The Medjugorje Apparitions
Marian apparitions are a subject I have not learned much about, but last week a Catholic friend of mine showed me a newsletter from Medjugorje.
Medjugorje is a small village in Bosnia-Hercegovina which since 1981 has been host to a series of alleged visitations - and messages - from the Virgin Mary to a small group of 'visionaries' who were children when the apparitions began, and are now adults in their 30s. Its status according to the Catholic Church is unconfirmed, and in some cases there is outright hostility to the idea that these messages may be genuine. Nevertheless, it has become something of an unofficial pilgrimage site.
Other than that a link to this place has appeared in my backyard, the messages themselves interest me for several reasons: they're freely available online, they're recent, they're regular and ongoing, they are of a type loosely consistent with other aspects of 'mental mediumship' (such as trance channelling and automatic writing), and the content has a character I have come to associate with the spiritual messages I personally consider 'interesting': a quiet simplicity and gentleness, and for such a war-torn piece of the world, a constant emphasis on prayer and peace.
One of the criticisms of the Medjugorje communications is that there is nothing overtly provably supernatural about them. But is that how we would judge the authenticity of a communication from any ordinary living person? The other major criticism seems to be that this instance of Mary seems to quietly ignore much of the Catholic bureaucracy, chooses her own visionaries and happily fellowships with them regardless of Church procedures and rulings. Which is probably more of a problem for Catholics than it is for Protestants (in fact for Protestants it's actually the opposite).
Reading these messages I notice 'Mary of Medjugorje' talks quite a lot about the Rosary, and has turns of phrase ('Dear children... I want to present you to God without sin...') very reminiscent of St John and St Paul.
According to Wikipedia, there are two schools of thought on the origin of the Rosary. The modern view is that it evolved gradually over centuries; however older tradition has it that the Rosary was given to St Dominic (founder of the Dominican order) directly by Mary in the 13th century. Something about the Mudjugorje messages (and the way this Mary refers to the prayer of the Rosary as hers) makes me wonder if that could in fact be at least partially true. Any time there is an ongoing, regular, intelligible spiritual communication it seems to centre around a call to meditation, often involving a simple system, and the Rosary (a bit like the Workbook of A Course In Miracles) has a sense of being just that kind of device: a mnemonic or spiritual tool, easily learned, easily memorised, portable, demanding little from its users except attention. Just looking at it quickly with an outsider's eye, there seems to be a sort of elegance that pops out and makes me think 'this could be a designed thing, and a teaching aid at that'. A sort of extreme compactness, a feeling I associate with survival kits, first aid manuals, and textbook quick-reference cards. Procedures slimmed down to essentials.
(I get a similar kind of feeling, on first glance, from Reiki, and indeed its inventor claimed to have 'received' it. But I've not investigated Reiki and still am not sure how to go about integrating my generally safe initial feelings about it with my religious scruples that say 'anything spiritual and not specifically Christian could be dangerous'.)
All Saints
This Sunday we celebrated All Saints Day at the little Anglican church I go to. It got me thinking about just what it means to believe in saints, and whether it has any connection with the taboo of all good Protestants everywhere on speaking with the dead.
The culture of saints is strongest in the Catholic church, I think, but as a new Anglican (I suppose I am; I mean I go there and I take communion, but I was baptised a non-denominational Christian in a Pentecostal context; and I have sympathies with a wide range of Christian tendencies from Quaker to Baptist to Anabaptist to Trappist to Spiritualist; the list gets bewilderingly long and yet remains bewilderingly Christian as I grow older) -- as a person new to the Anglican tradition, they do still stick out. St Mary's Addington is dedicated to guess who, and the phrase "May Mary and all the saints pray for us" in our liturgy is beautiful, but not one I'd encountered much in the evangelical-charismatic Pentecostal/Baptist/Vineyard world. (What I used to consider 'genuine Bible Christianity' while somehow filtering out that there do exist much older organisations that worship Jesus; or worship the Father and believe in Jesus, depending on how exactly one wants to phrase a distinction which is complicated and simple at the same time. But more on that later, perhaps.)
The most famous saint (if you don't count Jesus himself; and is he not a human?) is of course Mary (of Nazareth, not Magdala; though the other Mary is getting more popular press lately). I never used to get into Mary (you practically have to hand in your badge as a Protestant of *any* kind if you express interest in her; at least in any active saintly capacity, as anything other than a nice Palestinian girl who had a superstar child). But there's a tapestry of Mary on the wall and it's one I really like. Plus I've read a few stories about Marian visitations, or near-death experiences, and they seem to have similar resonances. She sounds, by all accounts, as if she's a very real, very loving person who has interesting things to do.
