"When Lucia cried, ‘Look at the sun!' the people responded. ... the sun was strangely spinning. It began to revolve more rapidly, more frighteningly. It began to cast off beams of many-colored lights in all directions. .... It is a story of wonder and of terror, too, as the great star challenges the discipline of all the ages it has known." On this day in 1917, at least seventy thousand people gathered for what would be the final miraculous event at Fatíma: another visit of the Lady of the Rosary to the three children at the center of the story - and then this display of celestial uncanniness to the whole assembled crowd. Believers and unbelievers, young and old, unlettered peasants and cynical journalists from the capital, all reported similar sights: the sun appearing as an opalescent disc, at which one could stare without pain; the world being bathed in stained-glass colors, now amethyst, now golden; the wayward star suddenly appearing to plunge toward a guilty earth in a zig-zag careen. People described it as "dancing."
What are we to make of this? True, the most-quoted eyewitness reports were gathered by a priest, but there were similar descriptions in anti-clerical newspapers: simple mass delusion seems unlikely. There are meteorological explanations, from a sun-dog to a stratospheric dust-cloud - and it was certainly a day of wild weather. The Catholic Church accepted the sun's dance as a genuine miracle in 1930, for the doctrinal reason that it was a "sign" serving to call people to faith, and the administrative justification that it was "inexplicable" by other means. It was later casually mentioned that Pope Pius XII regularly saw similar things in his garden at the Vatican.
Flash forward to recent times in the Bosnian village of Međugorje, where, starting in 1981, six Croat children were apparently granted daily visions of the Virgin Mary. Many among the 30 million pilgrims who have since visited report seeing exactly the same solar irregularities. Yet here is the opinion on the subject of the village's American confessor, Father Pavich: "That's a really spooky, sub-cultural spin-off: this craze to see the so-called miracle of the sun. Ain't no more miracle of the sun than the man in the moon! The sun ain't doing nothing up there. Your eyeball's doing it!" And indeed there have been several cases in the medical journals of retinal damage among Međugorje visionaries, acquired by staring at the sun. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, takes a cool– nay, chilly – view of the whole Bosnian phenomenon, due both to the sexual escapades of the priest at its origin and to the vast amounts of money made by those involved in its "faith-based tourism." So, as far as this particular miracle is concerned, it's Fatíma sim; Međugorje ne.
Seeing may be believing, but it's certainly not truth. As optical illusions demonstrate, our visual capacity is innately biased, with strong assumptions about how the world ought to look. This is unavoidable: without pre-suppositions, the firehose of sensory information would simply flood out our brains, leaving little processing power for living. People who, whether through savant disorders or the effect of drugs, do indeed sense the world in all its particularity and power find the experience overwhelming, almost painful. The rest of us edit the sensory world in terms of the normal, parcelling attention to where we expect it will be needed (thus missing, as participants in a famous experiment found, the gorilla crossing the room).
When we do see things out of the ordinary, that is itself a strong spiritual jolt; we stop and stare - and believe, because our previous beliefs have been shaken. It's possible in the lab to reproduce such powerful experiences as a haunting or an out-of-body experience using no more than a low-frequency sound generator and a closed-circuit TV system: all it takes is a tweak of the input, and our brains create a new, miraculous reality. This is what visionaries, poets, artists have always done for us; showing the unexpected glories we have been too busy to see, making us stare at things too powerful to withstand. Look! Look at the sun!
If oyu enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.
