El Milagro

4/9

Friday was fairly uneventful, and this is where I entered in an extremely antisocial period of time. I rationalize that spending time alone this weekend was okay, though, because I hadn’t really done that yet. The part I can’t rationalize as being something decent is that I spent a lot of time watching online tv… At least Castle is still awesome, right?


The hard part about Friday was my tica mom’s religious experience. Costa Rica is a Catholic state, which means that practically every person here considers himself or herself a Catholic, whether or not they are ‘practicante’, or a practicing Catholic. This is usually a non-problem for me, except when I get the big question: are you a Catholic?

I have been asked this question by Karen’s mom, and at least twice now by my tica mom, and I think it’s a question someone asks me after they have decided that they like me, and want to further test my worth as a person. The proper answer to this question for them is ‘yes’, but I am not the type of person that lies.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a complicated religious background, which is hard for me to explain in English, let alone Spanish. The way I see things, I am a good person. I believe in morality, and that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in most cases, I believe that the world is filled with many mysteries that we do not yet, and may never, understand, and I believe that humans, as all animals, are biological beings, and therefore there is something bigger than we are in the universe. I do not, however, believe in any one religion because I do not believe in religion at all. To me, it is just like communism in the sense that it sounds good in theory, but doesn’t quite play out in practice. I don’t believe anyone deserves to feel morally superior to anyone else due to their religious title alone, as horrendous things have happened within the church and wars have been started over religion, etc. etc., and therefore I feel almost insulted when my religion (more specifically, non-religion) is used as a judge of my moral character.

What I think sums it all up very well, and what I told Karen’s mom, is a quote from Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

The events leading to the question this time were a big stranger than in the past. My tica mom has chronic back pain, a side-effect from a surgery she had in which her three lower vertebra were removed (her coccyx). These three vertebra support the rest of the spine, so with them gone, it makes sense that she would have resulting problems. The last several weeks she had been complaining more and more persistently about her back, and I was steadily getting more and more annoyed because she didn’t want to do anything to try to fix it aside from schedule a doctor’s appointment. That means, she fervently refused to ever take a break during the day (as a person who is ‘muy activa’, she absolutely couldn’t lie down and instead had to run around the house cleaning things and rearranging my stuff), insisted on carrying heavy bags at the feria agricultor, and only commented on my statement that acupuncture could help as she waited until her appointment in September (the ticos have a great health care system, just not at times like these) with ‘los chinos son muy inteligentes’. Yes, she believes that Asian people are smart, so apparently the stereotype persists in many places. (Here, chino/a refers to anyone of Asian descent).

Talking to her more, and telling her my story of going to the chiropractor, I realized that she really did believe in Chinese medicine, as her daughter had been treated by an acupuncturist, but the acupuncturist she knew was out of town so she just stopped there. I definitely got the impression that unless she was dragged to get help (I offered to go with her, and told her I was very interested in seeing what the process was like here), she wouldn’t do anything and continue to suffer and complain. Heck, I STILL don’t know if I believe in Chinese medicine fully, but what I do know is after one session my shoulder injury of four years, two of which were spent going to the chiropractor regularly, dulled its constant, throbbing pain. After two or three, it was barely noticeable. I talked with my acupuncturist about this phenomenon and not being a true believer, and he asked me if I was willing to pay for the possible placebo effect I had just received. My answer? I would have paid him many times over! I finally went a day without pain. So, was it worth the risk for her to try to get some form of pain relief during her long wait? I’d say yes, even for my sake alone. I had a hard time not ordering her to go lie down and just take a break for a little bit, as it seemed the logical thing to do :/

At any rate, on Friday, she had a miracle of another sort: her back pain was completely cured. She told me in the morning that as she was getting her hair cut, the woman who cuts her hair (who is some form of Protestant, but still a good person, she assured me) was listening to a preacher on the radio. My tica mom told me that they were chatting while the radio was on in the background, and she told her hairdresser about the pain she had in her spine. She described it as a burning pain, and said that it was very strong. A little while later, my tica mom heard the preacher sending out a prayer, and since it was a beautiful prayer, she stopped to listen. She said that he was praying for all those people out there in pain, and that they may get relief. He then said, more specifically, for those people suffering strong back pains. He wanted God to help them feel better, and to alleviate their pain. She told me that she looked at her hairdresser, pointed out that they were talking about her, and got excited. She showed me how her hairdresser nodded to her, in a very serene, knowing way.

I can’t remember how that conversation ended, but I think she was distracted by her grandson and I was able to escape up to my room, happy to escape awkward follow-up questions when I didn’t immediately praise the Lord for her recovery and happy that she was finally feeling better (again, selfishly, for both of our sakes). Unfortunately, that tentative euphoria didn’t last long. My tica mom tends to forget things, as I may have mentioned before, and that evening she had forgotten that she told me the story about her miraculous back-pain recovery.

This time, however, I could tell she had been telling the story to every person with whom she had spoken, and it therefore had several revisions. In this version, the hairdresser’s religion wasn’t mentioned, and the preacher started out his prayer by saying that there was someone who was suffering from a strong, burning back pain, and that they should all pray to help this person. The preacher said that this person, SHE needs our prayers to ask God to alleviate her pain. Once again, the story ended with my tica mom discovering in that moment the preacher was talking about her, her hairdresser agreeing, and her back pain vanishing the next morning.

Now I was really trapped. I had it written all over my face that I didn’t believe one bit of what she just said, mainly because the story had changed *just* so, and that’s when the question came. She wanted to know if I was a Catholic. And then, if I believed in God (because then I could still be a good person, since it’s ‘la única cosa que es importante’). Oh boy, was I not in the mood to deal with that, but I gave it my best shot.

When I explained that I didn’t have a religion, and that I didn’t believe in the god from the Bible who hated gays and wanted women to be stoned if they went outside during menstruation, I felt a little badly for being so brutally honest. Thankfully, she started to break the tension I was feeling. She told me that God wasn’t really like that, and that the men who wrote the Bible had revised it for their own needs. On my being irreligious, she happily took to the gossip of yet another pedophile in the Catholic church, and eventually drifted away from the subject of my religious beliefs.

I know she still thinks less of me for what I said, but maybe she’s forgotten once more by now. Or maybe my never actually confirming or denying anything, yet providing facts in which she believes has allowed her to construct her own vision of me of what she wants to believe.

Either way, her back pain is still gone (it’s been a week now), and I thank whatever or whomever helped her for having mercy on us both.