We had been this way before, to the side and behind our hotel by Apparition Hill, where the first vision of the Blessed Virgin in Medjugorje was seen by the children decades ago. That time it had been to a place called Cenacola, a religious retreat for young men with serious addictions. There, a guy in his late twenties from New Jersey had told us of his decent into alcoholism, of his loss of job and driver’s license and girlfriend, of everything, which had sent him to this miracle town in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What courage, and what humility it must have taken him to tell such a tale in front of strangers, I had thought, but how could all these young men do it? No big city excitement, no girls, nothing for kicks except hard work and coffee. Lots of coffee, I suspect. It was pretty and peaceful amid the trees and foliage against the blessed hill, but how could that hold so many young men for months, even years?
This time, we were brought just short of that encampment to another, set in even greater verdant glory – a place of natural beauty. It was a retreat for the Catholic religious, a place of quiet peace, set around a chapel of native stone and hand-worked stain glass. It was to here that we were directed, and here that the director, a priest from Germany, lectured us briefly in a voice of incredible calm before he asked for questions. I complied: “How might we continue this holy feeling of peace once we return home?”
His answer took nearly an hour, as he carved out the things we must do and thoughts we must have in his peaceful tone, making the answer seem so obvious after a while that I began to feel the fool. Around us, statues of saints held out their hands or pointed to their martyred wounds as they basked in the rainbow of colors coming through the glass. It was peace itself until some gnome materialized from out of nowhere, running up besides the pews. “No, no, no!” cried the priest, shifting then to speak words in Italian that sent the gnome – what I then could see was an elderly woman in a dress and long scarf, scurrying back out through the door. Returning our look to the priest, we could see that his peace had been upset.
He apologized: “They come here to touch the statue of Jesus. It was done by ------ (a sculpture who was apparently famous) and is made of (some material) that is very life-life but also fragile. If I were to let everyone touch it, it would be destroyed.”
He did not need to apologize, as we had seen what millions of pilgrims could do, for even the rocks on the path up nearby Cross Mountain had been smoothed by the passage of so many feet. But that Jesus – yes, I had already noticed it. As the priest had talked and the light streamed down, I had seen that statue, set up on its cross on the floor rather than in the wall with the saints; I had seen it and shuddered. Yes, it was realistic, the colors of the flesh slightly gray as if that person were about to die. Worse still, the sculpture had put precise, human-like hairs into the naked legs of Jesus, hairs that shown as hairs will in the ethereal light. It was that touch that had made it so real. And it was that touch, I suspect, that had made it the target of that Italian woman, and probably thousands upon thousands of others.
What is it about touch, about the article itself? In this same village of Medjugorje, there is a bronze or bronze-like statue of Jesus at the end of the Stations of the Cross outside behind the church. It is a wonderfully conceived statue, with Jesus slumped hard forward on the cross, with his shadow-like silhouette impressed into the very ground – also of bronze – behind him. It is this “shadow” in Earth, of course, that reminds us of the impression his sacrifice made on the world today.
But that is not what draws the pilgrims. Instead, it is again his legs, or in this case, one leg. From just below his knee, there are often, but not always, droplets of water that come forth. Always there is a line waiting to soak up that water for miraculous cures, good luck, or simply for faith. It is so important to the Italians that someone has made little cloths to buy that say (approximately), “This is the drop given to you from Jesus.”
I remember well the first night I went to see the statue with my son Jeff. It was off-season, March, and there were only a few Italians at the base soaking up the drops with their special clothes. With the night lights on it, and the Stations of the Cross lit up nearby, it was a magical scene. Jeff and I just stood there waiting for the Italians to leave so that we might have a look, but soon one of the men waved me over. From the Spanish I know, I understood him enough to hear, “come, see the drop. Here, take this cloth, wipe it up.” He then did it himself and handed me the cloth, then gave me another to do it myself so that Jeff and I would each have one. (Oddly, I did not know that this was a special cloth with writing on it because it was night. Nearly a month later, my wife pulled it from a jacket she was about to wash and showed it to me. Without the writing and the little design on it, it would have been thrown away.)
Magic. The magic of touch is and has always been recognized throughout the world. In the Gospels, there is the bleeding woman who touches the tassels of Jesus’s cloak to be healed, where Jesus feels “the power flow out of me.” Yes, even Jesus admits to it, and the belief is there in us all, even if hidden by the practical man of common sense. But is it good? Is this belief good for the person of faith?
