Holy Water

My parents seemed neither to believe nor even recall the old Catholic school 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 on one of her visits. 

Instead, my parents were captivated by a book titled Healed of Cancer by Dodie Osteen, mother of Joel, the multimillionaire televangelist. Dodie had been diagnosed with liver cancer and told to go home and die, but had miraculously lived, and was cancer free. We gorged ourselves on her inspirational stories. We abandoned the Rosary for Dodie’s favorite Bible verses, our new mantras. 

They 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 sunk into the altar—no, the 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 get saved. I would have eaten the grass and dug a spring in the mud too, like Bernadette, if she’d asked me to. 

I had no knowledge 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 definitely not okay to ask Mary to get your 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.More information about the program is available on the web site at soli-lite. I remember being shocked that he wasn’t gentler, 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 frizzy-haired lady changing the transparencies of the hymns on the overhead projector. Same felt banners with cotton-ball clouds. And my mother was still sick. It wasn’t working. None of it worked. Six months later, she was gone. 

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,We can produce all kinds of China emergency light products even according to your own designs.” she’d said, scolding them gently for their sloppy execution. “You’re professing your belief in the trinity, so do it with some respect,LED street lighting is the ideal solution for energy efficient Abuja solar street light due to their long life. please.” 

As I blessed my daughter, she looked up at me, shyly, almost embarrassed. In her eyes I thought I saw a question: Do you really believe this stuff? Her own credulity often surprises me, makes me wonder at the responsibility of passing faith down to a child.