Virgin Mary Quite Contrary (long) (559 hits)
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Submitted by Drone of Industry (View user info) at 2005-06-29 14:07:24 EDT
If miracles don't happen every day, then it was even all the more miraculous that a profound imprint of the Virgin Mary was declared to have been sited just a mile away from my house! Weathered by rainwater and the salt of the earth, the dull stained concrete beneath Chicago's own Kennedy Expressway had transfigured into a religous icon. To think, that all this time, Mother Mary had been blessing each commuter every day as they barreled over her into the great lengths of their fleeting existence.
Prior to receiving the news, fate had already brought three of my comrades and I together near midnight that evening. At first word of it, we appointed ourselves minutemen in a call to arms to this (quote, unquote) "phenomenal" spectacle. No doubt, a relentless investigation was to be under way! And though it was true that our young, egocentric minds were armored by an impenetrable wall of skepticism, perhaps we could still get a sense of some honest to god spirituality blooming from the fresh air of this season's offspring.
Geezus! They could have charged admission! The underpass was bombarded by a mass of chattering believers, confined within a fortess of police barricades and a half a dozen or so pacing officers to contain them.
Joe and I squirmed through the horde of buzzing humanoids into the heart of the matter and admittingly braced ourselves for letdown. I squinted my eyes, canted my head, and opened my mind but was having some difficulty seeing this heavenly embodiment. Kind of like when I get bunk acid and I stare at the wallpaper for 5 minutes until it moves, to assure myself that my 10 dollars was not spent in vain. Yes, my brain wondered and then my eyes couldn't help but wander into the onslaught of humanity thrusting camera flashes like cans of Raid at the imprint, capturing it within the digital cells of their mobile phones. Yet the Virgin prayed there motionless, impassive to the crowd's endorsement. The dilapidated walls were grafittied with requests for deliverance from sin, and flowers and candles from the mere mortals buried her in ceremony of their unrequited devotion.
The vibe in the air was foaming with adulation, but the believers just made me feel sad in the context of what I presumed a DELUSION of hope... as everyone convinced everyone else that they could feel her presence 100 percent. Something seemed oddly desperate as they rubbed their fingertips against the dirty concrete and then to the tears from their eyes. All these people were so hungry for a sign from heaven, that they would eat anything to keep the foundation of their existence justified. This ambiguous icon became exclusive proof of everything they had been raised to believe their entire lives. They crawled to it on their hands and knees begging it for answers, favors, and guidance to an ethereal plane... like she was some sort of representative from God granting any 3 wishes that they desired.
All the guys at work were just discovering the breaking story on Yahoo News the next morning. Everyone thought it looked like a big vagina. Like I've said before... nothing is sacred on the internet. To each his own I suppose.
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Although I still think there are a few valuable aspects of church, I stopped going to it just a couple of years ago. I was, in fact, independently Christian for years after relinquishing from the rule of my parents. I would pray for something and if it happened, then hallelujah, God meant it to be... if it didn't happen, then by gummy, God meant it to be. It was a flawless system!
Really though! I used to have long conversations with God. I would often retreat to a forest, lake, or sumthinoranother, and submit my queries to the impartial ears of Mother Nature. I would speak out loud and a clear, tranquil voice inside my head would rationally interact with me. For some reason though, I eventually came to the conclusion that it was solely up to me to take responsibility for myself. All in all I was basically just talking to myself anyway, right? So I cut out the middleman, and If I wanted something in life then it was my obligation to meditate on it, summon up the strength, and make it happen, godammit!
I think that growing up in the binds of the Catholic faith actually INHIBITED me from spirituality. Everybody knows Mass is boring. We kneel, sit, and stand according to the routine. We sluggishly chant praises to our God through the drawl of the organ grinder. We execute, at best, half assed abominations of rituals from days of yore. There is no element of transendence in the Catholic Mass. Anyone who may feel the sudden holy urge to shout "Amen" out of script is frowned upon. The pre-teen alterboy swirls a little frankenscence from a decorative golden tin around the church and we call it a ceremony! There is nothing sacramental about that! Now if we were dancing naked around pillars of fire in the middle of a forest for eight hours straight, then we would definitely feel the powers of the holy spirit! I'M SERIOUS! We should be splling our blood into trenches in the earth and drinking it like the pigs we are!
