Miracle of the Eyes

In 1985 statues across Ireland began to move.

On Valentine’s Day, in the village of Asdee, seven-year-old Elizabeth Flynn was saying Hail Marys when a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus beckoned her with a curled finger. The Blessed Mother followed suit. When Elizabeth called to her sisters to tell them what she’d seen, other children flooded into the church.

Yes, they said, we see it too.

A few weeks later two girls in Ballydesmond reported a statue moving in Saint Patrick’s Church. A woman from the village fainted after witnessing the same but refused to talk about it, saying: If there’s a message, it will come again and more than me will see it.

In the seaside town of Courtmacsharry a group of tourists saw a statue move. Another in a grotto on the Waterford-to-Kilkenny road was said to breathe, her hands moving from center to right. In Waterford two boys reported a statue shifting her eyes outside the Mercy Convent School, while back in Asdee an eighty-year-old farmer saw the statue of the Virgin blink three times. In Cork city three children said a statue rocked so hard they feared she’d topple. In Rathdangan Mrs. Haddie Doyle observed Our Lady smile. In Kilfinane Geraldine O’Grady noticed the throat of the Blessed Mother’s statue move while Oliver Herbert witnessed her veil fall away to reveal a girl with long brown hair. A statue was said to sway in Mountcollins. In Mooncoin Bernadette O’Hanlon saw the Virgin open and close her left eye and a singular tear fall from the right.

In July Cathy O’Mahony stopped by the grotto at Ballinspittle to say the rosary with her two daughters when they noticed movement up the hill. The plaster Virgin’s chest was rising and falling, as if filled with air. The next night a hundred people flocked to Ballinspittle. Some saw the Virgin change expression. Others reported seeing her wave, smile, even blush.

I looked up and saw Our Lady ascending into heaven, said Josephine Foran. Her face became human like a baby’s. It was lovely pink flesh.

There’s no shortage of statues in Ireland. Jesus is well represented, as are Saints Patrick and Brigid, but the Blessed Virgin Mary reigns supreme. When Pope Pius XII declared 1954 a Marian year, Catholics celebrated worldwide with dedications, processions, and coronations of statues. But no country embraced the Queen of Heaven with such fervor as Ireland. Hundreds of grottoes sprung up along roadsides, ranging from statuettes set into simple niches to hillsides planted with flowers and life-size statues of Our Lady.

The Ballinspittle Virgin was fashioned of concrete and plaster and crowned by a halo of electric light. Modeled after the apparition in Lourdes, France, she was accompanied by a statue of a kneeling Saint Bernadette, the beneficiary of Mary’s visitation. Like many Marian statues in Ireland, Our Lady was unpainted—the demand was so great in 1954 there was no time to add blue to their sashes before sending them out from the Cork workshop.

In a season of moving statues, Ballinspittle became the pulse point. The media descended. Thousands flocked to the grotto, outfitted with binoculars and rosaries. Even the most hardened skeptics reported movement of some sort. Stories of cures began to circulate. Hearing was restored. Wayward husbands returned. Lumps disappeared from a sick child’s hands. Bent legs straightened, and walking sticks were abandoned to the cow fields of Ballinspittle.

While the Pope’s declaration of the Marian year had spurred the construction of midcentury grottoes, the church hierarchy was among the least inclined toward the miracles. Bishop Murphy of Cork and Ross said: Direct supernatural intervention is a very rare happening in life. Bishop Cassidy of Clonfert worried that with all this movement, we turn Mary into a marionette.

Mary’s function, he warned, is not to move herself, but to move us.

But while the statues were religious in form, their movement was not bound by the authority of clerics. The crowds swelled and continued into autumn and were sizable even on Halloween night when three men pulled up to the grotto. Two men jumped from the car and attacked the statue, destroying her face with hammers and axes while taunting the pilgrims, including three nuns praying that night. The three were evangelical Protestants; one later said: The statue at Ballinspittle only moved once—when I hit it. If it moves again, I’ll be back.

If the statues of Ireland were given to movement, their timing was painfully off. While they practically waltzed off their pedestals in 1985, they were stone silent the year before, when on the last day of January, in Granard, a schoolgirl left her classes and made her way toward the church. It’s unclear how much the nuns at school knew about fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett’s condition as she set off for the grotto, where she gave birth surrounded by wet rock and frozen moss, a kneeling statue of Saint Bernadette looking on as she pushed. When schoolchildren found her hours later crying beside her dead infant, she was losing blood and shivering hard.

