A digest of what’s been going on at my Substack newsletter since last I told you about it:

Thoughts about ‘Fatima’ — The Movie & The Event

The other night I watched on Netflix the 2020 drama Fatima. It’s based on the 1917 apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in the Portuguese village. The apparitions meant a lot to me when I was Catholic. As an Orthodox Christian, I don’t know what to think of them. It is clear that something supernatural happened — the 70,000 people who were there to witness the final apparition on October 13, 1917, all saw signs and wonders — but what does it mean? As a Catholic, I accepted it, and my wife and I made a pilgrimage to Fatima as part of our 1997 honeymoon. As an Orthodox Christian, the Fatima messages contain religious claims that I cannot accept. Again, I don’t know how to regard them now.

I watched the movie to see how the filmmakers treated the material. It’s a simple story: three shepherd children claimed to receive messages from the Virgin, who appeared regularly to them, once a month, for six months. Their claims were initially disbelieved by the church and certainly by officials of the anti-clerical government. The children were pressed very hard by authorities, but never varied their story. On the date of the final apparition, 70,000 people gathered, including atheist scoffers, and all saw spectacular solar phenomena. One of the skeptics, a prominent atheist newspaper editor from Lisbon, published a full testimony detailing what he saw.

All of that is in the movie, but what makes it stand out is the human side of the event. The mother of Lucia, the prime visionary, is often angry with her daughter for the trouble the child’s visions bring to the family. I laughed out loud at the rosary-hawkers making their way through the Fatima crowds. When my wife and I arrived in Fatima by bus on a gray, drizzly January day, we had to walk down the main street in the village to get to the basilica. It was a grotesque display of vulgar capitalism: shop after shop with glow-in-the-dark Madonnas in the window, kitschy pious junk, Fatiburger, the John Paul II Snack Bar, etc. It inspired revulsion, a real moneychangers-in-the-temple feeling in us.

But then we finally arrived at the vast plaza outside the basilica, shown here in this drone photo:

 

And we saw so many people walking on their knees, across the wet pavement, towards the church, their hands clasped in prayer. In front of us passed a family: a husband holding a baby, his mother (or mother-in-law), and his wife on her knees, moving forward slowly. It seemed to us that they were thanking the Virgin for her prayers in helping them have this baby. I felt ashamed for having passed such harsh judgment on the kitsch, bearing in mind that the people who were humble enough to approach the basilica on their knees were probably the same people who would buy that junky stuff to mark their visit. I had no doubt whose hearts were more pleasing to God.

Watching the movie the other night made me think of how stressful those events must have been for everyone involved — the children, their parents, the parish priest, and the hostile anticlericalist officials. I’m not sure how many of the details were pulled from the historical record, but there’s one scene in which Lucia’s farmer father discovers that apparition-seekers have trampled the field where his family’s crops are growing. They don’t give it a second thought; they are there to see the Mother of God. But Lucia’s father has to think about it, because this is how he feeds his family. The gift of the Holy Virgin’s favor to Lucia comes with real burdens to her family.

I pitied her mother too. Lucia’s mother is very pious, and consumed by anxiety over her son Manuel, who is off fighting in the Great War. You get the feeling that she is doing everything she can to hold herself together during this stressful time, and that the last thing she needs is a daughter who claims that she’s seeing the Virgin Mary. In fact, it’s the mother’s piety that causes her to lash out in anger at her daughter; the woman can’t imagine that the Holy Virgin would condescend to appear to humble country people like them.

Seriously: what would you think if one of your children said that the Virgin Mary was appearing to her? How would you handle the curiosity of the neighbors — both those who wanted your child’s blessing, and those who hated her for her claims? What if you were a priest, and this was happening in your parish? I once knew a Catholic priest who was on the pastoral staff at the Conyers, Georgia, church where a member claimed to have visions of the Virgin throughout the 1990s (visions that were never approved by the Catholic Church). He told me it was a real burden, because so many people were only interested in spiritual fireworks, and didn’t want to talk about about ordinary, meat-and-potatoes Christianity.

This was a bumper sticker you could see at the time:

 

Here in south Louisiana, where I live, in the 1980s, the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, were a big deal for Catholics. Many from here joined the throngs who went to the Bosnian town where six young people claimed to have apparitions of her. I first became aware of them in college at LSU, when a girl I used to see out at the bars came back from summer break as a strictly observant Catholic. Her parents had taken her to Medjugorje that summer, and she had a profound conversion. Later, I became friends with a Louisiana priest who was a passionate proponent of Medjugorje, and who associated himself with a local woman who was not a visionary, but was some sort of mystic who prophesied that a shrine they maintained down the bayou would be a refuge in the coming “Chastisement.”

