The Curé d'Ars, Bonding and a Fraction of Truth
In 1972 Chris Plant and I went on a drinking spree in his car, or was it my car, to the Gold Coast in Queensland. We caught up with mates and sank a few dozen coldies. But as the day moved on, we searched for a party to crash. And we found one in Kirra Beach or there abouts in an old Queenslander style house where there were scores of teens and early twenties all having fun. As gate crashers, we weren't offensive and actually made out quite well with the young hosts of the night. Ah to be 20 again! But the night moved on and we left to drive back to Brisbane (DON'T ASK). Chris had just painted his bedroom black. We talked in the car driving up the old Pacific Highway as it was in that time. Then somewhere, not far north of the Southport turn off, we both saw something incredible and spooky. There was a giant cross of fixed light occupying about a quarter of the visible night sky and not moving above the road and the trees on the side of the road. As Chris drove, or was I driving? I can't remember. But I do remember this scene we saw and talked about as we travelled on the Pacific Highway and watching this strange apparition. A giant light making a cross taking up about a quarter of the night sky ahead of us! We stopped at a servo for a pie or something ... maybe it was petrol and a pie. It was 1972; a good while ago. When we continued our travel, the cross had gone. Chris dismissed it fairly quickly. I simply puzzled as to what on earth was it. I was stricken with a moment of religious query. Not long before this, I read a book about a weird French priest: Jean-Marie Vianney, The Curé d'Ars!
I have tried to find reference to John Vianney's vision of a giant cross that prevented him from leaving Ars. There were at least four times he tried to leave. In spite of my research I haven't since found any reference to this moment that was documented in a book I read in 1971, "The Haunted Priest". The famous Cure d'Ars was said to be tormented by devils or demons because of his saintly confessional abilities and his holy devotion as a priest to his calling. I came across him again when researching the story of Jules Chevalier, the founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, when creating a play Sacred Fire. Chevalier met with Vianney in 1859 shortly before Vianney's death. Chevalier was in a desperate existential dilemma about where his future directions might lie while all around him was proving so difficult.
Both priests were totally dedicated to their causes with necessity caused by the effects of the French Revolution. But both were totally different. The Cure d'Ars would make the Puritans and the Taliban blush with his staunch and austere attitude and teachings on earthly pleasures like dancing and girls having fun! Chevalier was seeking a sacred heart of love for all humanity; a more humane and deeply empathetic church that had been abandoned prior to, and then well after, the revolution.
When writing the play on Jules Chevalier, I had a specific reason to include the Cure d'Ars moment. I can't dismiss what that strange priest experienced; though the actual reasons will never be known. Having seen things mysteriously moved before my very eyes and with no logical reason at night in my own bedroom in my childhood home, I find there are some things that cannot be fully explained; the events facing the Cure d'Ars are an example.
More specifically, I am struck with a sense of the mysterious that is embedded in religious rituals. While most rituals are unlikely to produce the spookies that Vianney experienced, one can be in awe with that sense of bond that people feel within the ceremonial context of much contrivance within religious occasions. The context is almost irrelevant. The success of ceremony seems to be related to the quality of the commitment from those organising and celebrating and the relationship to the function or purpose of such an ceremony: ie. a funeral or memorial service.
People of extreme devotion and commitment, such as the Cure d'Ars, provide the mythic sources and intense justifications for ceremonic and ecstatic experiences resulting from more than simply physical reactions and emotions. There is a deliberate and tangible adherence to something larger than anything within direct perception. While today, devils and demons are largely disregarded as significant entities, I must say I agree with that; yet I can't dismiss those moving cords that danced around my bed and a strange shape that once moved through my room when I revisited my family home in 1976.
Earlier this year I attended a funeral service for a very significant priest. I was struck by the sense of bonding with his colleagues who attended and with the feeling of those who knew him and benefited from his counselling and wisdom. It was as if everyone was connected through what appears like a giant spiders' web of connected threads of experience, longing and belief. Perhaps it is a truism that faith delivers this kind of bonding. Except, I don't share that same Catholic faith, though I grew up within it, and I certainly don't agree with much that is done and said in its name. Yet at that moment, I could feel within the ritual a kind of bonding with the ideals and sheer humanity of the priest who was to be celebrated and buried.
