miracles

One January, when I was a young seminarian, many, many years ago, one of my classmates and I were assigned to take a census for the Catholic parish in a tiny town outside of Boulder Colorado. The task was an attempt by a failing parish to find out where all its former parishioners had gone. If the pastor had earnestly wanted to change the way he did things so that people might feel motivated to come back to church, it would have been an easier task. But, instead, the "lapsed" parishioners had good reasons to walk away from a church where the liturgies were absolutely deadly, the parish had no community services or outreach, and the alcoholic pastor gave more attention to his mentally deficient "handyman" who also shared the pastor's bed and credit cards.

But I was 18 years old, clearly in denial on several levels, and sincere about any task I was given, so my classmate and I went from house to house on the parish register asking what the parish could do for them. Most of the parishioners were hard working people who had fallen on hard times in other parts of their lives and simply couldn't be bothered with the mess their church had become. Others did not even know how their names had gotten on the list, other than that their parents had gone to the church or they had been married in a Catholic church somewhere else.

A few were old faithful parishioners who loved having visitors from the parish. They were the ones we really didn't need to visit because they were always there every Sunday morning, sometimes even on weekday mornings, in the front rows faithfully droning back "and also with yous" and "amens" to the bald pate of the priest slumped over the alter. They were the ones that threw their doors open to us as we walked up the snow-covered path to their doors, took our coats and served us coffee and leftover Christmas cookies, fruitcake and pitzels.

One such parishioner was an old Mexican immigrant who took us through her house and showed us her entire collection of saint statues. They stood like commuters waiting on subway platforms of mantles, folding TV trays, window sills, bookcases and end tables. Some were big gaudy hand-painted plaster cast statues, with flowing red robes, teary eyes and deep red blood. Some were small cream-colored plastic statues like the ones found on car dashboards. But they all had their place. One in particular, she told me, a plastic statue of Saint Jude, would come up missing from time to time and then reappear several days later.

"He's just gone for awhile and then he comes back," she told me. "I don't know if he makes a miracle or what? But he just disappears." She looked to me for encouragement and repeated, "I don't know if he makes a miracle or what?"

I had nothing to say to her, but I noticed her cat eyeing the end table where St. Jude was standing. Her little grandson seemed as interested in her statues as he was with his army men. And later when we had coffee she had a hard time finding the sugar bowl.

When she located the sugar, my classmate who was a little older and sassier than I was at the time murmured, "another miracle!"

She smiled and said distractedly, "I suppose so," as she opened the cookie tin and set it before us.