our common journey: all are refugees

Epiphany, when we remember the wise men who knelt before the Son of God to pay Him homage, will always be a personal favorite.

On January 5, Epiphany’s eve -- exactly 59 years ago, my parents, my brother and I left our home town of Pinar del Río for the capital city of Habana. There, our family of four boarded a plane toward an unknown, mysterious and invisible future, becoming refugees in a new land. 

On that day, like the wise men who followed only the star, my parents chose to do the inconceivable, to leave the only place we had ever known, with nothing but our faith and hope in God's promises. I was 17 months old, the youngest of María de Jesús and Ignacio's children.

My official passport photo for leaving Cuba

When I look at my granddaughter now, roughly the same age I was when I walked out on that tarmac, I am blown away by the truth that certain life-altering experiences - like becoming a refugee - are etched deeply in our souls, shaping who we are. These moments may not live in my conscious memories, but they changed me forever. Emotions transcend memory.

My parent's anxiety, fear, determination as they walked us from airport official to official, clinging to each other and to each of us. The cruelty of the officer at the airport who ripped a doll from my arms. The passengers’ tension after hours of waiting on the runway, fearful that someone else would be taken off the plane. And the peace that surpasses understanding, as my father, who was aptly named after the brave Ignatius of Loyola, quietly began to recite, 

"El Señor es mi pastor, nada me falta... the Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want."

The events that led to my parent's decision to risk everything and leave family and home evolved quickly. Fidel Castro had closed the churches and the Catholic schools where both my parents worked. And he had collected religious men, women, priests, brothers, sisters, whom my parents considered friends, family and mentors, and literally shipped them off the island on a boat, destination unknown.

My own dad had been picked up on his way home one day and taken to the local jail for interrogation, accused of speaking out in the local Catholic newspaper, condemning how the Church and its people were being treated. Providentially, in the chaos of an evolving, disorganized revolution, my father was miraculously let go in the middle of the night and sent home.

 

Not long after the wise men venerated baby Jesus, Scripture tells us that an angel came to Joseph and told him to leave everything behind and take Mary and the baby to a foreign land—refugees, like me.

My parents' courage and faith is genuinely a parable, much like the parables Jesus used to proclaim Truth to His disciples, and now to us.

 

Surely with much fear and trepidation, they chose to believe in the promise we pray every morning in the Canticle of Zechariah:

This was the oath he swore to our father [Ignacio]:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight
all the days of our life.

Although there are many in the world who will, most of us will not be faced by such stark choices this coming year. But a pandemic has made us experience profound emotions: fear and anxiety; exiled from our normal, refugees separated from family, work, and everything familiar. We are still struggling with abandonment, isolation, distress, letting go of the known for something new and incomprehensible.

 

There really is only one choice before us, choose Life. Follow the star. Believe in the promise, the oath, God made with each of us.

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[NOTE: I am excited to begin a new journey this month as columnist for Liguorian Magazine's regular column, "Just live it"!  Clickhere for the printed, edited version of this column, y ¡feliz día de los tres Santos Reyes! ✨

 

remembering my dad, Ignacio Manuel Ruiz Diaz

It's hard to believe, but this week marked the 5th anniversary of my Papi's death.

As I have processed and mourned my Dad, Ignacio Manuel Ruiz Diaz, I've written and posted few blogs about him.  But in all honesty, nothing has been as insightful, accurate, and beautiful as what my children wrote about him, a eulogy they read at the church the night of his wake. 

Here's how my daughter Anamaría described it in her blog five years ago (without any edits).

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My grandfather, whom we called Abba, passed away last Friday afternoon.  

His funeral was this morning, followed by a lunch reception prepared by his fellow St. Joesph's parishioners.  They decorated the parish hall with lights and table clothes; they used real silverware.  They provided food for all who attended the funeral.  A friend of mine thanked them, and one of the women responded, "Of course.  The grandfather of the universe was buried today." 

That sums him up better than his obituary (which I wrote).

Rehearsal Dinner at My Wedding

My siblings and I co-wrote his eulogy, which my brother bravely delivered at the wake on Tuesday evening.  Here it is, edited to reflect me as the first person:

We called Ignacio Abba, which I think came about because my brother – his first grandchild – couldn’t say Abuelo.  Abba was quiet, not because he was shy or nervous, but because he really valued silence. On one of his recent wedding anniversaries, both he and our grandmother, Nana, were asked to give their advice.  His advice: silence.  El silencio.  This silence was evidently something he practiced in his life, and lived with contentment.

The result was that when you were with him, you learned to value that silence too.  Even as a child, when you were with Abba, you could see that stillness allowed him to be present to the moment, to God, to the people he was with.  And it made you still, too.

