Some years ago Edwards saw what she thought was a miracle. It happened at a prayer vigil. "I thought I saw angels high up in the sky. They drifted and disappeared," she says. "I didn't see wings, just something drifting across the sky higher than a plane. Normally, you couldn't see that high. It was a few. I would say three or four. To me, I thought they were female." Their garments were the colors of spring. "Not white, but yellow, pink and green to differentiate from the sky."
In walks Anna Rodriguez, 73, in a black veil. She slips through the pews, straightening up prayer books. Restless. She is sad about the pope. "We are very close. I love him," she says. "I cried for him."
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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And she is searching for miracles in his passing. Rodriguez, a nurse, is not sure this is a miracle, but it happened to her a while ago and it was amazing: The woman she cared for for 10 years gave Rodriguez her house when she went to a nursing home.
Rodriguez finally sits. She takes a seat on one of the pews in that empty church. She digs in her purse for her rosary. She pulls out three.
At the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in Northeast Washington, is an inscription in the gold dome ceiling: "SEND FORTH YOUR SPIRIT AND RENEW THE FACE OF THE EARTH."
Reading the words, head up, spinning round and round, twirling with the words on that golden ceiling is dizzying. But maybe a miracle is up there.
In the third pew back sits a woman in denim overalls and a white T-shirt. Her husband sits next to her. They are here all the way from Miami. The woman explains that she is Catholic and that, when she heard that Pope John Paul II had died, she felt empty and sad, sad and empty.
Then, just like that, she was happy. "I thought he was going home with his Father."
"He will always be with me," says the woman, Cynthia Passmore. "He is my guardian angel. . . . He taught us how to be a human being by just being himself."
Her husband, Bob Passmore, says: "I'm a Protestant and I'm here in a supportive role for my wife, who is Catholic and of the pope. I realize what an influential figure he was and I respect that. It's a somber time."
No, his wife corrects him. "It's not somber. We Catholics don't view death as an end. It's the start of another spiritual life." A miracle.
In the basement of the basilica, near the Crypt Church that was built underground, Sister Paula Beierschmitt is saying good has been happening this week, tiny miracles, not big ones. "A lot of things happening in a short time, unexplained things."
"Like her meeting the Korean priest at a ballgame," says Robert J. Ryan, a theological consultant who is accompanying the nun through the basilica. Each person she met that day seemed a special coincidence.
The nun is an artist, and she and Ryan stop and stand before her sculpture of Saint Vincent Pallotti.
