My friend Trevor tends to be this sort of Catholic. They annoy the heck out of the rationalists who insist there must be a material explanation for everything. Such things irritate all those who worship at the altar of good taste. I like television evangelists, faith healers, weeping Madonna,s and the Shroud of Turin for the same reason. ‘After all’, I could almost hear the biretta brigade sneer, ‘it would be so common to accept something as vulgar as miracles!’ I thought of the sort of religious snob who sniffs, ‘Enthusiasm, sir is odious,’ and was delighted because the spinning sun and visions of the Virgin to peasants knocks him for a loop. Furthermore, I got the impression that much Anglican rational religion was more a question of taste than real rationalism. In the midst of staid, respectable, and rational religion, this stuff was clearly scandalous. I was delighted because the weird events upset the status quo. I was not delighted because the miraculous was suddenly giving my faith a booster shot. Maybe I was delighted for the wrong reason. People reported healings, dramatic conversions, speaking in tongues, and people being ‘slain in the Spirit.’ I was skeptical. Folks were passing round ‘miraculous’ photographs with images of Mary appearing in a photo of a rose, strange shafts of light appeared in photos where there was nothing visible to the naked eye at the time. People said their rosaries turned gold when they came back from Medjugorje. What was going on here? Not only was the spinning sun weird, but the place was crawling with stories of spooky goings on. Faced with the whole phenomenon of Medjugorje I had some questions. In addition, many people we spoke to all around the town saw the sun spinning at the same time on those days.Īt the time my own journey of faith had brought me from the default fundamentalism of my upbringing to a middle-of-the-road, somewhat skeptical Anglicanism. I witnessed the same phenomenon on two other days that week. Furthermore, I looked down to the bonnet of the car and saw the spinning disc reflected there as well, so it couldn’t be just my imagination. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Then it seemed to spin back and forth like a Catherine wheel. The sun-which before had been a blaze of light impossible to look at-was now pasted in the sky like a white wafer. Then at six forty on the button Esther gave me an elbow in the ribs. I noticed at the time that the splash of light which was the sun was also reflected as a splash of light in the bonnet of the car below us. The sun was blazing high in the sky in front of us. Time to start the rosary in union with virtually everyone else in the town. On my second day I was sitting on the balcony of our hostel with Esther-a middle-aged Anglican from my own parish. Then everyone finished the rosary by reciting the glorious mysteries. At six-forty every day, after praying the first two sets of mysteries, the visionaries fell to their knees and had their daily visit from Mary. Then at six o’clock in the evening everyone stopped to begin saying the rosary. Mass followed mass in a whole range of languages throughout the day. The large church in the town was in constant use. Part of the orientation was getting used to the prayer routine. On arrival we settled into our hostel and scouted the village to find the main landmarks. There was an extraordinary sense of joy in our group of pilgrims and I eventually succumbed and started having a good time. So, former Evangelical that I was, I climbed on the plane with a mixed load of Anglicans and Catholics to fly to Bosnia. Then someone in the pilgrimage group wiped out my excuse by offering to pay my air fare. He joined a Medjugorje prayer group and twisted my arm to go with them on a visit to the Bosnian town where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have been appearing to some local youngsters.
One of the teenagers in the parish had been to Medjugorje and suddenly got keen on the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I was an Anglican curate when I saw the sun spin.
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