And so much of what we remember about Abba is small moments.  He and Nana took one of us to Puerto Rico for a month or so every summer for several years, while Nana taught summer classes there.  While she was teaching, we got to spend time alone with Abba.  Much of this time was spent watching Abba serve; he’d buy us a comic book or book and a coke and then take us to the laundromat, and we would sit, read, and wait for our clothes to dry.  He never said anything about his serving; it was just understood, between us and him, that it was something he did that he joyed to share in with us.

It was also in these small moments when his humor came out.  His eyes always sparkled when he heard a joke, or saw the humor and joy in some part of life. As a child, when we visited Puerto Rico, he taught us to pop the petals of a Caribbean flower.  He would enjoy the loud “pop” sound as much as we would.

He also loved to pick mangos as we walked, and showed us how to pick the ones ready to eat that day.  He loved to walk and to teach us about the island through everything we saw: the lizards, the flowers, the coquis calling at night, the empanadas sold at the beach.  Because he valued silence, he noticed and cherished all these things.  And as a result, we did too.

He did not lose this as he got older.  His great grandkids – the oldest of whom is 3 – loved being silent with Abba as much as we did.

He was also the best whistler any of us have ever heard.  I think it started out as a way to avoid singing – which he wasn’t great at.  But we loved it.  When he whistled a song, it was better than some of the best singers singing.

And Abba was brave.  He and Nana once had the fiercest beast anyone has ever known: a cocker spaniel.  And we were terrified of that dog.  But he always saved us from it, even when it meant carrying multiple grandchildren from the threshold of the door to the safety of the monkey bars (which the dog wasn’t very good at).

Monkey Bars

I’m going to close by talking about Abba’s eyes, because most of what we cherish about Abba can be glimpsed through his eyes.  His green, Castilian eyes.  

His eyes often contained silence, the stillness that he held within his soul.  The contentment with the gift of his life and his family. 

I can think of no better way to finish by quoting something my husband, Travis wrote about Abba’s eyes after he had met Abba twice, wrote: “Still, hushed, and sidereal, like an oculus in the dome of a cathedral at night, they bear no attribute of color or depth.” 

His eyes radiated the love he had for his family, often overflowing with happiness at our mere presence- and especially the birth of every one of his great grandchildren.  With the announcement of my pregnancy last May, his eyes grew wet, brimming over to his cheeks, as they did with the birth of a greatgrandaughter.  But it doesn’t seem accurate to say that he cried: water, like happiness, just appeared in abundance.

Abba, thank you for teaching us to love silence and, in doing so, to love the world.  We love you.

Winners of the Anniversary Dance at Our Wedding

Winners and Losers of the Anniversary Dance

Washing Caramelo, the cocker spaniel

Silent contentment

la fé celebrada: #MyMigrationStory

As National Migration Week comes to an end, a final reflection.

As a young Cuban refugee growing up in the neighboring island of Puerto Rico, I was keenly aware of all that made me different. In spite of speaking the same language, my schoolmates teased me for my differences in speech.

Like refugee families from other cultures, ours was a multi-generational home shared with three grandparents. Our family spent a considerable amount of our time and energy taking classes and attending events meant to remind us of our native culture, lest we ever forget what made us Cuban—and why we were refugees.   

It was an unsettling time for all the adults in my life. This meant that I attended five different grade schools and lived in five different homes—one not corresponding with the other.  

I was a perceptive child, more aware than most of the inner struggles of those suffering around me. In a very real way, I felt my parents’ anguish over the family and friends left in Cuba. I ingested my grandmother’s nighttime tears and loneliness. I experienced my grandparents’ uprootedness and displacement.  

In the midst of all this inner suffering and external displacement—and perhaps directly because of it—my sense of place, belonging, and peace became deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.  

Unlike most people’s experience, however, this sense of being claimed and chosen was not attached to one parish—but in a very real way, to the Church universal. Walking into a church. Celebrating the liturgy in unison. Receiving the Eucharist with mis hermanos, my brothers and sisters in the faith. This was, and is, home to me. 
  

In truth, there’s no substitute for the basics. Honest, daily prayer. Reclaiming the graces of the Sacraments. Approaching faith and tradition with a willing heart. Reclaiming the liturgy, and especially the Eucharist, as our home—the source from which “all its power flows.” 

Only if we put the events of our lives—past, present, future—in contact with the Word of God and the Sacraments will those events become signs of God’s presence in and for our lives. 

Only if we recommit to daily private and public prayer can we “rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed.” 

Do we dare live our lives with such certainty?

