Fatima

The end of a week with the Pope’s visit to Portugal and around half a million people gathered together at the shrine of Fatima about 100 km north of here. Which is a lot, when you consider the population of this country is not much more than 10 million. Fatima sort of sums up the relationship of the Portuguese people with their religion.

Apart from cynical elderly gentlemen like José Saramago, even those Portuguese who have already shrugged off any personal faith in God retain some sort of affection or affinity for the devotion that Fatima stirs up. The columnist José Gameiro in Saturday’s paper writes : “I’m an agnostic of 17 years, following an intense period of connection to the church .... but more and more I am finding myself trying to transmit to my children the same values that I had back then, and that are consistently vomitted out by today’s society”.

So what is there at Fatima? There’s an aura of mystery in the whole history of the place. It has to do with visions that were supposed to have been seen by three poor shepherd children in 1917. Balls of light, secret prophesies, an attempted assassination of the Pope and a cloistered nun. A curious mixture of reality and mystery, of fact and fiction.We’ve only been to Fatima once. We found it a bit bewildering. An odd mixture of lofty architecture and tacky commercialism, of individual piety and of ecclesiastical hierarchy. Shops selling religious artifacts. The heady sell of burning candlewax. Silent devotion.

What the place lacks is, well - Jesus.

Well he’s there set on an oddly incongruous

crucifix set far away in the corner of the plaza that surrounds the sanctuary. That was the thing that struck me forcibly in my impression of the place. This angular steel structure set in a corner, oddly jarring with the white marble and soft curves of the rest of the place. Its as though Jesus has been sidelined, forgotten about - which, in reality is pretty much the story of the place. The story of this country

Fatima needs Jesus. Portugal needs Jesus. We need Jesus. I need Jesus.

Lead me to the cross
Where Your love poured out
Bring me to my knees
Lord I lay me down
Rid me of myself
I belong to You
Oh Lead me, lead me to the cross

New Life, Old Body

When Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, he seemed confused by the idea of being born again. I always thought his response to Jesus to be a bit simplistic. “How can that be?” he says “can a man return to his mothers womb after he is old?” Hold, on, Nic, don’t you realise that Jesus is talking in metaphors. It’s not about physical birth. He’s a spiritual teacher, remember.

The thing is, Nicodemus was no fool. He was a Rabbi, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He knew his stuff. He spent his days talking in riddles and parables. And, in asking that question, he actually opens up a whole other area of philosophical inquiry, one that continues to confuse and to challenge.

If I become a Christian at the age of, say, twenty, what happens to all the stuff that has gone on before. Is it just obliterated? Do I just become like a clean slate? What about all the bad stuff that I have done, and the bad stuff that has been done to me. Do

es it no longer affect my life?

Well, yes and no. We do continue to be exactly the way we are, with all those early influences that shaped our character for good or ill. The big difference is that the perspective has shifted and the control has changed. Now are freed. No longer bound by the terrors of the past. Sin – abuse – hatred – lust – addiction. None of this stuff any longer has any power over us.

No wonder then, when Jesus died on that dark day on the cross, that it was Nicodemus who emerged from the shadows along with Joseph of Arimathea, to take down the body and lay it in the cold tomb. He’d learnt where true freedom and new life was to be found.