Christmas Miracles (12 page)

Incredibly, Dr. Ruehl said, after his mother read the card, she stated that she was feeling less pain when she sat up. She was able to be seated at the dining room table and enjoy their Christmas turkey dinner.

“Within the next few days, she improved at an astounding rate,” he stated, “soon resuming all her normal activities. And now, twelve years later, she still has suffered no recurrence of that terrible back pain. She has, though, limited her exercise regimen to brisk walking—and she snaps off the TV anytime an exercise expert pops up.”

As a scientist, Dr. Ruehl understands that skeptics might assert that his mother would have recovered eventually, that the timing of her resurgence with the reading of the card was purely coincidental. “But Mother and I are convinced that that Christmas card possessed a miraculous healing power,” he said.

J
ust before Thanksgiving, November 1990, truck driver Ray De La Cruz was sitting in his rig at an intersection in Mesa, Arizona, eager to get home after a hard five days on the road. As a line of pedestrians moved along the crosswalk in front of him, Ray glanced at his wristwatch, once again admiring the turquoise band that his wife, Renee, had given him for his fiftieth birthday in July.

Suddenly, his eyes began to cloud with a gray mist. He felt disoriented. His surroundings began to dim, and he prayed for the light to change so he could pull his rig over to the side of the road.

Within a few moments, Ray was unable to see the traffic lights, and only the sound of the horns of irritated motorists behind him told him that the light had turned green and he could drive across the intersection. Somehow he managed to pull his truck and trailer off the street just as he went completely blind.

Later, as he told his story, Ray De La Cruz admitted that he was very frightened when this terrible thing occurred. “I felt panic,” he said. “I had no idea what had happened to me.”

Sadly enough, neither did the specialists at the clinic.

Renee accompanied Ray when he went for a battery of tests, because he wanted her there to hear everything the doctors said and try to understand anything that he might miss in his nervousness and anxiety.

The examining doctors were able to dismiss Ray's fear of a brain tumor or any number of dire physical conditions, but they remained puzzled as to the cause of his sudden blindness.

Renee told the specialists that Ray was never sick, that he never even complained of an occasional headache. How could such a thing as this mysterious blindness occur all of a sudden?

“And I had no pain or no headache all the time when the doctors were examining me,” Ray said. “I felt fine. I just couldn't see.”

Finally, one of the doctors said—perhaps more in frustration than in a medical conclusion—that what was required to restore Ray's sight was a miracle.

“Mr. De La Cruz,” he said, “we cannot find anything physically wrong with your eyes or anything that could have caused your sudden blindness. What we really need to restore your sight is some kind of a miracle.”

Ray endured his sightlessness for three weeks before Renee declared that he had suffered enough. It was only a few days before Christmas. She would pray to Mother Mary to lift the shutters from Ray's eyes and restore his sight by the holy day of her son's birth.

“I asked Renee if she shouldn't have given the Holy Mother a little more time,” Ray said, “but she argued that since the medical specialist had said that it would take a miracle to cure my blindness, then we would ask for a miracle. And every believer in miracles knows that they can happen in a split second.”

Encouraged by his wife's faith, Ray began to pray also.

“And we asked our little daughters, Michele and Teresa, to pray with us until their bedtime,” Ray said. “Then, after mass on Christmas Eve, from nine o'clock until eight the next morning, Renee and I said the rosary and prayed for my healing.”

About eight o'clock on Christmas Day, Ray came down with a fever. “I felt like I was burning up,” he said. “It seemed as though there were flames all around me. I got hotter and hotter. I felt like I had gone to Hell. I started screaming for Mother Mary to save me from the fire and the fever.”

As Ray lay back on the bed, Renee placed a cool, wet cloth on his forehead.

“And then, somehow in my inner eye, I saw Mother Mary,” Ray recalled. “She wore a blue gown, a white veil, and she held a rose in her right hand. She smiled at me—and then she disappeared.”

When Ray told Renee that he had been blessed with a vision of the Holy Mother, she became very excited and asked Michele what time it was. She wanted to write down the exact time of the visitation so that they had a record of the marvelous event.

In spite of his blindness, Ray had continued to wear his watch due to habit. When he heard Renee ask the time, he automatically glanced down at his wrist.

“And my eyes began to focus on my watch,” he said. “Within just a few moments I could clearly see the numerals on the dial and the pattern of the turquoise band. I could see!”

Overwhelmed with joy, Ray leaped from his bed and kissed and embraced his wife and daughters. He could see! Mother Mary had restored his sight. And he could feel that the fever had also left him. The Holy Mother had brought them their Christmas miracle.

Later that joyous Christmas night, Ray and his wife sat down on the sofa in the living room to think about what had just occurred. They both knew that there was a lesson in the miracle that Mother Mary had bestowed upon Ray.

“We thought for a long time,” Ray said, “and then a thought came to me. My sight left me when I looked at my watch at an intersection—and it returned when Renee wanted to know what time it was that I had the vision of Mother Mary. I knew that all of this had something to do with time.” Renee and Ray thought and prayed through most of that night about the mystery of Ray's blindness and the miracle that had restored his sight—and by morning they felt they had the answer.

