They say a good man was to be buried this morning, a pure, peaceful man, a man on fire with the Holy Spirit.
People lined up for miles to mourn the loss of Pope John Paul II, sending thousands of prayers, hoping he is up there.
Cora Edwards, a day care teacher for St. Michael's School, prays after a children's Mass to honor the pope at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Silver Spring.
(Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)
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Some say he is a saint or should be a saint. Surely in heaven, but they are praying for him anyway, because he needs prayers until there is certainty he has arrived.
To prove he is indeed up there, people have gone in search of good, of hope, searching for an ease in the suffering.
Searching for miracles.
Not big miracles like the parting of the Red Sea, the turning of water into wine, the feeding of a multitude with five loaves and two fishes.
But inexplicable coincidences, like when you need $29 and you look in that old coat and pull out three $10 bills. Like when you hear the news about the pope's passing and you and your husband both start crying at exactly the same time.
Perhaps it's a miracle when you reach in your purse to pull out your prayer beads and instead of finding one string you find three, and you give two away. Like when that old knee doesn't give out after riding in the back seat for two hours to Mass. Like when you look up in the sky, beyond where airplanes fly, and you think you see angels.
Or like when a woman goes to bed at night in despair and wakes up in the morning to face a new day -- and a bright sun slips through her blinds.
"Isn't that a miracle?" the Rev. Eddie E.L. Tolentino III, pastor of St. Michael's Catholic Church in Silver Spring, is asking. "There is something incredibly mysterious about life. It is a miracle to wake up in the morning filled with pain and on the edge of despair, and realize you can go on. It's a miracle. If you consider a miracle as something we have no power over."
The pope, the Holy Father, he says, was a remarkable man who celebrated the ministry of God. "He awakened people to what is the best in them," Tolentino says. "There is something about the human person who yearns for something beyond, and he helped us see what that was."
Hoping for miracles.
Small moments in life when a prayer is answered and your life changes.
Like when Joyce Bridgewater of Silver Spring, who has had a knee replaced, didn't get to church on time Sunday morning. She tells the story in St. Michael's, filled with light and silent after the noon Mass, where she sits with her friend. They are close to tears, thinking about the pope passing. But they are not crying. Just sitting there after everybody else has gone, twisting their rosary beads and talking about miracles.
