Andres - A Celebration of Life

When life presents us with challenges, we struggle along, complaining to anyone who will listen over all our perceived misery.  But what if we were born with no ability to move?  Or to speak?  What if we only had our vision and our hearing?  When we imagine someone living that way for 33 years, our issues with life seem trivial.  Andres was someone who lived that life with a quiet wonder and a unique grace. Andres was the son of one of the mediums (Marisol), and he transitioned back to the spirit world last summer.  We had a memorial service for him at the Chicago center where we meet.  The upstairs section of the temple had not been used for over four years, and we needed to ask the spirits who still guarded the space for permission.  In addition to the human guests, those guardian spirits were present, as was Caballito (Nelson's guide) and his group of spiritual workers.

Marisol created two picture boards of photos and a video collage of images from from the life that she and her son (Andres) shared together:

Andres was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when he was about three months old.  It's a disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information between the brain and the body.  The cause of MS is still unknown.

Purple and gold were the colors chosen by Charlotte (the woman who built the temple in the early 1960's), so Sonia used those colors for the reception tables in the lower level.  The curtained wall closed off the space where we have our Sunday and Wednesday sessions.

Marisol addressing the crowd of about 80-100 people:

Nelson read the spiritist prayer for spirits who have just left the earth.  The prayer helps with the separation of the soul from the body, and it shortens the state of confusion while assuring that the spirit has a more peaceful awakening in the spirit world. 

In English and Spanish, Sonia emotionally read two additional prayers:

Below:  Andres' father is in the green shirt.  After he and Marisol divorced, he remarried and had three other children.  The boy in the white shirt is the half brother of Andres, and he wanted to play a musical tribute for his brother.

He wanted to face his brother while he played

Marisol catered food and desserts downstairs after the memorial - and the downstairs reception was standing room only.  Just imagine how many spiritual friends were there, celebrating Andres most recent existence with the rest of us!

Are you having a bad day today?  Andres may have had about 12,045 of them, but he couldn't complain about them to anyone.  So like him, try to find the beauty, the true meaning of what you are enduring, and embrace it.  If Andres could do it daily, so can you...