That priest and the mystic are both dead. The shrine was condemned by the Diocese, and is no longer there, I understand. The things they predicted would happen did not happen.

The priest who married my wife and me in 1997 had been an agnostic before he agreed to go to Medjugorje with his parents. He too had a dramatic conversion, and eventually entered the priesthood. His parents were involved in what he later would describe as a Medjugorje cult, and his father was taken advantage of financially by it. I haven’t spoken to this priest in many years, but I recall that he had grown very skeptical of Medjugorje, though he still acknowledged that many graces had come from there. I haven’t given Medjugorje any thought for a long time, but the Catholic authorities I paid the most attention to had decided that it was likely a hoax (Rome has not yet officially ruled on it one way or the other).

All in all, it seems that the dramatic irruption of the supernatural into the everyday could bring as many problems as blessings. Or at least these happenings are of ambiguous benefit, because they all have to be mediated through the crooked lens of our humanity. One of my favorite stories in the Gospel is the one in which Jesus frees the demoniac chained in the cemetery, exorcising him and sending his demons into a herd of swine. After seeing this possessed man restored to his right mind by this itinerant preacher, did the townspeople give thanks for the man’s deliverance? Of course not! They begged Jesus to go away.

I say that’s one of my favorite stories not because I am encouraged by it, but because it reveals human nature. They had just witnessed a spectacular miracle. They did not want to believe such a thing could happen, because it overturned their understanding of how the world works. All my life I have known people who prefer the pain they know to the possibility of being delivered into a future free of pain. Why would people refuse liberation? Maybe because with freedom comes responsibility. Having seen the miracle Jesus performed in delivering the demoniac, those people couldn’t unsee it. He disrupted the order of their world — and therefore, he must be banished.

It can be hard to understand where those Gadarenes were coming from. What kind of crackpots tell a man who has performed that kind of miracle to hit the road? Wouldn’t you want to know what he has to say about how to live? Well, it’s easier to grasp when you watch a movie like Fatima, and you see how some of the people — Lucia’s mother, most especially — react. Her life was stressful enough without having this crazy thing — a supposed apparition of the Virgin to her child! — added to it. Catholics in Portugal were under a lot of pressure from the secular, anticlerical government. The Fatima film shows that the Church authorities were frightened by the apparition claims at first, in part because they did not want to draw persecution onto the Church. It’s all too human to want things to stay manageable.

I think many people say that if we would only see a miracle, then they would believe in God. It’s not true. It might be true for some, but I think those who are not disposed to believe will always find an explanation for a miracle. Even those who believe it might not be changed by it. I have told many times the story of how a priest and a charismatically gifted woman came to my mom and dad’s house after my dad’s father died in 1994, and we had poltergeist activity at the house. I was down from Washington for my grandfather’s funeral, and experienced it myself. My father saw the gifted woman discern that it was my grandfather’s spirit — she sensed that there was something hot in a closet that she needed; my mom dug and found our only framed photo of my grandfather behind a board there — and that he lingered because he needed my father to forgive him so he could move on. What those strangers didn’t know was that my grandfather had badly broken my dad’s heart in his final years, but that my dad faithfully served him all the same. Now came this priest and a mystic, telling my father that God had allowed his late father to appeal to him for forgiveness — and that my dad had the power to set his father free by saying, “You are forgiven.”

My dad spoke those words. The priest blessed the house, then later said a mass for the peace of my grandfather’s soul. I was a new Catholic at the time, and though I didn’t expect my folks to convert to Catholicism, I thought this would surely bring my dad back to regular churchgoing.

It did not. It didn’t even make him more forgiving, not in the least. Yet all his life, he would testify that what he had seen and experienced that day was true. It wasn’t until very late in his life, in 2015, that he admitted that he too needed to be forgiven by his son (or by anybody). But thanks be to God, he did, and he died in peace. Still, if my dad had taken that extraordinary grace he had been given on that day in 1994 to heart, and let it change his way of seeing the world, how much better would his life had been? Would the brokenness he left behind in the family exist at all? We will never know.

Forgive me, I’m rambling. But listen, I think of the Russian writer in Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. He is so lost in his head, and mired in sorrow. In this scene, the writer traverses the nave of a ruined medieval abbey, and we hear a voice — the voice of the Holy Virgin — begging God to reach out to him:

God says that He speaks to the writer, but the writer can’t hear him. God says He reveals Himself to the writer, but the writer has not eyes to see.

