Losing My Girl
The Bells of Caleruega
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
One of the most joyous chores I look forward to each day or whenever I possibly can is to check on my email (the bitter half of that, which is getting to be more convenient, is deleting the spam from my bulk mail) I guess it’s understandable when you’re this far away from home and the weeks drag on. Among the emails, one that really struck me of late was the one from my 22-year old daughter.(She rarely writes me, by the way).
Although her engagement came as a happy surprise last December to the family, it was her email regarding the details of how she and her beau wanted their wedding to be in a few months from now that made reading her email, well, thought-pondering. It was finally beginning to sink in that before the year was through, I would be losing my daughter to another man.
There’s something about Dads and daughters I can’t put my finger on. With my son, it was like, “Whatt?!! He hasn’t dated yet?” You know, you like throwing them into the water to make them learn how to swim. You egg them on male rituals and other “macho” stuff and although the bond was there, it was more of a ‘tough love’ kind of bond.
My daughter only has to sob and point her finger somewhere as to the cause, and I’d be there as her knight in shining armor, ready to “slay the dragon” or other male irritants lurking in her way. Sometimes, she can get away with “murder”, specially when she looks at me with that “don’t you get it yet??!”kind of face and say, “Dad..??!” Even if I had registered my reservations earlier to her requests, I’d fold up, look around sheepishly
, let her have her way and the wife would just look up from the sidelines and smile.
It was that way when she chose to pursue college far away from home and when I gave her my first impression of her boyfriend she had asked me to meet. I told her and her Mom that he had shifty eyes. Oh, well.. at least I said my piece.
And now this thing about where they wanted the wedding to take place - supposedly, they had seen this place on the Internet and inquired further with their friends. And , of all things, it was located , thousands of miles away, where I was visiting. “Why here??!” Well, for one thing, the boy’s parents hailed from the Philippines, but there were certainly other churches in Manila they could’ve picked. Instead, they chose this remote chapel on the edge of a hilly ridge overlooking an island volcano called Tagaytay.
And after acquiescing once more to my daughter’s requests, I had to trek to a place called Caleruega and give them a first-hand report on the details they wanted to know. Maneuvering the car through an abandoned road leading to the place made me think whether I was not only providing the rope to my hanging but building the scaffold itself. Would her beau entertain the same thoughts, I wondered. Just a thought.
At the edge of the ridge, a façade loomed out and as I entered its gates, there was a sense of serenity that hit me. I also found out that Caleruega , aside from its chapel, had served as a place for spiritual retreat for some of the nuns who managed the facility. It had a beautiful garden and through it, small cabins for retreaters and an open winding staircase to the chapel.
The place spoke to me of harmony, of closeness to a God, of resolving differences and the struggle one had to put up with to make it happen. It spoke of Love. Without benefit of any verbose advertising, and with just visual (and spiritual) appreciation, I had finally understood what all the fuss was about in choosing this place to consecrate what was for a couple a ceremony to mark the beginning of their life together .I had imagined that at some future time, if (heaven forbid) the marriage starts to flounder, their thoughts would beckon to this hilly place where they would find the strength to rediscover what those vows really meant for each other.
I also found out that this remote chapel (Caleruega) was booked for weddings until the end of the year.
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