A friend of mine, a committed Pentecostal now, was born into a Catholic home. He told me he left the denomination decades ago not out of rebellion or convenience but out of conviction. Somewhere in his growing up he came to believe that Jesus Himself, not any intermediary, was the access to God, and the devotional life he had watched around him as a boy; candles lit before statues, prayers offered in front of carved figures of the saints, stopped sitting easily with him.
As he told me this story, he noted that despite his opinion, he saw his mother’s faith and prayers answered so many times. One of the events he recounted was quite extraordinary.
It happened years ago, in their family home. A dog had gotten hold of one of the household little pigs and mauled it badly that the pig’s head was left almost severed from its body, it lay motionless on the floor. The animal was as good as dead already, simply taking its time about it. His mother, however, did not treat it as a lost cause. She sat down and sewed the head back onto the body herself, the way you might mend a torn garment, and then she went and knelt before one of the statues kept in the house and prayed over the animal she had just stitched back together. My friend told me that, against everything the wound should have guaranteed, the pig lived. It came back, he said, as though the prayer itself had reached down into the wound and closed it from the inside out.
He did not tell the story as an argument for Catholicism. He told it almost reluctantly, the way you recount something you cannot fully explain and would rather not have to account for, because it complicates a position you have otherwise settled into. That, more than anything else, is what makes me believe him. A man with theological reservations about his mother’s devotional practice has every incentive to shrink that story down, to remember the pig as merely injured rather than as good as dead, to call it resilience rather than resurrection. He had no reason to inflate a miracle that, on its face, seemed to vindicate the very statues he had come to distrust, this is precisely why I do not think he was exaggerating.
I say this as someone who did not grow up Catholic myself. I am Anglican, and my own exposure to the Catholic Church has been considerable — I attended Mass many times, kept close Catholic friends through the years, and was even chapel prefect in a boarding house where Catholic Mass was held every Sunday. In all of that exposure, I never once came away with the impression that Catholic prayer is, at its core, about statues.
Catholic teaching, as I understand it, has always drawn that line carefully: the veneration shown to an image is never meant to terminate on the wood or plaster it is carved from, but to pass through it to the one it depicts — a saint, the Virgin, and behind them all, Christ. It was argued out explicitly at the Second Council of Nicaea in the eighth century, precisely because the confusion my friend felt as a boy has been a recurring one.
Honouring an image and worshipping it were declared, deliberately, not to be the same act. Whether that theological distinction was ever made plain to my friend as a young man in his mother’s house, or whether what he absorbed instead was something else, I cannot say. Doctrine is often the last thing a watching child receives; the posture and the image arrive first.
I will admit that another explanation occurred to me. Pigs, as it happens, are tougher animals; a wound that looks catastrophic to an untrained eye does not always mean fatality, and animals have been known to survive injuries that look unsurvivable. Honey Badgers for example survive poisonous snake bites. I could build a scientific explanation of the event: a severe wound, a competent hand with a needle, and a recovery that had more to do with anatomy than with a prayer spoken over the animal afterward. But I do not see a profitable reason to do that because I have seen miracles and prayers answered myself, in ways logic may fail to explain. To wave away my friend’s story with a hypothesis about pig physiology I have not actually verified, purely because the story is inconvenient to a tidier view of the world, would be its own kind of dishonesty.
A mother prayed in the tradition she was given and watched something impossible happen at the end of her needle and thread. Her son took what he had seen of that tradition, weighed it, and walked a different road toward the same God he still believes answered her prayer that evening. He has not stopped believing the miracle.
Emmanuel Akaolisa
akaolisa1987@gmail.com
+2348065976612