Why did she go there, that girl? Was the statue, slick with January drizzle, the warmest place in the village? Cold to the touch, yes. Fashioned of concrete and plaster, of course. But like cotton compared to the rest of Granard and the country that had passed a referendum to keep the ban on abortion ironclad just a few months before. When the girl and her child were buried in the churchyard a few days later, there were whispers about who knew what—the coldness of priests, the silence of nuns, and the tight-lipped chill of the village as a whole—but in the end there was only this: the statue of the Virgin, locked in position as Ann Lovett trudged through the Irish winter, pain mounting with every step. Perhaps, she said as she approached the church—letting herself believe, in the beautiful way only the most desperate do—perhaps, Our Lady will help.

I wonder if a statue is as real to those who don’t see her move as to those who do. To the priests who pray to plaster figures while closing their eyes to the flesh-and-blood bodies of girls around them. To the Protestants with hammers and picks. To the young girl in the churchyard as her body began to break and flood. A perfect repository for desire, a statue is made in our likeness, but better still, because her silence cannot disrupt the doggedness of our projections.

Just ask Pygmalion and his ivory-chiseled bride. Just ask the mob roving through Antwerp in August 1566, in what will come to be known as the Beeldenstorm (statue storm), men going from church to church with axes, mocking the statues of the Holy Family before pissing on them and bashing in their faces. Just ask clever Daedalus, whose wax-cemented wings eventually failed when his son skimmed too close to the sun, but whose statues were said to be so perfectly sculpted they required tethering to keep them from fleeing in the night.

My mother was a sucker for miracles. She liked most of all to go to the shrine near Niagara Falls with the thirteen-foot Virgin reigning from atop a Plexiglas dome. And like the Falls themselves, the shrine had fallen into disrepair since its heyday decades before. A sense of desperation clung to the place, the shelves of the gift shop lined with glow-in-the-dark rosaries, faded prayer cards, and mass-produced statuettes collecting dust in the folds of their poorly painted robes. But with its candlelit chapels, banks of roses, and Avenue of the Saints, to my mother the shrine was magic. Nearly as good as the miracles she whipped up. Like the time she cured the warts on my little sister’s hand through the work of her rosary group.

I think it was the Compound W, I said back then.

Maybe, she answered. But how can you know for sure?

Her face was wide, eyes lit like it was Christmas—and, similar to a Protestant on the streets of Belgium in the summer of 1566, I thought how easy it would be to hammer her down. Instead I looked around: the cramped city neighborhood, the horde of children, the unrelenting stream of low-paying jobs. What’s wrong with a bit of wonder, I thought, and the occasional trip to the shrine? The truth was that I would have liked to believe too, and while I didn’t—at least not like she did—I was drawn to those who did, and wanted more than anything to be convinced. Until then, would it hurt so much to allow her a pair of wax wings?

I must confess here my own tendency toward half sight. I’m nearsighted and do not always wear my glasses. For the past year and a half, in fact, I’ve ditched them altogether except for driving. This has led to many fine things: A pair of swans in the Huguenot historic district of New Paltz’s Wallkill River that became white plastic buoys as I approached. A flower the exact shade of a bluebird’s wing that blossomed into a valve handle as I bent toward its petals. A slip of white paper on a railroad track that opened into a deer’s skull. An orchard of pomegranates that turned before my eyes into a patch of ripened prickly pears.

But even when we wear glasses, our vision is always playing tricks on us. Desire fattens the beads of our eyes. Longing conspires with refracted light. We are gifted with the merciful blur of cursory sight—and how lovely the question mark, all curve and bend and half-circle crown, especially compared to the period with its tightfisted declarations. Of course, the true shape of the thing will eventually emerge. Of course, the buoys in the Wallkill must be allowed to show themselves, as must the skull lying bleached and delicate in the sun. The nature of seeing demands that we touch down on the surface of the world exactly as it is, locating beauty in the valve handle, the prickly pear, the animal skull. But sometimes, and until that close reckoning with reality, what the eye most needs is a kindly swell of fog and the tenderness of its cloak.

