About a month ago I saw an ad for a book called The Meaning of Knock, and I rang the publishers and asked for a copy. It wasn't that I brilliantly guessed that Knock would be in the news. I didn't even know that this week is the anniversary of the apparition, that it occurred on August 21st, 1879. Nor was it the promise of its title: I know that a meaning for Knock can't be handed to me. But something had made me long to try to glimpse, across all this time, the world in which that event happened. Over the last two or three years there have been occasional intuitions of what it might have been like to be living here as the Great Famine started, and then spread, and then enveloped everything. But what about afterwards? What did Ireland feel like afterwards? The apparition at Knock happened within Famine lifetimes. Had it to do with emanations of sadness from the land? Or have apparitions nothing to do with this world here, the world of telegrams and anger?
I would love to feel I understood even for a moment the people who ran from cottage to cottage in the hamlet that was Knock to say that the Blessed Virgin Mary - an Mhaighdean Bheannaithe, to the monoglot Irish-speaker among them - was manifest, rounded and whole, at the gable end of the church. But in a way it is no less difficult to identify with the people around me in the here and now who see statues move, but who more importantly have God and his Mother and the saints as friends, family, lovers.
Questions about perfect faith aren't just addressed to the silent past. One of the distinctive things about living in Ireland is that most of the people, apparently, inhabit a parallel world which is invisible and intangible.
Meanwhile, a sizeable minority never believed in that world or have lost belief in it. There is an underlying denial of each others' truth here, instead of the consensus there must be in countries where they all believe the same thing, or they all don't care about belief, or their beliefs are minimalist and as reasonable as belief can be.
No code of manners between believers and unbelievers has been worked out in Ireland. But then, this is a culture that rarely provokes unnecessary confrontation. And it hasn't been necessary to have a protocol. In practice, belief has ruled.
It is not just that the institutional Catholic Church and individual practising Catholics have had such power. It has been a matter of tact. Belief is more respected than scepticism. On family occasions as on State occasions the sceptics go amiably along with the practices of the believers. I don't think one single gesture of conscientious atheism has ever been made in public life in Ireland. Yet there are few late converts to belief, either.
THE sheer beauty and strangeness of a phenomenon like the apparition at Knock seems to me to have been lost somewhere between the two positions. One lot almost domesticates it, as if nothing could be more natural than that Our Lady and St Joseph and St John the Evangelist, and an altar on which stood a lamb "about eight weeks old", should appear in a radiant light and in perfect dryness against the wall of a nondescript Irish church on a wet summer evening. The other lot don't think about such things at all.
Alternatively, one lot tries to harness supernatural manifestations to some mundane agenda. And the other lot, similarly, try to discredit belief in the supernatural, in the interests of what they see as truth. We are extremely rich in otherworldly narratives, but we haven't learnt to let their meanings speak for themselves.
It seems to me most suggestive that Our Lady of Knock said nothing. No verbal or written message was given by any of the figures. And the people who saw the figures didn't mind this silence at all. I can't imagine anything more interesting than this silence, whether the event was "real" or in some way imagined. Another aspect of the event beyond ordinary invention is how it ended.
One young woman who saw the apparition, Judith Campbell, ran home because her mother was sick. She found her mother "in a swoon at her cottage door. She had heard the news that had been brought to her house and had made an attempt to go to the church gable. Judith ran back to the gable and asked for assistance. Those who were there rushed to the aid of her mother but returned hurriedly. On their arrival at the gable, there was no apparition to be seen. The rain was dashing on the gable wall and all was in darkness."* Weren't the priorities of that little group wonderfully sound?
We know the touching details. The priest was drying his rain-soaked clothes in front of the fire in his thatched cottage. His housekeeper was out talking in the road. Turf was being brought in from the bog on a donkey. There was no reason, so to speak, for the Queen of Heaven to enter time from eternity and bestow herself on that entirely unregarded corner of the Earth.
Unless, of course, you believe that that is indeed the value of Lourdes and Fatima and Knock, that they take the absolute nobodies of the Earth, such as children who herd animals, or the penniless peasants of Mayo, and in a twinkling make them in their own and others' eyes the most fortunate people on Earth.
And that was perhaps the biggest surprise to me, in The Meaning of Knock. The people weren't particularly unhappy in the first place. And the apparition made them very happy. The whole thing had and has an almost un-native joyousness. It has nothing to do with the violent angst of one kind of contemporary conservative Catholicism.
The fact remains, however, that to people who don't believe, a mystery remains a mystery. And, what is more, a boring mystery, like listening to accounts of other people's dreams. A sign on Knock church for many years read: "It is important that any miraculous cures wrought here would be made known to the parish priest." To people who do not believe in miraculous cures the matter-of-factness of this notice - its air of fussy bureaucracy - is completely bizarre.
This society contains many such people. They are children of the nation who hope to be treated equally with all others. How can they find a respectful attitude to a presidential or any other campaign that sets off from a site of miracles? Yet why would a believer in miracles set out from anywhere else?
A foray into electoral politics by Nora Bennis or Dana or the like opens up these difficult questions. As long as belief and unbelief stayed quiet, all of us could cope. Believers pitied unbelievers, which was at least nice for the believers.
The harder question was hardly addressed: how can one truly respect the beliefs of other people when those beliefs truly seem to you utterly silly? I suggest, to unbelievers, that they begin by cultivating what Keats called "Negative Capability" - "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . ." As for believers, they don't need suggestions.
*The Meaning of Knock, ed. Flanagan, The Columba Press