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The Cup of Hope Runneth Over
[Source: The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), June 7, 2005]

LAST WEEK, Ray Quintanilla was in Puerto Rico, but his heart was in Madison, so the veteran journalist did something he had been intending to do for at least a couple of years.

Quintanilla, 43, who spent much of the past decade with the Chicago Tribune (including a stint embedded in Iraq), is now a San Juan-based reporter and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.

Since taking the job in Puerto Rico, Quintanilla had been intending to visit and write about the little mountain village of Sabana Grande, where, legend has it, a miracle occurred more than half a century ago.

In April 1953, a boy named Juan Angel Collado had left his one-room schoolhouse in Sabana Grande to get water. Walking through a sugar cane field he came to a tiny stream, and it was near that stream, he said later, that the Virgin Mary appeared. The 8-year-old boy subsequently brought friends, and they, too, said they saw a vision of a woman in the air who then descended and said, "Don't be afraid. I'm the Virgin of the Rosary."

The legend has survived and is often mentioned when there are other sightings, like a recent one in a grilled cheese sandwich that eventually sold for thousands on eBay.

The temptation might be to dismiss the Sabana Grande miracle as quickly as most did the cheese sandwich, but in Puerto Rico and around the Caribbean, they are not so dismissive. "It is something that is talked about a great deal," Quintanilla was saying Monday.

He had been thinking about writing about it since getting his San Juan posting, but breaking news kept intervening. "It kind of went on the back burner," Quintanilla said.

Last week, he went to Sabana Grande.

In the last two weeks, the lives of Quintanilla and his family have been turned upside down. It was two weeks ago that Ray, his wife, Noelia, and three of their sons flew to the Midwest. The trip was planned around the graduation of their oldest son, Eric, from UW-Madison. Ray is originally from Rockford and has family there. It was decided on this visit that everyone in the family would have physical exams.

The exam of Ray and Noelia's youngest boy, Peter, age 9, showed an enlarged liver and spleen, and the doctor in Illinois suggested further tests at the University Hospital in Madison. Those tests brought the unthinkable: a diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, a lymph node cancer.

Peter and his mother have been at University Hospital since last week, when Peter started chemotherapy treatments. The other boys are with relatives in Rockford. Ray flew back to San Juan, to attend to some business and family matters, including getting their dog out of the kennel. His newspaper bosses have told him to take whatever time he needs.

One day last week, confused and depressed, Ray Quintanilla decided to visit the shrine at Sabana Grande. "It seemed like a good time," he said.

What he found, he said, was "a tiny little place, very beautiful, very tranquil." There is a large statue of the Virgin Mary, perhaps 8 feet tall, and a small little access hole that's tapped into an underground stream. There were some two dozen people there when Quintanilla arrived. There were also wreaths and photos and thank you notes left by previous visitors.

Quintanilla, who calls himself a "trained skeptic," will almost certainly never see a holy image in a cheese sandwich. But in the beauty of the tiny village he thought he might find some spiritual guidance, if not answers to questions that are probably unanswerable anyway.

He was standing near the small access hole to the underground stream when a man approached. It was the shrine's caretaker. Quintanilla had seen him sweeping a small concrete area a moment before. The man dipped a paper cup into the water and said, "Take this. These waters are said to have healing powers."

Quintanilla drank from the cup.

Later, he would file one more column before flying back to the Midwest, where he will be for at least a while. Peter is tentatively scheduled to leave University Hospital today or Wednesday, and through friends the family has a house in Rockford where they can stay while Peter continues to get periodic treatment in Madison.

Quintanilla's column about Sabana Grande, in all probability his last for some time, ran Sunday in the Orlando Sentinel. It's a brave and poignant piece.

He wrote of the caretaker talking about the healing water, and of looking into the man's eyes, and what he saw when he did. In his eyes, Quintanilla saw hope.

"When those things we depend on fail us," he wrote, "there is always hope.

"The famous Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel captured it beautifully when he said: 'I have learned two lessons in my life: First, there are no sufficient literary, psychological or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.'

"I sip the water taken from the stream. Then quickly drink it all. And like others here, I fill another small container--only this is for my family at my ill son's bedside ...

"It's a 6-ounce bottle filled with hope."

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