ASU Art Museum explores miracles in exhibit

PHOENIX — Ruben Hernandez believes in miracles.

From a near drowning incident when he was 8 to a brush with death as a teenage gang member to the circumstances that allowed him to connect with his wife, Hernandez believes. That's why he was eager to participate in a project about miracles that was put together by a pair of artists at Arizona State University.

The exhibit, "Miracle Report," was put together by Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer as part of ASU's Social Studies series. It will be on display at the ASU Art Museum in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in Tempe through June 2.

The exhibit uses a variety of video monitors and screens of different sizes. Each display features a close-up shot of the hands of the person telling his or her story of miracles.

Hernandez talks about a day when he was at the beach with his family in Southern California when he and his sisters were playing on a raft and didn't realize the current was carrying them out to sea. He lost his grip on the raft and was starting to sink. Just when he thought he was about to drown, he said he heard, or sensed, a powerful male voice asking if he was ready to cross over. He said he wasn't, and though he thought he was far underwater, he found himself able to surface and take a breath.

"I was allowed to carry on in this world for whatever reason," Hernandez, now 60, said. "That was the first of many miracles in my life. My life seems to have a charmed protection. Even though I encountered death in other forms — I was a young gang member in Southern California, I experienced violence, drugs, I was stabbed and I walked away from head-on collisions — that led me to believe I was being kept alive to fulfill a destiny somehow."

Another miracle in Hernandez's life actually happened to his wife, Linda Moser Hernandez. She had suffered a neck injury in a car accident years before she met him that left her unable to look up without experiencing excruciating pain. As a result, she had decided she was not going to date men taller than her first husband, who had died. Her first husband was about 5 feet 6, she said.

"About seven years after my husband died, I met Ruben through a friend," Moser Hernandez said. "He's like 6-3, so I thought, 'Oh well, too bad.' "

A few day after she met Hernandez, she kept an appointment to meet with a psychic healer. While focusing on another body part, Moser Hernandez said she felt an electric current come through her head and explode in her neck.