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It's A Miracle - Recession Religion...

Until we see some real green shoots, praying to a tree stump may be the next best thing...



It's a miracle. It's a sign from above in bad times. It's a tree stump.


It all depends on where you stand, how you view the tree stump in the churchyard in Rathkeale, County Limerick. People from all over the country have been coming to pray at the stump, in which they perceive an image of the Virgin Mary.

Workmen removing old trees from the grounds of the Holy Mary Parish Church, having sawn away the upper part of the tree, noticed that the leftover stump had an unusual shape.

They believed it looked like the Virgin Mary.

The parish priest could have seen this as a great opportunity to revive the faith, but instead, he talked commonsense.

"There's nothing there," he said crisply "It's just a tree. You can't worship a tree."

God help him, he's fighting an uphill battle, as local teenagers line up in the Church in the evenings to say the Rosary in a throwback to their grandparents. Not to mention the cars with out-of-town reg plates lining the streets as people from as far away as Dublin come to be moved by the graceful shape of the Virgin they insist is to be found in the rough side of the standing stump.

This is shaping up to be the new example of Recession Religion.

We had it before. Last time we had a recession, moving statues came into play.
It's a function of bad times, and it's not confined to Catholicism. When times get tough, the tough may get going, but the frightened want to believe that something bigger and better than themselves is taking care of things. The common factor in virtually all claimed apparitions of the Virgin, for example, is that they happened in times of death, disease, despair and poverty.

It's easy to mock the very idea of people getting into their cars to visit a tree stump. It's even easier to laugh at the idea of someone getting two thousand signatures on a petition to preserve the tree stump.

But the fact is that following the best advice and the most rational approaches has landed pensioners in poverty, because they bought bank shares. It has landed homeowners in negative equity. It has landed the nation into ownership of useless land banks. The reasonable world has been turned upside down, and when that happens, it's time to bring on the rain-makers.

That's what primitive societies have always done, when there's a drought. The most expert witch doctor is called in to do a rain dance. Everybody gets involved in the singing and the hand-clapping, to the point of exhaustion. If luck and coincidence happen, rain begins to bucket out of the sky and everybody runs for shelter, happy that they did the right thing. Even if luck doesn't happen and the drought continues, hearts lift for a while because of the collective effort and the shared belief.

We may be the most educated generation in history, but we have not a single brain cell more than our primitive ancestors. And what we have in common with them is an atavistic yearning to believe that we're not alone. That somebody up there cares about us. That the Great Father (as the Native American tribes saw him) is on the job. Or that the Virgin Mary (much preferred, as an apparition figure in Ireland, France and Italy) is going to take care of us.

The Virgin of Rathkeale has already done a lot of people a service. She's given a bit of excitement to a flat summer. She's attracted visitors to a town that's not usually thought of as a tourist attraction. She's fulfilled a gut-need to sing, light candles and get involved in ritual -- and that gut-need is enormously powerful when to look at one's own finances is to face apparently insurmountable problems.

The parish priest is quite right. This has nothing to do with serious religion.

But the local man who pointed out that local people of all religions and ethnic backgrounds were coming out at twilight to pray has a point, too.

"What's wrong with that?" he asked.

Not a lot, it has to be said. Until we see some really green shoots, a tree stump may be the next best thing.



Report by Terry Prone - Evening Herald

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