Which isn't to say that she feels things less, unless you're talking about unimportant things.
The thing that does affect her is the prayer meetings.
Every Saturday, everyone who lives at the compound attends and does his part. Leticia will perhaps man the table at the rear of the yard, where prints of a painting of the Blessed Mother, painted by Reyes in a folk-art style, are sold for $10 apiece. Armando will perhaps lead the rosary while Peggy stands by the front gate and helps out of a long Cadillac a local pediatrician who frequently attends with his two profoundly retarded sons--grown men now--one of whom must be lifted into a wheelchair.
If you are not a believer, if you don't expect to see the Mother of God's eyes change and become real in the painting that hangs just behind the shrine of Jesus, as many claim to have seen it, it is difficult at first to understand what about these meetings so stirs the blood of the Ruizes and other visitors.
It is not the impassioned, mystical atmosphere that one usually equates with tales of miracles. No one in the audience shouts Hallelujah or collapses in an ecstatic fit. (Reyes says someone did the latter once, but the worshiper quickly regained all faculties upon hearing Reyes say that he was going to call 911 for help.) No one bursts into tongues.
Even during the moments of the rosary when Estela is seeing and talking to Mary, you wouldn't know unless you knew. Sequestered indoors with a few worshipers while the larger prayer group carries on outside, able to hear the crowd's Hail Marys through a speaker system that pipes every syllable into the house, Estela stops praying for a few minutes and her gaze fixates a little. That is all; in a few minutes the vision is over.
Far from being frenzied demonstrations of belief, the Ruiz prayer meetings are occasions when common sense and the supernatural somehow combine, as when a man swooshed up to Estela after prayers were over and declared he felt the evening had cured him of cancer. "How can I know that I'm cured? Do you think the Lord will send me a sign?" he inquired of his prophetess.
"Aren't you about due for a checkup?" Estela asked him. "I think the doctor will be able to tell you whether you still have cancer or not."
And if the Ruizes aren't in it for show, what moves them again and again to clean up the yard and pray into the night with strangers?
"There are people who need love, and we can give it," says Peggy Ruiz.
"Sometimes I started thinking, 'It's crazy to live here, there are gunshots!'" Armando adds. "But I also start thinking, 'Where would I go?' The Blessed Mother is appearing here. It is holy ground. If I get killed here, I prefer that."
THE WORD IS OUT... v7-15-92
