We had been sitting – or at least the others had been sitting – on rocks for nearly five hours to be in the presence of Our Lady. True, me and my son had taken a short time out of the vigil and hiked up the remainder of Apparition Hill in Medjugorje to the place of Our Lady’s statue where the first apparition had appeared in 1981, but we, too, shared in the butt-numbing penance of waiting at the Blue Cross for Her to come with “her.” And at last, it was about to happen.
“Her” was Mirjana, one of 6 people who as children first had visions, and then conversations with, the Virgin Mary in 1981 Yugoslavia. Then, what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the communist dictatorship under Tito, who had ordered the killing of 600 clerics back in 1945 after his take-over of the area from the Nazis. He had continued the persecution, torture and murder of the religious until his death in 1980, and was followed by an even more insecure communist government with similar, if not greater, desires to shut down religion, for religion is the greatest competitor of Communism. Both want your soul, one to save it, and another, communism, to annihilate it. Mirjana and the other visionaries now enjoy a sort of celebrity status, but in 1981 they were threatened, detained, interrogated, and otherwise persecuted. They did not, as some now think, have visions of Mary for fun and attention. Whatever they might be, they were not and are not mentally ill masochists.
We had met Mirjana just a few days before as she helped serve us food in her modest hotel. Now, several hundred people, most of them from Italy, were crowded about the Blue Cross at the foot of Apparition Hill to see Mirjana and bask in the presence of the Mother of God. To us, she had come as a servant; now she was to appear as a prophet. She was not a prophet, for she only said what she was told by the Virgin, but she could not help but be special, to exude a peace and grace with a blessed quality that is rare anywhere in the world. Many had naturally elevated her to sainthood, or to something even more. But she remained truly humble. We had met her and she was a wonderful human being, but only human.
Humble and human – qualities that she knew she needed, as temptation was everywhere. She could, with her fame, become rich and powerful. But visions of Our Lady seem to never come without a price. That price is most often persecution or physical illness and suffering. At other times, that price is temptation itself – the actual presence of Satan.
It has been said – I don’t know by whom – that where Mary appears, so appears Satan or one of his minions. It is said that a battle for souls is going on, and Mary is the one person who is both fully human and fully perfect. That is a tempting target for Satan. But because she is perfect, the evil one must always settle for an imperfect one near her – for one of us.
Laugh if you want, but none of us imperfect mortals were laughing that day at the foot of Apparition Hill when, just as Mirjana arrived to be blessed with a vision, we heard the screaming and growling erupt from below in the nearby village. My first thought was: could this really be? It must be some odd-voiced child having a terrible fit. But that voice, the growl that sounded both high and low, it was so loud and continuous! And that shouting of a man afterwards – what a bad father he would have to be to shout at a young child like that, even with such a temper! But I knew better; as we all did when, at the time of the apparition, we heard the sound of one gigantic retch, as in vomit, and then no more. From then on, the growing fear that was certainly in my breast ended, to be replaced by a growing peace.
We later heard the details from someone who knew the priest who had been there. A young woman had begun to thrash about like an animal alongside a group of nuns come for the apparition. They had tried to hold the woman down, to at least stop her from hurting herself, but they could not. A priest came to help them, and on seeing him, the sisters begged him to perform an exorcism. “Me?” he had said. “I have no training. Me?” But he had gripped his cross and then begun to repeat the Hail Mary prayer. He had only gotten to the end of the first phrase the second time around when the girl said with a snarl, “I hate you (Mary)! You rob me of so many souls!” And then she had retched, and the girl woke as if from a deep sleep, dazed but otherwise perfectly normal.
Maybe you had to have been there, but I can assure the reader that this was no prank and no ordinary acting job, or even ordinary mental illness. You could feel it to your bones, just as you could feel the peace that followed with the vision.
We, at least myself and the group I was with, did not see anything or have any great internal flashes of light. Mary, Queen of Peace, does not usually work that way. She directs you instead to calmness, to a peace that reaches into what truly is at the heart of that too-often misused word, Love. But the devil rides behind like a wolf at the heels of a horse. If Mary is the horse, we are the rider – not the master, but the ultimate victim. This reminds us that life is not just a matter of clearing one’s head and becoming optimistic and happy. That works in self-help books and in some New Age religions, but it is not what is. The wolf of evil may appear as sickness or in the person of a violent criminal, but it will appear sooner or later to all. For many, it is Mary – and of course, that which she speaks for, the Trinity that is One God – who helps them to outrun the wolf. I, at least that one day, believed and was grateful for her swift and grace- filled gate.
