When I was younger and unwise, I looked for answers and solutions to my problems in all the wrong places. Astrology, faith healing and fortunetelling are just some occult practices that I had tried. I spent countless hours reading about astrology from magazines my mother bought and from books. I even went as far as going to Bulacan to attend a local healer's sessions. This healer was famous in the '80's for having a dwarf as a friend. He chronicled his life with the dwarf in magazine articles and through a book. My father had that book and I borrowed it one day. Soon curiosity gave way to an overpowering impulse to meet the man. I was attracted by the supernatural. I went to see him on the very day that Mount Pinatubo erupted. The wind carried the ashes far and wide. The healer invited all of us present in the session to bring with us displaced dwarves from Pinatubo. Without thinking I silently communicated to them to come with me. One day, a friend who was staying then at my house told me that a dwarf manifested itself to her as she lay on her bed. It was evening and the room was darkened because she was about to sleep but there was light from a lamppost outside and through the door that was left slightly ajar there was light from the living room . It scared the wits out of her that she grabbed for her rosary that she kept under her pillow and started praying. The dwarf was so near her that she could feel the air coming from a little fan that it was waving to and fro. It did not talk to her but left through the barely open door into the living room where I was watching TV. The door creaked a little when it passed. My hair stood on end when my friend recounted her story. My friend was not the flighty or imaginative type. She was simple and not given to theatrics and I believed her. She never slept with the lights off since then. For my part, I came so close to another supernatural experience that I started to regret my decision to invite the dwarves to live with me the moment I heard my friend's story. I had not wanted anything more to do with them.
My introduction to fortunetelling came from a lady whom I had helped. She was partially crippled. She thought that she was returning the favor when she predicted that I would be a dishonorable woman upon seeing the scar on my forehead. She was actually cursing me. That curse would overshadow my relationships until I finally married. A friend's mother would tell me my fortune for free. She made a living telling fortunes through palm reading and tarot cards and I often saw her at it whenever I dropped by their place. I had not wanted to offend her so I accepted her offer. She also did a ritual where she pricked my hand with something like a thorn to remove bad fortune. It was scheduled on a Friday. She said that for the ritual to work it had to be done on either a Tuesday or Friday. My mother had her fortune told months before her death. The fortuneteller who was popular among her friends had predicted the death of her friend's daughter. That time, it was my mother's turn to hear her death being foretold. She was to die before her 55th birthday on May 17, 1987. She felt relief when she reached her birthday with nothing unusual happening. A month later, she boarded a plane for Baguio with 48 others and they were never heard from again. Rescuers had a very difficult time recovering the remains of the victims of the crash.
Recently in the Philippines, a scandal broke involving a celebrity medical doctor through videos that showed each of his sexual trysts with different women. He was born on May 20. My attention was caught by a new search engine, mysandbox.com when I read my favorite broadsheet last Sunday. I browsed through their pages and came across Ramon Bautista, who has gained a loyal following in the few years he has been in showbusiness. He teaches film at the premier state university and is a man of varied talents besides - a radio dj, actor, commercial model and rapper. Many of his fans greeted him online when he celebrated his birthday on the 20th of May. One is being much ballyhooed while the other is tauted as one of the best comedy acts ever. They are leading very different lives.
This is just to illustrate how different two people sharing the same birthday can be. Justifying these differences by the different hours, years and positions of the planets and signs at the time of their birth as an astrologer would, precludes the existence of God, the Divine Being, whose perfect will rules over all but whose permissive will shows His love for us. Our desire to rule over time, people and events around us make astrology and other occultic practices very appealing to us. It had given me a false sense of security and confidence. I was fooled for a time but now that I know that God gave me the freedom to choose between right and wrong, I will try to do as He wills.
It is not God's perfect will for me to experience misfortunes. His love for me has no bounds and He would not wish ill against me. But His love allowed free will and when something bad happens to me because I used my will in the wrong direction or other people used theirs going the wrong way, too, these wrong turns lead to consequences that may be either good or bad. Speculations as to what caused my moher's plane to crash still remain just that - no blackbox surfaced. People say that the pilot was a veteran pilot of international flights but not local ones. Although he had known that there were two creeks along the way, fog hid one creek from his view. He thought that he had passed only one of the creeks and so made a wrong decision that cost him his life and that of others. Somebody took the wrong turn and others suffered. Somebody listened to a false god and gambled with others' lives and it was not just the pilot.
To find out what He wills for me, it is necessary to be silent and listen to His voice in the depths of my soul. I need to call on His Spirit to guide me in discerning, to find Him amid the false gods of this world, to find His Truth behind the lies and to find Him in spite of myself.
photo by Radrice on flickr
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