It is small and water-stained, this paper portrait of “San Charbel” inside of a plastic sleeve. The saint is wearing a black robe with a hood, his arms outstretched. His white beard is almost glowing. Behind him are a cedar tree and a white building at the base of hills that are grey and green against ice-winter mountains, which in turn blend into the faded yellow-blue glow of a sunset, or maybe a sunrise. A light blue circle around his head suggests a subtle halo. Above his left shoulder is a faint apparition of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, above his right, a wine goblet. In front of him, on clay-like orange rock, is an open book with Arabic writing and next to it a hoe or shovel. I don’t know much about him, except that he was Lebanese and his presence in Mexico is due to its large Lebanese immigrant population. He’s the saint of miracle cures—both physical and psychological—which I imagine is why he’s so popular. He’s the saint equivalent to blue-light late-night infomercial promises of less pain. He is hope found again, a garden cultivated from rock.
I’m not Catholic, or even religious. Raised loosely Episcopalian by closet-agnostic parents, I will, if asked, mumble something about secular humanism or in rare moods admit to some sort of vaguely pagan spirituality. This card is covered in symbols I don’t really understand and have never cared to learn about. The earnest prayer on the reverse side full of promises and exclamation marks and supplications pulls no heartstrings in me, nor makes me want to attend mass.
And yet I hold on to this little card, and have transferred it time and again from purse to bag to purse, for 14 years.
Shortly after we started dating, on an oppressively hot April day in 1997, H. took me to the cathedral in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City where the shrine to Saint Charbel is located. I stopped outside the heavy wooden doors, where an old woman was selling rosaries and milagros and little cards of the saint. I wanted milagros because I had an idea to make jewelry out of them and on a whim purchased the little San Charbel card as well.
I wandered inside and found H. near the rows of candles and an explosion of colored ribbons on the wall. He was writing something on a ribbon—a thank-you note, he explained—and then pinned it into the others. Always the sarcastic atheist, he shrugged quickly, embarrassed, but explained how one of his aunts had convinced him to visit the church several months before, at a low point. He told me how he had come here and knelt down and awkwardly asked for help, feeling silly, but doing it to please his favorite aunt.
