Lar Espírita Chico Xavier

The building of a Spiritist House is sometimes independent of will of its incarnated founders. They have guided by friendly Spirits, finish, thus for to lead it of various manners, beginning with created situations by invisible companions that join to the will of others selected workers for the task. It is processed in this association the blessed enterprise, with simplicity and, above all, will.

Thus, occurred with the Spiritist Home Chico Xavier. Officially inaugurated on June 30th, 1985, but there is five years in preparation on the visible world and there is fifty years delineated on the spiritual world.

Everything began when my brother Gumercindo, in the middle of 1979, by the telephone, notified me that in Salvador, capital of Bahia, he visited a lady of African–Brazilian Cult (Candomble). In private meeting, she incorporating a spiritual entity had advised to him that my family and me had been in life danger. We were going to pass by many financial troubles and my wife and daughters were going to be attained by irrecoverable diseases.

It was an appalling premonition. However, our faith on the Catholic Church, with the frequency on Sundays and all the obligations that it had taught us, during decades, thus I became an unbeliever man. Especially because, I have been born in Bahia in the middle of the time of the university and of the scooter and, mainly with tourists I have frequented the African–Brazilian Cults, because I was interested in to hear the contagious sound of the conga drums and to enjoy the cordiality of the Priests and Priestesses of the Cult that have toasted us with abundant and delicious meals. However, at the same time in that the dances and rituals always called us the attention, the respect for the cults ended up imposing with the presence of the Orixa (spirit entity that incorporates on Priest or Priestess in the Candomble) in their beautiful and attractive ornaments.

On one Monday in the same epoch, my brother has recalled with other contact, he was informed me about serious matters, of which only I have had knowledge. I have remained thoughtful and preoccupied, and I was replying to him that my godmother Our Lady and Our Lord of Bonfim were protecting me, and nothing I have feared. He as a good brother said me of his preoccupation, that lady of African–Brazilian Cult has not received by the information and that I had had very caution.

The situation has begun to aggravate itself. My wife has been with incessant headaches, our wedding has past by difficulties, our daughters have been with problems at school, and the enterprise has past by serious disturbances.

Of my part, more and more I have promoted mega parties in our residence, bringing famous singers, groups very known, reaching the point of to hire Afoxe Filhos de Gandhi group, (a group of African-Brazilian Music from State of Bahia). They were days of abundance and irresponsibility. Our life was summarized to parties and national and international trips. We were constantly in the more respectable social chronicles of the city. We always had the best drinks, the best champagnes, the best foods, and the ones that were said the best companies.

In my brother’s third phone call, before the citation of subjects still more serious and of the dangers of health faced by my wife, I accepted the challenge.

We have arranged for the following day. At the sixteen hours I was in a humble room, however pleasant and very clean, replete of the smell of flowers that I didn’t get to identify. On the table a jar of water and a vase with white flowers that accompanied the whiteness of the towel of linen that covered it, spilling their folds in our legs.

Gumercindo did not have access to the room. Composing the table there was, in the headboard, a clear brunette lady, nice and smiling, strong, but she was not fat, in white clothes, still young, she was about 39 to 45 years old. It was Mãe Mocinha. She was accompanied of more four, two of they seating in front of me, and other to my side and the other in the other headboard.

The fear stuck me on chair and my regret was already shown through my visible impatience, and in the movement of my wet hands, that I didn’t know where to put.

Lady in front of me was using a blue and white dress, when she have begun to sing some music, while Mãe Mocinha has becalmed me, and informing that there were the ritual songs.

It is valid to point out that I was always a coward when the matter was about souls. Even today, in spite of to be a spiritist, I still look for on wardrobes and under the beds before I go to bed, to see if there are not souls. They are our neuroses. When a known died, I have passed months sleeping with the lamps turned on and I never slept only. It was a torment. I have never stayed at any home alone for none money.

I have started to hear the ritual songs, beautiful and cadenced, seeing for the ladies in front of me and at my side. The efforts to go out from the room were of no avail, inasmuch as I felt me arrested at chair.

Suddenly I have heard a hoarse voice, tired, gasping, and leisurely to say me: My sonny, don’t be afraid. I have seen to that winsome lady sitting at top the table and for a moment I have understood the her transfiguration, because who has spoke with me there was the same Mãe Mocinha, however oldest with body cambered forward and the hands and arms of an old woman with about seventy years old, tremulous, with the fallen cheeks and fallen eyelids, the mouth also to tremble, beyond a common double chin to the old people.