[ This reflection, “Faith Celebrated,” was first published 

in the August 2013 issue 

of St. Anthony Messenger magazine ]

why Fidel Castro's death changes nothing

I was born on Fidel Castro’s 34th birthday. There is no word in either Spanish or English to describe the ugly mess of emotions that come from sharing a birthday with a stranger who irrevocably altered the pattern of my life. 

Irony? Paradox? Absurdity? ¿Mal humor?

Yet today when I heard about Fidel Castro’s death at the age of 90 I felt strangely numb. And immediately I remembered my Papi’s attempt at humor as he tried to seriously describe his feelings about Castro, “I don’t wish Fidel dead, only that he may meet Jesus soon!” 

Castro’s death is huge. And yet it changes nothing. 

What I mean to say is that it’s difficult for me to describe a simple response to this convoluted reality.

Some events in life shape us to the marrow of our substance, reshaping the fibers of our being. You don’t “get over” being a refugee any more than you get over the death of a loved one. You do have to learn to live within a new reality.

Like strokes of bold, gallant color on an empty canvas, it is not only the actual images that define the picture, but also the empty spaces.

The truth is that being a Cuban refugee defines and identifies my sense of home and of self. It orchestrates my view of life, and also shapes my spiritual journey. I do believe, with my whole heart, that all, and I mean everything, is grace. 

Leaving Cuba as a toddler, carrying only the clothes on our backs. Growing up as immigrant nomads, without a true place to call home, ten different cities before the age of 20. Knowing and being reminded over and over that our family would never “go home” again. This is a political truth, an economic truth, a cultural truth, an ethnic truth --and most importantly, a spiritual truth.

I returned to Cuba as a journalist to cover the historic visit of Pope John Paul II. I took that opportunity to visit the place of my birth, the city Pinar del Rio. I will never forget standing across the street from the house that was once home for my parents. Or seeing with my own eyes the cathedral church where I was simultaneously baptized and confirmed on my way home from the hospital as a three-day-old baby. 

As my parents explained to me, when I was born, they simply didn’t know what would happen next. the Catholic schools where my parents taught were shut down by the new regime. The churches were closed. And their priest and nun friends continued to be rounded up and shipped out of the country.  

That day in Pinar del Río, I was struck by the reality that I could have grown up there, living in Castro’s Cuba. Yet because of my parents courage, I have never known anything but freedom -- or have ever had to face such staggering and terrifying decisions as they did.

Cubans have a way of expressing the most serious thoughts within carefully crafted humor. How I wish I had inherited that fast Cuban wit!

Don’t ask me how I feel about Fidel Castro’s death, the man who has shared my birthday for 56 years. 

All I can say today, as a Cuban-born American citizen, that I toast to my parents and to the millions of Cuban exiles who were brave enough to let go of everything, what they owned and what they knew, in order to find a place where they – where I – could worship and live freely as a disciple of Jesus.  This is my true home. 

It may not be a Cuban, but tonight I’ll smoke a cigar to that! 

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"One of the astonishing things about being human... is that you have only to state exactly how you're exiled and you're on the road back home."

~ David Whyte, speaking on the spiritual journey

[ All photos © María Ruiz Scaperlanda, 2016 ]  

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!

On our family’s Jubilee Year pilgrimage throughout Europe, perhaps the most personal encounter took place for me in Lourdes, France, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Our family at the Sanctuary entrance

Because my full name – or as I prefer to say, my REAL name, is María de Lourdes, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes was one of places I most looked forward to visiting.

My parents named me after Our Lady of Lourdes because of an encounter with a French priest ministering them as young adults in their parish--a man very devoted to Our Lady of Lourdes who became their mentor in the Catholic faith and dear friend, at the Cathedral of Pinar del Río, Cuba.  

Growing up as a Cuban refugee in Puerto Rico, it was easy to request (read MAKE) my teachers and friends call me simply "Lourdes." But when I moved to the United States as a teenager, no one could pronounce Lourdes and I became plain “maría.” But that’s a different story!

[For more on the history of Our Lady's 

apparition at the Grotto of Massabielle, 

Lourdes, go here]

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes – and I urge you to remember and pray in a deliberate way today for all the people you know who need healing: all who are ill; who live with a chronic illness or an addiction; all who are recovering from or in need of surgery; the elderly facing diminishment in body, mind, and spirit; those facing imminent death; those mourning someone’s death; all who live with cancer; people with a mental illness; those suffering chronic depression.

Take a moment, and bring their names and faces to your mind… ask Our Lady of Lourdes to be a mother to them, and petition that she remind her Son and Our Lord, that your friends “have no wine” and need the miracle of healing. 

Let us pray for one another.

Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, ¡reza por nosotros!