Whatever They Are
Frankly, I’m glad we still live in a world where headlines such as, “Vatican moves to assert more control over claims of supernatural sightings” can still appear, as this one did today, in The Washington Post. The story concerns the willy-nilly way in which bishops have been characterizing unexplained visions and apparitions over the centuries. Too often, the Church has ended up legitimizing dubious supernatural claims, such as Jesus appearing in a slice of toast. Then you have to canonize the toast and it’s a whole mess. Il Papa has decreed that, henceforth, “only the Vatican decides” what is truly of supernatural origin, and what is not.
Regular readers know I am intrigued with all manner of bizarre phenomena. I love this stuff, and have come to accept that the world contains a base level of high strangeness that intrudes upon each of us now and again.
Most people have events from their lives they cannot explain. Maybe a ghost or a bigfoot sighting, or a dream visitation that seemed more real than our waking reality. Maybe you had a near death experience or heard a voice speak to you from within the confines of your head – maybe the voice even made predictions. It could have been a miraculous healing, or a memory of a past life. An answered prayer. Or something as simple as thinking of somebody just before they call. And girl, you know I love me some UFO sightings, encounters, and abductions. All of it, to me, falls under the general rubric of “what the fuck”?
Whether or not any of these events are “real” isn’t that interesting to me. No doubt many – most – of them are simple misinterpretations of everyday occurrences. But not all. That’s the thing that keeps me thinking about this stuff way more than I should. Not all.
So what do we do with the small number of cases that cannot be explained away? Approximately 70,000 people witnessed, for example, “The Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. For those unfamiliar with the story, an “angel” or “Lady of the rosary” appeared to three Portuguese children over a series of months. One of the children asked the Lady to perform a miracle. The Lady responded that the miracle would occur in October.
On October 13, 1917, a massive group formed in Cova da Iria to witness the promised miracle. There’s a lot of witness testimony:
“I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun, which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zig-zag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment." — Rev. Joaquim Lourenço
And this one from an unintentional witness who was miles away:
“On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda" – Alfonso Lopes Vieira, poet.
Interestingly, descriptions of the event varied among witnesses, with some seeing the sun moving erratically in the sky, or spin on its axis, or turn various colors. Some didn’t see anything.
How do we make sense of stuff like this? Apparently, the bishops haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Neither has anybody else. For thousands of years, we’ve been trying to understand our world and, for thousands of years, the more we look, the more mysteries we uncover. The most obvious is one I’ve mentioned before: we don’t even know what from what 96% of the universe is made.
We used to know everything about the universe: the sun and planets and all the stars in the celestial heavens revolved around the earth, the center of all, with Man in charge of the whole kit and caboodle.
How do we know less now than we did thousands of years ago? We used to have a ready explanation for everything - God did it and it’s not for us to know His ways. Then Nietzsche threw a pity party because we killed God and now we’re left with a more nuanced, and sadder, view of the world.
Sadder because our materialist science doesn’t allow for miracles. If the world operates along understandable and predictable physical laws, then events that do not respect those physical laws cannot exist. Whatever you think you saw, you didn’t see. Whatever you experienced, you didn’t experience. You think you did, but you didn’t. Science operates along the principle that all mysteries can be solved. It’s a good principle, made all the better by the fact that the world doesn’t seem to be cooperating.
I’m glad we’ve got this world, a world in which the Pope can still issue a sternly-worded edict placing operational control of all ghostbusting strictly in the hands of the Vatican. I prefer a world in which Schrodinger’s cat really is alive and dead at the same time. A world in which thoughts and ideas and people can become entangled in ways that cannot be readily explained. I prefer a world in which unexplained objects zip around our skies and in our seas. I like a world in which mysterious beings assume bizarre forms and pop around from time to time, whatever they are. Whatever we are.
I tend to rely on rational thought, perhaps to a fault (as it probably makes me a very boring person). I have to believe that every phenomenon, no matter how mystifying, comes with an underlying scientific explanation, even if we can’t quite put our fingers on it. Like, there was probably a time when the aurora borealis was seen as a reward from God for having avoided masturbation for some prescribed period of time or something like that. Now we really understand the science behind the aurora borealis… so Kramer on!
As the saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. The danger is in the people who know a little and then proclaim to know everything.