Reality Check
Some say it was a miracle, others say it was a delusion. For me, it was a turning point.
By Brendan Coffey
To get from Timoleague, a town in Ireland’s County Cork best known for its medieval abbey ruins, to Kinsale, an upscale port town crowded with yachters and Americans on golf vacations, the most logical route is to head east along the coast road, through rolling, patchwork fields of green farmland. Somewhere halfway between the two points is a village called Ballinspittle.
This is the route my family always took in our summers around Timoleague, when we were the Yanks on extended holiday on the farms of my aunts and uncles. One day in 1985, we started out to visit the Kinsale lighthouse, but the road through Ballinspittle was, unexpectedly, impassable. Cars were parked where the road should be. Perhaps it was a street fair, which was odd since nothing ever happened in Ballinspittle. We turned back.
We learned the next day that a couple of days prior, tourists from The Netherlands (or some equally unfamiliar place) had reported seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary move at a roadside grotto. Impossible, of course, but my devout mother wanted to go see for herself. So, the next morning we drove over to the grotto, against the vehement protestations of one of my sisters, a driven New York professional who knew a moving statue was a hoax. I was curious, but my rigorous schooling had me figuring something obvious would explain it—a trick of the light or the eager wishes of the viewer. As we parked, my sister launched a new attack against this ridiculousness and, mid-sentence, saw the statue move. And then I did, as did my other sister. My mother, curiously, didn’t.
I can only describe the movement as being immediate, otherworldly, and impossible to explain. But we did try to explain it, to my family, our relatives, and to the throngs of people who within days were flocking to Ballinspittle to see the moving statue in what became a national sensation. Perhaps it was the effect of standing still or a weakness in the eyes, or an unstable platform for the statue. No probability proved out, and anyone who saw it knew no explanation would suffice, even if they had wanted one to. At the time, I accepted the apparition with wonder, but without surprise, for the questions the world generates to shake one’s faith had yet to beset me.
In the years since, the events at Ballinspittle have been attacked by some as the claims of publicity-hungry locals and by others as the self-induced hallucination of a crowd of zealots. I have my own explanation for what happened that summer.
When I am back in Cork now, having logged countless hours of self-doubt and crises of faith in the years since, I still find myself slowing when the sign says Ballinspittle, then stopping at the roadside grotto. There are no crowds now, no film crews or reporters, no indication, in fact, that anything out of the ordinary happened here. I wait and stare for a few moments at the statue. It doesn’t move. The statue hasn’t moved since it stopped, as inexplicably as it started, after just a few weeks. I always look away, then look back, then away again but faster. Then I try standing different ways to see if I can re-create what I saw, but with no success. Soon I give up and get into the car and drive on, satisfied that it is as silent and steady as a statue should be. But that it doesn’t move now doesn’t matter, I find myself reminded.
Once, on an ordinary road between two places, something did move, a brief-lived, incredible sign that our grand journey isn’t all that can be logically measured and proofed and satisfactorily explained.
Brendan Coffey is a freelance writer. Send your Inspiration essay for consideration to regina@collinsonpublishing.com.
