Casting

When they called everybody with a disease to the front, I pondered and decided to go. I suffered from recurrent UTI's and was not sure that would qualify as a big enough disease for the healer to pay attention to, but I wanted so badly to feel God's presence, to have somebody show me the way. I was twelve years old at the time, on my first ever church retreat.

They made us stand in line, facing forward. The healer would move from each person to the next. He laid his hands on them, his booming voice invoking God's infinite power to channel through him and heal the wretched. People erupted in sobs and loud moans. Some fell to their knees, quivering in ecstasy.

I remembered seeing scenes like that before, when I was five and my neighbor took me to their Pentecostal church to perform a singing number we kids from down the street had been rehearsing for weeks in my neighbor's informal biblical school.

En la escuelita bíblica yo aprendí
que Jesucristo murió en la cruz...

My friend Denise and I stood backstage waiting for our turn while the service took place. At some point my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to take peek through the side door. It was not often that I had a chance to attend a church, much less a non-Catholic one. I was not prepared for what I saw. There were people wailing, screaming at the top of their lungs, jumping up and down the aisles, yelling words I had never heard before. Stunned and fearful, I refused to take part in our group's singing number. The ride back home was spent in silence.

The church's antics went unexplained. Our neighbor did not even address the matter and my mom shrugged off the whole incident. I never went back to my neighbor's biblical school.

Now I had a preacher standing in front of me, spewing rapid-fire invocations, laying the trinity of his index, middle and ring fingers on my forehead. In the short interval between him touching me and pronouncing me healed in the name of the Holy Spirit, I waited for the rapture that never came. Nothing felt different, I was not healed, my cup was not filled by the Lord.

While I tried to hide my disappointment, the preacher sensed that I needed encouragement, so he applied pressure on my forehead, pushing my head back while increasing the volume of his litany of praise. How could he expect me to fall to my knees? Did he not notice that Jehova had decided to pass on my miracle? I pushed forward, annoyed. He increased his pressure, but I did not budge. I lifted my head and looked him in the eyes. He held my gaze, briefly, before taking his hand off me and moving on to the next person in line. As soon as he touched her, she collapsed on the floor screaming, generously offering what I had been incapable of giving.

While the rest of the faithful joined in a tight circle around the girl with the demon inside, I hung my face down and slowly made my way out the chapel door.