Waiting For The Miracle

There Were Lots Of Invitations, And I Know You Sent Me Some In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around. Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of “mass hallucinations”, this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time. I got kind of obsessed with this; you can read my preliminary investigations in this , this , and this post. One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles - at least ten! - similar to Fatima. Most were associated with Marian apparitions, but one was at a Buddhist temple. Bigfoot only gets sighted by lone hikers; ghosts are only ever in the corner of your eye; UFOs are just blurs in the sky. Of all the countries and outposts in the vast empire of the unexplained, it’s only this one phenomenon - the spinning, multicolored sun - that regularly gets seen by thousands of people at once, in broad daylight. Speaking of “regularly”, there’s one spot where it continues even today. Fifty years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Now those children are well past middle-age, but she continues to come. Three of them report that she’s appeared less frequently as the years go by, but the others still see her every day at 6:40 sharp. Travelers to Medjugorje, especially those passing through around 6:40, report a slew of miracles, including the spinning sun. Certainly this is true of those whose hearts are pure. But even the atheists get lucky sometimes. I was shocked never to have heard about this before. There’s a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy! So in early April, I and my extremely-accommodating, long-suffering wife flew to Dubrovnik, rented a car, and drove down a series of windy mountain roads toward the Bosnian border, hoping for a miracle. The Sands Of Time Were Falling, From Your Finger And Your Thumb Our story begins at 6:40 on June 24, 1981, at the very beginning of the slow-motion collapse of Yugoslav communism. Two teenage girls walking in the countryside suddenly perceived a glowing woman on a nearby hill, but were too scared to approach. The next night, a group of villagers came to investigate. Most of them saw nothing, but six children - including the two original visionaries - saw the woman again. Compelled by a force they couldn’t understand, they ran up the hill at a speed later determined to be impossibly fast, then fell to their knees on the rocky ground. “Be not afraid,” said the figure, was now clearly visible as a girl about their own age. She introduced herself as the Virgin Mary, and said she had chosen this town for a special role in her project of bringing peace to the world. “Give us a sign,” pled one of the children. The Virgin suggested they check the time, a suggestion so bizarre that they instead remained transfixed on her. She said 1 that she would give them ten secrets to keep until the appointed time. In addition, each would play their own special role bringing her message to a different demographic: Vicka and Jackov to the sick, Ivan to the young, Ivanka to families, Marija to the souls in Purgatory, and Mirjana to the unbelievers. Then she vanished, promising to return at 6:40 the next night. Mirjana, the girl charged with ministering to the unbelievers, was the first to finally check the time, and found that her watch had reversed. Not in the sense of “it was running backward”, but in the sense of: And as part of her ministry to the unbelievers, it was Mirjana who wrote the definitive book about the apparitions: As an unbeliever, I was happy to have it, and it’s my source for the rest of this story. The next few weeks were a whirlwind demonstration of both the best and worst of humanity. Thousands of pilgrims descended on Medjugorje, begging for scraps of information, miracle cures, or word about the fate of dead relatives. The visionaries tried their best to relay the flood of requests to the Virgin during their daily meetings; she answered some requests and denied others, without obvious pattern. The children’s families and the local priests tried to shield the children from getting totally overwhelmed, from angry unbelievers, and from angry Christians who thought this was a scam and a blasphemy against the Virgin’s name. The Communists interpreted the whole thing as a thre