20090513

Dear darlingest Annelies Marie,

There are two significant things, in my mind, about my earliest years. Given the grace to look back into my life with the new perspective I have in my Lord Christ, my loveliest love, like looking into the darkness to see what has been concealed from me all this time, I can now seek to recognize the motions of grace in my past life as moments distinct from the darkness which was all that was to me before God chose to pierce it with Light.

Though not all of it, mind you, for grace is an unseen motion in all our lives, my darlingest dear, and I do believe that pretty much 99% of the time, due to the unsurpassed generosity of our LORD, we remain unaware of it until the Beatific Vision (which God wants all Mankind to enjoy) and of the 1% that we are allowed to recognize in the darkness of exile time, these instances, realized in ourselves by the merits of prayer, virtue and all its resultant good works, would still be more than enough to fill our hearts with a joy that (like starlight is shed) seem to stretch out into infinity.

Grace is in our lives as human beings not because we are anything good, my loveliest love, but because our LORD alone is infinitely good and I know in myself - for I can only speak for my own heart - that I receive it only because I have chosen to believe in my All, in my Savior Jesus Christ. Yet the evidence of our LORD's grace is obvious in all the good things - in the motions of peoples lives, in places and things contained within those moments between our hearts with each other and in God - that I see (and perceive) all around me, seen (and unseen), which only magnifies and confirms those good things that are already present in Christ in me.

And I owe it to the counsel of Saint Maximilian Kolbe that I can now aspire for things that seem so impossible before. You yourself, my loveliest love, led me to Saint Maximilian in Auschwitz and in your respecting my own particular belongings to God, I will be what you became to me.

Indeed, God calls freely whom God calls to be free. What one has to do when the choice arrives at the door of each our hearts is to say, "yes - yes, O LORD, I accept" and allow ourselves to be led across the vast wilderness within the self unto a peace without division whereupon in our heart of hearts is established the capital City of our LORD in eternity.

At around age 4 or 5, I remember my mom and my dad fighting and in that fight, a statue of our Lady (it might be a statue of our Lady of Fatima but I can no longer recall with enough certainty to know for sure) was broken, and I was more concerned with what to do with our Lady that my mom or dad and their big blue. I instinctively wanted to bury the statue which I now know is the proper thing to do with blessed objects.

Incidentally, today is the feast of our Lady of Fatima. I also have patient ties with the Flower of Fatima, our Blessed Jacinta, a friendship of which I have little spoken about hitherto which is a friendship that is no less precious to me than the friendships I have with all my friends, seen and unseen, whether human or angelic, whom I each have learned to love, as I love you, my loveliest love, without compare - a love which I learned by loving our LORD, above and beyond all things, as one LORD.

Now, at around the same time in my life, I remember when I used to cry and get upset, my mom would give me a bright and shiny peso. Oh, what candy one could get with one peso here in the Philippines in the 70's, my loveliest love, it was certainly enough to get me to cheer up.

The candy that I used to like to buy (besides Mr. Cinco - which was nice) was those little flag candies where the flagstaff was a clear, plastic straw filled with little sugary confections. You know, those were the flags of our nations, my love, and during that time where these things was lost in significance to my child's mind, that same significance of my particular affinity to those things can not be lost to me now. Because it is to that same love that the path of my calling takes me - for I do have love for all our nations, of our one family of nations, and desire peace for each of them - most especially those of our nations sorely affected by the curse of the spirit of War - that same love for humanity that you yourself bore with great patience in your heart of hearts, my loveliest love, we now bear together.

The motto of the school that I attended after kindergarten at Saint Paul's, a CICM Catholic School, Saint Andrew's School, from elementary to high school is "Pro Deo et Patria" which means "For God and Country". Now, this is something that has only grown in significance to me only now for I have never really placed much thought about these things until now nor could I even attempt to do so before because the choice itself to do these things was not at all available to me at the time. I was a sinner and in my sins I knew as the darkness knew neither itself nor anything outside of itself, destined for oblivion.

Our beloved Blessed Jacinta reached out across time to help open this choice to me. I know in my heart of hearts that her steadfast desire to save sinners and her heroic love for God - and the cost that she paid with my All, my Lord Jesus Christ, helped to open a new way for me and so, in God's own good time, I eventually met you, my darlingst Annelies Marie, at the most dismal point in my life.

In the pit of that despair, it was your starlight smile, my darlingest Annelies Marie, that helped to turn me away from the darkness and from friendship to friendship, have helped to return me into the one fold of our LORD - my one triune Perfection - where I now struggle to remain with all of you, with all of us.

