It’s Sunday night, and despite having already put in his obligatory 40 hours on the job as an auto mechanic for the City of Toronto, Ahzard Mohammed still has work to do.
There's a group of desperate-looking individuals anxiously milling about inside the Abundant Life Assembly Church in Etobicoke, and they're all expecting miraculous results from the amicable native of Trinidad, whose penchant for fixing things has long surpassed the restricting confines of the dusty garage on Eastern Avenue where he makes his living.
Tonight, Mohammed looks nothing like the man who tweaks engines and packs a humble lunch five days a week. Diligently groomed and sporting a perfectly pressed three-piece suit, he walks along the line, surveying the awaiting faces. They range from the young and psychologically troubled to the elderly and infirm. Some are being consumed by cancer, others by demons.
All of them have shown up hoping for a miracle.
Rachel, 45, is scheduled to have a mastectomy in a few days. As she waits for Mohammed, her hand unconsciously drifts towards the walnut-sized lump on her breast.
Angelo, 24, locked himself in his room for four years while he dabbled in the occult and unraveled before his worried mother’s eyes. She heard about Mohammed from a friend and brought her son along.
“He needs to have deliverance from demons,” she explains.
The stories flood out of attendees like confessions yearning to be released --- colon cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease.
The tasks at hand are daunting, but Mohammed doesn’t look worried.
He saunters before the motley mass with the confidence of a prize fighter, preparing to summon the powers he hopes will transform him from a ‘grease-under-the-fingernails’ blue collar worker in coveralls, to a spiritual conduit basking in an aura of supernatural light.
Not long after arriving in Canada from Trinidad in 1977, Mohammed saw a flyer for a faith healing service in Toronto. He was immediately intrigued.
“It said, come and see the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and I went and didn’t see anything, and I was disappointed,” he explains. “I was (skeptical) in the beginning, but I was still searching.”
His searches eventually brought him to the Abundant Life Assembly on Dixon Rd., where he not only began his conversion from the Muslim religion to Christianity, but first experienced what he described as "audible voice of Jesus", commanding him to pray for the sick.
Allan Bowen has been the pastor at the Abundant Life Assembly for almost two decades. He recalls Mohammed’s first spark of interest in the controversial subject of healing.
“He was a tender, but he started to tell me, ‘Pastor the Lord’s calling me to pray for people, that they would be healed.”
“Next thing I know he was going to hospitals, hospitals were calling me as to who he was,” a towering Bowen explains. “They protect people and I’m sure they’ve had all kinds of undesirable people come there. So I gave them a letter stating who he was, that he was going out with our approval and that opened his doors a lot of times to the hospitals.”
Mohammed's early attempts at answering his apparent calling were often turbulent and spontaneous.
One day, he simply walked into Humber River Regional Hospital and began praying for the sick.
“In the beginning I went without any authorization or permission,” he relays with a mischievous grin. “I went on my own and I started to pray for people and two big guys, security guards, they were big like sumo wrestlers, they grabbed me and they threw me out of the hospital.”
“I asked Pastor Bowen to write me a letter.”
For a short time, Mohammed was granted permission to visit and pray for the sick, but his enthusiasm soon proved too distracting for hospital staff.
“I was in every room in the hospital until I got thrown out again,” he laughs. “Because I was commanding the dead to rise and praying for limbs to grow back. The Chaplain said I was a crazy man.”
Pastor Bowen seems to comprehend that skepticism comes with the territory.
“I think healing has been given a bad name by some television people who basically say, 'send money and I’ll send you healing,' ” he explains.
“These people are carpet bagging frauds. There’s some really good ones, really beautiful people, but there’s a few that are corrupt. At the same time…if you have a barbeque you can always be assured that the mosquitoes and the bugs come out...unfortunately there’s some twisted people that get into it.”
Rachel's eyes remain closed and her face is locked in a concentrated grimace long after Mohammed has attempted to dissolve her cancerous lump. He moves along the line and throws his hands upon ailing body parts, vehemently commanding diseases to disappear and demons to scatter.
Several recipients of his touch awkwardly flop to the ground and are quickly attended to and covered in light blankets.
Mohammed makes his way back towards to Rachel, asking her if the caner is gone. She sheepishly states that the lump is still there, and Mohammed, undaunted, commands the parishioners to reach their hands out towards her in a collective effort.
He moves on to Andrew, who explains that he is in the almost unshakable grip of evil forces. He is powerless against lust and is fascinated by the occult. Mohammed responds with booming words that reverberate throughout the church, "Through the power of the Lord I command these demons to exit this body!"
Arms reach out. Eyeballs roll back. A babble of tongue-talking ensues.
A frolicking hymn is being sung as Mohammed surveys the scene of scattered, sprawled bodies squirming in religious ecstasy.
After the session is over, Rachel remains optimistic, despite the fact that her lump hasn’t shrunken.
“I could feel the presence of God but the lump is still there,” she admits with a weak smile.
“Sometimes it’s a progression…It doesn’t have to happen right away.”
Andrew, who was suffering from suicidal thoughts, depression, and panic attacks, looks somewhat startled by what took place.
“I had to get delivered from spirits,” he says. “To be touched by the holy spirit, to re-invite Christ back into my life.”
“I felt like a release, something peaceful, something had come inside me, it’s great what happened.”
His mother, Marlene, interjects.
“If it wasn’t for (religious intervention) he would have already killed me, my daughter, and my granddaughter,” she states, her eyes widening.
“For Angelo, we found that he had dabbled in the occult heavily, through the websites, and through a lot of time on his hands. He got really involved in a lot of demonic things.”
Angelo stares blankly ahead, before adding, "When I was a baby I was deceived by Satan."
“My mom said I made a deal with the devil.”
During the week, Ahzard Mohammed is a self-described 'Regular Joe', although he admits that his unique life away from work sometimes overlaps with his 9-5 existence.
"I work for the City of Toronto, I've been with them 21 years, I work as a mechanic and sometimes in a supervising capacity," he explains.
He tries to separate his life at work from his 'higher calling', but sometimes he just can't resist.
"I pray for (my co-workers) and heal them on the trucks sometimes," he chuckles. "When they have a bad muscle or a twisted neck I lay hands on them right there on the job with my greasy hands and they heal instantly."
"I'm like a perfectionist," he adds.
"When I fix things I want it to be the best, and it's the same way when
I pray for people I want to see them be whole or else I'm not happy. I
always believe in the best."
So while most of us spend our Sunday nights resting up for the long work week ahead, Ahzard Mohammed will be staring down a new set of faces, putting in long hours in a local church, trying to will the miraculous.
On Monday morning, he'll brown bag it and punch the clock, his suit replaced by greasy coveralls, knowing it won't be long before he makes the transformation all over again.
"In the day I work for the city," he declares.
"In the night, I work for the Lord."
michael.talbot@citynews.rogers.com
