Anyway, for my second tattoo which was inked beautifully & inexpensively in the Philippines for only $20, or PHP1,000 in 2 colors, red & blue, I thought it would be nice to put an image on the inside of my left foot that epitomized the person I run to when my faith in God is in trouble, or more simply when I'm losing it, and having what St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta called 'the darkness of the soul.'
Although Gie, Mama, and Sr. Marieta introduced or strengthened my belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord & Savior, there is one Lady (I even doubted her to be worthy during my collegiate years because my intellect as a philosophy major couldn't grasp, like the Islamists, the idea of an Infinitely Perfect Being in God, as having a mother; hence, she was always the first person that the enemy attacked in order to shake and abandon my faith, which was very weak, indeed, due to the fact that I was already politically correct then, even before the word was invented, in thinking that all religions were the same, didn't want to offend any believers, and had persisting doubts of this Lady being the Mother of God, inspite of my belief in Jesus, as the Son of the Father, and God Himself, as divinely revealed by St. John the Evangelist in his Chapter One of the Sacred Scriptures,) who I sought, and granted my wish to be a joyful, honest, and true Christian again, every time my feet brought me to her; and that is, whenever my faith in Jesus Christ her Son faltered because of Satan's tricks.
She's a mother, and her name is also Mary, like Mama, who was named after her. And, what better way of honoring her feat and fiat than to etch Mama's favorite prayer, the Holy Rosary, as personified by the Blessed Mother of Jesus, on my left foot, in order to remind me of my first line of defense today in my spiritual warfare, by praying her Rosary and asking for her intercession whenever I was at my weakest and overwhelmed by 'the darkness in my soul,' in turmoil or in doubt of my spiritual life due to the devil's lies & deceptions, because "even demons are afraid of her," and couldn't stand her humility which is antithetical to Satan's pride & envy, according to St. Padre Pio.
And just like in the church tabernacle where Jesus in the form of the Holy Eucharist is reposed, Mary carried Jesus and fed Him with her own blood inside her womb, which served as a tabernacle that shielded Baby Jesus from harm for nine months. Indeed, her cousin Elizabeth was right when she said "Blessed are you among all women;" while the baby in her womb-- St. John the Baptist, who paved the way to Mary's Son Jesus Christ's coming, leapt with joy during his mom Elizabeth's reunion with, and faith-filled words to the Mother of God, when she also said "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."
Gie has a different take regarding moms like herself, but as a Dad to our children, there is no way I can fathom the farthest depths of a mother's anguish for her suffering Son with a mere glimpse of His Face, or looking up to her dying Son during His Crucifixion at the foot of His Cross. I can only imagine it while watching Mel Gibson's film Passion of Christ, and looking at the statue of Mary with 7 daggers piercing her heart, or at her face while holding the body of Jesus in her arms in Michaelangelo's Pieta masterpiece sculpture inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.
Yet as a mother, Gie shares, not only in Mary's Magnificat, but also in the beating of our son Osbert's & daughter Claire-Voe's hearts, and knows their rhythms wherever they are (even today as she tried to explain it to me,) the way she nourished them with her own blood for nine months.
I call it mother's intuition, or 'mother knows best' because I would not have been married to Gie for almost 40 years now, if not for Mama, and the Blessed Mother's intercession.
First of all, I would have been married to the 1st Filipino Miss Universe Gloria Diaz lookalike, who was loving (she would wait for me & won't eat until I came home in the boarding house from work; or wiped my face & body with a warm towel when I got drank,) kindhearted (collected bath water in pails for my shower, early in the morning before I woke up, while she left for work, because running water was precious commodity in Manila then,) and ambitious to go abroad like myself because she was a nurse and I was a professor.
She was courted or sought after by half of the men in our coed boarding house, including my cousin Jun, before she became my girlfriend; but she only loved me, and I loved her. I even took her to our village Fiesta, and introduced her to Papa (who didn't say a word ) and Mama, who told me that she's not the right woman for me, when she left. And sure enough, I found out from her after coming back from our furniture store in another province, that she went out with her friends while I was away for a week. But later on, I heard some rumors circling around her from other women in the boarding house about her going out with other friends and board mates. I confronted and promised to love her no matter what happened, and she told me that she was drugged by one of the men, and woke up in a motel. After that, I broke up with her, left the boarding house, and decided to come to America.
