Invitation to a Canonization

Gianluca’s wife Nelda invited me to the canonization while she was sudsing up shampoo in my hair, getting it ready for Gianluca to cut.  “You like saints, don’t you?” she said casually. “Didn’t you once translate the life of a saint?”  Yes, I perked up, not knowing where she was headed with this.  I am sometimes a little nervous around Nelda because she hovers around that part of me that is tempted to convert to Catholicism. “Well, we’re canonizing one on Saturday. Four o’clock at the Duomo.  Why don’t you come?” I told her I would think about it. I am still thinking about it, even though it is now Sunday and Madre Maria Luisa Prosperi has crossed over from regular nun-mother to saint in a ceremony that was not graced by my humble presence.

I am a true believer of a kind, a true believer in dimensions of spirit I experience first hand and can identify bodily. It is hard for me to assure people like Nelda that one can be a believer without being Catholic, but I believe my belief is as strong as Nelda’s belief who has even seen the Virgin at Medjagorge. I love that she has seen the Virgin and even conceived a baby late in life she named Maria after the Virgin who granted her the miracle of conception. I have no doubt that something powerful happened to the entire family during their pilgrimage to Medjagorge: the 12 year old saw the Virgin, too, and before his contralto voice had even changed, began to passionately lead the recitation of the Rosary at San Loreto, that church named after the house where Mary and Joseph raised Jesus, the house that angels flew from Nazareth to Croatia to other places in Italy in times of strife before letting it come safely to rest in Loreto.  

I am also complicit in the family’s faith somehow. The elder son was a reluctant believer until the day he was praying to San Giuseppe for help with his homework and I came in for a haircut and announced that I was translating the life of San Giuseppe.  A kind of hush rained down on all of us gathered there in the beauty parlor, the kind of hush that is accompanied by a very fine shower of golden light. We all knew that San Giuseppe had stepped into the room. The praying son felt it. I felt it. We all felt it, a quickening, a change of light.  I told the story of how a Catholic college I know refused to elect San Giuseppe as patron saint of their chapel because he gives the wrong message.  San Giuseppe was known to be stupid. He could only hold one idea in his head at a time. He knew that in order to be a priest, he had to take tests and so, rather than study, he prayed to God for help on the test. Infallibly God divinely intervened to make sure that the only question that appeared on Giuseppe’s tests was the one that he knew how to answer. The best miracle of all was the one in which his examiners tested the first two boys in the group and assumed if they knew the answers everyone else in the group would know the answers, letting San Giuseppe completely off the hook. “San Giuseppe may be the patron saints of students, but studying may help you as much as prayer,” I told Nelda’s son, perhaps in a way that bothered Nelda.  Soon afterward the entire family took me on as their special conversion project. I love that a mere haircut has become a bimonthly spiritual adventure.

I ask Nelda why this Madre Maria Luisa Prosperi has been deemed worthy of sainthood.  What did she do? How do people decide this?  According to Nelda she cured a Trevi woman of terminal cancer.  I tell her I go to a woman in Torino, an Energy Healer, who zaps tumors all the time with loving, high-frequency energy and makes them disappear and she’s not in line for sainthood. The Catholic Church needs to get to speed with all these advances in Energy Healing.  Reiki, Theta Healing, The Reconnection, Quantum Entrainment, Matrix Energetics: People everywhere are zapping tumors these days and you don’t find them inviting ostentatious ceremony in overwrought Duomos. They go about the work, humbly, without much recognition, unless of course you are Eric Pearl or Vianna Stibal, but they’re different somehow. Their schtick is “anyone can do it”, while the schtick of the canonization is “only they can do it…and only the Church can recognize and name the miraculous.”I realize that I have launched a new battle in my personal Armageddon and the nuns are losing this one.  Oh, Sisters of Poverty!

Nelda’s eyes flinch a little but the sheen of belief glows stronger as she quietly, faithfully explains that this Trevi woman was cured 100 years after Maria Luisa’s death! The nuns at the convent of Santa Lucia prayed to Maria Luisa, asking her to cure the woman’s cancer and she did!  This was a true miracle. There's a difference.

I do not believe I am the devil’s advocate when I determine I must persist in this. I believe instead some other force is guiding me, maybe even the spirit of Maria Luisa: “How do you know that it was not the humble prayers of the nuns themselves in the convent that zapped the tumor. Who says that Maria Luisa alone had the power?  We are all endowed with the power to line-up our energies with the energies of Christ-Consciousness and convey healing. All of us.”

Nelda flushed a little and conceded that she didn’t know the details. I should go to the canonization and hear all the details and then I’d understand. It’s not the same, the powers a saint has and what the rest of us have. The Church has some way of knowing that it was Maria Luisa who cured that woman.

The hush and golden light that some days fill the beauty salon were sorely missing after my discussion with Nelda. There was a different charge in the air, static, dryer static, little shocks. She wrapped my hair in a turban of towel and led me toward Gianluca who was waiting for me scissors in hand.  What horror to confront myself in the three-way mirror, that unframed face, pale and flaccid, unadorned, mooning out of me too rawly.  Gianluca clip, clip, clipped at my wet tufts of hair and I imagined for a moment that I would not know myself when he was done, that the wetness would dry into a shape and style I would not recognize. No, not tonsured. Not cut short-enough for the wimple, but not right somehow. But, of course, in the end it would be just right, the hair cut he has always given me, the style, my face, the same, familiar, the way it’s supposed to be.