Ireland in the 1980s needed a cloak. Violence in the North. Thatcher and Reagan. Hunger strikes. The hands of church and state resting heavy upon the bodies of women they could not move. In my old neighborhood the single mothers and their squadrons of children trailing behind them on Sundays into Corpus Christi Church where we dropped to our knees, looking to Saint Joseph and the gospel writers but most of all to the ever-tranquil, sweet face of Mary. What better remedy to drudgery than hope? What better balm for hard times than possibility?

Despite a continual decline in churchgoing and religious affiliation, eighty percent of Americans believe in miracles, which aren’t limited to statues or Catholicism, of course—though apart from faith healings in certain evangelical sects, the Catholic Church seems to put a greater premium on miracles than most. Rome is silent on the majority of apparitions and imposes strict guidelines before validating miracles through its Congregation for the Causes of Saints, but their approach to the mystical is a tough balancing act, as the requirement for sainthood requires two miracles per candidate and the celebration of Mass centers on the supernatural act of transubstantiation each and every day. Beyond the fishes and loaves and water into wine handed down in the gospels, Roman Catholicism abounds with Hollywood-style miracles. Blessings and intercessions. Apparitions and cures. Visionaries and mystics. Lourdes and Fatima. Tepeyac Hill in Guadalupe, Medjugorje, and Knock.

But what to make of a throng of moving statues? A smiling plaster Virgin, while wondrous, isn’t exactly a heavy hitter as far as miracles are concerned. Of what consequence a blinking concrete figure? Are we such beggars—accepting a nod as a stand-in for more substantive movement, allowing a flutter of eyes in place of a living breathing person stepping down in the drizzle to spread her mantle over a suffering child?

Perhaps a moving statue is not so minor a miracle after all—and the opening of the eyes, not such a small act. We open and close our own thousands of times a day, so we have no choice but to take looking for granted, but, in truth, we elevate what we behold. There is no more perfect consecration than attention. It’s the closest we come to being priests, tracing crosses of balsam and oil with the work of our eyes.

A friend from Cork took me to Ballinspittle a few summers back. I had not asked to see the grotto, but she was generous, so I let myself be driven to a fort and the brightly painted houses of Kinsale and the beach where tall grasses sprouted from dunes and families parked in campers for a holiday, and finally to Ballinspittle where we sat on benches before the roadside grotto. I was in high school back when the statue opened her eyes—the same age Ann Lovett would have been if she’d survived giving birth in the frozen grotto. 1985. Back then, all I knew about Ireland were U2 songs and the Troubles of the North, which we added to the litany of intentions every week at Mass. Still, years later, I enjoyed sitting there, the hillside lush with ferns and gorse, the sound of birds in the fields around us.

We sat there. Two women. Both working at the local university. Both with time for the reading of books and the contemplation of thoughts. Different from each other, yes, but light years removed from our mothers with their shrines and rosaries and stubborn insistence on mystery and faith. We sat there, looking toward the statue beneath a bower of greenery. Our Lady of Ballinspittle. Eyes fixed to heaven, holding roses and standing a stone’s throw from a plaster Bernadette, the kneeling girl caught in perpetual supplication.

Not far away, the sea. To our backs, a few kilometers along the peninsula, the Old Head of Kinsale. We’d stopped there earlier, walking up the cliff to view the rush of water below and the birds soaring in coves. The wonder of it all. We brought the same quiet reverence to the grotto. We looked up the hillside toward the Virgin, and it seemed to me then that there was something of our mothers in us after all. Perhaps we were simply acting out a devotion pressed upon our cells before we were ever born, or did we behold the statue with clear vision, seeing beyond the prescribed proportions of the craftsman who’d fashioned her, beyond the obedient virginity the priests adored, beyond the negative influence vandals with hammers believed her to be?

It was girls and women who’d most often reported seeing the statues move. Girls and women who filed onto buses for visits to the shrines. Girls and women who said rosaries when their knees ached, the rent was due, and their invocations to men fell upon unyielding ears.

We sat there at Ballinspittle, a breeze coming up from the sea fluttering the swell of fuchsia and roses. Now and then a car passed. The driver might look up the hill to the figure cast in plaster, but would he see what we did? A woman crowning a hilltop. A woman wearing a halo of light, blue sash tied like the sky around her waist. A woman surrounded by ferns and flowers, bare feet tipping up and away from her stone base, inching, ever so slowly, toward movement.

Read more from Issue 14.2.