But, how did Mama know that she was not the right woman for me the first time she met her? And, how did she conclude that it's ok for me to marry Gie (whom she had not seen yet) in the civil court, when my plan was to go back to my teaching job first in the Philippines because my sabbatical leave was over, then she could follow me, and we would have a grand wedding, with Fr. Fermin (the Catholic University of Santo Tomas Rector and friend of mine who was instrumental in me getting a Visiting Scholarship at Columbia University) officiating.
The fact is if I did not listen to Mama then (which was what Gie wanted anyway because she was pretty sure that her Dad wouldn't allow her to leave the US and follow me in the Philippines, after I proposed to her to marry me, inside a McDonald Restaurant near the Empire State Building in New York City, before going back to the Philippines,) and didn't buy Gie a dozen red roses, picked her up at her parents' apartment, and married her secretly in front of a judge in Jersey City, with no rings (although I bought her on layaway payments a 14 kt gold necklace for our engagement,) and with only $50 in my pocket (because I was only making $3.69 per hour working part-time at Prentice-Hall Publishing as an editorial assistant & then textbooks production editor, while studying at the same time, and sending all my spare money to my parents in the Philippines,) went to dinner at a Chinese place for our witnesses-- my bestfriend-driver-photographer Essex (who didn't want me to get married yet because we were having a great time double dating every weekend, but who ended up getting married himself after I did,) and husband & wife/landlord & landlady of mine, who were kind enough to let my new bride Gie stay with me for the night in one of the rooms upstairs that I was renting, then que sera, sera, because Gie and me would not have begotten Osbert & Claire-Voe, and Kendra, Xio & Violet would not have been part of our family today.
But Jesus is so good, and cannot say no to His mother Mary, just like at the Wedding in Cana, when it was not time yet for Him to reveal His true Nature as both God & Man, but was forced to reveal Himself by doing His 1st Miracle of changing water into wine for the newly-married couple who ran out of wine during their celebration, when His Mother Mary told the servants to do whatever her Son tells them to do.
In the same manner, I kept asking the intercession of Mama Mary with a 9-Day Novena Mass at St. Cecilia Church in Englewood, New Jersey before taking the bus to Prentice-Hall, while Gie kept praying also on her way to Chubb & Sons in New York, for her Son Jesus Christ to allow our civil wedding to happen without a hitch, if it's going to be good for both of us here on earth, until death do we part, because we both do not believe in divorce, while we're waiting for our marriage license and the results of our blood test (which was a requirement then) to come out.
The rest was history, but our devotion to the Blessed Mother, and our Faith in Jesus Christ as Lord & Savior is ongoing...
Although Gie, Mama, and Sr. Marieta introduced or strengthened my belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord & Savior, there is one Lady (I even doubted her to be worthy during my collegiate years because my intellect as a philosophy major couldn't grasp, like the Islamists, the idea of an Infinitely Perfect Being in God, as having a mother; hence, she was always the first person that the enemy attacked in order to shake and abandon my faith, which was very weak, indeed, due to the fact that I was already politically correct then, even before the word was invented, in thinking that all religions were the same, didn't want to offend any believers, and had persisting doubts of this Lady being the Mother of God, inspite of my belief in Jesus, as the Son of the Father, and God Himself, as divinely revealed by St. John the Evangelist in his Chapter One of the Sacred Scriptures,) who I sought, and granted my wish to be a joyful, honest, and true Christian again, every time my feet brought me to her; and that is, whenever my faith in Jesus Christ her Son faltered because of Satan's tricks.
She's a mother, and her name is also Mary, like Mama, who was named after her. And, what better way of honoring her feat and fiat than to etch Mama's favorite prayer, the Holy Rosary, as personified by the Blessed Mother of Jesus, on my left foot, in order to remind me of my first line of defense today in my spiritual warfare, by praying her Rosary and asking for her intercession whenever I was at my weakest and overwhelmed by 'the darkness in my soul,' in turmoil or in doubt of my spiritual life due to the devil's lies & deceptions, because "even demons are afraid of her," and couldn't stand her humility which is antithetical to Satan's pride & envy, according to St. Padre Pio.
And just like in the church tabernacle where Jesus in the form of the Holy Eucharist is reposed, Mary carried Jesus and fed Him with her own blood inside her womb, which served as a tabernacle that shielded Baby Jesus from harm for nine months. Indeed, her cousin Elizabeth was right when she said "Blessed are you among all women;" while the baby in her womb-- St. John the Baptist, who paved the way to Mary's Son Jesus Christ's coming, leapt with joy during his mom Elizabeth's reunion with, and faith-filled words to the Mother of God, when she also said "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."
