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BROTHER MIKE:  EL SHADDAI'S MIRACLE TOUCHBROTHER MIKE:  EL SHADDAI'S MIRACLE TOUCH
    
   
Home Page of Brother Mike: El Shaddai's Miracle Touch 
 
History of El Shaddai 
Links and Chapters of El Shaddai 
 
About the Book 
Preface 
The Author of the Book 
Outline of the Book 
Book Launching 
ChanRobles Publishing Company - Publisher of the Book 
  
 
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BROTHER MIKE: 
EL SHADDAI’S MIRACLE TOUCH 
 
 
PREFACE

       Outside the laws of gravity, the ultimate truth is that there is no such thing as impartiality.  The historian, the biographer, and the author of non-fiction, who thinks to rise above prejudice, betrays his secret predilections in the choice of his materials, and the nuances of his adjectives, if not the incline of his politics or the fold of his religion.  And since one’s knowledge of another is always incomplete, writing a biography is a precarious enterprise.  Only a fool would try to compress an adventure of a lifetime into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions – especially in abbreviation of an account of the life of an evangelist, whose activities are still producing a wealth of materials embarrassing to a biographer, whose work becomes progressively out of date, as facts not to be guessed at, becomes known as time changes the colors of the portrait that has been painted.  

     This book might as well be read as “narrative” biography, which I begin with a profile – a profile of one known to millions as “Brother Mike”, who, next to the Bible, is revered by prayer-partners of the El Shaddai Charismatic Renewal Movement (of the Roman Catholic Church of the Philippines) as an Agnus Dei, who has burst upon the scene as the greatest multiplier of Christ the world has seen since the crucifixion. For Mathew, Mark, Luke and John combined, were never known to have regularly gathered a crowd of 5,000 for regular weekly healings sessions, as the inventory of 12 basketfuls of fish and loaves of bread leftovers is a mathematical account of those who could have been fed if there were more at the Sermon of the Mount.  Contrast this to the sight of multitudes of half to a full million which crowd Metro Manila’s Luneta Park to tie up traffic into knots ten city blocks away, just to listen to Brother Mike preach and pray for God’s blessings that washes the saints and sinners alike among the crowd.  By this preponderance of numbers, the foregoing acknowledgment of one man’s virtue is a compelling tribute which a  couple of millions of card-carrying El Shaddai prayer-partners today  would attest to, without doubt nor hesitation.  
   
    Yet, as I set out to write about Mariano Zuniega Velarde, I did so with the intention of uncovering a hoax.  The masses of Filipino society, I thought, had to be warned against a hazard – a bewitching demagoguery that ought to be exposed.  Such was the design which I pursued.  I surmised the astute evangelist guilty of many errors, which beguiled as many unwary souls.  A year of El Shaddai prayer-meetings, however, bore no fruit to confirm my suspicions.  Thus, my thesis of a breathtaking fakery crumbled. Instead of a demagogue, the figure of a prophet emerged.  

    Acclaimed historian of the 20th century, Dr. Arnold Tonybee, whose survey of over a dozen civilizations compresses 5,000 years of recorded human activity, in A Study of History suggests that the decline of religion could be traced to the error of universal churches (among them, the Roman Catholic Church); abandonment of its original role and function in society:“...to enable human beings to enter into direct personal relation with a trans-human presence in and behind and beyond the Universe, instead of being introduced to this ultimate spiritual reality only indirectly, through the medium of civilization or of the pre-civilizational society that is the individual’s social setting” – meaning the mistake of interfacing church rituals with direct worship, as oil on water, which only denied the individual's personal access to God.  

     Esoteric liturgy only mystified the faithful, instead of priming him with the experience of relating earthly life with a divine presence, as well as stimulating his vision of God’s reality beyond the universe. It was this fascinating relationship which King David of the Genesis demonstrated when he sang, hopped, and danced from the plains of his annointment to the top of a mount to praise and thank God for the power he had been blessed just  before he was enthroned as king of Israel and Judah.  So, everywhere in the open-air settings of the El Shaddai prayer-meetings, Brother Mike recreates King David from the mold of the crowd, when on his bidding, they sing, hop, and dance as King David did, to thank God for the graces they have been blessed.  

     By that mystique, Tonybee seems to suggest that Brother Mike is correcting a mistake and returning the Church to the grandeur of its original role and the nobility of its primary function in society.  And it has been said that a revolution never goes backward.  And not a few see that the forward movement of the El Shaddai prayer-meetings which has grown by leaps and  bounds, not in arithmetical, but in geometrical, progression, marks Brother Mike as the ablest proliferator of religion worldwide as attest the fact that in the world today, no one can draw a multitude of half to a full million, rain or shine, the whole year round, every Saturday of the week.  

     Bishop Fulton Sheen, a doctor of divinity and medic to stricken souls, in the Life of Christ, wrote: “...to preach to people to do good is meaningless  without the power to do good.”  And talking about the Philippines of 1999, religion has been divided into two worlds:  between all those who preach to people to do good; and Brother Mike.  He preaches to people to do good but gives them the power to do good as well.  In a pillow-soft voice, he dramatizes the hunger of the individual for self-esteem, that could only come as a gift from God.  He bids them then to raise their arms to the heavens like a forest of trees lifting its branches to pray, that their own outstretched hands be blessed with the power to heal themselves, neighbors, friends, and enemies.  

     Still, Brother Mike’s festive prayer-meetings have been dismissed by some as “shallow” showmanship.  But that derogation bounces off against a great wall of faith.  Prayer-partners see Brother Mike’s mystique as a way of painting a vision to make it simple.  Another way of saying that, indeed, Brother Mike is a prophet.  Only prophets can paint a vision to make it simple, as Joseph of Egypt simplified the Pharaoh’s dreams – (seven fat and sleek cows devoured by seven other thin and gaunt ones; and seven healthy heads of grain swallowed up by seven other heads, lean and scorched by the wind – to be no more than seven years of plenty and seven years of famine) – to make the Pharaoh wise.  Ant the perception is fast growing that Brother Mike is simplifying the rituals of the Church to make the wise, simple, and the simple, wise.  

  
   

BRO. MARIANO R. LOGARTA
 

June 1999

Makati City







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