Knock is a very special place. It should be full of despair; instead, it is full of a quiet dignity, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
IT WOULD be a mistake to assume that everyone who flocked to Knock to see whether Our Lady would appear or the sun would dance was brought there by religious motives. The rubbish left in the Basilica, the overturned chairs and the near stampede to the doors with no regard for the safety of others suggests strongly otherwise.
Old-fashioned nosiness and a desire to be part of any potential excitement are rooted deep in the human psyche. But equally, not everyone was there out of curiosity or scepticism. Some people genuinely wanted to see something unique that would reinforce their faith. They were not sensation seekers, but spiritual seekers. They worry me far more than the gawpers.
Knock is a very special place. It might be an odd choice of metaphor to describe a rainy shrine in the west as an oasis, but it is. The thin veneer of brittle pretentiousness that marked the Celtic Tiger years was never a feature in Knock.
We human beings like to cling to the illusion that we are in control of our destinies. The modern version is that if we are relentlessly positive, chant our affirmations, cleanse our chakras or whatever, that the universe will rush to fulfil all our wishes. As our mothers would have said, I hope it keeps fine for you.
There is enough human suffering on display in Knock any day to dispel any illusion that life is that simple or easy. It should be a very raw place, full of despair, as you watch parents push children with severe disabilities in wheelchairs, or when your glance falls on a young woman obviously in the last stages of cancer. Instead, it is full of a quiet dignity.
What the alleged “visionaries” brought to Knock was a circus, a tawdry parody of faith, where people pushed and shoved to get the best view, and munched their sandwiches and dropped their wrappers in a church – oblivious to any sense of the sacred.
But forget the merely curious, and those who would flock to news of a UFO. What makes religious people risk solar burn, an untreatable and painful eye condition, in search of spiritual enlightenment? I am reminded of a line from Milton’s Lycidas: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” Few are keen on the image of believers as sheep these days; if, however, you can get past it, the idea that a shepherd has a sacred duty to feed his flock still speaks powerfully as a metaphor.
People are looking for meaning, and they are not being fed. Ironically, Knock is a place where hundreds of volunteers ensure that thoughtfully planned liturgies do feed the soul, but when pilgrims return home, many have no real community of faith to nurture them.
The popularity of New Age texts such as The Secret on one hand, and established spiritual traditions such as Buddhism on the other, illustrate that many people, even religious people, no longer find adequate nourishment in their Christian parish community. A complex mix of factors has led to people looking elsewhere, and among them is a lack of knowledge and formation.
Prof John Haldane, a British Catholic philosopher, spoke in Dublin recently. In an Irish Catholic report, he says there is “a loss of contact with religion that is not really an effect of the onward march of scientific rationalism: it’s got much more to do with a breakdown of society”. In other words, the rise of individualism and hedonism has damaged all sorts of communities, including churches.
He also believes that without a firm intellectual background, faith is like a body without bones – it cannot stand up. Religion degenerates into a form of sentimentalism or superstition. He has a point. There is a surprisingly weak tradition of any kind of public Catholic intellectualism in this country, in comparison to, say, allegedly post-Christian France. Can you imagine a situation in Ireland where politicians of all stripes are defending the right to crucifixes in public places, as they are doing in Italy? However, a head without a heart is pretty useless, too. Catholicism used to be magnificently capable of feeding the senses and the imagination – all those smells and bells were an acknowledgment that we are not just disembodied souls, but that we worship with our hearts, and minds, and bodies, too.
Some atheistic or agnostic commentators have lumped the original apparition at Knock in with the current controversial claims. If you promote one piece of mumbo-jumbo, runs the argument, you can hardly blame people for making statements such as “Our Lady is very angry”. This is like philosopher Daniel Dennett, who had to force himself to forgive people who told him they were praying for him after his heart attack. He wanted to respond: “Thanks, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” In other words, a heartfelt prayer for someone’s recovery was as pointless and useless to him as animal sacrifice.
However, I suspect that this hard-line approach does nothing to discourage the wilder manifestations of religion, or even deadly manifestations, such as fundamentalist-inspired terrorism. Thoughtful, mainstream religion has much more chance of doing that, so lumping all forms of religion together and hoping to undermine them all is extremely short-sighted. Although not, perhaps, as short-sighted as gazing into the sun.