I will have several more blogs on Medjugorje over the next few weeks. I might break them up occasionally with some other topic, but there was so much that happened on our nine - day stay that I feel I must write about it before time takes the memories away. Until next time, FK
“Her” was Mirjana, one of 6 people who as children first had visions, and then conversations with, the Virgin Mary in 1981 Yugoslavia. Then, what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the communist dictatorship under Tito, who had ordered the killing of 600 clerics back in 1945 after his take-over of the area from the Nazis. He had continued the persecution, torture and murder of the religious until his death in 1980, and was followed by an even more insecure communist government with similar, if not greater, desires to shut down religion, for religion is the greatest competitor of Communism. Both want your soul, one to save it, and another, communism, to annihilate it. Mirjana and the other visionaries now enjoy a sort of celebrity status, but in 1981 they were threatened, detained, interrogated, and otherwise persecuted. They did not, as some now think, have visions of Mary for fun and attention. Whatever they might be, they were not and are not mentally ill masochists.
We had met Mirjana just a few days before as she helped serve us food in her modest hotel. Now, several hundred people, most of them from Italy, were crowded about the Blue Cross at the foot of Apparition Hill to see Mirjana and bask in the presence of the Mother of God. To us, she had come as a servant; now she was to appear as a prophet. She was not a prophet, for she only said what she was told by the Virgin, but she could not help but be special, to exude a peace and grace with a blessed quality that is rare anywhere in the world. Many had naturally elevated her to sainthood, or to something even more. But she remained truly humble. We had met her and she was a wonderful human being, but only human.
Humble and human – qualities that she knew she needed, as temptation was everywhere. She could, with her fame, become rich and powerful. But visions of Our Lady seem to never come without a price. That price is most often persecution or physical illness and suffering. At other times, that price is temptation itself – the actual presence of Satan.
It has been said – I don’t know by whom – that where Mary appears, so appears Satan or one of his minions. It is said that a battle for souls is going on, and Mary is the one person who is both fully human and fully perfect. That is a tempting target for Satan. But because she is perfect, the evil one must always settle for an imperfect one near her – for one of us.
Laugh if you want, but none of us imperfect mortals were laughing that day at the foot of Apparition Hill when, just as Mirjana arrived to be blessed with a vision, we heard the screaming and growling erupt from below in the nearby village. My first thought was: could this really be? It must be some odd-voiced child having a terrible fit. But that voice, the growl that sounded both high and low, it was so loud and continuous! And that shouting of a man afterwards – what a bad father he would have to be to shout at a young child like that, even with such a temper! But I knew better; as we all did when, at the time of the apparition, we heard the sound of one gigantic retch, as in vomit, and then no more. From then on, the growing fear that was certainly in my breast ended, to be replaced by a growing peace.
We later heard the details from someone who knew the priest who had been there. A young woman had begun to thrash about like an animal alongside a group of nuns come for the apparition. They had tried to hold the woman down, to at least stop her from hurting herself, but they could not. A priest came to help them, and on seeing him, the sisters begged him to perform an exorcism. “Me?” he had said. “I have no training. Me?” But he had gripped his cross and then begun to repeat the Hail Mary prayer. He had only gotten to the end of the first phrase the second time around when the girl said with a snarl, “I hate you (Mary)! You rob me of so many souls!” And then she had retched, and the girl woke as if from a deep sleep, dazed but otherwise perfectly normal.
Maybe you had to have been there, but I can assure the reader that this was no prank and no ordinary acting job, or even ordinary mental illness. You could feel it to your bones, just as you could feel the peace that followed with the vision.
We, at least myself and the group I was with, did not see anything or have any great internal flashes of light. Mary, Queen of Peace, does not usually work that way. She directs you instead to calmness, to a peace that reaches into what truly is at the heart of that too-often misused word, Love. But the devil rides behind like a wolf at the heels of a horse. If Mary is the horse, we are the rider – not the master, but the ultimate victim. This reminds us that life is not just a matter of clearing one’s head and becoming optimistic and happy. That works in self-help books and in some New Age religions, but it is not what is. The wolf of evil may appear as sickness or in the person of a violent criminal, but it will appear sooner or later to all. For many, it is Mary – and of course, that which she speaks for, the Trinity that is One God – who helps them to outrun the wolf. I, at least that one day, believed and was grateful for her swift and grace- filled gate.
I will have several more blogs on Medjugorje over the next few weeks. I might break them up occasionally with some other topic, but there was so much that happened on our nine - day stay that I feel I must write about it before time takes the memories away. Until next time, FK
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