In reading and writing about Our Lady’s apparitions over the last three months, I have discovered many gemlike treasures. One of my favorites is the spontaneous response Fernande Voisin made to an artist in 1932. She and four other children had been receiving visits from the Queen of Heaven in Beauraing, Belgium, and the artist offered to paint the Lady for her. Without hesitation, Ferdinande replied, Non, monsieur, vous ne pouvez pas, “No, sir, you cannot.” She didn’t have to explain why he could not paint Our Lady. She did not have to tell him that the Queen of Heaven was too beautiful, that the transforming graces pouring from her could never be reduced to oil on canvas.

This morning I went out the eastern door or my little Irish farmhouse to greet the day. The dawn had begun stretching her rosy fingers westward over a field of lush grasses in which twenty-five cows grazed contentedly. Even as I raced back inside for my phone, I knew it would be futile to “capture the shot” on my little device. But I took it anyway, which you can see below.
In a limited way, an earthly sunrise reflects the glory of what we imagine heaven to be. There are many reasons we think of heaven as brilliant and beauteous light. Those who undergo “near death” experiences testify to “a wondrous light,” and those who see apparitions of Our Lady describe a woman “clothed with the sun.” The magnificent colors of a sunrise, the precise textures a rising sun projects onto clouds, the warmth with which it clothes the earth, and the sun’s bursting over a dark horizon all portray infinite beauty, heart-warming goodness, and eternal truth. A good sunrise goes a long way to make one’s whole day beautiful and instill hope in one day seeing God’s undying day.

All of this I sought to capture on my cellphone this morning. But even if the phone gets the colors right, how can a two-dimensional image convey the breadth and width and height of all that surrounds a sunrise? What of the husky ravens calling  to each other, or the twittering sparrows diving and climbing through the brightening air? And what of Mr. Fox, loping through tall grass, not bothered at all by towering cattle grazing through the green? What of the tussling grasses, and the warming breezes, and the woodsmoke curling from the neighbor’s chimney? What of my own wondrous gratitude for another day newly begun? We must go outside to rejoice in these graces. We must go outside of our own little digital worlds to find them.
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Nevertheless, you have my little screenshot below. It’s a tiny image, but it is “sacramental,” a small thing pointing to a great thing. Even a pixilated image can help us see God, but we must not become pixilated ourselves. We must not be reduced to the technology we use. Our newest saint, Carlo Acutis, found much pleasure in video games, but he resolved to spend no more than one hour a week on them. He saw more of God’s great universe in fifteen years than most of us because he looked up much more than he looked down. That’s why we call him a saint, and that’s why his very healthy approach to digital technology is worth imitating.

​We don’t think about September 11th much anymore, but I woke up rather early today, as I did on that morning 24 years ago. I had pushed my bed up against the open window on that hot California evening, and at 5:45am the next morning a blast of wind blew the venetian blinds forward with a great clatter. I sprang from bed and went outside. The sky was aflame with bulbous clouds, like so many blooms of orange fire. There was no wind outside, and I couldn’t imagine what might have caused that single blast of air at 5:45. I went inside to get ready for holy hour and Mass. It was only as I approached the church two hours later for Mass that my parishioners, dazed and almost in tears, told me about the attacks on New York and Washington.
 
Today I awoke naturally at 5:45 and went outside. All was quiet, and all was bright. A nearly full moon shone over pale fields, while Orion’s belt stretched over the eastern sky. Two planets looked down as well: Jupiter high above and Venus lower on the horizon, in all her shining precision. Rather than a blast of wind from flaming clouds, a gentle breeze deftly rustled the tall field grasses. Three months in rural Ireland has put a blessed distance between me and our anxious coastal cities.
 
How nearly perfect has been my sojourn in the Irish countryside! How healing it has been to live quietly among the sheep and the cows, to greet my friend the red fox with her full white-tipped tail patrolling the field every morning before sunrise, and to give the farmyard dogs a run for their money on my red bike. How bracing to range through tall grasses in high boots, crossing streams and rivulets without fear of snakes or garbage. Ireland is like a jungle, at least in the summer, a land of gentle rain and strong wind, fields and hedgerows overflowing with flora and fauna. The world has been at war since 9-11, but not here in rural Ireland.
 
The bible describes heaven as a city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. But I wonder if more like a village than a city like New York or Beijing? The other day I went into the village to pick up some milk and to make a visit at the parish church. It was about 5pm, and many were going home after a day at the lumber mill, the village school, or the dairy plant. The light was turning golden and the air crisp on this late September afternoon in one of  ten thousand Irish villages. A deeply satisfying sense of community swept over me, and I realized what kind of “city” God has in mind for us. In most Irish villages there is only one main street, the road between townlands along which most of the villagers have built their homes. There are no “developments” or apartment complexes but only a row of brightly-colored houses with their chimneys and flowerpots. I know many of these people by now, having talked to them in the one village grocery store, worshipped God with them in their only parish church, and dropped off my laundry with Mrs. Mayberry in the only village dry cleaners. I’ve talked about cows and weather with them in the village pubs (not one but three of them in my village).
 
In a week I return to the city, which has a different kind of beauty born of the concentrated energy of large numbers of people. I think heaven will be more like a village than either the splendid isolation of the farmhouse or the exciting density of the city. Heaven will be, I think, a natural community of those who know and love each other, who have built their homes not far from the village tabernacle and along the road that links one village with the next. And the Lamb of God will be the light, and the tabernacle, of that City.
 
