Get a Miracle

“One must have faith and pray; the water will have no virtue without faith.”

— St. Bernadette of Lourdes

My daughter came home from her Catholic day camp with a crèche she made from a shoebox, a St. Brigid’s cross of pipe cleaners, and a plastic bottle of holy water, blessed by the deacon.

“It’s not from Lourdes,” the catechist told us, apologetically. For Catholics, the spring at Lourdes — dug by the bare hands of St. Bernadette at the urging of Our Lady — is the champagne of holy water. The water my daughter brought home came from the drinking fountain in the school hallway. I was sitting out there with my son, still a toddler then, when a volunteer filled the plastic basin.

My own elementary school, just outside New Orleans, was named for Our Lady of Lourdes, and Mary was our patron and mascot to the point of insanity. My memories of Catholic education consist almost entirely of stories of Marian apparitions and miracles, mothers whose rosaries had turned gold before their eyes, and standing in the courtyard of our school hoping to see the “miracle of the sun,” a phenomenon we’d learned about from our friends who’d gone on pilgrimage to where Our Lady, as we called her, was appearing in a place called Medjugorje, which we pronounced as Magic Orgy when adults couldn’t hear. Even our slumber-party games of Bloody Mary conjured images not of some demon or witch but of a glowing lady in a cave, a benevolent apparition who whispered strange riddles like “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

I wasn’t sure if Mary was to be feared or loved. She seemed kind enough in “The Song of Bernadette” with Jennifer Jones, which we watched in the library during rainy-day recesses, but somehow I still imagined her as an omniscient scold, looking down her fine nose at me from her spot on the pedestal, condemning me for talking too much and “refusing to come to order,” as my teachers said on my pink slip “demerits.” I guess I thought of Mary much like my mother: kind, but fierce. Beautiful and composed in a way I could never imagine myself becoming, but not to be trifled with.

Whether I feared or loved her, I believed in her power. And I was counting on this power when I told my classmates, gathered at the lunch table on the second day of eighth grade, that my mother had stage IV metastatic lung cancer. I threw back my shoulders theatrically and proclaimed that it would be okay; we were going to get a miracle. That’s how I phrased it: get a miracle, as if miracles could be bought at the shrine’s gift shop, plucked from the shelf right next to the finger rosaries and bottles of holy water.

I can still see those 13-year-old girls, their forbidden lip-gloss and rumpled uniform shirts, the yarn bracelets we stacked on our wrists. I imagine a frozen Last Supper-style tableaux, forks suspended halfway to their mouths, gazes directed at each other or at their plates, all of them looking anywhere but at me.  Miracles might happen to peasant children in Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje. But coming from my own mouth, at our cafeteria table in Slidell, Louisiana, those words, get a miracle, suddenly sounded absurd.

Meanwhile, my parents seemed neither to believe nor even to recall the old Catholic stories. At home, throughout those weeks of chaos and tears and strange casseroles cooked by the neighbors, a small vial of holy water from the spring in Lourdes sat atop our refrigerator, untouched, covered with the same layer of dust as the unpaid bills and the pack of cigarettes my grandmother left behind on one of her visits.

Instead, a 1986 book called Healed of Cancer by Dodie Osteen, mother of Joel, the multimillionaire televangelist and founder of Lakewood Church in Houston, captivated my parents. Doctors diagnosed Dodie with liver cancer and told her to go home and die, but she had miraculously lived. Not only was she cancer-free, but she also now healed others. We gorged ourselves on her inspirational stories. We abandoned the Rosary for Dodie’s favorite Bible verses, our new mantras.

Well, they abandoned the Rosary. I still slept with mine under my pillow.

But those scriptures we memorized still bob to the surface in times of need. I hear my dad whispering to us in the night, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

The Osteens called their Houston church “an oasis of love in a troubled world,” and it became the spring of hope for my mother in the short weeks when hope was still possible. On one of her many pilgrimages there, she felt the heat of Dodie’s hands running through her body and thought, it’s working.

Soon we all ended up in what appeared to be a Jacuzzi bathtub sunken into the altar — no, that’s the Catholic in me, this was a stage — in the First Assembly of God on the I-10 service road in Slidell. It didn’t seem like too much to ask, to perform, to “get saved.” I would have eaten the grass and dug a spring in the mud, too, like Bernadette, if my suffering mother asked me to.

I knew nothing of the Reformation, didn’t even know the word catechism. I’d never been anywhere but a Catholic church and had only the barest glimmer that there was any difference at all between being this kind of Christian or that kind of Christian, except that here at the First Assembly it was, for some reason, not okay to ask Mary to get you a healing.

So we waded into the lukewarm water. I was last. The pastor smiled at me expectantly, then took my hand as if leading me to the dance floor. He braced my forehead and the small of my back and then dunked me with surprising force. I remember being shocked that he wasn’t gentler with me, thinking I’m only a child! I gasped and wiped my eyes as the music surged, and then, the applause.

My mother was waiting on the other side of the tub, clapping. She seemed so proud as I emerged dripping in my gym shorts.

But the world was unchanged. Same fluorescent lights. Same cheap drum kit in the corner. Same frizzy-haired lady changing the transparencies of the song lyrics on the overhead projector. Same felt banners with cotton-ball clouds. And when I looked at my mother, I saw she was still sick and became furious with despair. It wasn’t working. 

“It’s not going to work,” I said, as I sat in a folding chair with a towel around me, and my family looked at me in disbelief.

It didn’t work. Six months later, she was gone, and I was accountable for my lack of faith.

At bedtime on the last day of church camp, I opened my daughter’s holy water bottle, sprinkled a few drops on my fingertips and made the sign of the cross on her forehead, as the catechist had suggested. 

“The sign of the cross is a prayer in itself,” she’d said, scolding the group of 6-year-olds for their sloppy execution. “When you make the sign of the cross over your body, you’re professing your belief in the Trinity, so do it with some respect, please.”

As I blessed my daughter, she looked up at me, shyly, almost embarrassed. Her credulity often surprises me, makes me wonder at the wisdom and the danger of handing on one’s faith in things seen but darkly, with all our tangled associations and half-understandings. In her brown eyes, so like my own, so like my mother’s, I thought I saw her questions. Is this real? Is it working?

I said nothing, but dipped my fingers in the water again, closed my eyes, and crossed myself.

More from The Bitter Southerner