Some Protestants would say no, and I understand this. At some point, magic replaces faith, which the full-time priests at Medjugorje know all too well, so much so that they advise people to stop looking for “signs” and to start praying to Jesus. But of course, it is signs that bring people to Medjugorje, or to Fatima, and, for that matter, to Machu Pichu or the Mayan pyramids. It is not just about objects, but about the place, the reality of a substance, or an area itself. It is about a cross, a substance, a place that is especially blessed, that has what the students of religion and magic call “manna,” after the Old Testament’s mana in Exodus. The Hawaiians believed in manna to such an extent that to simply touch their chief without special preparation would kill one. In the movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” the graveyard of the Indians had such manna that those who approached it, again without proper preparation and reverence, were condemned to death.
What is it, then, that is in both tribal and civilized (as in “of the city”) religions?
We of most faiths know that the world was created by powerful sacred forces. We of most faiths know that it is “manna” or supernatural force that sustains this creation at all times. To the human mind, then, all of creation is a magical act itself. Young children know this, but something alchemical happens as we grow older. The magic of everyday people and objects fades into a bland normalcy that is the mark of the human race. Some might call this mark original sin, but for whatever reason, the profanation of material reality is almost universally inevitable. But some things come to stand out; some things are made special by “signs,” oddities or things and places that are associated with oddities that we often call supernatural, even though the natural is, in its miracle of existence, supernatural to our mundane way of thought.
We have been cursed in a way, set under a blanket that hides the stars, but sometimes, a hole appears in the blanket; sometimes we or someone sees a star, or maybe the whole sky, through the blanket. We know what they have seen; deep in our memories we recall this magical world, and Oh God do we want it again! And then, there it is, made plain by an accident, or miracle, an oddity that shows us that world of wonder does indeed still exist. And, if we are not too jaded, we take it to ourselves as if the world depended on it.
Which it does. Not the thing or the place, but the sense of magic that is the sign of the sacred. Just like the young men in Cenacola, those who became addicted to drugs and alcohol, we are all looking for that magic, for the sacred, for the sense that fills a world made empty through our own device. We take pills, we drink, we buy yachts, we travel to Bali to see them dance– and we travel to Medjugorje to touch the legs of Jesus. Some ways to the sacred kill, but others remind us. Better, some remind us so much that we are able to sacrifice the ordinary now and then – our food, our time, our pleasures – to find what is beyond the ordinary, which has become ordinary only through careless habit.
In things we can go beyond things; in things we can find the sacred within and behind and beyond all things. It is and always has been about approach and about attitude, from the Indian graveyard to the legs of Jesus. If we do it right, we find the sacred in one thing or one place and through it, find the sacred in everything. That is the meaning of sacred objects, of the tassels from Jesus’s robes; that is the meaning of Medjugorje, or of Jerusalem: to open the sky through a portal, through a hole that brings us back to the whole. To make of one thing holy, then to make it all holy. To, if we have our minds turned right, see the world as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be.
This time, we were brought just short of that encampment to another, set in even greater verdant glory – a place of natural beauty. It was a retreat for the Catholic religious, a place of quiet peace, set around a chapel of native stone and hand-worked stain glass. It was to here that we were directed, and here that the director, a priest from Germany, lectured us briefly in a voice of incredible calm before he asked for questions. I complied: “How might we continue this holy feeling of peace once we return home?”
His answer took nearly an hour, as he carved out the things we must do and thoughts we must have in his peaceful tone, making the answer seem so obvious after a while that I began to feel the fool. Around us, statues of saints held out their hands or pointed to their martyred wounds as they basked in the rainbow of colors coming through the glass. It was peace itself until some gnome materialized from out of nowhere, running up besides the pews. “No, no, no!” cried the priest, shifting then to speak words in Italian that sent the gnome – what I then could see was an elderly woman in a dress and long scarf, scurrying back out through the door. Returning our look to the priest, we could see that his peace had been upset.
He apologized: “They come here to touch the statue of Jesus. It was done by ------ (a sculpture who was apparently famous) and is made of (some material) that is very life-life but also fragile. If I were to let everyone touch it, it would be destroyed.”
He did not need to apologize, as we had seen what millions of pilgrims could do, for even the rocks on the path up nearby Cross Mountain had been smoothed by the passage of so many feet. But that Jesus – yes, I had already noticed it. As the priest had talked and the light streamed down, I had seen that statue, set up on its cross on the floor rather than in the wall with the saints; I had seen it and shuddered. Yes, it was realistic, the colors of the flesh slightly gray as if that person were about to die. Worse still, the sculpture had put precise, human-like hairs into the naked legs of Jesus, hairs that shown as hairs will in the ethereal light. It was that touch that had made it so real. And it was that touch, I suspect, that had made it the target of that Italian woman, and probably thousands upon thousands of others.
