c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) There are shrine seekers and shrine makers. The first often see things that aren’t there, while the second look unblinkingly at the harshness and loss that is always there someplace in life.

As to the first, is there any connection between changing-of-the-season madness and the reports of religious statues beginning to weep? What should we make of images of the Virgin Mary materializing on such unlikely surfaces as the stained walls along underground highways in Chicago?

People there recently claimed that such an icon smiled from a retaining wall so long in place that its first sash of mud may have been deposited by the squealing tires of Al Capone’s limo back in the ’20s.

Prompt municipal power washing soon erased that along with the “attention must be paid” messages of more recent graffiti artists and the slush swipes of a million cars. Still, flocking pilgrims claimed that, yes, they could still see the virgin there.

Is this mysticism or monkey business? Why do people continue to come to such locales or to journey to other unlikely sites? Do they find faith in these questionable settings?

This brings us to the other group, those men and women intuitively guided to holy places that have not yet made the tour guides.

They actually bring faith, tested in a thousand ways by loss and disappointment, with them. They bear the modern-day counterpart of the Bible’s mustard seed of faith that moves mountains.

These are the eucharists of ordinary time through which people who never get their names in the paper write large on the empty slates of everyday places, transforming them and making them sacred through the power of their honest hopes and prayers. Their pilgrimages are tributes to belief itself.

Flashy popular magazines document how the shallow of this world are drawn like iron filings to the magnets of Nice, Malibu and other places that are famous, as the old line goes, for being famous. These places become so infected by time _ Why do you think celebrities wear big watches? _ that their spas don’t spout healing waters and the management never mentions the eternal. That concept unsettles the famous but does not trouble ordinary people at all.

Ordinary people mark sacred places with clutches of flowers and wind-bent candles, proclaiming in the same way that explorers did new lands that these places belong to us, to the human family that may never have sampled celebrity but has drunk deeply from the cup of joy and sorrow.

What are ordinary people saying when they spontaneously make a street corner more sacred than some churches by placing there simple gifts of blossoms and flickering light? They place them at intersections where accidents have happened, on the sea after a ship has gone down, or everywhere in cities like hurricane-stricken New Orleans.

These are not tributes to death or to the terrorists who preach that the end is near. These gifts are not signals that death so triumphed in these spaces that we should all head off to repent in the hills.

These gifts certify these locations as sacred not because death took place at them but because life filled them to overflowing, that here, in this place, men and women were alive enough to love each other and so break forever the chains with which time would grapple us.

Only lovers brave enough to take on the hazards of time itself make places sacred. The floral pieces, often as homemade as real love itself, tell us that here, in this place, we are in touch with the eternal energy of love. It is outside time and, as we come to honor those who lived and died here, we are refreshed by them instead.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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