Our Lady of Zeitoun

The problem with miracles is that there are just too many of them. Internet research will  disclose a never-ending stream of stories and claims about the miraculous. Some or many may be a fortuitous coincidence that can be explained as natural events. Unexplained medical cures may in fact be a spontaneous remission of the disease. That doesn’t rule out divine intervention; it just makes it more difficult to classify as a miracle. Ironically, too many inexplicable events would make them commonplace and thereby undermine the miracle of God.

A cross in the sky

On the other hand, it would seem that if there were one totally inexplicable event that the whole world simultaneously witnessed we would have universal proof certain that God exists and loves us. For example, assume for a moment that at 1200 Greenwich time a spectacular cross appeared in the heavens and was simultaneously viewed throughout the world from Greenland to the Antarctica. Day or night, cloud coverage or no, everyone could see the blazing cross. Fifteen minutes later it disappeared.

I think it would be safe to speculate that the following Sunday there would be an upsurge in church attendance. Media would concentrate on the event – for a while. Soon talking heads would appear on television explaining the event as something which although can’t be explained right now, when you think about it and view of the billions and billions of stars and galaxies it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later such a coincidence would occur. The television program would then be interrupted by a news bulletin that a prostitute has proof that 15 years earlier the President of the United States was her customer. The dominating news event would then shift to things more understandable and earthy. Adios God and hello beloved scandal. Memory and news coverage of the cross would diminish and recede until it were unofficially categorized as one more, among many, unexplained events such a UFO flying over Phoenix or an image of Jesus on a piece of toast.

Our Lady of Zeitoun

Why are so many afraid to acknowledge the possibility of God, even in the face of millions of witnesses? Why is a Supreme Creator cavalierly dismissed as an impossibility? Over a three-year period thousands, and perhaps millions, witnessed what appears to have been Mary on a Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo, Egypt. She moved among the domes of the church, sometimes bowing before a cross. Hovering above her were unidentified phenomena that  appeared to be doves (in the New Testament, doves are associated with the Holy Spirit). This church is built on the location where tradition holds that Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus stayed when they fled to Egypt to escape the murderous treachery of Herod. There are even photographs of what was seen by Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and everyone else that was there when she appeared on numerous occasions from 1968 to 1971. The apparition is now known as Our Lady of Zeitoun. The skeptics online encyclopedia, The Skeptics Dictionary, analyzed these appearances but couldn’t come up with a rational explanation of the image and its movement. The article concludes, “I don’t know what caused the Zeitoun lights, but last on my list of plausible possibilities would be the hypothesis that it was the 2,000-year-old ghost of a virgin who gave birth to a god.”

Return for a moment to the hypothetical cross that appeared in the heavens as postulated above. One can easily imagine a successor to Carl Sagan (who is dead) analyzing the event and then pronouncing his well-considered and objective conclusion, “I don’t know what caused the image of the cross that was in the sky, but last on my list of plausible possibilities would be the hypothesis that it has anything to do with a 2,000 year old myth of a godman being nailed to it.”

The number and diversity of miracles and visions granted by Our Lord is staggeringly high, and this website is only bringing you a few of them. Others are easily accessible on the internet. Read about them with an open mind and heart.

Some websites and references

Last modified on September 9, 2019