Mirabilia: Events of Divine Causation

By Ramon Ermita

My faith has been tried in afflictions and tribulations, granted perseverance; thus, proven genuine and authentic. It has been forged in fire and pounded on an anvil to be reshaped. I now know that I am real, proven, genuine and authentic. I confirm that I am a true believer of Christ who gave me hope ... that I will truly inherit the glory of God. The hope that is inspired by proven character will not deceive because God gave me the experience of His love. Is it then true that my current life is to a large extent, the result of my past actions, choices and experiences? My past does not have to define me, but rather, my present is being defined by 'Events of Divine Causation'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644684870

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Mirabilia

Events of Divine Causation

Ramon R. Ermita

Copyright © 2020 Ramon R. Ermita

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

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For Lucille

Prologue

This book is not about making miracles happen, for that will always be within the realm of our God Almighty. Rather, this is about how we allow ourselves to be blessed in seeing the miracles that come our way and realizing how good and great our God is—He Who puts us in a state of grace if only to make His unworthy children worthy of His love. Events, problems, and resolutions come to pass, one after another, in a way that shows God’s design of His purpose for my life, even before I even realized what was to be.

If I have foreseen writing about miracles in life over a period of more than half a century, I would have considered myself hallucinating. After all, how can the concept of miracles, more so one’s life being full of them, fit into the psyche of a young man who lived life in a fashion so deprived of tact and direction? But as they say, life becomes a mentor without par, and we can only be made better if we appreciate and learn from the lessons it teaches us.

This account of my life’s journey starts from my troubles in the Philippines, which were of my own making and of no one else’s, and ends in my retirement while living as a Filipino expatriate in the United States of America. Along this expedition that has taken me more than five decades of my life is an adventure that has taught me that life is not just what it seems. It is a compilation of events that makes this journey all worth the while. In writing about my life and the wonders that have allowed it to flourish, I derive immense inspiration from the literary giant C. S. Lewis whose prose is as beautiful as the inspiration he professes only as the divine can enkindle. From him, I take these words:

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. (C. S. Lewis)

As the French Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade once said,

There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us or through us, contains and conceals His divine action. It is really and truly there present, but invisibly present, so that we are always surprised and do not recognize His operations until it has ceased.

I will now attest how God took me through hard times, tempered the steel of my faith, and determined how I am defined at the present.

Table of Contents

Dire Beginnings

Mother’s Love

Love at First Sight

Reinventing My Life

New York Arrival

Getting Started

Breakthrough

Moving the World

Doing What It Takes

Hitting Rock Bottom

Bukas Loob sa Diyos (BLD)

Deluge of Graces

On to Retirement

Until the Twelfth of Never

Chapter 1

Dire Beginnings

At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountiful He provides for all our wants; or I must say for our pleasures!

—St. Theodore Guerin

In our littleness, we realize with humility and gratitude how those who love and care for us see a much larger person than what we view ourselves to be.

On the other hand, that perception can run in the opposite end. Most often, it takes a while for us to realize how limited our capacities are as individuals. We are so engulfed in our thinking that whatever success we may have achieved in life is of our own doing alone. My friend, that is farthest from the truth.

I am now seventy-seven years old and have retired for nine years. Thanks to the many quiet times I have at my disposal, I get to reflect on how my life has been. I manage a wry smile remembering my very dire beginnings—my journey through valleys so deep that getting out of them tested my very humanity, in many moments bringing me through bouts of depression. Then, there were the peaks that made me soar above it all. So exhilarating has been my surge that I could only attribute them to the proverbial winds beneath my unstable wings. These are the winds of divine guidance, of the force of prayer that came from the lips of people who loved me and truly cared for me, and of the inspiration that came with them allowing my own spirit to rise after each hard fall.

I was born in August of 1943, at the height of the Second World War while the Japanese forces were occupying the Philippines. As a child, I was sickly. I had weak lungs which troubled my parents a lot. I was not allowed to run outside with children my age because my parents feared that I would break into a sweat and catch cold—worse, that I would get seriously ill. In addition to my physical health issues, I was also born with anosmia, a condition that deprived me of the sense of smell. Thus, I was not aware of my body odor, for which I was endlessly teased by other kids. My mom used to pretend to kiss me on the cheek, but I knew she was checking if I smelled bad. I grew up overprotected by my parents, but I never took it against them knowing they were only after my welfare. Unfortunately, having a sheltered childhood prevented me from learning any sport, not even swimming or riding a bicycle. And if you expected that a nonathletic boy would excel in academics, well, not so either. I went through elementary school barely passing my subjects. For all these reasons, I grew up shy and withdrawn.

Chapter 2

Mother’s Love

To feel the love abundantly showered on us by people who matter the most in our lives is nothing short of a miracle.

In my state of weakness and helplessness, I found strength in a woman who loved me unconditionally, and that was my mama who loved me so much. Indeed, I felt her immense love that I even suspected myself to be her favorite among her eight children. I remember when I was a child, she used to come to my bed and I would pretend to be asleep. She would tuck me in and cover me with a light blanket—during warm nights, just over my ankles.

