Communio Thursday.

Last Thursday's Communio discussion group had a healthy ventilation of the subject of apparitions and holy places and what they are good for. Mike, our future seminary student, argued that apparitions and holy places are essentially useless, that holiness is found everywhere in creation, that the connection with God is found in prayer and not in things you see or places you visit, and that apparitions must have some spiritual message or meaning for the observer. Mike's argument was direct and really quite effective. Nonetheless, Jeff and I, after registering a strong provisional skepticism as to any particular claim of apparition, argued that Catholic theology does not partition the divine from the mundane. Sacraments, for example, involve a physical aspect - water, oil - and a heavenly grace. God's Will sustains the universe; He didn't simply wind the watch and leave it running. So it is not surprising to think that the sacred might manifest itself in the mundane world in apparitions without regard to whether the apparition would have meaning to any paticular observer. Likewise, although all of God's creation is holy, all of God's creation cannot be treated with identical regard, and, so, we cordone off special areas of physical reality in our churches and holy places and call them sacred. All of this furthers the middle path that orthodox Christianity has staked out, denying an exaltation of the spiritual to the degradation of the material, or of the material over the spiritual. I think our argument was deep and nuanced.

All that said, however, a deep and nuanced argument can be rent asunder by a single instance of the "image of Jesus on a tortilla." Bill Cork offers a nice extension of Mike's argument with a citation to the example of St. John of the Cross. I think Bill and Mike's essential point - that placing a priority on searching for the sensational and immediate spiritual experience is a waste of efforts - is unarguable.

Update: Overall, it was a tough day for apparitions and visions yesterday. Here is Lane Core's take on the Bill Cork post:

But I know what Bill is getting at, and I agree with him. I recall a story about St. John of the Cross. His confreres wanted to go see a famous alleged stigmatist, who was later revealed to be a fraud. They all went, but the saint thought it better to go to the seashore and read the Sacred Scriptures, and that's what he did. And he was the saint among them.

[Which, note - credit where credit is due - preceded Bill Cork's citation of the example of St. John of the Cross.]