What is it about touch, about the article itself? In this same village of Medjugorje, there is a bronze or bronze-like statue of Jesus at the end of the Stations of the Cross outside behind the church. It is a wonderfully conceived statue, with Jesus slumped hard forward on the cross, with his shadow-like silhouette impressed into the very ground – also of bronze – behind him. It is this “shadow” in Earth, of course, that reminds us of the impression his sacrifice made on the world today.
But that is not what draws the pilgrims. Instead, it is again his legs, or in this case, one leg. From just below his knee, there are often, but not always, droplets of water that come forth. Always there is a line waiting to soak up that water for miraculous cures, good luck, or simply for faith. It is so important to the Italians that someone has made little cloths to buy that say (approximately), “This is the drop given to you from Jesus.”
I remember well the first night I went to see the statue with my son Jeff. It was off-season, March, and there were only a few Italians at the base soaking up the drops with their special clothes. With the night lights on it, and the Stations of the Cross lit up nearby, it was a magical scene. Jeff and I just stood there waiting for the Italians to leave so that we might have a look, but soon one of the men waved me over. From the Spanish I know, I understood him enough to hear, “come, see the drop. Here, take this cloth, wipe it up.” He then did it himself and handed me the cloth, then gave me another to do it myself so that Jeff and I would each have one. (Oddly, I did not know that this was a special cloth with writing on it because it was night. Nearly a month later, my wife pulled it from a jacket she was about to wash and showed it to me. Without the writing and the little design on it, it would have been thrown away.)
Magic. The magic of touch is and has always been recognized throughout the world. In the Gospels, there is the bleeding woman who touches the tassels of Jesus’s cloak to be healed, where Jesus feels “the power flow out of me.” Yes, even Jesus admits to it, and the belief is there in us all, even if hidden by the practical man of common sense. But is it good? Is this belief good for the person of faith?
Some Protestants would say no, and I understand this. At some point, magic replaces faith, which the full-time priests at Medjugorje know all too well, so much so that they advise people to stop looking for “signs” and to start praying to Jesus. But of course, it is signs that bring people to Medjugorje, or to Fatima, and, for that matter, to Machu Pichu or the Mayan pyramids. It is not just about objects, but about the place, the reality of a substance, or an area itself. It is about a cross, a substance, a place that is especially blessed, that has what the students of religion and magic call “manna,” after the Old Testament’s mana in Exodus. The Hawaiians believed in manna to such an extent that to simply touch their chief without special preparation would kill one. In the movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” the graveyard of the Indians had such manna that those who approached it, again without proper preparation and reverence, were condemned to death.
What is it, then, that is in both tribal and civilized (as in “of the city”) religions?
We of most faiths know that the world was created by powerful sacred forces. We of most faiths know that it is “manna” or supernatural force that sustains this creation at all times. To the human mind, then, all of creation is a magical act itself. Young children know this, but something alchemical happens as we grow older. The magic of everyday people and objects fades into a bland normalcy that is the mark of the human race. Some might call this mark original sin, but for whatever reason, the profanation of material reality is almost universally inevitable. But some things come to stand out; some things are made special by “signs,” oddities or things and places that are associated with oddities that we often call supernatural, even though the natural is, in its miracle of existence, supernatural to our mundane way of thought.
We have been cursed in a way, set under a blanket that hides the stars, but sometimes, a hole appears in the blanket; sometimes we or someone sees a star, or maybe the whole sky, through the blanket. We know what they have seen; deep in our memories we recall this magical world, and Oh God do we want it again! And then, there it is, made plain by an accident, or miracle, an oddity that shows us that world of wonder does indeed still exist. And, if we are not too jaded, we take it to ourselves as if the world depended on it.
Which it does. Not the thing or the place, but the sense of magic that is the sign of the sacred. Just like the young men in Cenacola, those who became addicted to drugs and alcohol, we are all looking for that magic, for the sacred, for the sense that fills a world made empty through our own device. We take pills, we drink, we buy yachts, we travel to Bali to see them dance– and we travel to Medjugorje to touch the legs of Jesus. Some ways to the sacred kill, but others remind us. Better, some remind us so much that we are able to sacrifice the ordinary now and then – our food, our time, our pleasures – to find what is beyond the ordinary, which has become ordinary only through careless habit.
In things we can go beyond things; in things we can find the sacred within and behind and beyond all things. It is and always has been about approach and about attitude, from the Indian graveyard to the legs of Jesus. If we do it right, we find the sacred in one thing or one place and through it, find the sacred in everything. That is the meaning of sacred objects, of the tassels from Jesus’s robes; that is the meaning of Medjugorje, or of Jerusalem: to open the sky through a portal, through a hole that brings us back to the whole. To make of one thing holy, then to make it all holy. To, if we have our minds turned right, see the world as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be.
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