But growing up in such a passive, dogmatic religon has forced me to be intimidated by even the slightest enigmatic behavior. Last year I used to go to the Krishna Palace every Sunday to eat their free food, but hell if I would consider dancing to their freakish mantra for 3 hours. To make myself completely vulnerable to possession by The Spirit is scary shit!
So here I am now wandering the foggy plateau of this empirical reality, automatically deducing that the miracle of Mother Mary in front of me is nothing more but a slab of concrete. And you know what? She looks absolutely heartbroken.
That night, when my fellow comrade, Stash, asked the police officer what he thought of Mary, he refused to look at us and simply replied, "It's just another day on the job."
Now there is a guy who needs a miracle!
To me, this concrete Mother Mary is the embodiment of the very thing that distracts people from the REAL miracle of life... that life simply DOES EXIST and that YOU ARE LIVING IT! Good God, man! Is the meaning of life the fact that you are always searching for it? The world is already a magical place in itself in itself in itself. I guess when you slather cement all over it though, it loses some of its charm.
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I wondered what my Roman Catholic parents would think about Mother Mary's revelation beneath the freeway. I assumed that they would disregard it as a hoax. Probably because miracles only really happen in foreign countries during antiquity by superhero saints. Oh yeah, and babies being born... that's always a miracle.
One time my dad recommended a book to me that confirmed the ongoing miracle of the Lady of Lourdes. Being the smartass that I am I dumbly replied, "Oh, you must believe in aliens too." This led to the most elementary argument in spirituality I had had in years! And all I really learned is that you cannot contend with blind faith just as you cannot contend with an existential 25 year old. They still believe in everything they were taught from the catechism fifty years ago... back when you were slapped for questioning "God's" rules. And at 60 years old I'm sure their know-it-all son isn't going to prove them otherwise.
I remember always telling my mom, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing!"
"Don't get all philosophical on me!" she'd say.
My folks actually came up for a visit to Chicago just this past week. I would've taken them to see the Virgin Mary as a tourist attraction, but some gung-ho revolutionary wrote "Big Lie" on top of Mary and got arrested for his noble yet futile sacrifice to our misguided society. Yeah right, whatever. Now the Stragglers for Christ Club just pray to a big, brown blob that the city painted on top of it... still holding on to the coat tails of their idol in an all expense paid trip to everlasting life. They'll dissipate eventually. Until then, I will see cops staking out the scene afterhours in order to shoo away the excessive believers from the remaining brown streak on the wall.
"We don't need proof, John. We have FAITH! Besides, it has NOT been recognized by the Vatican as a miracle." ...gross. My parents' devotion to the Catholic religon has become so much more vocal lately. I wonder if they're putting in all this extra effort because they are stretching closer to death. Or maybe they are trying to save their straying son who is at fault for attempting to think for himself.
"Did you know that they are trying to make Pope John Paul 2 a saint? They say he performed over three miracles. It officially takes three miracles in order to be established a saint. They're trying to speed up the process cause they already know he's a saint... him and Mother Theresa..."
ugh. I'm sure that the pope and Mother Theresa were really nice people, but this is the kind of righteousness that truly urks me... turning these people into superheroes. Mostly because I know my mom just saw that "three miracles equals a saint" thing on some Hollywood movie.
Somehow, proceeding that, mom and dad then steered the conversation into an awry tangent. They began to reminisce of the UFO's they had both encountered among the cornfields of my small hometown in Kentucky. They are pretty similar accounts, typical accounts at that. They claimed that both of them witnessed these cigar shaped space crafts, which after a period of levitation, suddenly shot off into outer space within a split second.
!!!!!
Now my parents are not, THEY ARE NOT, consciously compulsive liars! And I had heard these stories before. As a kid I was really astounded by their extra terrestrial encounters... now I was just weirded out! I even felt a bit of disgust in my skepticism as they recalled their experiences, and just nodded my head in affirmation as they told their story to me for the hundredth time.
