heading for Cebu with his wife, 

Lita. Before we left for Cebu, my daughter Maya, newly married to Tata Malferrari prayed together that me and my wife would somehow stumble into the charismatic movement in Cebu and their prayers were heard. In that first CLP Tata’s parents were there, and we too were among the many. 

Ed: God again, had clearly  intervened in our lives.

In 1990, on a PAL flight from Zamboanga City to Cebu, I had an urge to send this message to Cebu: I said: “What are you guys waiting for? You already sent a team to investigate Cagayan de Oro, talking to influential folks there, even visiting Archbishop Tuquib. What are you waiting for?” Deep in my heart I was thinking, “Lord, we are ready in Cagayan.”

Finally, the first BCBP Community in Mindanao was formed. We tell you all these stories, some deeply  personal, only for one reason: That in the spiritual geography and spiritual history of BCBP Cagayan that God indeed had come down and continues to come down to our lives in loving and living ways too many to recount. 

And so today we remember those members now gone home to God.

They believed that God, the Absolute Mystery, indeed exercises, and had exercised an “inescapable power over their lives and in our lives and over their existence and in our existence.” Indeed God is alive.

Lita: God intervened when we were timid and lukewarm. God intervened when we were ignorant or proud. God intervened when we were rich or when we were poor. God intervened when we were abused or when we were the abuser. God intervened when we were humble or were humbled. 

Ed: God intervened when we did not know how to love or when we fell in love with money and wealth, with  power and prestige and with false gods and fake news or sought refuge in conspiracy theories which were nothing but rabbit holes,or when we argued or mouthed reformist ideas but did nothing about them. Or even when we fell in love with ourselves. God intervened when we wandered the night streets. Or when our hearts were made of stone.

The Absolute Mystery, the God that today we testify before you is the One who did not stop knocking at our doors until we opened our hearts and our families’ hearts to him. 

God had saved us even when we were sinners, and precisely because we were sinners. “ This fact of salvation is something we experienced in our lives. 

Psalm 40: “I have waited, waited for The Lord and he stooped toward me and heard my cry. He drew me out of the pit of destruction, out of the mud of the swamp.

He set my feet upon a rock, he made firm my steps. 

And he put a new song into my mouth, a hymn to our God.

Many shall look on in awe and trust in the Lord.

  • Happy the man who makes the Lord his trust, who turns not to idolatry, or to  those who stray after falsehood.

           How numerous have you made, O Lord, my God, your wondrous deeds.

           And, in your plans for us, there is none to equal you. Should I wish to declare or 

           To tell them, there would be too many to recount.                                 

1991 photo. BCBP Founding Group, Manresa, Cagayan de Oro. With BCBP Cebu Mission team

R1 L-R Herrera, Escara,Canlas, Almonia,Dela Cerna, Gorospe, Saguisag,Polotan, Tucker, Magtajas, Malferrari, Penaflor, Racaza, Bualat, Entece, Magaro

Kneeling: Osmena ,Garcia, ?, Abastas, B.Montellano,N.Montellano, ?

R2 L-R ?,?,Villa 

R3 LR Congmon, Almendras, Du,?, ?Roa, Neri, Rojas,?, Paras, Raypon, Escano, Ecco,?