“Freeing the Soul from Fear” says: A culture that leaves no room for living connections with the spiritual realms can foster fear. Robert Sardello believes connections with angels, spirit guides or the dead can provide an antidote to fear.

My personal experience of this involves Julie Anne being stranded in Mexico because of stormy weather. I sought comfort through prayers addressed to my numerous prayer warriors among the dead. Two maternal aunts used to question this practice of mine. I couldn’t understand why these two aunts, traditional Catholics at that questioned my interpretation of communion of saints teaching!

Since August 29 of this year, (For lack of a better term) I have been spooked. It started with Emil’s passport which I could not locate just two days before our flight to Singapore. It was sheer agony to wait for the bank to open for us to check the safety deposit box. My husband and our daughter examined several options in case the passport could not be found.

In he bank, my husband calmly emptied the contents  of the safety deposit box. The passport wasn’t there. Then my husband decided for us to go back to the condo and for him to personally examine the contents of the overnite bag where the passport was supposed to have been kept.

Another round of agony for me. It was the longest three minute ride back to the condo for me. I did not even dare to check my overnite bag. My husband calmly too out the contents of my bag and quicly identified his passport. All along it was there but I mistook it as my old passport due to its thickness. I wrongly expected his passport to be as thin as my new passport. I completely forgot his old passport was attached to his new one when he applied for a visa to South korea. I did not go with him.

Back from Singapore this September, the spooky business continued. I could not locate my extra pair of glasses inside an embroidered Singaporean case. To make a long story short, my husband and I simultaneously saw the case on top of one of his many school bags. I did not bother to check in that area because I remember I did not unpack there. The logical explanation is: the embroidered case must have fallen from a paper lantern from Singapore I placed on top of Emil’s closed laptop.

I have yet to write about several unmindful episodes both in Singapore and herein Manila. Wake up calls!

I have been seeking answers in clear-edged concepts to many of my burning issues. I have been agonizing over my personal experiences of God that run counter against what was “indoctrinated” in school, and in church till the 90s when I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression.

Lately, I reviewed Bro. Ebner’s FSC book written in the 70s and first read when I was pregnant with our one and only daughter. Like Bro Ebner I have been searching for better explanations to questions about life. Like him I feel that : “Until church spokesmen and theological experts offer us more immediate helpful things, I feel that there is a place for me to tell my story.”

Our only daughter who has been living away from us since her college years was home from London lately. In spite of my serious work on expanding my consciousness for the past 3 years I feel humbled by her maturity and her global experience: Singapore, Australia, London, USA, Dubai, Spain, Vienna, Paris, Morocco, Prague etc

Between Bro. Ebner’s book and conversations with our daughter, I feel short-changed. My fearful clinging to traditional Catholic teachings has robbed me of the exuberance which our daughter exudes. She has unwittingly made me realize the truth in what Bro Ebner wrote:
“It arrives as something new in the Catholic church, where “objective faith” has been stressed officially for the past four centuries.”
“Whatever we can say and do about God that will be real for us has to grow out of this person’s experience.”
“We can expect to experience the true God only when we get in touch with ourselves. ”

I am still dealing with what Bro Ebner calls “layman’s frustration and perplexities.” He may be speaking of me as he wrote:
“We may be so conditioned by our past, we may perceive through so many filters, that we may scarcely know what actually we ourselves really think and feel. So that when contemporary writers urge us to explore the religious side of our experience, we may not be reading our depths but mainly remembering words we were told and which we only take as ours. However, to be sensitive to this problem is already to be solving it.”