Fr. Higgins says he was at a Young Adult Ministry Home Mass and barbeque when he received a phone call asking him to come to a local hospital.
"I drove quickly, thinking that the nurse in charge of the ER, Anne, would be waiting for me," Father wrote. "I knew her and her husband and children from the parish. When I walked in I could see paramedics at the foot of the only occupied gurney there, so I hurried and walked in."
The minute she saw him, Anne told him the sad news. “Sorry, Fr. John, you’re too late. He’s gone.”
He watched as they removed the wires and other apparatus from the man they had tried so hard to save. It was then that he noticed the deceased was wearing a Brown Scapular. He reached for the scapular and said, “He’s wearing an old fashioned Scapular.”
"When I touched it there was a beep from a monitor, then another," Father recalled
Anne asked him what he did, and he replied, "Nothing!"
"She and another nurse jumped to work, reconnecting wires and calling for help," Father wrote. "The Paramedics stood with their jaws dropped. The patient opened his eyes and said (in an Irish accent) 'Oh, good, Father. I’ve been waiting for you. I want to go to Confession.' I nearly fell over. I’d done nothing but seen and touched his Scapular. The next thing I knew they were working on him. He didn’t get to go to Confession, but I gave him an emergency absolution as they worked. One of the Paramedics asked if I was OK and sat me in a chair."
A few weeks later, the man came to him for Confession and told him the doctor couldn’t figure out what happened and tore up the Death Certificate he’d already started to fill out. The paramedics also came to visit him in the hospital and showed him the notes they made about the time and circumstances of his death. On the bottom of the page they added in big bold letters, "BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE BY GOD."
"Miracles still happen," Father Higgins writes. "And no, I didn’t do it. It just happened according to God’s will. Why does He intervene in some cases and not in others? I really don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet."
But what Father Higgins does know is that God has worked plenty of miracles in his own life, "the most important for me not being what He did for someone else, but what He has done over and over to bring me back from sin and death, through the Sacraments into His Covenant Relationship."
As for the man who "died" on the gurney on that fateful day, "That man still has to die a natural death to be raised from the dead into eternal life," Father Higgins says. "The resurrection Jesus offers all of us is eternal too. And that’s what we look forward to at Easter."
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