HEART BEAT:A good apparition might urge repentance on those who voted this shower into office, writes MAURICE NELIGAN.
THE MET Éireann website, in particular its rainfall radar, says I’m in an area of heavy precipitation. I can confirm that, by looking out the window. Furthermore the national weather organisation is decidedly gloomy about our ongoing prospects; this accords with the national mood.
I am not alluding this week to the report of An Bord Snip Nua, or the Leas Cross report or the Dublin diocesan report on sexual abuse. I’m not strong enough. Isn’t it quite remarkable that at a time when such serious reports demand our full attention, our legislators have gone on vacation? It makes you wonder if we are entitled to be called a parliamentary democracy at all, when legislation is passed without proper scrutiny and the vital economic decisions are apparently not worthy of debate.
I’m going to write in a most unlearned fashion about miracles and apparitions.
Right now we could certainly do with some of the former. The apparitions on the other hand seem to abound at times of national stress and in general exhort us to be good and repent. We need a good, strong-minded apparition to urge repentance on those who voted this shower into office.
We used be told about such afflictions that one should “offer them up”. We’d offer them up alright, but in the most unregulated of free markets, who would take them?
This subject came to mind following the recent visitation on a tree stump in Rathkeale. Visitation is probably not the right word as the “image” seems to be a fixture. Could one say it appears to be deeply rooted?
It is not an occasional phenomenon, nor is it a wandering statue as in Ballinspittle or a bleeding statue as in Templemore. I haven’t heard recently of further movements in Ballinspittle and, as for Templemore, the phenomenon apparently ceased when the local republicans paid the visionary a visit and suggested to him that a continuation of the wonderful events might prove deleterious to his health. Mind you that was in the bad old days before the Criminal Justice Bill; now the local gardaí could simply have them all removed from circulation.
I have early memories of apparitions near Gaybrook, outside Mullingar. The stories told by those returning made you firmly resolve to cease whatever transgression you might be involved in and that was clearly putting your soul in jeopardy. At or around the same time there were reputed visions at Kerrytown in Donegal and trainloads of devoted pilgrims used to leave Westland Row station to pray at the site. You seldom hear of it now, but on enquiry it seems that people still go there
A patient of mine, lawyer and gentleman, told me of an apparition near the Céide Fields outside Belmullet. At the time he was in training with the Mayo senior football team which had reached the All Ireland Final. When word of the wonders reached them they visited the site; they needed all the help they could get.
When they arrived, there were crowds in a small boggy field praying devoutly. There was no sign of a supernatural presence. They prayed and just as they were about to depart a young boy with a loud-hailer climbed on to a rock in the field and addressed the crowd. “Would yiz stand back for Jaysus sake and give the apparition a chance?”
George Santayana, writer and philosopher, wrote in 1910: “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”
There might be a little bit of the finite contemplating the infinite here. Shortly after my appointment as a consultant cardio-thoracic surgeon in the Mater, my first private patient was referred to me, a very nice lady with a large lung tumour.
I arranged an operation for the following Tuesday. The following morning the lady rang and asked if it could be deferred for a few days as she wished to go to Lourdes. There is no problem with that, I assured her, biting my sceptical tongue.
She duly arrived, calm and and ready for her operation. We did her pre-operative blood tests and repeated her chest X-ray. Much to my astonishment this was now clear. There was no sign of the large tumour that had been there a fortnight before. She was discharged and a further chest X-ray was carried out six weeks later and again a year further on. They were normal, and she was and remained well.
This was not my only experience of an outcome beyond my understanding.
The same George Santayana, who thought miracles must have a scientific explanation in 1910, wrote in 1931: “There is nothing impossible therefore in the existence of the supernatural; its existence seems to me decidedly probable.” I wonder why he changed his mind.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon