From Unity, 14 November 2009

Knock, knock.—Who’s there?

Apart, that is, from several thousand hopefuls anticipating a visit and a message from you know who! It would seem she did indeed appear and leave a message, but, in true revelatory tradition, only a soothsayer was privileged to receive it.
     This reminds me of the enterprising teaching nun who had the novel idea of having her charges not merely pray to God but do it using an imaginary telephone. His reply, however, was relayed only on Sister’s private line!
     There are complaints about a lack of devotional behaviour at Knock by the church authorities. This would seem to pale into insignificance beside the fairyland ostentatious commercialism at Lourdes. Here you can buy everything to meet your Rosary needs: a Lourdes flick-knife, perhaps, or an Our-Lady-shaped plastic bottle for holy water (water with the hell burned out of it?). Or maybe your devotional needs are best served by a St Bernadette snow shaker, or a holy corkscrew or cigarette lighter. Small wonder it is known as God’s Disneyland!
     It would seem, though, while the Church is comfortable with accepting visionary appearances in the safe and distant past it is less comfortable with the in-your-face recent events. In fact having been responsible for the creation of Marian worship it cannot entirely wash its hands of what is happening at present.
     Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen when she reputedly had her visionary experience in 1858. She was canonised in 1933.
     Imagine you are in the tenth century and that someone told you eight hundred years ago that the disciples of St James, who, according to Scripture, was executed in the Holy Land, sailed with his corpse and landed in Galicia in northern Spain and then buried him forty miles inland, but that this fact had been mislaid for all that time. You might think he was two beads short of a Rosary. However, this is precisely the story behind Santiago de Compostela, one of the most revered holy sites in Christendom—second in Europe to Rome itself, with pilgrim paths crisscrossing much of Europe even today. Pilgrims can get their cards stamped to prove they haven’t taken any short cuts.
     Nor are visions the exclusive copyright of the Christian brand “Catholic.” In the famous brand “Protestant” revival in Co Antrim in the 1850s visions were also an in thing. The accounts of the mill girls may bear more relation to Freud, however, than to Christ “. . . and I saw the Angels open right and left, to let him pass out to me with his glorious train . . . and He came, bringing in his hand a suit . . . which He pointed at, to show it was for me.”
     The one question I have is, Why are the media carrying the sayings of the soothsayers in such detail? But then it is perhaps just good press. Everyone loves to hear cranks. Well, in this case clearly one in particular does; so it seems to be a case of Vision on . . . again!

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