The day of Ratna’s funeral (Final Part)

Before throwing the last shovels of dirt onto the coffin we once more said our good byes. When my turn came I stood dumbly feeling the heat melting me.  I prayed to Ratna and promised I would never forget her smile, how she had been the joy and the light every time I was at the home helping the nuns.  Lost in remembering all that she who could not even move had done to fill up my empty life, my constant on the run existence, my perpetual motion to keep me from seeing the shallowness of my life, keep me from admitting how selfishly depressed I was because my desires were unfulfilled I experienced an epiphany.  I saw how self-centered I was, how focused on my own goals I was, how, yes, I certainly did service work but what was I doing to help myself.  I asked my Guru to forgive my behavior and I knew that Ratna, in some way, was helping me.

I moved away from the coffin and the rest of the soil was placed on it.  The burial was over.  Most ineffable though—my headache was gone and my dullness too.  I didn’t feel sick anymore.  I was whole once again.  Where had the missing part of me been?  It had become the witness, “She who watches,” and it had dissociated from the dream of life to be in the presence of God so that I could come back renewed and restored.

“She who watches,” what the Warm Springs Oregon indigenous people called the unseen force who sees all and explains all when the time is right, came to me with  the perfect ending to Holy Ratna’s story.  It happened on an ordinary Sunday at the Jyothi Seva Home.  Wanda approached the communion rail to receive the round white wafer that is a symbol for receiving God.  When the wafer was placed on her tongue by the priest and she swallowed it, she stood up from the kneeler and swooned.  She fell to the ground as if she had fainted.  Sister Agata ran up to help.  Wanda opened her eyes.  “I can see she said softly.  I can see.”

The Mother superior and the other nuns thought that maybe the strain of Wanda’s new life as a round the clock mother to her adopted daughter was too much.  They did their own tests trying to disprove that Wanda could see. But she did seem to pass each test.  Finally they took Wanda to her own eye doctor, the one who said that she would be blind for life.  Like the doctor who had diagnosed her when she was 10 and lost her vision, the Bengaluru doctor examined her very carefully.  He kept nodding his head in disbelief.  He did all the necessary eye examinations and finally reported.  “Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed with her eyes.  According to the tests she is as blind as she ever was.

“But there is no doubt that Wanda can now see.”  A hush fell over the room, the kind of hush we feel when we know angels are hovering.  Wanda smiled her bright Polish smile as dazzling as the summer sunlight on the fields outside of Warsaw.  “I told you I could see,” she said.

Of course, we do not read about miracles in the news much.  It seems the angels prefer the hush.  But when I learned about what happened to Wanda I remembered that in order for a person to be judged a saint, at least in the Catholic Tradition, the person prayed to had to grant a miracle to prove prayers were answered.

Later, I asked Wanda, Did you ask Ratna to help you.  Did you pray to her?’

“Yes I did,” Wanda said.  “I asked her to help me be a good mother, always.”

Saints, mothers, and nuns…..miracle workers every one.