Miracles

I grew up thanking saints at the bidding of my mother who claimed that those saints cured me.  I was sickly when I was young, and although my mother brought me to medical doctors, she also made deals with these saints to heal me in exchange of a yearly pilgrimage to the church dedicated to them during their feast day.   She brought me in these churches throughout my childhood, but she never explained exactly whose saint was involved in which disease.  In my early teens, I would go all by myself to honor my mother's pact with these saints and to have fun as well.  A feast day, after all, is also a time of merriment.  Eventually, my mother would have to remind me of her panata (promise), and I would tell her that she should be the one fulfilling
it since I was too young to make that commitment.  She'd get angry.  I still would not go.


I remembered all about these saints and finally understood why my mother had to make pacts with the saints when I began suspecting that my son had autism.  Autistics, I found out from a directory in the Catholic Community Forum website, do not have a patron saint.  The website made the suggestion to look in the related categories of "children" and "neurological disorders, against."  At that time, my son was gibbering a lot, self stimulatory behavior which I mistakenly thought was sign that he was about to speak soon.   I read somewhere that many of the undesirable behaviors that children with autism show are partly due to their inability to communicate.   My search led me to the patron saint of children who are learning to talk, St. Zeno of Verona.  For several months, before going to sleep each night, and while my son was babbling beside me, I would pray for the intercession of St. Zeno.  I don't remember when or why I stopped praying for a miracle.  I just came to realize that perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree, perhaps his patronage is limited to children whose speech delay is not related to autism.


Recently, I learned that I missed an important detail.  I read again St. Zeno's profile and I found out that according to legend he "was briefly replaced by a demonic chang[e]ling."  The link between changeling myth and autism has been pointed out in this article (Leask J, Leask A, & Silove N.  Evidence for autism in folklore? Arch Dis Child 2005; 90:271).  It highlights the resemblance between the characteristics of changeling and autistic children.  I might have been praying on the right saint, except that my prayers were all wrong.  I should have specifically asked him to help my son overcome autism, or better yet his changeling-like symptoms, and not just for a cure for his speech delay.


More than three years after losing speech, my son can now say simple sentences.  He can now be aptly described as a child learning to talk.  The prayers I silently uttered then remain unanswered, and I will definitely welcome a grand miracle.  But I have since found out that my son's little improvements, small steps away from the undesirable aspects of autism spectrum disorder, and made possible by his caregivers, tutors, and therapists, are nothing short of miraculous.