How does one square the idea of there being actually existing saints - in the Catholic sense of ordinary people who actually have God's ear, or some kind of permission to violate the Prime Directive separating heaven and earth - authority to listen and intervene on their own behalf?
How, when one comes right down to it, does one square the idea of Jesus of Nazareth, an otherwise perfectly ordinary person, being such an entity as 'the Christ' - whatever exactly that means - but seems to involve having keys to all the locked doors of the universe, at once, everywhere?
From a Jewish or Islamic perspective, the idea of a human being 'the Son of God' is as blasphemous as the idea of a human 'ascending to Godhood' sounds to a Christian; or as praying to a saint and expecting a miracle not in God's name, but in that of a mere human, sounds to a Protestant. But why do we believe in one, and not the other? If Jesus is truly human, are his friends not also human? If Jesus truly has the Christ power or title or role (and again, I can't really comprehend what that might be; except that it makes Superman, the Silver Surfer and Santa Claus look like wannabes) - then does he also give that to his friends?
What does 'to be a Christian' mean other than to have some portion of what it is that Jesus had (and presumably still has)? Or can such a thing as 'unity with the Divine' even exist in portions less than the whole lot? Can it even be given singly, to one person here and there and not to the whole intersecting mass of humanity, everywhere, across all time and forever? Can God Himself be divided? By definition (at least by the Jewish definition which Christianity inherited) I'm not sure the One God can be anything other than One.
And what does being 'a saint' mean other than the humility to listen to cries for help and the authority to perform miracles - either in this life or the next?
Or: are saints merely a lapse, an error, a slide from true faith in the One Living God Who Alone Answers Prayer back to polytheism? Are saints a back door to necromancy, consultation with the unquiet dead? If (and I am not now speaking hypothetically) - if an entity appears in a psychic channel (which is a fancy term for saying 'a voice speaks to you in your mind') - claiming to be a saint, and giving reasonably good evidence for in fact being that saint, and doing the things saints are popularly supposed to do (which is: answering questions, giving knowledge, performing miracles, pointing the way to Jesus, or to Christ, or to God): if this happens, how should we react to it?
If there are no saints, and if all contact between the dead and the living is forbidden, the province of evil, then presumably any entity claiming to be such a thing would be either an illusion or worse. But what if it just turned up in your head, unexpected, uninvited? Can evil powers do that? I do believe that there do exist limited spiritual entities or powers or personalities who aren't good friends. But all indications are that getting in touch with one of them requires first doing serious damage to one's soul; much like bacteria get into a wound, or the old myth about vampires and invitations. If there is bad stuff around, just how thin is the veil between this world and the next, and how afraid should we be of sneezing - or thinking - in the wrong place and attracting demons?
But it's so tempting. The Anglo-Catholics have some really neat saints. St Anthony of Padua - patron saint of lost things. How do you get that job, anyway? Is it like you go up to heaven and say 'you know what, now I understand my eternal vocation. Healing, ennh. I've always just wanted to help people find... stuff. You know, missing stuff. Car keys, that sort of thing.'
It's probably a sign of my inherent geekiness that I could see myself actually signing up for that. It sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
Well, that or psychopomp. Escorting people into the afterlife would rock. 'Hi, guess what, you're dead. Now you're going to find out what's really going on. Trust me, it'll blow your mind.' It would be like the afterlife equivalent of preschool educator. They'd be all totally random little bundles of joy and you'd just almost want to die all over again to get that seeing it for the first time feeling.
Or saint of matching lost socks.
Is there an opening for a saint of PHP debugging? Or did that come from the other place?
Rocking the House
I was out at the Crowded House / Supergroove / Pluto concert this weekend, which was great, except for being way too loud (a few decibels above pain level; my ears stopped hurting after about twenty-four hours). My brother and his wife, having done this a few times before, wore earplugs. For whatever reason I didn't bring any; I think a part of me wanted to experience such a big event (the reforming of Supergroove actually interested me more than the reforming of Neil Finn's band) as directly as possible, disintermediated. For future reference, though: earplugs == comfort.
The first two acts were lit by simple coloured strobes, and then Crowded House got the works: searchlights scanning the crowd, a multilayered backdrop/set that slowly erected itself piece by piece between songs, projected colours and logos over curtains over scultures. And Neil doing a perfectly calibrated mix of his new stuff and the old standards which have dominated NZ airwaves for the last twenty years or more. Ending in the big crowd-pleasing finales of not 'Don't Dream It's Over' and 'You'd Better Be Home Soon'. Words everyone knows and can sing along to, in a wall of sound like sticking your head inside a jet engine for four hours that puts you in your own private universe. (A universe of pain, for me, but I could at least appreciate the thought).