When Ray had been discharged from military service, he had told his parents that he didn't have “time” to go back to school. He needed a job.

As he grew older, he could not find the “time” to get married until he was in his late thirties. Although Renee was ten years younger than he, Ray kept putting off having children, insisting that it was “not yet the right time.” Now Ray was over fifty, Renee was forty, and their daughters were only nine and seven. Michele and Teresa needed a father who would spend “time” with them.

Ray always complained that he didn't have “time” to help with the housework, to maintain the yard, to play with the girls, to go to church, to visit his parents— because he had to keep long hours behind the wheel of his truck. And yet he was the one who kept volunteering for the long hauls.

“To get more money to pay the bills,” he said in his defense. “My time earns money.”

Renee stroked her husband's hair and pulled his head to her shoulder. “And how much time do you have left with your daughters before they are grown and married?” she challenged him in a soft voice. “How much time do we have left before we are too old to enjoy one another? How much time do we have left before God calls you—or me—home? And when you are home, how much time do you waste by playing cards with your friends when you could be having quality time with the girls and me?”

Ray had no argument against such charges. He then clearly understood that Mother Mary had given him another chance to have more time with his family and the things that really mattered in life. She had taken his sight—then restored it with a Christmas miracle—so that he might truly see.

Ray De La Cruz has enjoyed full vision ever since his dramatic Christmas miracle. He quit his job driving big rigs across the country and went to work as a dispatcher for a taxi service. He is home every night for dinner, and he spends as much time as possible with his family.

And there was even a bonus to his miracle: Before he mysteriously lost his sight, he required bifocal lenses in his glasses. Since the Christmas miracle bestowed by Mother Mary, he has not needed eyeglasses at all.

E
ach year during the Christmas holidays, we receive numerous reports from sincere men and women who tell us that they received a visit from the spirit of a departed loved one sometime during the traditional twelve days of Christmas.

Some may theorize that such visitations may be due to the power of suggestion brought on by the nostalgia for the past that is so prevalent during the Christmas season. The sights, sounds, and smells of the holiday have an incredible power to cause us to revisit cherished memories of those dear ones who have passed to the other side.

Or is it possible that the spirits of our beloved departed truly do draw nearer to us during this wonderful, yet sometimes melancholy and introspective, time of the year?

For many men and women, the holiday season can be a time of loneliness and a great longing for what they remember as much better times in their past. And for those who have lost loved ones during the Christmas holiday, a season that was once associated with joy and family togetherness can become a time of sorrow and depression. It may be that the grief of loved ones on the earthplane can draw the departed back to offer reassurance that they are all right and that life and love truly do extend beyond death.

When Joyce Epstein's twenty-four-year-old sister, Nan, and her husband, Jason Moore, were killed in an airplane crash on September 12, 1988, she felt as if she could no longer go on living.

The children of a Roman Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Joyce had been Nan's surrogate mother since she was nine and Nan was four.

“Our mother died very young of cancer,” Joyce said, “and Dad didn't remarry until I was in my second year of college, so I had a lot of years of looking out for my baby sister.”

In spite of the surrogate mother relationship assumed by Joyce—or perhaps, because of it—she said that the two of them had always been closer than most sisters she knew.

“It had been pretty hard after Mom died,” Joyce said. “She had been a lively Irish-American girl with sparkling green eyes and coal black hair. No one could resist her charm and her good spirits, and the sound of her laughter would encourage the most solemn of stone statues to join in the fun. Before she got sick, we would sometimes as a family go to Saturday synagogue with Dad, then get up on Sunday morning to go to mass with Mom. And in December, we celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, placing a crèche with the baby Jesus beneath the Christmas tree and lighting the eight candles on the menorah to commemorate the miracle of the oil that fueled the candelabrum in the Temple for eight days.

“After Mom died, I more or less floated between the two faiths,” she said. “Dad wasn't a strict orthodox Jew, so he let us girls pick and choose as the spirit moved us, so to speak.”

Although she kept close tabs on her sister even when she was attending city college, Joyce was delighted when Nan began dating Jason Moore during their junior year in high school.

“Jason came from a good family, and he was a decent, hard-working guy himself,” she said. “I had a feeling that this would be one of those high-school romances that would last forever.”

Sometimes, Joyce learned to her sorrow, “forever” on Earth may not last for a very long period of time.

“Nan and Jason were such a wonderful couple,” she said. “They both got jobs right out of high school and began to save for their marriage. Jason went to night school at a junior college in the city, and he was determined to better himself.”

After nearly six years of hard work and planning for their future, Jason Moore and her sister decided that they could enter comfortably into marriage. They had acquired a sizable savings account, and Jason had satisfied the graduation requirements at the junior college, been promoted several times at work, and was now taking night courses at city college. Nan's position as a cashier at the bank was secure, and it now seemed as though all systems were go to continue their lifepath together as a married couple.