Rev. Fr. Dennis Alexander Apostol Cunanan, Jesuits Christi Infiniti (Fr. Dennis Cunanan JCI)
I have had a hard life. Before I became a priest and consecrated my life to God as Dennis Cunanan JCI, I was little Den, the chubby boy with the short hair, and I was the son of Redencio Cunanan, the father I never knew. My brave mother, Margarita Hernandez, gave birth to me at the back of a Catholic Church, assisted through a painful and a near-death-inducing state of labor by nuns from a religious order that specialized in streamlining medical aid for victims of the war. Away from her, Margarita's true love Redencio, or 'Red', for short, was conscripted to be a soldier, absorbed as an infantryman into the American Forces for World War II to fight against the Japanese. My mother spent years after my birth just letting go of the man she once knew, assuming that he had fought with all the tenacity and all the spiritedness that she had loved him for in the first place, and that he was in a better place than his wife and son.
I already know the sacrifices that my mother made for me when she helped give me the gift of life--life that my father sacrificed his own fo as a soldier to his country and to his family. I am guilty about not reflecting too much on my absent father, as I spent much of my childhood being angry and frustrated and lonely, not having a father-figure to look up to and teach me how to be a man. At first I was hesitant to forge bonds with God, as i used to try to ask Him why He had taken my father away from me and my mother, who needed him so much.
Luckily enough, I found a father in God, and I am tasked with being a loving son to Him, which I feel instinctively is also what my late father must have wanted. I eventually reconciled myself with the fact that my father's life was given for a great purpose, like Christ's death, and like my mother, I had to 'give him back.'Yes, without my father, I was faced with a difficult childhood, and sometimes i think that it was part if my inheritance from him somehow, and I admit that I was bitter about it for the longest time. But most of my wounds have healed now. Let us also never forget, for the joys and the hardships we experience, in just living the lives that we do, we are blessed, we are all blessed.And so, this is my special prayer for this entry: that I and others can see the meaning of bravery, self-sacrifice, and resilience in every place that we turn, in every person that we meet, and that in the spiritual development of ourselves, we may live to be soldiers of Christ our Lord. Amen.
I already know the sacrifices that my mother made for me when she helped give me the gift of life--life that my father sacrificed his own fo as a soldier to his country and to his family. I am guilty about not reflecting too much on my absent father, as I spent much of my childhood being angry and frustrated and lonely, not having a father-figure to look up to and teach me how to be a man. At first I was hesitant to forge bonds with God, as i used to try to ask Him why He had taken my father away from me and my mother, who needed him so much.
Luckily enough, I found a father in God, and I am tasked with being a loving son to Him, which I feel instinctively is also what my late father must have wanted. I eventually reconciled myself with the fact that my father's life was given for a great purpose, like Christ's death, and like my mother, I had to 'give him back.'Yes, without my father, I was faced with a difficult childhood, and sometimes i think that it was part if my inheritance from him somehow, and I admit that I was bitter about it for the longest time. But most of my wounds have healed now. Let us also never forget, for the joys and the hardships we experience, in just living the lives that we do, we are blessed, we are all blessed.And so, this is my special prayer for this entry: that I and others can see the meaning of bravery, self-sacrifice, and resilience in every place that we turn, in every person that we meet, and that in the spiritual development of ourselves, we may live to be soldiers of Christ our Lord. Amen.