When I was about to enter high school, knowing how academically challenged I was, Mama made me take remedial studies during the summer. She was determined to change my life for the better. She contacted a former teacher of hers to tutor me through summer, just to make sure that I got to be accepted at one of the more prestigious schools in the country, the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University from where my grandfather, father, and eldest brother graduated. Her efforts were a success. I passed the Ateneo entrance exams.

Unfortunately, I did not graduate from Ateneo. In my sophomore year, I got kicked out due to poor grades. My family had no other choice but to enroll me for my junior and senior years at San Sebastian High School. All that time, I never heard a harsh or spiteful word from Mama. Instead of pointing a blaming finger at me, she showered me with optimism, encouraged me to no end, and never got tired of reminding me that I had what it takes to be successful.

After graduating from high school, Mama was the first to notice that my grades were good enough for me to reenroll at Ateneo, this time as a college student. So one day, she called up her brother, Dr. Virgilio Ramos, who was then the dean of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) College of Medicine. My mama asked her brother, a noted Ateneo alumnus, to write a letter of recommendation to the school’s admissions office and for my capability to make it as an Atenean.

To make the long story short, I got admitted to Ateneo. I passed the examination, but surely that recommendation played a big part. The happiest person that celebrated my victory was no other than my mama. At dinnertime, while all of us were seated around the table, Mama happily announced to everyone: Finally, I am so happy. Ramon is now enrolled in a good school and is on his way to become a lawyer. In retrospect, my brothers and sisters used to make fun of me. They would ask my opinion about something, and (as they said) I never answered with a direct yes or no, but rather would always say, It depends. For that reason, everybody thought I should be a lawyer.

But our family’s victorious celebration of my success was short-lived. Mama passed away the following morning. It was a fatal case of cerebral aneurism. On her deathbed, I held her hand for as long as I could, not wanting to let go of the lovely and loving woman who stood by and believed in me all those years. I did not want her to leave, because I felt then that I needed her more than ever. I held her hand while it was still warm and supple until it turned cold and stiff. My heart was torn apart by a nagging guilt. I thought it was the physical strain and the mental anxiety to get me into a good school that caused her death.

I felt this way because; after getting my uncle’s letter of recommendation from UST, we took a Marikina bus to Katipunan road. After that long bus ride, we walked under hot sun for 3-4 kilometers (2 miles) towards the Ateneo Admitting office. We completed the admission process and walked back another 2 miles to ride a bus to home. This was in addition to the fact that during the same week, we were in the process of packing to move to a bigger house. All the physical strain and excitement of getting me enrolled for college and moving led to her untimely demise. I felt sure of that.

After two years at Ateneo, I was again kicked out due to poor grades. Reason: Being a mama’s boy losing his mama was too much for me to handle. I just simply lost it. I felt I was floating in a vacuum.

I went back to the school where I did well earlier. I went back to San Sebastian College in Manila. San Sebastian was then considered a school of hard knocks. It was the school where students who got kicked out from other schools were accepted and given another chance.

In my case, it was different; it became worse. I got involved with the wrong crowd; I became a gang member—among which were others like me, kick-outs from other schools. Maybe this was my way of overcoming my shyness. In being part of a gang, I found acceptance, independence, and a sense of direction for my life. I realized too late that the direction I was heading to was toward the wrong way. I started accumulating personal expenses that came with my extracurricular socializations, and my meager allowance was not enough to meet them. One time, the gang and I went out with a group of girls for dinner and drinks. When the bill came, everyone pulled out their wallets to pay their share, except me. I did not have enough money so I pretended to be too drunk and nauseous so I could run out to the parking lot to vomit, thus an escape from paying. I was very embarrassed.

When I turned eighteen, I decided to work while continuing with college going to night school. I applied and got hired as a field representative at a bank, a roving teller. I went to merchants in the marketplace to collect their deposits, brought the money and their passbooks to the bank, and returned with the deposits posted. I worked during the day and went to school at night. This new independence drove me more to the wild side of life. After drinking bouts, almost every night (at the same time cutting classes), we used to take turns beating up any student we found standing alone waiting for a bus to get home. Of course, this would lead to retaliations and subsequent street rumbles. One night, we got into a challenge among ourselves—to drink and let the last man standing walk out the door. I won and got to go home leaving everyone else passed out on the floor. I actually made it home. I remember getting off the jeepney; then, in pouring rain feeling neighbors’ fences, I staggered all the way home. I literally crawled to my bed and fell asleep in wet clothes. I came to my senses forty-eight hours after, in the hospital. I did not even know how I was brought to the hospital. I had pleurisy (water in my lungs); my weak lungs could no longer take my excessive drinking, and the tissues that surrounded my lungs became inflamed. I had chest pains and was breathing with great difficulty. With the onset of pneumonia, I was required to be confined at the hospital for a complete bed rest, not even allowed to sit up. I stayed in the hospital for three months.

After getting discharged, I stayed with my brother Kuya Rhett and his wife, Ate Belle, at their house in Pasig. With much love, the two nurtured me back to health for four more months. I was constantly in bed and confined in-house, not able to go out.

After missing a year in school, I eventually got back and graduated with a degree in political science. I actually graduated as president of the graduating class. My sister, Ate Nenette,