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idealism,
faith
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dedication
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Paulo Eduardo Cherino Malerbi (photo), an engineer from the Brazilian city of São Paulo, is an active member of the local Spiritist Movement. He is a volunteer worker at the São Paulo State Spiritist Federation and for more than 30 years he has has been involved in teaching and spiritual assistance activities, as he explains in the following interview:
Since joining the Spiritist Movement, you have become one of its most enthusiastic members. Which aspect of Spiritism triggered that process?
I was born into a Roman Catholic family, but signs of my mediumship first appeared when I was 12 years old and began seeing spirits. I sought help from the Catholic priests I knew but each one of them solemnly ignored my pleas. That was very disappointing, as they labelled themselves as “youth leaders.” I began looking for guidance in other religions and attended services at Christian evangelical temples, synagogues, mosques and even a Russian Orthodox church. Eventually, as I suffered deeply with the impact of my grandfather’s death, my father gave me a Spiritist book, “Educação para a morte“ (Education for Death), written by our dear Herculano Pires, whose family lived nearby. As soon as I read those clear and straightforward words, I decided to go to the headquarters of the Spiritist Federation. I was welcomed there by a lovely lady who told me, in one minute, everything that I needed to know. And I hadn’t even asked any questions. I knew then and there that I had “found my spot.” That lady, I would find out later, was Martha Thomas, a model Spiritist whose remarkable work and legacy I would get to know in the coming years.
Don’t you think the frequent contact you’ve had with Spiritists across the world, thanks to your duty trips as an engineer, have also helped you strengthen your determination?
No doubt about that, my dear friend! Spiritism has grown a lot in other countries in the past 40 years, both in the numbers of adepts and in quality. And I think that much of that is thanks to our dear Divaldo Franco, who has been a true missionary of Spiritism. In the beginning of the 1980s, the Spiritist Teachings were well established across Brazil, but it had limited reach in the rest of the world. Funnily enough, it was by learning Esperanto, the international language created by Zamenhof (a Polish professor who lived in the same era as Allan Kardec) that Ifirst met Spiritists from other countries. At the time, I was working on engineering projects in Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Finland. About 15 years later, I was pleasantly surprised to find dozens of Spiritist Groups in cities and towns across North America and Europe. The spread of Spiritism was helped by the arrival, in those countries, of thousands of Brazilian families who moved abroad escaping high inflation and economic instability at home. And, of course, by Divaldo Franco’s tireless efforts. He was the true globetrotter of Spiritism, often spending more than 200 days a year in international tours aimed at disseminating the Spiritist Teachings, with the support of Brazilian families that had settled in those places. I witnessed that countless times.
Tell us about the books you have published?
I would like to have time to write a lot more. I’ve been able, so far, to publish six Spiritist books. One of them, Acima das nuvens e Além do nevoeiro (Above the Clouds and Beyond the Mist) begins with a narrative that continues in another of my books Os caminhos de Jó (Job’s Pathways). It tells the story of an aeroplane pilot who is focused on providing for his children, even if that entails taking risks and facing many challenges. The book is a classic novel with a mix of humour, objectivity and a soft touch to address difficult and uptodate issues, such as drug trafficking, parental alienation and the shallow and mediocre relations that prevail in many families these days – something that could be easily addressed if parents brought Jesus into their daily family lives.
From all your memories in Spiritism, is there a particular one you would like to share with our readers?
I thank God’s mercy for allowing me to have experienced so many wonderful moments, despite my repeated mistakes. One of those moments happened 20 years ago, during a visit to the Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey in Barcelona. My late brother, Zé, had been living and working there since 199. I found a way of paying him a visit every time I travelled to Europe for work. He had a heart of gold but he had admitted many times to me that he couldn’t feel the way I did, he couldn’t have faith in God. Our mother had died three years before that meeting. Some of her attitudes and habits had become like a trademark for her, like always peeling off any fruit he served to us, or only wearing cotton blouses or always wearing an English lavender perfume, which was made by Atkinsons. She wore it everyday after coming from her bath. Well, I was meeting my brother for lunch in Barcelona on a Monday, in the few hours I had between arriving there and taking a plane to Germany in the evening. Zé came to pick me up at the airport and suggested that we had some tapas for lunch in Montserrat and later visited the abbey. “I would like to have 10% of your faith, but I simply can’t,” he told me as we got there. We arrived at the abbey at 2pm. He’d been there many times before, but it was my first visit. I remained near the entry portico, looking at the altars and the dome from the inside, as Zé continued to walk, alone, through the nave. When he was further away, some 40 metres from me, I could see a short woman, with grey hair, next to him and I could immediately feel the scent of my mother’s perfume. “My mother is here,” I thought. Then my brother returned to my side, drying with his hands the tears that rolled down his cheeks, as my mother’s spirit walked next alongside him, with a tender smile on her face. As soon as he got next to me, he said: “Can you feel this perfume? We are alone here, but I can feel that she’s here with us.” He couldn’t see her spirit, only I could, through my mediumship. She then made me understand that I should hug him so that she would be able to hug us both at the same time before she went away. So we hugged each other. At that moment I prayed from my heart to express gratitude to her, to Jesus and to all of those who made the unique moment of our lives possible. Zé continued to cry incessantly and when I looked at him, to make sure he was OK, he told me sobbing: “Now I believe.” My beloved brother would return to the Spirit World in 2009, five years after this wonderful occasion.