After the bad guys destroyed our thousand-foot towers in New York, we built an even taller tower for a city that never sleeps. Exciting stuff, but as I grow older the city holds less fascination for me. The village is the thing for me now, a place in which everyone has a home, and with which terrorists do not think to bother.

Today is the day Mother Teresa died in Calcutta twenty-eight years ago, and so today is the day the Church celebrates her dies natalis, the day she was born into eternity. The same Church canonized her on September 4, 2016, declaring with certitude that God took her from Calcutta straight to heaven. If one fully engages grace in that city, Calcutta is certainly a purgatory on earth. But as Mother pointed out frequently, one can find the immense love she found in Calcutta in every city and village. “Go home and find Calcutta where you live,” she would encourage those who wanted to prolong their stay at Motherhouse on Lower Circular Road (now A.J.C. Bose Road). In three weeks at Motherhouse in April 1997, I found a great love of God in that city. Mother Teresa was in a wheelchair by then, parked against the back wall of the chapel, along with a hundred sisters and a hundred lay volunteers as the deafening roar of A.J.C. Bose Road came through the open windows. I found Jesus himself—I held Him in my arms—when I carried a naked man back from his bath at the Home for Dying Destitutes. I knew he was Jesus, and I knew that I had never done anything remotely Christian before He allowed me to carry His frail body back from the washroom that morning.
 
God gave me another grace in the sacristy after Mass one morning. Having been raised in Sacred Heart Parish in Skopje, Mother Teresa installed a kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above the vesting table to remind her priests of Christ’s divine and human heart. Mother Teresa usually wheeled herself into the sacristy after Mass to thank the priest and ask about his day. She sat there that morning, looking at me, and the kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above her head looked at me too. The picture of Jesus that I had seen thousands of times without giving it a second thought came alive for me that morning, and I knew that I had a Savior. Being close to a saint—especially an extraordinary saint—opens one’s mind and heart to the invisible realities in which that saint holds daily converse. To be close to a living saint is wonderful, but to be close to a “dead” saint is good too, which explains the Church’s veneration of relics. A relic of Mother Teresa (my breviary which she signed with “God Bless You, M [aria]. Teresa, MC”) was kissed by a dying friend, and a week later Stanford Medical Center could find no trace of the intestinal cancer that had spread throughout her body.
 
I am not in the deafening city of Calcutta today but in the quiet fields of West Cork, where I have only two weeks left of my three-month sabbatical. The Archbishop kindly afforded me ninety days away from my bustling parish to write two books, both of which I have finished (at least the first drafts). One is the history of Star of the Sea parish, at one point the westernmost Catholic Church on the American Continent, and so the book is entitled Star of the West. The other book is a high-level look at 18 Marian apparitions entitled Mother of the Light. I had to distance myself from the parish to gain the perspective needed to write a full and balanced history of that parish, from 1776 to 2026 (in time for the Church’s 250th anniversary in San Francisco next year). I had to distance myself from my Marian shrine in San Francisco to write a thoughtful summary of all the apparitions of Our Lady throughout history. To more fully understand the world, one must get away from and above the world at times. History, literature (especially poetry), philosophy and theology, art and music—all of these “big picture” disciplines that education so painfully lacks these days—are vital to a meaningful life.
 
Unfortunately, the big picture and creation’s multiple dimensions have been reduced to a tiny flat screen much of the time. Last week I went to England, both to confer with an author and to visit a former parishioner at the Birmingham Oratory. The author had written a book like mine, and the parishioner wanted me to see Cardinal Newman's vast library before he is named the thirty-eighth doctor of the Church. To get through London and Birmingham, I felt it necessary to bring my little screen. It’s GPS directed me through complicated city streets and twisting English byways, for which I am grateful. At the same time, my eyes were torn between beholding the green countryside of “Mary’s Dowry” (the fields and copses around Walsingham are particularly lovely) and fixating on the tiny screen. My cellphone reduced the glories of England to a flat and colorless series of lines and numbers (the M25, the A1065, and the B1355, for example). It was a necessary evil, I suppose, to get from London to Nottingham, but how dismal merry England appeared on my little screen. Here in Ireland my eyes were glued to my little screen for the first three weeks as I found my way around Cork City and the farmlands further west. What a sense of relief when I knew the roads well enough to put my phone aside and look out the window for myself!
 
I brought my pretty red bike to Ireland, and I ride it every day past well-kept farms and seaside villages. Because the roads here are narrow, twisting, and enclosed by tall hedgerows, I installed a little mirror at the bottom of my right handlebar. But I found myself glancing down a bit too often at that little picture. It’s tempting to fixate on the screens “for safety” and for a sense of control. They are helpful, to be sure, but how much better to look around us, to see and think freely, to behold the vast horizons God spreads before us.
 
Mother Teresa left her Albanian village in 1928 for Dublin, to become a Loretto Sister. “Put your hand in Our Lady’s hand,” her mother told her as she got on the train. “Don’t look back, because if you look back you will go back.” Young Agnes (who would take the name “Teresa”) did not look back. She looked forward, even to the vast horizons of the Indian subcontinent, to which she had been assigned. She found a brilliance in Calcutta's darkness, and from that city she taught the entire world to look up, not down. Look down at your little screen only as much as is absolutely necessary, but look up into the sky, to the sun and the clouds and the stars, as much as you can.