And so here I am with you, my loveliest love, here we are into this present time of anticipation of our hope together, a hope that we share with all people of good will; a hope for meaningful peace in our hearts, in our times and in our nations.
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I have been seeking our LORD all of my life but I now know through all of this that until God opens a way for us to find Him, we shall never be found by Him. Faith until it is enabled by our LORD by His Light to see the object for which this virtue is intended to move towards, shall never behold what faith is intended to behold which is all true things, above all the one highest of Truth unseen, our Almighty God.

This again underscores the importance of prayer and of praying for others as well as ourselves - for nothing reaches out, with wings swift as light, to our God than a heart in silent prayer, and even if this heart be outwardly or inwardly distracted, or feels less than itself or even angry, once it is inclined in its being, at any time or place (but most especially at those favorable times and places), to the desire within itself, it shall learn to pause and then to pray.

And to pray within itself, my loveliest love, speaking without words to the silence that speaks to calm the storms that rage within ourselves, we shall learn the art of its grace - alone and above all with other hearts - and the craft of its virtue that always adds to life, giving glory to the LORD of all life.

There are many kinds of prayer, one must know, and all of them opens the heart of the children of Mankind to the Heart of God, that we may be held by our hope and learn, in faltering steps, to walk in the way of our LORD unto a peace without division.
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Its going to be a wonderful day today, my loveliest love.

Tomorrow, I shall - er, we shall - work on that requisite post on Friendships.

We shall also devote time to meditate more on the Middle East peace - particularly, we shall, in parts, state our understanding on the Palestinian position as well as on the position of modern Israel - I say modern Israel because the Jewish nation of our elder Israel includes it but it does not include the former yet they are native to each other's particular hope of common Country.

Every nation in our world today is a nation born and bred in battle - the common experiences of our peoples include conflict - and this for the last 2000 years (or more if our collective memory would like to take us that far) is without exception. How we shall choose to be defined by this in our own particular nations is the crossroads we, as a planetary whole, find ourselves perceiving at this defining moment in the history of our shared humanity.

We shall either allow ourselves to be further oppressed by the spirit of war and division and in so doing justify the planetary consequences that it shall plunge our world into or to be redeemed in the darkness by our turning away from the gaping maw of this beast into the sheltering wings of common Country and the meaningful peace that shall give hope and respite to our needful world - before the days are further quickened.

We must turn into ourselves, as individual human beings and as individual human nations, in order that we may turn into each other in good will as a family of friends in friendships that should be those friendships built to last forever unto a peace without division.

It shall be difficult, extremely difficult, my loveliest love, but commensurate to this is our hope for life and all of the generations of life - and where these burdens are shared in God and in Country, it shall from the impossible pass into the possible and from the possible into the probable and from this, at the completion of our sacred remembrances of all things, in the timeless now.

We all, as human beings one and all - from the least to the greatest - the same with all of the holy angels of our LORD - have a particular part to play, as purposed by our one common Creator, in this great and common responsibility of our time that we call our inhabited earth of the visible habitation of all Mankind.

As a last thought for today, to those who wonder if there is life is out there, this longing for life - when we look out into the great void of the visible universe - that vast emptiness is how much life Itself longs back to see us through this night - so that that empty void, above, around and immediately beyond us, my loveliest love - hostile beyond hostile to all life, most especially to all human life, might become full of living lights once more at the beginning of all things new.

We are more likely to be visited by angels than by aliens - as a matter of fact, we are visited by angels every moment when we remember, with gratitude to our God, how good it is to have this promise of our being alive.
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I love you, my darlingest Annelies Marie.

Always to always,

Pusing

P.S.

You know, I was watching Deutsche Welle on cable recently - the soldier in our Pim has never lost his patriotic sense, you know. This year, it was broadcast, is the 60th year of the Federal Republic of Germany which made me wonder because by my accounting the German nation is way older than 60 years - it is the state that is celebrating its 60th anniversary with the nation.

I have an affinity for Germany, you know, as if it was placed within myself. Notwithstanding all the evil that was done amidst her, particularly to you, your generation and to those generations of your people that embrace your own generation, my darlingest Annelies Marie, I understand that these evil things have no relationship whatsoever to those timeless friendships that stand beyond and besides those evil things that seek to destroy our belongings with each other as individual human beings and as individual human nations.

For I have learned in time not confuse our nations as arks of Country and vessels of sacred life with the principalities* of hell and their ambition of war.

*the choir of angels entrusted by God with the care of our nations most of whom were thrown down with the Devil and are now particularly hostile to our shared humanity, specifically our human communities.
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