That voice was calming me down, and my life was opened as a book. Without condemnations or censorships, dictated in an old speech, but with a lot of love. I have continued prisoner to the chair while, in an indefinable moment, my heart opened up in tears that ran abundantly. I have wanted to stop crying but I was not able to. She has given me so many advices, said with honesty and so elevated tenderness, that they have enlarged me the emotion and they filled me with shame. Sheepish by the presence of other participants of that meeting that only then I noticed that they have also been sensitized themselves, seeming not to be present in that ambient. They have sung with confused voices, with the hands flattened in my direction and saying things that I haven’t understood.

All my life was described in those unforgettable words. My quarrels with my wife Vera. Her incessant headaches. The dangers that our daughters have passed. Besides subjects that only I have known. Problems in my enterprise. And so many other problems. As it is sad and difficult we verify that subjects that we thought that they are exclusively our, but they are of knowledge of other, without we at least know as.

Taking her advice. I took them and more two of her daughters to Recife. She have said that our house and our family have needed a spiritual cleaning. Until then, I had not communicated Vera or to the girls nothing of what there was past in Salvador. They have stayed accommodated at a hotel, where we went to look for them for the programmed spiritual cleanings.

The meeting would happen in the cup of the house. Vera has resisted to get down and to participate. She has said that she didn’t believe in sorceries. After some time we got to convince her and to our daughters, and finally they came so that we have began the meeting.

As it had been a repetition, there same arrangement was configured. The same places, and the flowers, and the pitcher of water, and the white towel. Begun the works and Mãe Mocinha, already with her incorporate Orixa, she saw herself for my wife and she said that she would make her head. In that instant, Vera cuffed violently with both hands the marble table, she got up and she begun to receive entities and more entities, dancing and gyrating for about thirty minutes, while Mãe Mocinha’s team continued singing. My daughters and me attended afraid that scene, in which my wife sang in unrecognized languages and she danced twirling as a spinning top.

They were moments of surprise and astonishment. We felt calmed with the turn of Vera to the normal, we questioned what had happened, and Mãe Mocinha informing and explaining the facts, she told us that Vera’s head was made and she was a daughter of Iansa and Oxum. She would need to get better, to work with the umbanda, receiving the Orixas and helping to the persons in need of the soul and of the body.

We began the cleaning of the house for the record collection. Mãe Mocinha beat with branches of Surinam cherry that crackled and broke as if they touched in something solid, spilling for the ground all their leaves.

Besides the traditional bath of leaves, several other tasks were indicated for we to accomplish. The most terrible for me, due to my fright of souls, was to go alone at midnight in the Church of Guararapes and to light a candle in its door. I suffered of fear. I lit the requested candles using a glass cupola to protect them of the wind and, hurriedly, I deposited them lit already in the door of the church, running soon afterwards for my car that, naturally, it was already started up and with the open door. It is not necessary to say that the fear forces us to hear. Until today I don't understand how I got to drive the Galaxy car back to home.

Some tasks were accomplished with Mãe Mocinha’s presence and their auxiliaries. Besides, Mãe Mocinha recommended us a series of obligations that we should accomplish after her return to Salvador. That respectable lady brought us moments of peace and hope and we have for her intense gratitude, for having shown us the stranger and to cure the intermittent headache that harmed our Vera.

The days have passed and the tasks and obligations have been done with the respect that they demanded. Vera has received saints, as medium and she has begun the service to become friends closer, helping them and explaining to them on doubts and fears.

On frequent Sundays of barbecues and on Saturdays of the matches of tennis that were watered to a lot of twelve years whisky, and a lot of food, it was common be called the saints that, motivated for the friends altered by the excessive alcohol, they played comic situations. Sometimes entities terribly sufferers were also bringing their pains. In spite of the respect everything was very entertaining.

Certain night, we were in a crossroads, in the neighborhood of Boa Viagem, to we to make a task, an obligation, when we wondered: and if anybody, some friend had seen us in that situation, with candles and offerings?

We have come back without doing the task and at home I remembered a colleague of office, of IPASE, that he has lived together with me for fifteen years, since my eleven years. I have passed more time with him in the working environment than with my parents, and I well knew that he understood of those subjects. It would be him who would give me the morals vision, responsibility and discipline that I carry with me until today.

I called the friend that didn’t see there are long years and we have agreed that I would go to Salvador. Arriving to the capital of Bahia, I went to the street Barão of Cotegipe, more specifically to the Spiritist Center Caminho da Redenção (Pathway of Redemption), where I was received with the same affection of the old days of the office. That fraternal greeting I would not forget: "Hi, Rudi!". This was the way for which the lover friend Divaldo Franco treated me in dawning of my life.

We talked a lot and he gave me an umbanda class, candomble class and other religious syncretism, spilling about my curiosity and anxiety the Spiritist Doctrine, codified by the Mr. Allan Kardec. The same Spiritism that so many times he tried to become trained without success, since my ignorance, immaturity and fright of the souls repelled it.

