Twinkle weeps blood
Meet Twinkle Dwivedi, an adorable 13-year-old from Uttar Predesh, India. Twinkle has a rare blood clotting disorder that makes her thin, pale wine-colored blood seep out of her skin and, as you can see, her eyes. It’s pretty disturbing, and she’s taking a lot of shit for it in her home town. Accused of being “cursed”, Twinkle gets yelled at in the street, kicked out of one school and refused entry into another, and basically sits at home all alone and dizzy and gory.
Her mom Nandani says “We are not superstitious people but we became so desperate. We’ve been to temples, mosques, churches and sufi saints, but nothing has cured her.” No doubt. Doctors in India aren’t exactly sure what’s up, but a British doctor thinks he’s identified the disorder as Type II von Willebrand disease. Twinkle says it doesn’t hurt, but it’s scary and gross. Their family is poor so treatment looks grim, but the story has spread across Europe and the word ’stigmata’ is getting airtime. An extensive search of the Vatican website turns up no ‘contact the Holy See’, but if anyone has a line to some Catholic charities maybe they can help this little girl! The comments in London’s Daily Mail are already demanding a fund be set up to get treatment in England.
Recently I’ve been defending the agnostic viewpoint against a meanie atheist in a comment thread on another blog, and the meanie had a nice quote:
“Gods were obviously created by humans in order to explain what was inexplicable to them. As scientific knowledge increases, the role of the gods decreases, there being less and less that is inexplicable to us. This correlation is so obvious that only those who choose to ignore it don’t see it.”
I agree with this statement (of course; you’d be amazed at the low opinion some atheists have of the angostic intellectual capacity, lol), and acknowledge support for it in Twinkle’s story. It was also a premise of Dr. Weinberg’s essay Without God (what up, Ion?).
We see here a condition that would once have been referred to as stigmata - “wounds in the hands and feet, from nails, and in the side, from a lance. Some stigmatics display wounds to the forehead similar to those caused by the crown of thorns. Other reported forms include tears of blood or sweating blood, wounds to the back as from scourging, or wounds to the shoulder as from bearing the cross. Some stigmatics’ wounds do not appear to clot, and stay fresh and uninfected.” Even grosser, the blood is supposed to smell great; even hilariouser, some stigmatics just report pain and show no outward injury. I think my mom has that.
So there you go…a girl with Twinkle’s problem (or practically any problem, if the above rather broad set of ailments is applied) in medieval France would be quickly identified as Christlike, start granting prayers and probably end up canonized. Science reveals a less romantic but completely rational blood clotting disorder. I invite Catholics to read that sentence again and cast a critical eye back over their histrionic history. If the bulk of ‘miracles’ are easily explained in hindsight, does that extra information throw a shadow across your faith?
“No case of stigmata is known to have occurred before the thirteenth century, when the crucified Jesus became a standard icon of Christianity in the west.”
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