The Apparition That Started Them All, and the Faith to Believe

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of the Pillar. I alluded to this day recently when I was discussing Marian apparitions and their role in the faith lives of Catholics. This apparition is especially notable for being the first one recorded, and for having required a miraculous act of bilocation on Mary’s part.

According to tradition, the Blessed Virgin appeared to the Apostle James in A.D. 40, when he was struggling to win converts in what is now Spain. As he was praying along the banks of the river in Zaragosa, Mary came to him, perched atop a pillar and accompanied by legions of angels, to give him encouragement. Mary herself would have still been alive and residing in Jerusalem, under the care of the Apostle John, about a decade after Jesus would have been crucified.

A basilica in her honor stands in Zaragosa today, housing a sculpture of Mary on a pillar that some claim to have been made by the angels who accompanied Our Lady to Spain.

I mention this apparition for a few reasons. One is that I just love how rich the Catholic church is with beautiful, pious, and reverent traditions like this stretching across the past two thousand years. Another is how this apparition, being the first one known, began a phenomenon of Marian visitations to the faithful that continue to this day. And this one is unique in that it meant Mary, still alive on Earth, managed to be in two places at once. Bilocation is something you hear about in the mystical traditions of the East, usually associated with enlightened masters who have cultivated such extraordinary abilities, but not so often in the West.

To the modern mind, stories like these seem impossible to believe. I know that I’ve always struggled with the extraordinary claims that religions make. It seems to me that you have three choices to make when encountered with the supernatural: (1) take it on faith that things happened exactly as described, (2) try to understand what greater message or lesson the story is attempting to convey, neither embracing nor dismissing the literal interpretation, or (3) reject it as a fable.

Modern minds tend toward Option 3. I’m often a 2, because I’ve always had a hard time coming to terms with Option 1 in my faith life — but also because I think a slavishly literal understanding of religious stories can put blinders on you just as much as not believing them at all can. Do you have to believe that God literally made the universe in six days, created the first two humans from scratch, and placed them in a paradisiacal garden, or can you take the stories as signposts to something else? What if those stories are meant to make us understand how the universe was made, rather than in what exact manner, and what our relationship with the divine ought to be, why we struggle with it, and what we need to do to return to our natural and original state of harmonious union with God? What if we miss the bigger picture because we’re so focused on making sure we believe only the surface literal interpretation of events? Conversely, what are we missing out on if we scoff at these stories as being the superstitious nonsense of primitive minds?

The Catholic church teaches that there are four ways of reading scripture: in a literal sense, an allegorical sense, a moral sense, and an anagogical sense. Sometimes a particular verse can be read in all four senses, but we should also take note of when, for example, an obviously poetic passage is attempting to communicate something to us in a less than literal way. Even St. Augustine noted that our understanding of scripture should never conflict with reason or with what we know about the natural world. Literalism is a fairly new phenomenon in Christianity, and Catholics have certainly never been literalist fundamentalists.

In that sense, it’s never been all that hard for Catholics to square what they would call pious tradition with what we think of as everyday reality. Pious tradition, for example, tells us that we have the rosary because the Virgin herself personally handed the first rosary to St. Dominic. That’s a beautiful way of expressing how praying the rosary has great spiritual benefits that bring us into a closer relationship with Mary, her son, and the Father. You don’t have to take it literally to see what the account is trying to tell us about the value of the rosary.

Likewise, you can, if you wish, understand Mary’s visit to James in Zaragosa in the sense that Catholics have put their faith in the Virgin to intercede for us practically from the beginning. Or you can indeed believe that Mary actually did appear to James. Millions who have encountered other Marian apparitions over the centuries would tell you that their experiences were very real, and not symbolic in any sense.

But how would that work? Well, think of when Gabriel, at the Annunciation, greets Mary as being “full of grace” — at least that’s how you’ll see it expressed in Catholic Bibles, which is why the Hail Mary prayer says what it says. The church would tell you that this means Mary, having been immaculately conceived, was endowed with special graces — more, in fact, than any other human — and is able to use those abundant graces in her role as the spouse of the Holy Spirit to reach out to us, her spiritual children, in ways that seem fantastical, even impossible. (I have a slightly different take on things, but the church’s description will do for the purposes of this discussion.)

This is obviously where faith comes in, although “faith” doesn’t need to mean putting your brain on hold to accept things that you know aren’t true. St. Paul tells us not to despise prophetic utterances, to test everything, and to retain what’s good. So in a sense, the question of pious tradition isn’t so much about what you’re required to take on faith at the bare minimum, but on whether a tradition is helpful in your devotional life. Does it help you to believe in this or that tradition? If it does, then there’s no problem.

This is the attitude I take, especially toward all things Marian. To believe in them helps me on my path. Besides, I’m not so cynical and jaded to think that extraordinary things that defy logic are incapable of happening. It’s a big universe out there, with lots of mysteries and unanswered questions. Not to mention that I’ve experienced things in my life for which I have no rational explanation — a couple of which involve the Blessed Mother herself.

And anyway, if a Christian can believe that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, then why should it be so hard to also believe that his mother is able to appear to us and intercede for us?

And so I say, with faithful confidence: Our Lady of the Pillar, pray for us.

Image: Our Lady of the Pillar, Ramón Bayeu, 1780. Public domain.