In elementary thru high school I would tremble beneath my bedsheets, scared shitless that there were creepy-ass aliens outside my window looking for a human speciman by which to subject their twisted scientific experiments. There was no doubt that aliens existed. This universe was too fucking huge that it was more of an impossibility for them to NOT exist! When I was a tot, I would scour the night sky for wandering dots of light sneaking through the starscape, and at the slightest suspiscion of a UFO, I would scream bloody murder for my parents to come see it. Hell, when I was pubescent teen I would even talk to this speck of a UFO that watched me from a distance and telepathically knew everything I was thinking from thousands of miles away. I would ask it 'yes' and 'no' questions! It would respond with a circular motion for 'yes' and an infinity motion for 'no'. Of course, looking back on it, if you stare at something long enough, and you are looking for a reaction, then your eyes are going to deliver!
Now when people ask me if I believe in UFOs I just kind of mutter back disinterested, "yeah, maybe there's something way out there. The possibilities are endless."
"The possibilities are endless." That means, "I got too much shit to worry about here in my own life than to debate the existence of aliens from outer space."
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JESUS H. CHRIST! Where has all the fucking magic gone! I firmly proclaim to humanity that it's out there, ALWAYS out there if you're willing to see it, but now I'm wondering if I can even see it for myself anymore! I'm scared that I have lost touch, that I'm turning to stone, that I'm riding a fading descendo into an inevitable adulthood. My mom says that when I turn 30 everything will change. "You'll see. You'll be like everyone else someday. That's just the way life is, John."
My loving parents who I trusted all my life, are in a joint conspiracy with the status quo, and urge me, above all other things, to grasp tight to my job, my security, my sanity, my appearances, and the God that bestows these blessings upon me... to stop "railing against society" and just follow its lead. How could something so old be so wrong, right? But all of these things that I am encouraged to hold honorable, are precisely the things that detach me from the depth that life has to reveal. It has become my biggest fear to deteriorate as a prisoner of mediocrity. So in my compromises with society I have not only become overly bitter, but shamefully suspicious of nearly everyone that supports it, and everything that it has to offer me. In my clouded eyes, these holy idols do not arch into a gateway to the spiritual realm, but distort into an iconic representation of our lifelong oppression! Yet another distraction put in the spotlight to devert our attention from the really REAL honest to god magic that us humans are capable of experiencing and creating! Magic to what degree?... I don't know. Everything has become so concrete that I can't even imagine!
Now when I elope from society into the arms of Mother Nature, I attempt to relieve my woes into the roar of her waves, the camoflauge of her foliage, the expanse of her sky... I ask, "Who is going to save me from this?" But the only response I can hear anymore is this sort of matter-of-fact voice admitting point blank, "YOU are the only one who can save yourself."
I miss being close to God.
User Reviews
Submitted by skweetis (user info) at 2005-06-29 22:31:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
very excellent...i'll break my ubersite boycott just to review this. i still remember the story of playing mandolin to the ufo's.
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2005-06-29 17:53:03 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Only three reviews...
This is what happens when you don't post often and add the word 'long' to your title.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-06-29 15:10:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
"Did you know that they are trying to make Pope John Paul 2 a saint? They say he performed over three miracles. It officially takes three miracles in order to be established a saint. They're trying to speed up the process cause they already know he's a saint... him and Mother Theresa..."
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Karol kicked the Soviet Union in the nads pretty hard, dude - I say we make him the Patron Saint of Kicking Commie Ass!
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2005-06-29 15:00:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fucking beautiful.
You need to spell check, but still fucking beautiful.
Submitted by RaineLark (user info) at 2005-06-29 14:28:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
There are plenty of things we can't explain; there always has been. These things used to be explained by religion (weather phenomena, for example), but are now measured and explained by science. One day, many of the things we explain with religion today will later be explained by science when we finally have the tools to measure them. Miracles are just scientific principles that haven't been measured/discovered yet.