March is named after
the Roman god Mars, god of war, because it was the season of war. The weather
grew warmer, the days longer, and it was time to resume wars that might have
stalled under wintery snow. Spring might be thought of as the season of life
and mating, but it was also a season of death and destruction.
I’m not sure we’ve
changed much since the Romans. April is the cruelest month. Late April, in
particular, has a disproportionate amount of tragedy in American history:
Columbine, Waco, Oklahoma City bombing. There is agitation in the air.
On April 6, 1917,
the United States entered the Great War. On the same date 100 years later, the
United States launched dozens of missiles on a Syrian airfield. Quite the
commemoration of the “war to end all wars.” A week later, the United States
dropped its biggest non-nuclear weapon in Afghanistan. Not that these attacks
were that striking; we’ve been bombing those places for years. The wars don’t
stop anymore; they just accumulate.
I look at a snapshot
of 1917 and compare it to 2017 and I don’t see much difference: Tangled,
bloody, international politics, the struggle to shake off colonialism, marches
for the rights of women, destruction of the environment for profit, a push for
progressive globalism and the pullback, the nationalists, the populists, the
capitalists, the communists, the anarchists, the hedonists, industrialization,
corporations, pollution, immigration, injustice, opioids, violence, disease.
Nothing really changes. It all feels stale.
But there was something
else going on in the spring of 1917. Three Portuguese shepherd children
witnessed the first apparition of Our Lady of Fatima on May 13. She appeared
again on the 13th of the month throughout the summer and into the fall. By
October, tens of thousands converged on the site. They were witnesses to the
Miracle of the Sun. Many were religious skeptics, looking to discredit the
children, but what they witnessed changed their minds. According to
testimonies, after a period of rain, the clouds broke, and the sun appeared as
a spinning disk, casting multicolored light. It was also described as opaque,
duller than normal, so that people were looking right into it. The sun shifted
in the sky in a zig-zag before settling back in its natural place. The soaked
ground and pilgrims were dried. The event lasted about 10 minutes. Witnesses
gave varying testimony, but many claimed multicolored light and movement of the
sun.
While some critics
claim that the visual signs can be attributed to staring at the sun too long or
mass hysteria, it should be noted that the people did not gather for a sun
miracle; they were waiting for a vision of Our Lady, and many report looking at
a gate or the tree where she had appeared before when the miracle started.
Additionally, people up to 40km away who were not aware of Fatima reported the
miracle, ruling out group hallucination. It is also suggested that what people
saw was a parhelion, when light appears on either side of the sun caused by
refraction of ice crystals. Color grades through a muted prism. Still, it
happened at that exact moment, as thousands gathered, looking to three, poor children
for a sign of hope, a message from God.
What does a dancing
sun mean? That’s probably left to the individual witnesses. Some were filled
with fear, awe, and thanksgiving. The message from Mary to the children was
that the war would end and the soldiers would return home along with a reminder
to continue saying the rosary. Maybe the gloom and violence of the 1917 just
needed a comforting reminder of color and warmth.
It’s the
quintcentennial anniversary of the Reformation (its own kind of destructive
force). It’s the centennial anniversary of U.S. entry into World War I, the
Russian Revolution, the Halifax explosion. But it’s also the centennial
anniversary of the visions at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun. God sends
comfort and light in dark times. The world might seem terrible and stale, and
the world is like that sometimes. But it also beautiful and alive and in the
hands of its creator.