Blessed Divaldo, that always had a word of love, word of advice and of affection with all of the friends. How many renouncement demonstrations, self–denial, wise orientations and without impositions, of the information of the doctrinal bases of the Spiritism, always repelled and criticized by many friends. How many aggressions I witnessed, how many slanders, how many injustices. I felt sometimes revolt for the silence of Di. I didn’t understand because he didn't react. The ones that more attacked him, they were for him treaties with more affection, and he always improved in assisting to the requests of all.

He advised me to seek the Casa dos Espíritas de Pernambuco (House of the Spiritists from Pernambuco), in the person of the Mr. João the Batista Campos and Mrs. Iracy Campos. For five years, with a frequency of a hundred percent, as abnegated Rotary people say, we absorbed the Spiritist Doctrine in all its postulates. As it didn’t work with mediumistic meetings, Vera began the reception of the entities in the room of passes, that the Mr. Campos applied it. In that House we learned the whole spiritist doctrinal content and we can say that there we were prepared for the task that soon more would relapse on our shoulders.

Mr. Campos and Mrs. Iracy have been for us excellent teachers, introducing us in the social works and have given us the opportunity of we are to the table of the doctrinal meetings. There we have learned how to study the Kardec’s works and the complementary ones. Until that one–day the commitments and the Spirits friends’ pushes called us to the construction of what would come to be the Lar Espírita Chico Xavier (Spiritist Home Chico Xavier).

We possessed a terrain that we acquired in the summer of l970, at seaside of the neighborhood of Candeias and there we have begun the project of the construction of the Institution. We have relied on the technical support of the Dr. Wilson Nadruz, Dr. Nelson Mergulhão, our sibling Bernardino, Donizete Oliveira, Dr. Heraldo Velho and of master Amaro. Once having been approved by the City hall of Jaboatão dos Guararapes and competent organs, we have made available the resources so that the work has been raised with the best materials. It was treated of a bold, modern project, and out of the patterns of the Spiritist Centers. The architects have drawn wide spaces and alive and cheerful colors.

On June 30, 1985, in a great party that relied on the special guests’ presence as the Honorable Dr. Roberto Magalhães, to that time Governor of the State of Pernambuco, several authorities, the spiritist community from the state of Pernambuco, from other States of Brazil and from foreign, and of the spiritual medium Divaldo Pereira Franco, official speaker of the event, we inaugurated the Spiritist Home Chico Xavier.

During the months that preceded the opening of the institution, in our Gospel at the Home we have received the Spirits friends’ communications, through Vera’s mediumship, when in one night, the venerable Miguel advised us to do our public meetings at the movie that we have at our house. He said: "The Mister done invite several friends for they distract themselves at his movie, why not to invite them also attend to the spiritist meetings in the same atmosphere, while our House is not ready?"

I have resisted and I said that the movie has been a place where some friends have drank and they have watched films, not being able to me to impede that some of them brought stronger scenes, since they were passed in first exhibition, before even of they be at the movies of the city. He has insisted and we have begun the first doctrinal meetings of the Spiritist Home Chico Xavier at our domestic movie, with a capacity for twenty-six participants. We have installed the direction table for three people and, until the day of the opening of the institution one time a week we have received from thirty to thirty five people for they attend and participate in the doctrinal meetings.

Therefore after the inauguration, in the same month of June, 1985, the same venerable Miguel, in the Gospel at Home, told us that being the Spiritist Home already in operation, of that day in before he would no longer communicate during our Gospel, however he would be always to the disposition for explanations that were necessary, whereas couldn’t be of personal character.

From June 30 upward, besides the boys’ arrival, the works were increasing itself in volume, until that we made available all of the works that the Mr. Kardec, of blessed manner, guided us to develop.

In the tenth year of operation of our institution, already with thirty four children under our responsibility, mediumistic and disobsession meetings, varied courses, social area with several fronts, on June 30, 1995 we inaugurated the new installations so that we could welcome the number of visitors of the House, inclusively the great amount of evangelized children by the Uncle Chico Youth and the whole range of works in the social area, inclusively with the enlargement of the medical clinic.

In the current moment, when we are to complete fifteen years on June 30, 2000, we wondered if it was difficult. We have to be sincere and to affirm that it was, however admitting that the motivations that we received from the incarnated and disincarnated friends along our journey impelled us ahead and that, as it could not leave of being, we are already in process with the project for enlargement of the installations of our Institution, in course, lay on above all with the Celestial Father’s blessings and Jesus’ blessed help, our unconditional friend.

Sincerely,

Rudival Cohim.