Number No Longer in Service

This week's Camino a Ítaca asks whatever happened to good 'ol fashioned miracles? It seems that the dead no longer walk and the seas no longer part. But hell, that doesn't stop people from asking. All this and more is explored in my soon-to-be-published book. Stories Left in Stone. Trails and Traces in Cáceres, Spain. Click over to read the originally published piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

What ever happened to good old-fashioned miracles? Those shock and awe events that convinced the otherwise cynical to put aside their previous beliefs and embrace a new faith. And by this I don’t necessarily mean the kind that are written about on papyrus and which create religious dogma, like Palestinians walking on water, bearded men driving motorways through the Red Sea, raising the dead or even talking donkeys (Numbers 22:21-39). I suppose that these feats use up a lot of spiritual energy and can only happen every other millennia or so.

I was thinking more along the lines of more recent wonders. Like those mysterious women who appear to young girls in the countryside surrounding places like Fatima and Lourdes. Are children too engrossed in their screens to notice gossamer floating ladies anymore or are they too protected to allow strange apparitions to approach them? Or maybe it’s the socialists who are to blame for their absence. After all, these kinds of miracles always seemed to appear to the humble and illiterate. Perhaps the steady increase of standards of living and near complete literacy rate have something to do with the recent dearth of levitating maidens in grottos.

Then there are the Virgins that once lay hidden in the fields, forests and mountains across the land. Why haven’t any of them appeared to shepherds and the like in the past 500 years? I recently wrote a travel book on the province of Caceres that is coming out on Tuesday that explores these mysteries and asks some of these questions. Have they all been discovered? Will there be no more supernatural events like Gil Cordero’s sacred cow? And if they do appear, would the church be able to useAznar’s law and register the surrounding land as their own without any need ofland deeds or even proof?

All this makes you wonder, is the Christian God still in the miracle business? Or is he busy ensuring that millstones get hung around the necks of pedophile priests before drowning then in the depths of the sea?

One thing is for sure, it is not for the lack of the faithful trying to get the big guy in the sky’s attention. Here in Spain the calendar year is jam packed with Virgins getting carried around the country. From an outsider’s perspective, these Marianist images seem to serve as local telephone operators for the faithful with a direct line to a more distant divine. Interlocuters that intercede and relay people’s prayers to God. They act as perceptible go-betweens with the Almighty while providing a convenient out when prayers aren’t answered.

Here in Caceres, the local Virgin and 'honorary mayor' is being paraded around town to celebrate its centenary of canonical coronation and you can imagine they prayers being asked. I imagine big prayers like peace in the Middle East are directed straight to the Big Man while more local affairs are left to the Virgin. Perhaps a stop to the carcinogenic mine? Decent rail service? A government that seriously invests in public health so that ‘miracle’ cure prayers can be answered?

Whatever the case, *I just came here to talk about my book.

*a phrase that became famous in Spain when a well known writer got terribly angry on a TV program and said this.