This letter, recently received at our editorial office, comes from our dear friend José Luis Sansaloni (photo). To understand what is related in it, I think it necessary to add a few anecdotal yet nonetheless important details. A few weeks before these changes began to take place in José Luis’s life, we had a conversation on the matter of invoking the Virgin Mary. José Luis was at that time a member of a Pentecostal church. So it was that José Luis decided to ask the Most Holy Virgin for her intercession and guidance in coming to Christ himself. Then, after praying while sitting in his car, José Luis found a small calendar stuck under his windshield wiper (we show it in the photo he himself sent me). The calendar bore an image of Our Lady, and on the back a caption: “Open your windows.”
For those of us who are used to these little touches from Our Lady… it doesn’t seem like such a big deal (heh heh…). For José Luis, however, it was the push he needed to fall headlong into the Lord’s arms in his Church. I hope this letter brings you the same joy it brought me. When God grants these beautiful tokens of grace, all the sufferings one may endure in proclaiming the Gospel evaporate, and all that remains is the fragrance of the Divine Presence in his garden, of which we are all fruit and laborer at the same time.
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Dear Carlos and Luis Fernando:
Today I sat down to reflect a little on what has happened over this past month, and I am sending you what the Lord has placed in my heart in a simple way.
It is not a very long testimony; many more details have taken place, but in summary, and taking for granted the heap of little things that Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Mary have done in my life, I sum up what I have felt:
Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy
Christ, hear us
I had not the slightest idea that those beautiful words of the Kyrie — pronounced by a young priest full of love for Christ named Leopoldo, in the Sacred Liturgy of Holy Mass, and which struck me so deeply that cold night of January 13, 2005, in the church of San Mateo in Lucena — were going to be the beginning of a headlong “free fall” into the arms of my beloved Jesus. Now, just a few days after that happened, I see Christ as if he were my beloved daddy, waiting for me to make the decision to leap trustingly into his arms, knowing that at last everything I had begged him for over the past months and even years was finally going to be fulfilled.
There comes to my mind the image of a little boy begging his father to take him in his arms so he could make a somewhat “dangerous” jump, and the daddy saying to him, “My little son, you are not ready yet; your little legs are not yet strong enough to bend and make that jump, but don’t worry, for when you have grown a little more, daddy is going to play with you and will let you jump, and don’t worry, for I will hold you tight and nothing will happen to you — on the contrary, you are going to love it, because you will come to my lap and the two of us will be very happy.” Truth be told, it was not only the words of the Kyrie that struck me; it was each and every one of the prayers, verses, readings, responses, and movements carried out that night before my astonished eyes.
As far as I can remember, I had been to two or three Masses in my whole life (one of them at Carlos’s invitation, in Barcelona), and although I saw the Word of God read there, and came away on every occasion filled with peace, they were not what we might call a tremendous service of Divine Power, the kind I was used to in my meetings at the Pentecostal evangelical church. Truth be told, neither was this last Mass I attended at San Mateo: I did not leave there speaking in tongues, nor did I fall in the Spirit, nor did I weep or laugh, but I was indeed filled with a tremendous Peace, the Peace that only my Father can give me. From the time I was little my mother would carry me in her arms to the parish of Mare de Deu de Montserrat in the Guinardo neighborhood of Barcelona, and there she would make the Sign of the Cross on my forehead with holy water. Though it surprised me, only a few days ago, to learn that my parents had me baptized as a Catholic in another nearby parish, that of Cristo Redentor, also in the same neighborhood — for I have had to request my certificate of Baptism in order to be able to receive Confirmation, a moment I await with great eagerness.[1]
I go on with my story: some years after those visits to the church with my mother, when I was in the first years of primary school, at six years old, one day, frightened, I knelt down and asked the Lord, through my Guardian Angel, to get me out of a tight spot, and he did so ipso facto. That confirmed my faith in Him even more, if that were possible; I knew with certainty that Christ would get me out of that childhood predicament, and that amusing anecdote, now with the passing of time, makes me see that Christ has always been with me, and has loved me far more than I ever deserved.