It got me thinking, though. Here's a stadium-sized rock concert, one of the defining acts of the Australian/NZ scene, as big as they get in this city. An arena full of people who are all delighted to be there. Huge amounts of talent, creativity and money thrown at the task of translating inspiration to art, art to performance, performance to technology, technology to emotion. Pretty much a peak of the state of the art of the defining art form of our era; an art form that only became possible fifty or so years ago, after electrical amplification techniques invented for or first applied to political rallies became used for entertainment. And I had a flash of how it must have felt in the early days of rock: this new thing, an electrified guitar; a military-specification sonic crowd control weapon wrested from the hands of authoritarianism and war, and repurposed for individualism, for the search for personal happiness and even love.
How it must have felt in those post-war years, the hopes, the fears about technology and for the new baby-boom generation in their cradles, and the silent generation who had been too young to go to war but were old enough now to see a new way to fight. How magical, spiritual the miracle of electrical amplification and the music it created must have seen, at least to some: almost a new form of worship. The Amp, counterpart to the Bomb. The tool for mental revolution.
How much intelligence, how much sincerity, how much dedication, how much time and money was thrown at rock music, and still is! And how powerful a force it was. And I marvelled, with my head in the jet engine, my ears in pain, thinking: how is it that with all this creative power focused on a point - on creativity, art rather than destruction - how is it that the world is still not saved?
The Beats and the sixties generation experimented, did their best to throw their best and brightest minds against the iron cages of the psychic prison that promised only nuclear war; how they randomised their thoughts with drugs and sex and music only to come up short, fail, burn out, defeated by their own hubris, their own darkness, or the sheer impossibility of the task.
(And even that mythology is a lie; the weapons industrial-science complex spawned creativity like the Internet; the entertainment industry was bleak and dirty and controlling, the more so as obscene amounts of money flowed in; teen rebellion was inspired by middle-aged teachers and slickly marketed as a commercial product from the beginning. There was no golden generation, just a bulge in the demographic curve and devastated international rivals and a trade surplus; there was no clash of cultures, just a change in tastes and marketing strategies.)
But still I thought: here I am, in arguably one of the best rock concerts, the best popular art our culture can create; and I feel nothing, or close to it. I feel a wall of sound, I feel a huge display of raw physics; I see beams of physical light shining out from the tiny distant stage; but somehow I expect more. I expect to see beams of spiritual light, feel a wall of spiritual empathy and emotion. I'm gathered in this place with thousands of my fellow citizens and fans; it is an iconic moment; I expect to feel something in the way of unity, somehow touch the vast oversoul that binds us; but I do not. I feel more alone here in my stadium seat in a crowd than at home typing on the Internet.
Why do I expect a spiritual experience from a rock concert? I don't know. A part of me just does.
And I think about fragments I've read in various prophecies and channelled writings: visions of Heaven, visions of a maybe future: thousands of people gathering in stadium-like enclosures, generating that kind of spiritual power that a rock concert does in raw decibels. Prayer concerts. Maybe without a stage even; maybe without a focal point. Maybe everyone comes in as they are, lift their hearts to the heavens, and invisible pyrotechnics begin.
I think maybe there's a time coming when we won't have the energy or infrastructure to run the huge audio amplification systems that power rock as a genre. But maybe this other kind of concert wouldn't even need that. I picture something like an event running for days, weeks even: people come in, people leave; the stadium remains packed. It's quiet. There's no infrastructure to speak of, no organisation; maybe some kind of skeleton organising committee, but without a huge sound and light rig, what actually is there to organise? Food, medical care maybe (and with a shiver, maybe in that possible tomorrow that's no small thing). Maybe things run themselves, anarcho-syndicalist collective style, like the Seattle '99 spokescouncils. There are no performers; the audience are the show. Everyone comes, brings themselves, their hopes, their fears, their visions, their inner stillness; the hush comes; something settles on the crowd. It's like the opening notes of a familiar guitar solo; but it's silent. Or at least, it's silent out there, in the air, but everyone feels it in here.
And the song begins, the song we heard a million years ago and all forgot until only just now. And maybe it doesn't ever stop.
And the house truly gets rocked.
I Am An Acquaintance of Terrorists
Well, one alleged terrorist anyway. Name suppression on the 'Urerewa 17' was lifted late last week and it turns out that I know, or have met, at least one of them in the peace activist scene: Valerie Morse.
I met Valerie in 2003, I think, at the Social Forum Aotearoa when she was heading up Peace Action Wellington. I don't know her well but my impression was that she was sensible, level-headed, and dedicated to antiwar causes.
I can't really picture her with rifles and napalm calling for bloody revolution.