Significantly, his burial took place near the graves of priests for whom I served mass as a child. There was Father James Long, Father Drake, Father Ether and possibly one other; all buried within meters of each other. The bond reignited connections within my life that couldn't be erased by my own questioning and conclusions re the absurdities of so much that is granted as "given" in religion. None of that mattered. The bond still existed.
The god-delusion and transcendental experiences through LSD, extreme fasting and isolation with sleep deprivation and mental illness may all account for us time travelers to feel connection to worlds beyond the observable day to day! Even outside these possibilities, there are moments in many of our lives that totally defy explanation. We see ghosts, the supernatural and hear voices in our sleep that suggest some other plane of reality of which we know nothing. Yet only arrogance and smugness can lead even the most sincere prophet to proclaim the whole truth behind any of such experiences.
The Shamanic practices found across many cultures and even finding its way into appropriated capitalist new-age stuff, may also be a part of the transcendental discoveries associated with seeking and finding worlds beyond the every-day.
The startling thing is with all such belief systems that give rise to all the above suggestions, is that within each discovery there is a likely fraction of some normative truth; some truth going beyond the post-modern precept of everyone having their own truth! Each philosophy, each religion, each belief system or even each artistic discovery as a result of the induced experience from drugs etc ... each one of these, most likely will contain a fraction of a truth that might well produce a bond of sorts that gives meaning to one's existence or at least gives energy to explorations outside the straightjacket of one's cultural nature. In music, the Beatles and The Moody Blues found horizons beyond the mundane when transcendental windows opened for them. One must wonder what was in that cave in Patmos when John (who ever he was) was writing his religious texts on Revelations ... I wonder what mushrooms were growing in that cave!
Whatever the basis for the bonding at the funeral service for my Priest friend might have been, whatever the fervor that drove those men to devote lifetimes to a cause and to a belief, that fraction of truth they lived by and propagated was able to infect each other and those directly around them. A web of connection was certainly evident. And you could feel it at the funeral ceremony.
How many priests actually experienced ecstatic spiritual moments is unknown. Such experiences escalate the justifications for defining some other world of saints and demons. The schizophrenic Manichaean dichotomy between flesh and spirit and the whole world creations of Saint Augustine still permeate Christian religious practices. Some of that was certainly found in the work and beliefs of Jean-Mari Vianney.
And so back to my sighting of a large cross in the sky. I doubt it had any lasting effect on me. My friend, Chris, became a "born again Christian" shortly after; though I have hardly seen him at all since in over fifty years! For me? I separated out from Catholic belief around that time. I still wonder about the experience of the cross in the sky and have no explanation. I don't believe in ghosts; yet I saw a strange apparition move through my room in my parents' house that later I purchased. What it was is beyond my ability to explain. A couple of years earlier I saw things move around that same bedroom in 1976. My dog also watched the electric cords dancing around in the middle of the night. I was too tired to be bothered enough to fear anything and when it stopped I went to sleep.
The problem is for all human beings to take care of explanations for weird and the unexplained observations and experiences. To extrapolate from the strange and incredible sighting or event; to extrapolate a human explanation and then deliver it as fact has been the cause of the greatest calamities to face human kind. This is the ugly side of the history of mankind. Just look around and see how insanity is normalized and semantics take the place of any real sense of direct experience. Just consider this in education! Cultural neurosis and personal delusions dominate so much of our cultural surroundings. The ghosts we see or feel may have some reality beyond explanation; but then to define what they are and to elaborate and teach it all as fact is to pander to and legitimize the false witness of fragile minds.
While there is always a fraction of truth within deeply held views and beliefs, it means the may well be bonding all such people with aspects of that very fraction into small close societies.
Joe Woodward
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