Mary and Miracles

Rod Dreher shares an interesting personal story.  Excerpts:

...S.'s cancer had gone into remission, but came back not long before my sister died. She's still fighting it.

S. is a prayerful Catholic. For the past 10 days, she's had in her house a Rosa Mystica statue of the Virgin Mary. It's about 18 inches tall, and she has it on her coffee table. I had never heard of this particular devotion, even during my Catholic years, but S. says this is one of two (I think) such statues in south Louisiana.

Both are passed around among Catholics who are very ill or otherwise in distress. S. told me that she and others sometimes see moisture forming in the eyes of the statue during prayer. She showed me a couple of images on her iPhone purporting to document this, as well as other eerie alterations on the statue's face during and immediately following prayer.

We were sitting right next to the statue the whole time. I didn't notice anything unusual about it.

We talked for a while about how her cancer treatment was going, and things that have been on her mind. After a while, she asked me if I had time to stay and pray her daily rosary with her. Sure, I said.

We knelt down to pray, and I could see at the bottom of the statue's right eyelid moisture forming. It was strange.

It was definitely not there when I first saw the statue, and I had not moved more than two feet from it the whole visit. Nobody ever touched it. We prayed the rosary together, and asked God's help and blessing for the sick, and others in need of mercy.

When we had finished, S. said, "Do you see that?"

Yes, I did see that. There were two small beads of liquid appearing on the lower lid of the statue's right eye. They had been there since we started to pray.

Make of that what you will. I know better than to try to say what that was, or what it meant. I believe this kind of thing can and does happen, miraculously. All I'm willing to say about this particular incident is that these "tears" weren't there when I first examined the statue -- and I examined it from a number of angles, both before and after this incident.

Nobody touched the statue while I was there. The liquid appeared to have emerged as we knelt to pray...

As I left, she gave me three white roses from a vase next to the statue -- one for my sister's family, one for my mom and dad, and one for my family. They looked fresh, but S. said they have been in that vase since the day the statue was brought to her house. They haven't decayed...