At that time I was deeply absorbed in learning the Catechism, since that spring of 1966 I was to receive my First Communion, but an unexpected visit to our home by some young Jehovah’s Witness girls changed all my family’s plans, and, wondering why that change had come about, I was left without making my First Communion. I vividly remember that my parents exchanged my beloved Catechism and my Gospel stories for a book with orange covers, full of drawings quite horrible for a child of my age, called “From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained”; the simplicity of the Gospel was traded for striking illustrations of red dragons and of people dying at Armageddon under a rain of enormous hailstones. There began my three-decades-and-then-some with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, into which I will not go deeply, for I already did so in its day, when the Lord led me to my next step of drawing closer to Him. Through my personal encounter with the Lord in 1999 I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and drew ever closer to the evangelical church: first it was in an independent New Testament congregation, doctrinally classified as Baptist, where I received my baptismal waters, and later, over these last four years, through a Pentecostal congregation of the Assemblies of God in Andalusia, where I moved in response to a clear call from Christ to serve him, leaving my native land and all our family.
It was a very beautiful time; there is nothing in it that I could regret. There I met great children of God, I was able to perceive in myself the tremendous Power of the Holy Spirit, and I greatly enjoyed praising Christ as the one in charge of a little worship group. Nevertheless, my hunger and thirst for Christ would not let me rest; there was a longing in me that was never quite filled, and my constant plea and supplication to the Lord was, “Father, if there is still something more you want to give me, please give it to me; I die and wither away if I do not have more of You.” That is how I began to have a negative feeling about the time of the Lord’s Supper in the Pentecostal church: first, the irregularity with which it was celebrated in our community (sometimes a month would go by without holding it), and second, the irreverence, in my judgment, of using rather unsuitable symbols (sliced sandwich bread and fruit juice). Besides, deep within me, there was a seriousness missing, some biblical words, I don’t know — something. Something the Lord later showed me is called “liturgy.” Evidently something very great was missing there, and it was the Living Presence of Christ; honestly, I was withering away in that place. When I partook of the “emblems” in the Pentecostal church, I would say to myself, “Lord, I firmly believe that this is Your Body and this is Your Blood; I do not care what the others believe.” Evidently, the Lord heard my prayer, and did not allow that situation to go on much longer.
In the meantime, my brother Carlos would call me every week; he would tell me about his discoveries and the miracles that were happening to him within the Catholic Faith, and I would listen to him. Some words struck me: verses that spoke about Apostolic Tradition, about how the three pillars on which Protestantism rests — “Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Scripture Alone” — could not be sustained biblically, except for Grace Alone. I even began to read Scott Hahn’s “Rome Sweet Home,” a book which, at first, made me think that my brother Scott had read too much theology and had worked himself into a tremendous mental muddle; but I must say that once again the work in my heart has been Christ’s, since there is no human reasoning that can convince you of anything — it is only the work of the Holy Spirit; all the glory is His.
By this I do not mean that my conversations with Carlos were not interesting and very fruitful, or that my brother has not been and is not a great support to me; but I am absolutely certain that his prayers have done much more in my life than the long hours of telephone conversation that crossed the Atlantic week after week. How beautiful it all is, now that it is seen from the perspective of time gone by! Carlos is a very special brother and friend to me, and truly my heart suffered when he underwent that great loss of faith upon seeing his working life cut short, practically living in his car. How many times I prayed for him, and how many times he has prayed for me these last months when he saw my sadness within the evangelical world! I give thanks to the Lord for all this time, for all these months, for having brought me here to Andalusia, a place I used to brand “the cradle of idolatry” for its religious fervor — in short, for so many things: for having led me to San Mateo, that ancient church in Lucena, for having brought me together with Leopoldo, the young priest who for me has been a blessing. None of this is coincidence, and I will not go into further detail about the little things that have kept happening and that prove to me that He, Christ, and she, Mary, my great unknown, are behind it all.
I long to be able to partake once more of the Eucharist. While the baptismal certificate makes its way from Barcelona, I pray to Christ that I may little by little take in all this incredible heavenly space now opening up before me, and that He may continue to have mercy on this little son of his, who wants nothing more than to be at his side, at his feet, in his arms, or wherever — just close to Him; and now also marvelously loved by someone whom I did not know as a mother, but who has revealed herself to me in an incredible way as well. I truly feel part of a complete family. Thanks be given to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who, with the intercession of my beloved mother, Mary, and of my brothers and sisters in the faith, of both the visible and the invisible Church, have worked this marvelous miracle in my life.
Lucena, February 9, 2005
Author: José Luis Sansaloni
Source: Voxfidei.com
[1] To appreciate the journey that today brings our friend to the Church of the Ages, please read his own initial account from the time he left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A few weeks after writing us these lines, José Luis was received into the Catholic Church and now enjoys full Communion.
