I had always been a fearful child - jumping scared at a clap of thunder; at the blurry vision of a kitchen rat scrambling the floors of our fallen-apart flat; at the sound of an adult’s angry breathing, familiar with the threat that it brings – all usual things you might consider. However, there were other things I could not understand: like the bark of a tree, its scratchy texture spread across that towering gait. I was afraid of leaves and plants and onion bulbs so moist from heat they had begun to sprout tendrils. I was also afraid of the moon and stars and clouds - unable to look up at the sky without thinking (with undignified certainty) that these galactic presences could see me – that the moon was descending in startling speed to crush me to dust. And so, by the time I arrived my early teens, I did not understand why anyone would be fascinated with nature. I had been so completely subdued by the large and outside world that I simply concluded that whatever was non-human could not be trusted.
Recently, I started thinking about the Catholic legend: The Miracle of the Sun, also known as the Miracle of Fatima, a story that emerged all the way from international media and slipped into my catechism classes. As the reports go, the incident was heralded by Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta; three young children in Portugal in 1917. The children, according to the reports, were out tending sheep during the First World War- when a strange being or apparition of light appeared to them. This presence would later be construed by the children to be the Virgin Mary, who had come to deliver a message and promised to prove herself using a signpost of the supernatural. What happened subsequently was this: the sun appearing to a whole troop of villagers, breaking in pieces, spinning as a disc, descending to a tree and then zig zagging all the way back to the sky. What a sight! In my memory of this anecdote, I kept thinking – they stayed and waited for the sun to do all that? Sigh.
That story has been fraught with many controversies, one of which was that the World War did not end as predicted by the Virgin Mary. But if there was any contention – it was not that the people saw what they saw, it was the veracity of what the vision represented. What is the point of the supernatural if in its splendor it cannot connect the dots, the critics seemed to ask. The truth is, even as a Christian, former catholic and present day ‘miracle chaser’ – I am very sympathetic to this line of questioning: Why do these grand and spectacular things happen?
I am currently reading Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, an epic that intertwines the lives of two women caught in the web of unexplainable hauntings and disappearances. It is a fascinating ghost story, with sharp edges but also loose ends, so that the story itself is filled with loud enough gaps that make you wonder about the veracity of the plot line. Personally, I think that the genius of good fantastical fiction, is the way it makes you suspend belief, some writers creating worlds so far removed from our reality and others slipping and spilling in and out of or known world so that it is hard to tell what is real and what is not. Perhaps this is what we can know for sure: we live in a world of strange occurrences, the unexplainable, both of things that are spectacular and grandiose and things that are muted and invisible.
In all honesty, there’s a part of me extremely skeptical towards things I cannot explain. A great irony considering my core life’s philosophies are built on a faith postured on the miraculous, that unseen landscape of alternate life, with its many historical incidents of the spectacular. But beyond my faith, having a distrust for what I cannot explain is also illogical, because in the realm of my own situated-ness as a human in the world, my perception is fraught with its own limits. For instance, the gaps in my knowledge of science and philosophy naturally mean there are realities shut away from me, not because I don’t understand, but because I don’t have the context that specific knowledge offers. This can be said of our relationship with the material world but also of the immaterial. For instance, just because we do not have the language or formula for certain paranormal events doesn’t make them unreal or even dangerous.
Still, there is one question I am left to wrestle with – why? Why do strange things happen – the surreal, the spectacular? Why are we so eager to see them, from the sensuous bloom of nature that whisper the presence of God to the startling appearance of angels heralding a divine message. Why the drama and affect when our lives remain small and fractured and inching towards demise. Again, what is the point?
And then, I consider my own life, growing through and out of fearfulness, and I think: Maybe these things – the supernatural-spectacular is intended to inspire possibility, alternate perspectives. What if it all just translates to this: vision. A kind of seeing. An expanded lens by which we view what is right in front of us. A perceiving of what is wounded and bleeding, what is cracked and broken, what is alive and surrounding us. What if is all a stirring awake, shaking us from our industry fueled fatigue? I truly do not know, except that when I am crouched in a sofa, encircled by the night, with groaning sounds of prayer racking against my chest, I do, in fact, expect a miracle. I ask often to be rescued from a world that everyday tries to subdue me. I am casting visions of what my faith considers to be real and to be true, and in some very rare moments, when it seems like I am more spirit than flesh, I feel in my heart a taste of God that is both impossible and natural. What a wonder!
Today, I am thinking about the spectacular or in my case, my desire for a miracle with a new kind of posture; one of first halted steps, of careful and close consideration, and then, of tentatively walking towards things that are loud and sharp and terrible in their stance. Things I cannot explain. Or for which I do not hold answers. The miracle in this sense comes by looking closely. Not just receiving but paying attention to the receiving. It comes by beholding. It is through our gaze that we are transformed into this ‘magical’ realm, where magic is a metaphor of our desire for the divine. I think about the legend of the Sun and I conclude that it is not just spectacular that the children witnessed what they considered to be the virgin Mary, it was instead, that they, along with a village of people, stood still and watched and waited and watched and were in awe and watched and waited. What a posture even if I hold no attachment to the incident in itself.
It is true that we may not all walk on water, or see the sun spin as a disc, or witness ghosts crashing through doorposts in haunted houses, but we can behold what seems difficult and impossible and unexpected in our lives and decide in that moment: We Are Not Afraid. We. Are. Not. Afraid.
This writing thingy is Tochi.
Thank you for sharing this gift.
Beautifully written as usual, thanks for sharing.