The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Dreher

Author:Rod Dreher [Dreher, Rod]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, Biography & Autobiography / General
ISBN: 9781455521906
Google: Ur7gSq2yTFMC
Amazon: 1455521914
Barnesnoble: 1455521914
Goodreads: 15791543
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-04-09T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Expecting a Miracle

After the initial harshness of chemotherapy and the catharsis of the concert, Ruthie and her family finally settled in to everyday life with cancer. Ruthie’s brain lesions retreated, Dr. Miletello adjusted the chemo doses, and her swelling subsided. The main tumor, the one pressuring her superior vena cava, responded well to chemo, and shrank a bit. She looked more like herself again, absent a full head of hair. Inside, though, she was changing in subtle but important ways.

I was startled but pleased to learn that Ruthie asked Abby to take her down to pray at Father Seelos’s shrine, where I’d taken Hannah right after her mother’s diagnosis. Ruthie had always been prayerful, but not open to new religious experience or practice. She wouldn’t have judged Catholics for their pious customs, but wouldn’t have sought those customs out, either. Cancer changed that.

As word of Ruthie’s cancer spread friends, neighbors, and even virtual strangers threw everything they had at her, spiritually speaking. Protestants sent Bible verses and prayers. Catholics passed along blessed objects, including Father Seelos’s relics, and rosary prayers. In the journal she kept spottily, Ruthie wrote down Scripture passages (“From Uncle Butch: 2 Corinthians 1:3–7”), psalms (“Psalm 91: ‘He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…’ ”), and specific prayers.

One day that spring Ruthie finally made it down to the Seelos shrine when Abby drove her to a healing mass.

Ruthie did not know what was expected of her at the shrine, but wasn’t bothered by it. Before she got sick Ruthie never would have come to a place like this. Too exotic. Too strange. But now she was happy to be here. She made sure to venerate all the relics, to light a candle, and to pray before Father Seelos’s tomb. She spent so much time in preliminary prayer that there were no more seats left in the church for the mass. As she and Abby made their way through the crowd of sick pilgrims to the balcony seating, a woman Ruthie had never seen before walked straight over, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Expect a miracle.”

“I tell you what, that made me feel so good,” Ruthie told me on the phone that night. “I really got a lot of hope out of that.”

I was worried that she would read too much into this happenstance.

“You need to be careful,” I said. “If you get a miracle, it might not be a healing. It might be something else. We don’t know for sure what God’s doing here.”

“I know,” she said. “But it was still neat to hear.”

We talked about how cancer was changing her spirituality, and how it was opening her mind and her heart. I mentioned that a Turkish Muslim reader of my blog posted a comment saying he would pray for her. She was so touched by this, and asked me to thank him. “Honey, I’ll take prayers from anybody who’ll give them, because I sure need them.

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