This is me. I am someone who believes in miracles and apparitions — not automatically, but I certainly believe they can exist — but I am also someone who is often so caught up in his own head that he can’t perceive the voice or the presence of the Lord in everyday life. I don’t judge my dad for failing to integrate what he saw and heard that day into his life. If I received fully the graces God has given me through seeing miracles and wonders, I would be a saint. I am not a saint, I regret to inform you. And here we perceive the reason for the sorrow of the parish priest in Conyers, who wearied of the people who came seeking God in the extraordinary, but who gave barely a second thought to the fact that they could receive Him in the miracle of the Eucharist.

Here are the first eleven minutes of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Here we see the Russian writer Gorchakov and his Italian translator Eugenia approaching a rural Italian church where a famous painting of the Madonna hangs. Peasant women have the habit of coming to pray before the image, to ask for the Madonna to help them conceive. Gorchakov sourly refuses to go into the church, but Eugenia wants to see the painting. She is beautiful and sophisticated, and really stands out among the modestly clad pious women. A sexton, perhaps, asks her if she’s there to pray for a baby, or to be spared of one. No, she says, she’s just here to look. He tells her that those who want something must be prepared to go on their knees — to sacrifice. Eugenia tries to kneel, but can’t. She lacks faith.

But the faithful experience a miracle. Watch:

This is the consistent message of the movie: if you want to understand, you have to be prepared to sacrifice — your pride, your worldliness, your nostalgia, your idols.

What does that say to me? I wonder. I struggle with this every day. Tarkovsky said that art is not meant to convey ideas, but rather to prepare the soul for death by harrowing it so that the soul is capable of turning to the good. If I do manage to write a book about the re-enchantment of the world, please know that it began with this Tarkovsky movie.

Yeah, I really need to think more deeply and systematically about this new book idea. How do we prepare ourselves to receive the graces of God’s presence? We may never see a bona fide miracle, but God is everywhere present, and fills all things. If we can’t sense him, that is because of our own weakness. Our souls need harrowing so that the seeds of faith planted in them can bear fruit.

My readers have received a lot of my thoughts about Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a film that haunts me like nothing else in recent experience.

The Seeker

I tracked down an extraordinary young man I met once in Alaska, who told me about an experience he had recently had in a cave in the Himalayas. Jesus appeared to him. He converted to Orthodox Christianity. I tracked him down because I had stumbled across some things he had written online. Turns out he’s now an ordained Orthodox deacon, husband, and father, living in small-town Washington. From that long interview:

Living with a girlfriend in Eugene, Oregon, he considered himself a devotee of Krishna, but had also found his way into shamanism. One night he and his girlfriend called a local shaman in to bless their house. During the night, they heard their dog barking furiously in the next room. When they woke up, they saw some sort of ghostly creature run from the living room, cross their bedroom, and go through the wall into the next door apartment. Their frightened dog ran into the bedroom with them, and crawled into their bed. Suddenly, they saw a six foot “three-dimensional shadow” standing at the foot of their bed. They covered themselves and the dog with a blanket, in terror. Frangipani began chanting a Hindu prayer, hoping to make the thing go away.

They found out shortly thereafter that their next-door neighbor, who was into a very dark form of shamanism, had a crush on Frangipani’s girlfriend, and had put some sort of curse on them. Their dog was never healthy after that. He kept coughing up some kind of black goo that the vet couldn’t explain. They realized that they would have to put him down out of mercy. They arranged with the shaman to go up on a nearby mountain and ritually strangle the dog, offering it as a sacrifice to make whatever demonic thing had attacked them desist.

(“Wait, you strangled your dog?!” I said.

“Yes. Simon,” he said, in a tone that conveyed, can you believe how insane I was?)

During the sacrificial ceremony, the shaman started chanting om, the most sacred sound in Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism). Back home in Eugene, and sitting on his back patio, Frangipani had a vision. He saw appear before him the om symbol, and looking through it, he saw a representation of the Hindu god Shiva.

 

“That was like the Bat Signal calling me to India,” he recalls.

“I went to India in search of the Source,” he tells me. “I had been summoning different beings through yoga meditation, but I realized after the vision that I was done in America. I wanted to go to a place where they had levitating monks and bleeding statues, to see if it was all real. I broke up with my girlfriend, got rid of everything, and bought a one-way ticket to India, just me and my backpack.

Frangipani made his way to the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala, in northeastern India. But even that didn’t satisfy him. Buddhism satisfied him intellectually, but it did not satisfy his heart. He felt that he was at an impasse.