Gie has a different take regarding moms like herself, but as a Dad to our children, there is no way I can fathom the farthest depths of a mother's anguish for her suffering Son with a mere glimpse of His Face, or looking up to her dying Son during His Crucifixion at the foot of His Cross. I can only imagine it while watching Mel Gibson's film Passion of Christ, and looking at the statue of Mary with 7 daggers piercing her heart, or at her face while holding the body of Jesus in her arms in Michaelangelo's Pieta masterpiece sculpture inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.
Yet as a mother, Gie shares, not only in Mary's Magnificat, but also in the beating of our son Osbert's & daughter Claire-Voe's hearts, and knows their rhythms wherever they are (even today as she tried to explain it to me,) the way she nourished them with her own blood for nine months.
I call it mother's intuition, or 'mother knows best' because I would not have been married to Gie for almost 40 years now, if not for Mama, and the Blessed Mother's intercession.
First of all, I would have been married to the 1st Filipino Miss Universe Gloria Diaz lookalike, who was loving (she would wait for me & won't eat until I came home in the boarding house from work; or wiped my face & body with a warm towel when I got drank,) kindhearted (collected bath water in pails for my shower, early in the morning before I woke up, while she left for work, because running water was precious commodity in Manila then,) and ambitious to go abroad like myself because she was a nurse and I was a professor.
She was courted or sought after by half of the men in our coed boarding house, including my cousin Jun, before she became my girlfriend; but she only loved me, and I loved her. I even took her to our village Fiesta, and introduced her to Papa (who didn't say a word ) and Mama, who told me that she's not the right woman for me, when she left. And sure enough, I found out from her after coming back from our furniture store in another province, that she went out with her friends while I was away for a week. But later on, I heard some rumors circling around her from other women in the boarding house about her going out with other friends and board mates. I confronted and promised to love her no matter what happened, and she told me that she was drugged by one of the men, and woke up in a motel. After that, I broke up with her, left the boarding house, and decided to come to America.
But, how did Mama know that she was not the right woman for me the first time she met her? And, how did she conclude that it's ok for me to marry Gie (whom she had not seen yet) in the civil court, when my plan was to go back to my teaching job first in the Philippines because my sabbatical leave was over, then she could follow me, and we would have a grand wedding, with Fr. Fermin (the Catholic University of Santo Tomas Rector and friend of mine who was instrumental in me getting a Visiting Scholarship at Columbia University) officiating.
The fact is if I did not listen to Mama then (which was what Gie wanted anyway because she was pretty sure that her Dad wouldn't allow her to leave the US and follow me in the Philippines, after I proposed to her to marry me, inside a McDonald Restaurant near the Empire State Building in New York City, before going back to the Philippines,) and didn't buy Gie a dozen red roses, picked her up at her parents' apartment, and married her secretly in front of a judge in Jersey City, with no rings (although I bought her on layaway payments a 14 kt gold necklace for our engagement,) and with only $50 in my pocket (because I was only making $3.69 per hour working part-time at Prentice-Hall Publishing as an editorial assistant & then textbooks production editor, while studying at the same time, and sending all my spare money to my parents in the Philippines,) went to dinner at a Chinese place for our witnesses-- my bestfriend-driver-photographer Essex (who didn't want me to get married yet because we were having a great time double dating every weekend, but who ended up getting married himself after I did,) and husband & wife/landlord & landlady of mine, who were kind enough to let my new bride Gie stay with me for the night in one of the rooms upstairs that I was renting, then que sera, sera, because Gie and me would not have begotten Osbert & Claire-Voe, and Kendra, Xio & Violet would not have been part of our family today.
But Jesus is so good, and cannot say no to His mother Mary, just like at the Wedding in Cana, when it was not time yet for Him to reveal His true Nature as both God & Man, but was forced to reveal Himself by doing His 1st Miracle of changing water into wine for the newly-married couple who ran out of wine during their celebration, when His Mother Mary told the servants to do whatever her Son tells them to do.
In the same manner, I kept asking the intercession of Mama Mary with a 9-Day Novena Mass at St. Cecilia Church in Englewood, New Jersey before taking the bus to Prentice-Hall, while Gie kept praying also on her way to Chubb & Sons in New York, for her Son Jesus Christ to allow our civil wedding to happen without a hitch, if it's going to be good for both of us here on earth, until death do we part, because we both do not believe in divorce, while we're waiting for our marriage license and the results of our blood test (which was a requirement then) to come out.
The rest was history, but our devotion to the Blessed Mother, and our Faith in Jesus Christ as Lord & Savior is ongoing...
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