Did she wave at me? She may have waved at me. That nice Jewish girl, on the hill, I think she waved at me. Too bad she’s a statue and she’s already with another Guy.
It was the summer of 1985, and I was biking across Ireland, alone. It was a miserable trip; Ireland was all hills and wind and rain, and the first pleasure I had each day was a Guinness at 4pm. That beer, almost as good as the one in the locker room after playing hockey, was always in whichever pub I could find a meal and a room for that night. Once I had that first Guinness, I didn’t leave the building until morning.
There was a glitch one afternoon in Kinsale, a County Cork village at the end of my exhaustion. I couldn’t find a room in Kinsale, and I couldn’t ride further. All I could do was have a beer and chat with the locals in a pub.
“I have a room for you, if you want,” said a cloth-capped, 40-ish man with a blackened thumbnail, like he had a hammer mishap. His name was Paddy, which I thought was an Irish stereotype until I kept meeting Paddys in Ireland.
“Really? You run a B&B?”
“No, but it sounds like you’re stuck,” said Paddy. “We have an extra room. My wife won’t mind. She’ll make us dinner.” This sounded great, until he told me he lived 10 kilometres away, on a dirt country road, and he couldn’t fit my bike in his car. We had another pint before I saddled up for a weaving, dog-tired pedal to Paddy’s house, powered by Guinness-fuel.
Paddy’s wife served stew. I’ll let you guess which kind.
Dinner almost done, Paddy said, “So, have you see the moving Virgin?”
Virgin? Not at my university, I thought. “Uh, I’m not sure what you mean. Which virgin?”
“THE Virgin, of course,” said Paddy’s wife, named (what else could she be named?) Mary. “At the grotto.” As Mary dished out second helpings of stew and beer, she recounted the biggest story to ever hit the nearby village of Ballinspittle (the oddness of this name is your guarantee I couldn’t have made it up). While I biked through Irish storms for two weeks, I was unaware tiny Ballinspittle was the centre of national attention (remember, it was 1985, pre-internet). A dog walker noticed a statue of the Virgin Mary waving at him from a secluded hill. Word spread, and 100,000 worshippers and spectators flocked to Ballinspittle’s nearby grotto soon afterwards.
“Well, I have to see that,” I said. This was better than the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. “I’ll ride my bike over after dinner.”
“No, no, I’ll drive you.” Paddy sopped up the remains of his stew with a tranche of dark, dense bread. “I haven’t seen her move since last week.”
Shortly after, Paddy parked his car at Hurley’s Bar (est. 1864), because we could only reach the Virgin Mary’s grotto on foot. A bus idled at the side of the building and several attractive women stepped out.
“Oh, I see the girls are early tonight,” said Paddy.
“What?”
“That’s the hooker bus. They’ve been shipping in prostitutes from all over Ireland while the crowds are here to see the statue. Business is good.”
“That’s somewhat ironic, considering the event is sponsored by a virgin,” I said.
Paddy and I walked along a wide, dirt path through the forest. No moonlight could pierce the clouds or the canopy of branches and leaves interlaced above us. Hundreds (thousands?) of adults and children walked in both directions, silently. It was so dark we couldn’t see the faces of those returning from the grotto until they were very close; they had the open mouths and blank, eyes-wide stares of a zombie apocalypse. The hairs on the back of my neck danced. The trees opened to a clearing, bordered on one side by a ravine. Past the ravine was a low hill, and on the side of the hill was a life-sized, blue and white painted statue of the Virgin Mary. She would have been lost in the darkness were it not for the shimmering electric bulbs surrounding her head like a halo. Wooden stadium stands, constructed near the ravine facing the Virgin, were jammed. Hundreds of others crowded nearby, standing. A crazed-looking woman with wiry, exploding hair stood before us with a megaphone. She led the throng in a monotone recitation of the “Hail Mary” prayer like there were no spaces between the words. HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee. The crowd spoke in a spooky, robotic, my-brain-has-been-eaten tone. The prayer was repeated ten times, fifty times, without a pause at its end or beginning. There was a scuffle at the edge of the crowd as penitents jockeying for position came to blows, and two priests tried to break up the fight by threatening eternal damnation.
“See?” said Paddy, elbowing me. “See that? She just moved.” I missed it while watching the fight. I stared at the Virgin Mary but she didn’t react. I gazed harder, without blinking, like I was in a staring contest with my sister at our childhood breakfast table and the winner could punch the other in the shoulder as hard as they liked. All the while, the lights around the statue’s head flickered and wavered, and the crowd continued its pitchless mantra. I became drowsy, and fought to remain awake. I knew the statue couldn’t move, but I wanted it to move. After thirty minutes of concentration, I was ready to ask Paddy if we could go back to the pub. Sensing my weakening faith, Mary wiggled her finger, or the weird lighting wiggled her finger, or the hypnotic chanting wiggled her finger, or my sleepiness and 5 beers wiggled her finger, but I gasped just the same. Had her finger really moved? I still don’t know.
Back at the cosy, packed Hurley’s Pub, everyone was talking about the Virgin.
“I’ve seen her move her hand three times.”
“She smiled at me and nodded her head last Sunday.”
“I saw her step down from her pedestal, pick a few flowers and shake a stone out of her sandal.”
The evening ladies were plying the oldest trade. Replica statues of the Virgin, each a foot high, stood at attention on the bar, unmoving. They were for sale, along with t-shirts, keychains and snow globes of Mariolatry (a word I just learned, but you can figure it out). The GDP of Ballinspittle trebled overnight. After a couple more Guinnesses I was telling everyone the Virgin Mary had given me the finger.
Leaving Ballinspittle, I had no idea the moving statue was more than an Irish curiosity. Days later, I called Canada for my weekly check-in with my parents (texts, emails and cellphones remained in the realm of science fiction). I told my father I was still biking through Ireland, and before I could mention Ballinspittle, he asked, “Did you see the moving virgin?”
Back in Canada, I heard the Vatican closed the Ballinspittle site for a day, and surreptitiously replaced the statue with a fake. The Vatican took the moving statue on a whirlwind international tour of which Ireland was unaware. After a lucrative run of cities with huge Catholic populations, the Vatican threw the statue in a dumpster, having found a prettier, and more animated moving idol in Rio de Janeiro.
Shockingly, I have been accused of exaggerating some of my stories in the past. But I swear by the Virgin Mary that this story, coincidentally about said icon, is true.