“I looked at the map and said I want to go to the Source, as far as I can in the mountains without going to China,” he says. “I wanted to go to the source of the Ganges. There’s this power there, and I wanted to go to its summit.”

Signposts Of Enchantment

We’ve been talking at length about anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s new book How God Becomes Real. One of the things that has to happen for the experience of God to become real to people, Luhrmann writes, is for them to shift their “faith frame” to make experiences of the numinous possible. In other words, you have to believe that these things can happen in order for them to happen. It’s not universally true; people can and do have inexplicable supernatural things happen to them despite being unbelievers prior to the event. Luhrmann is talking about what happens most of the time.

I told my readers that my own faith frame changed many years ago. I began to recall all the supernatural manifestations I have seen in my adult life, and I was struck by how many of them there have been. Here’s one:

There was that time in early 1994 when, after praying the rosary intensely, for weeks, asking for the Holy Virgin to help me decide whether or not to return to Washington, I accepted the job without having received a sign. I went into a bedroom at the country house where I was staying to say a rosary of thanksgiving for what I was sure was her help, and also to ask her to “hold the hand” of my friend K., who was visiting that weekend, and going through a painful divorce. As I prayed the second decade of the Glorious Mysteries, the room filled with sunlight — the only time the sun came out that gray January day — and the aroma of roses. It lasted for that one decade only. When I finished praying, I went upstairs, stunned by the event, and started making up the bed in my bedroom, trying to figure out what had just happened.

K. came in from her walk in the garden, came up the stairs, and burst into my bedroom holding her right hand out to me. “Smell this!” she said, her eyes wide.

Her hand smelled as if she were holding a bouquet of roses.

“Did you wash your hand with floral soap?” I asked.

She shook her head, no.

“Did you use perfume?”

“No. I heard you upstairs and figured you were making up beds, so I came up to help you. I rubbed my nose, and for some reason my hand smells like roses!”

I told her what I had prayed for her while she was out in the garden. And I told her what had happened to me. She dropped her hand. Her mouth fell open. Then the aroma of roses went away.

(She later moved to California, remarried happily, and became the mother of two beautiful children.)

Readers Write

My Substack newsletter focuses not on the news, and on culture war stuff, but on religion, spirituality, and other aspects of life, all written with an eye towards finding things that give us hope and purpose. A reader wrote last week to say these discussions have been helping him:

I used to live in an enchanted world. Over the course of a couple of years, some bad things happened to me, I made some bad decisions, and the end result was that I cut myself off from my capacity for enchantment. I could tell the stories if you’re interested, but they would be very boring to anyone who is not me.

Now, five years after that period, a part of me that I thought was long dead is waking up. Your newsletter and the stories you share in it are a big part of that. Other things have contributed to this awakening as well. Maybe God is bringing these healthy influences into my life to lead me back to Him?

I had a strange experience this morning after reading today’s edition. Instead of going about my usual morning routine, something prompted me to write in my journal. I wrote about how I despaired of returning to the enchanted world in which I grew up and about which you have written at length over the past few months. I thought that I had destroyed the faculties that I once possessed for perceiving this world and engaging with it.

Over the course of the next hour, though, even as I wrote about being cut off from the spiritual, I felt the old sensations I had once experienced returning to my body, as vivid as they had ever been, if not more so. I was aware that the spiritual part of my being was not dead. I had silenced it because it was in pain. “How can you expect me to show you the glory of God in the beauty of a sunrise if my leg is caught in a bear trap?”, it seemed to say. I had grown tired of my soul’s wounded scream, so I silenced it.

It seems like part of me, my Christian soul, if you will, has been living in hell. This morning, it told me what its hell has been like. This part of me wanted to die, to dissolve and escape the pain, but it couldn’t. It wanted to run or fight the source of its pain, but it couldn’t do that, either. I was preventing it from doing so. It was trapped, helpless and suffering, in a kind of living death. Scary stuff. I almost screamed at the top of my lungs in the shower, but I managed to keep the scream an internal one so that I didn’t freak my wife out too much. (I kind of want to go to a lonely open area at night and let out a roar like a wounded lion to get this out of my system). Did I see anything float across the room or hear disembodied voices? No, but I felt like I was connected to something more than myself nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m no longer having an intense spiritual experience, but things are looking up. Keep the newsletters coming and please write your book!

The book to which he refers is a book I’m contemplating doing about the ways we can learn to see the world through the eyes of enchantment — that is, to perceive the presence of God everywhere, filling all things.

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Oh, and you get more pictures of Roscoe, here expressing his “I’m never trusting you people again” sentiment after coming home last week from a day at the vet, who had to pull two teeth: