c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) For a miracle to happen, do you need to believe it?

The new film “Henry Poole Is Here” ambitiously tries to get at that question and does so with a quietly melancholy, difficult and powerful answer.

Luke Wilson portrays the title character, a sad and angry man suffering from a terminal disease who moves into an anemic green stucco home, for which he overpays, in the nondescript California suburb where he grew up.

Henry has a death wish and withdraws into the shadows of his new home, draws the curtains, and begins to consume himself to death with a combination of Vodka, wine, pizza and doughnuts. He just wants to be left alone to wallow in his depression and impending, too-soon demise.

But God, clearly, has other plans and sends a parade of female neighbors bearing plates of homemade tamales and chocolate chip cookies to disrupt Henry’s morose solitude.

The first to arrive is Esperanza (whose Spanish name means “hope”), the sweet if pushy lady next door who used to date the man who lived there before Henry. (The man died of a coronary on the kitchen floor and Esperanza found him.)

Henry politely brushes her off, but Esperanza (Adriana Barraza) is persistent and becomes unavoidable when she discovers a water stain on the side of Henry’s house that she believes is the face of Jesus Christ.

The director Mark Pellington, whose credits include “Arlington Road,” “The Mothman Prophecies” and the concert film “U23D,” smartly makes the water stain ambiguous. You can sort of see the face in it, sometimes more clearly than others. It might be Jesus, but it might just be a water stain.

Esperanza, a devout Catholic of fierce faith, sees the face and believes. Henry can’t see it _ or doesn’t want to _ and when a drop of blood appears in the middle of the stain, he tries to remove it first with a garden hose and then with all manner of household cleaners, to no avail. The blood simply reappears.

“Did you not see?” Esperanza asks Henry.

“See what?” Henry replies, agitated.

“You’re not looking,” she says.

It’s the face of Christ, a sign from God, she insists, adding, “Are you going to ignore it?”

“No,” Henry says, “but I am going to ignore you.”

Without giving away too much of the plot of this charming film, suffice it to say that miraculous healings start to happen when people touch the stain on Henry’s wall. Instead of cracking Henry’s disbelief, the miracles only make him angrier and more determined not to believe.

One of the miraculously healed, when confronted by Henry, tells him, “What if you did this seemingly meaningless thing, you put your hand on the wall, and you were healed? … Sometimes things happen because we choose for them to happen.”

Henry is confounded by what’s happening in his backyard.

“It’s getting harder, isn’t it?” Esperanza asks him.

“What’s that?” he says.

“To pretend this isn’t happening,” she says.

Through the stubborn love of several women who barge into his life, Henry, in spite of himself, begins to come back to life. A very wise man once told me that he sees grace most easily and most powerfully in women. They are natural vessels of grace, and mothers who pour out unconditional love _ agape, as the Greeks called it _ are the first experience of grace most of us have in this life.

In that way, Henry is bombarded by grace, but continues to struggle against it.

“Why do you need for me to believe?” Henry, livid at Esperanza’s persistence, shouts at her. “Is it that if you can convince me that it’s real,your faith will be more real?”

In the end, the divine touches Henry and changes his life, even though he still has doubts.

Sometimes miracles happen, especially when we can’t manage to get out of our own way long enough to realize it. Sometimes they come in the form of dramatic divine apparitions, like the Virgin Mary appearing to Bernadette in Lourdes. Sometimes they’re more vague and open to interpretation, like a water stain in a poorly done stucco job, or on an expressway underpass.

Sometimes people are the miracle, by their presence, their prayers or in a sacramental plate of homemade cookies.

When the divine decides to reach its hand into human existence, it doesn’t matter whether we believe it’s happening or not.

Even when we swing a sledgehammer of doubt and try to destroy the evidence, miracles happen. Every day. All around us.

Even if we don’t have the eyes to see them. Yet.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

DSB/JM END FALSANI

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