Pier Giorgio Frassati lived a quietly holy life, and the miracle that clinched his canonization is a perfect mirror of his life of ordinary virtue. Frassati was born in Turin, Italy, in 1901, and he lived a life animated by the love of Christ, but not in the startling manner of St. Teresa of Avila’s levitations or St. Padre Pio’s bilocation.
He gave away his bus fare to the poor, annoying his parents with his resulting tardiness for dinner. He urged his friends “Verso l’alto!” (“to the heights!”), leading them on hikes into the mountains and raising their hearts to God with a shared Rosary. It’s not so surprising that his second miracle came in the course of a shared, joyful athletic competition. What touches me most is the tender smallness of the miracle.
In 2017, Juan Gutierrez was a seminarian in Los Angeles. He and his classmates habitually played a casual game of basketball on Monday afternoons. In one September game, he heard a pop, and a follow-up MRI confirmed he had torn his Achilles tendon. This sports injury is painful but common. Gutierrez’s doctor told him he would be able to have surgery to stitch the ligament back together. The recovery period would be hard but finite.
Something was stirring in Gutierrez’s heart, though. He had the impulse to pray a novena for healing. When he wondered to whom to entrust his intention, he told Angelus news contributors, “I had this whisper in my head that tells me: ‘Why don’t you make it to Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati?’ I just remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.’” He began praying every day, asking simply, “Lord, through the intercession of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, I ask you to help me in my injury.”
We don’t have to triage our needs and save only the big ones for God.
Before the novena was complete, he felt a warmth at the site of his tear when he prayed before Jesus in adoration. He kept up his prayers, and when he went to see his surgeon a few days later, the doctor could find no sign of the tear. The miracle, investigated at length, will allow Pier Giorgio Frassati to be canonized this August at the Jubilee Year celebration for young people.
It’s not the kind of miracle one might expect. It even diverged sharply from Frassati’s first miracle: the 1933 healing of a man dying of tuberculosis, who fully recovered and lived for thirty-five more years. Some ailments—a terminal cancer, a limb slated for amputation—offer no worldly source of hope. The sufferer requires either the grace of an improbable healing or the grace of knowing his or her pain is united with Christ’s. Gutierrez’s injury didn’t require a miracle—he had a clear, if arduous, path to recovery.
I find the miracle so moving because it is a sign of God’s (and Pier Giorgio’s) tenderness in small things. It is easy to divide our lives into two domains: the parts of our life we need God’s help for, and the bits that can (and maybe should) pass under his notice. Gutierrez’s miracle is an encouragement to lift every part of our day to God, not just the parts that obviously need his help. We don’t have to triage our needs and save only the big ones for God.
God’s grace is not rationed. You can ask for help in the small things without wearing out his patience with your most urgent needs. A habit of turning over the smallest and simplest parts of your life helps foster a lively conviviality in your prayer. If the day is a continuous conversation with God, it (hopefully) is more natural to ask for help with a persistent sin that makes you ashamed than if you were approaching God after a long silence with that heaviness on your heart.
There’s another reason that I am grateful for Gutierrez’s unassuming miracle. I have prayed for some of the kinds of healings that only a miracle can provide. My husband and I lost six children, one by one, in utero. I would see blood; I opened up my lab results to see flatlining HCG; I waited through the ultrasound tech’s long, revealing silence. I prayed that the Lord who gave life to dry bones would somehow countermand what every physical sign was telling me. We never received that kind of miracle.
You could say that the three children I birthed are miracle enough—a trio of Tobiases who found abundant life in the chamber that had been a place of death. But during the long time of hoping and grieving, a friend of mine received a miracle-miracle for her child in utero.
At her eighteen-week ultrasound, my friend learned that she had lost all her amniotic fluid, and the doctors did not believe her baby would be able to develop lungs capable of breath. Doctors suggested termination, but she kept going and kept praying for either of two miracles. That her baby might be born alive and look at her mother, even if they lost her shortly after. Or that she might, however implausibly, take one breath, then another, and another.
She was born in 2018. She is living still. A month after she was born, I miscarried again.
Her miracle was so stark and surprising that it dispelled any envy. For my friend’s baby to have working lungs was a blazing sign—one I felt my children participated in, even though they did not grow as she did.
A miracle is a show of God’s glory and love. It reminds us that this is how much he loves each person on earth, even if their lives aren’t marked in the same obviously miraculous way. What he has done for the few people singled out as images of his glory he has done for all of us even more spectacularly on the cross, and does in many quiet ways throughout our lives.
My children were as intimately known by him as the baby who improbably lived. They are as tenderly cared for as Gutierrez, who received a miracle he did not “need.” I am no less loved, including in the moments when God’s love feels more distant because I am engaged in some project where I feel I have more control and less reliance on his providence.
Soon-to-be St. Pier Giorgio Frassati leavened all his friendships by uniting them with his friendship with Christ. A hike was an invitation to a foretaste of heaven by contemplating what God did for Mary and longs to do for us. The gentle touch of miraculous healing for Gutierrez is a reminder that there is no wound, whether of sin or of flesh, that Christ does not intend to heal, if we will allow him by asking. St. Frassati and Fr. Gutierrez together set an example of considering nothing excluded from God’s inexhaustible love.