Those of us who believe never stop praising the Lord, and it is precisely in the most tortuous trials or sufferings when we are proud to demonstrate our trust in Him, as Lot already expressed:
“Even if he destroys me, I will trust in him” (Job, 13, 15).
I lost Yaneth Cristina, my little sister, at the age of 8, an experience that I left in my book HYMNS TO DEATH (HIMNOS A LA MUERTE), and like the priest in one of François Charles Mauriac's stories, I wanted to be a Jesuit so as not to beget children who might revive such deep sorrow.
I married Leyla, the most transparent soul, in 2015, and God gave us not one, not two, not three, but four children who died before they were born.
We cried, like all grieving parents, and I translated those, my toughest tests, into verses that make part of my book of poems AFTER THE STORM.
I will never forget the last breath of one of them in my arms.
We knew that powerful forces were attacking us, and I prayed that the Lord to stop them.
In those desolate days, enduring the recriminations of friends and relatives, we experienced what Saint Ignatius of Loyola called the dark night, when we cry out to the Creator for his help and he turns his face away from us.
But it was precisely our love to God that redeemed the sorrows my wife Leyla and myself underwent. Like Job we lived in the certainty of being rewarded for our faith in love and righteousness, if not in this life then in the next.
That test proved to God, moreover, my trust in what I lived in Chennai on June 1, 2011, when he anointed me as his prophet, granting me all his blessings.
As the journalists of the TRO channel implied in their 2022 interview, a world that competes for fame, money and power prescribes that those who suffer the loss of their children survive, if so, with melancholy, drunkenness or resentfulness.
That was the thought of the world, and in particular of my enemies, who caused those losses, fearing my voice would rise above their emporiums.
For those who covet the world, the greatest tragedy in life is, certainly, death; for those of us who believe in Christ, death is but his greatest blessing.
We know that our babies wait for us in the afterlife, cared for by adoptive families, far from the anguish of this farce of appearances and extreme hypocrisy.
In the end, isn't death an illusion? A series of attachments, as Buddha prescribed, that we must shed in order to attain perfection or Nirvana?
I praise and will praise God not only for listening to our pleas, but for neglecting them when necessary.
The joys of those of us who appreciate his punishments, his corrections, his omnipotence are great; for we trust in his will, manifested in the course of days and nights.
Let's go back to the days when I wrote the first draft of these lines; in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, when the world yearned for a vaccine that could stop the anguish that hung over the cities and fields of the entire planet.
One day I wrote on the website of a local newspaper: "Bucaramanga is the metropolis with the fewest infections in the country (12), which gives us the title of the safest city in the West in relation to the number of inhabitants. I thank the Lord for listening to my prayers".
Everything we receive comes from the Creator, including what we receive from other human beings, who, assuming the precepts of the gospels, are, in reality, instruments of the divine will.
I’ve never hidden my love for the Virgin of Chiquinquirá and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and it is thanks to that devotion, in deeds and works, that divine inspiration arises.
One day I wrote on the website of a local newspaper: "Bucaramanga is the metropolis with the fewest infections in the country (12), which gives us the title of the safest city in the West in relation to the number of inhabitants. I thank the Lord for listening to my prayers".
Working in India
I arrived in Chennai in November 2010. After a 2-month adjustment period, Ponraj, my driver, took me to a downtown store where I bought the sheets for my new bedroom; Ponraj asked me what my religion was, and when I told him that I was Catholic, he brought me an almanac with an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, blond and blue-eyed, like the one reproduced below. My apartment was actually a huge hall and study.
The image of Christ did not please me then, since I considered that the historical Jesus must have had dark hair, so I hung it on the wall of the entrance hall.
After teaching intensive courses for two months at the Sivani Ganessa Film Institute of SRM University, my teaching colleagues asked me to make a short film that would demonstrate my mastery of cinematographic art to our students.
I knew it was a test. But I had nothing to fear; I had already made three feature films as an actor, director and producer.
I wrote a script that synthesized my experience in India for five months; the anecdote of a foreigner who argues with a Rickshaw driver about a surcharge on the fare.
When the fight threatens to come to blows, Providence intervenes to show that the foreigner understands the inequalities of the world, and instead of fighting for his privileges, he shares them with those he meets along the way.
A SHORTCUT TO INDIA, was filmed one afternoon in April, and edited in the midst of many difficulties that I will narrate in another book. The final poem of the short film is part of the book of poems AMÉRICA DEL NORTE AL SUR (AMERICA FROM NORTH TO SOUTH):
ANIMA MUNDI
Maker of all philosophies
Port of all oceans
Mother of all creeds,
Shelter of the races
Thirty years ago
They also called me Indian
In a school in South America
Where I was born
India, India, India
The hope of my hopeless era
The vindication of the self,
The convivial market of violence and peace
Because if once I admired
Those willing to win,
you taught me to admire
Those willing to live
Due to legislative elections, we finished the academic semester at the beginning of April and I received orders to stay until September in my flat, in the four-story building where I was living.
The perversity and envy of humanity had come into my life from Colombia, in such a way that I took on that four-month solitude period as an opportunity to meditate and write the story of my blessed life in Bogota, Philadelphia, Porto, Manchester, Bishkek, London, Bucaramanga and Chennai.
One night in early May, while feverishly writing about my early love affairs in Pennsylvania, I heard a voice calling me:
"Hugo!"
I left my study and went out into a dark hall, and from there to the door that communicated with the corridor of that three-story building with deserted offices.
I walked to the railing that overlooked an empty swimming pool on the first floor, peering into the darkness at the stairs and corridors. There was no one.
I came back to writing. Soon I heard again that voice calling me:
"Hugo!".
I went out and saw nothing.
I returned to write and I was called for a third time.
This time I heard the voice coming from the back wall of the entrance hall, where I discovered the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus shining with its own light.
"Why have you locked me out of your bedroom?" I heard in my mind.
I realized that for the first three months of my life, I had slept in a bedroom without a crucifix or a picture of our Lord.
I smiled and hugged the image in that almanac, and brought it smiling to my room, like a friend who receives a reproach from his best friend, or from his parents, for having forgotten him for no reason.
As I hung it in front of my desk, I said:
"I’m so sorry my Lord. It's just that THAT’s not your true image."
And his voice told with a sweetness that touched the finest fibers of my soulr:
“Don't judge me by my face; Judge me by my heart's intentions."
I then understood my mistake, having repaired the face of that image, and not in the resplendent love that always bleeds from the Messiah's chest because of human perversity.
He also told me that I should pity the blond man with light eyes, because having governed the world, he wouldn't longer be able to do it, due to his accumulated prejudices.
The joy I felt then, and still feel, because the Lord fixed his eyes on me, I preserve it as the greatest treasure of my days.
Almost without realizing it, I began to dress like him, using the dhotis I had bought on the streets of Chennai.
My soul was filled with joy, like that of a bride before her wedding.
This Holy Week of 2020 I will narrate, for the first time, the mystical experiences that I had since then, in which the Lord granted me all his blessings.
I, Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira, in other lives Peter the apostle, Jeanne D’Arc and Baruch de Spinoza, write by the grace of Jesus in my studio in Bucaramanga eleven years later, during the plague that, as the Lord would tell me after the shocking earthquake of April 13, 2012 in Chennai, would hit the world because of our rulers’ sins.
The books of Petrus Romanus, published by Editorial Stanley, reveal the secrets of a life full of blessings, without illness, in the grace of God, through the renunciation of fame, money and power.