By chance, in April this year, I found myself standing beneath the spire of Basilica di Santa Maria in Vado, in Ferrara, Italy. While using Google Maps to find my way to the Palazzo Schifanoia, I sat down outside a small café to order a coffee and check my locations. Sitting at a shaded table, I looked around to see what was blocking the sun and there,-- charged in something more than stone and shadow -- stood the church.
Not jumping to any assumptions about its relevance within the landscape but wanting to uncover the history of the area, I opened my iPad and checked in with Google Maps on my phone and found the links to the site. And when I clicked through, there it was--the sense of “something more," explained:
In 1171, during the consecration of the Eucharist, the Host is said to have bled. Blood spurted from the chalice and splashed the underside of the vault above the altar. To this day, the stains remain--reverently preserved down the centuries through a couple of rebuilds and renovations--not unlike a wound that refuses to vanish entiely.
This was one of the earliest Eucharistic miracles witnessed by a congregation during Mass. It occurred decades before the Church officially defined the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215. Unlike earlier, more private visions--such as the 8th-century miracle at Lanciano--the Ferrara event was dramatic, public, and left a physical trace: a miracle woven into the very architecture of faith.
I am Irish Catholic, and at home, miracle stories flow as freely as folklore. A Padre Pio relic will be shared within a circle of friends who are looking for a cure or an indulgence. A hand-woven Saint Brigid’s Cross will be kept in a kitchen cupboard to keep evil, fire, and hunger away. A sliver of the Easter Palm will be used as a lucky bookmark or placed in an alcove to bring peace and allow the love of God to flow through.
These small beliefs carry truths that people find stored within a culture--simple things that take on life-size meaning when one considers the importance of the apparitions. In the early 1980s, I remember stories of statues weeping blood in Cork. I watched news shows as RTE covered the events. I saw the tension that emanated from the screen as the crowds assembled to wait and pray--a mixture of wonder and unease, belief and suspicion. In those years, stories also emerged of men and women who spoke in tongues, in prayer rooms, in community centres, where people gathered for prayer meetings. And all these events garnered attention. Something was breaking through. And then it stopped--disappeared--as life moved on and other, more pressing social concerns overtook the day, the season, the year.
The Church of the Apparition, in Knock, County Mayo, is our own sacred site: the place where images of Mary, Saint Joseph, and Saint John the Evangelist reportedly appeared to fifteen locals, the image settling on the gable end wall on a wet evening in 1879.
I have visited the village on a number of occasions over the years--first with my parents in the '60s when it was still a small village lined with market stalls, later in the '90s to visit family who had moved there, and again after the Covid pandemic, when, while travelling in Mayo, I stopped to say a prayer and light a candle. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on these encounters--not merely as isolated spiritual events, but as part of a larger phenomenon. On YouTube, I've listened to the voices of channellers, modern mystics who, in trance-like states, claim to receive messages from angelic realms or higher beings. Their voices change. Their language shifts. Something else appears to speak through them. And though the context is contemporary, I can’t help but feel a kinship between their experiences and those of the visionaries of the past.
Could it be that what we’re witnessing isn’t a new phenomenon at all, but an old one taking on a new form? Could the channeler, like the seer or the stigmatic, be attuning to live thought-patterns saved on sacred frequencies?
I’ve had a few visionary experiences over the years, one of which I will share here. But I never assumed an angelic realm was setting down in my vicinity, or that an alien was attempting to contact me, or that I was in any way special. If anything, I reckoned it was my subconscious filling in detail--a precognition, a warning even--sharing its impression in a recording of my work, my life, my fears, etc. Working for me, or at least in my favour. Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of the morphic field is a theoretical concept suggesting there are non-physical fields carrying memory, habit, and form. These fields, according to Sheldrake, influence biological development and patterns of behaviour. But more evocatively, they may also store the echo of rituals, devotions, and divine encounters. In this view, places like Knock or Ferrara are more than historical sites. They are resonant chambers, where the same sacred note is struck again and again, and where some of us--sensitive, open, receptive--might still hear it or even see it.
Maybe controversial in scientific circles, but as a poetic framework, it’s rich with possibility and suggests that miracles are not simply supernatural intrusions but patterned responses--old presences, rising again in familiar form.
The field remembers. The soul responds.
Was that what happened? It was late in the afternoon. I had finished work, and the early summer light beckoned me outside. While considering my options, I stood with my back to the fireplace. To my left, a set of double doors led into the front garden, which bordered the lake. The sitting room was spread out in front of me. Leading off it was the kitchen door, and to my right a staircase; beyond that and to its left, a door to the downstairs guest suite.
The room was quiet when suddenly, from nowhere, a vision opened in front of my mind and I saw golden notes drift, fall and tumble down from a gorgeous sky. They swaysed through stillness, as though memory was their compass, each notation followed by another, and another, and another--slowly falling down from the heavens over a calm lake that was bordered by countryside that looked warm and welcoming. It was momentary, and I didn’t wait long enough to see the notes enter the water, or to see what else might happen, or might bloom on the horizon, and I quickly pulled myself back into my reality. That year I was based in Dromod, in County Leitrim. My office overlooked Lough Boffin. I was working with some lovely texts and artwork, and each day I walked in the forest by the Shannon. To this day, I can reopen the image and replay it in my mind, just as one would view again a favourite letter or card or watch a favourite video. I believe my brain had recorded its impression of my work and surroundings and played it back to me. But then Ireland, with its thin places and whispered lore, is fertile ground for such resonance. Our holy wells, our Mass rocks, our prayer-soaked ruins all bear traces of a deep and abiding memory.
Perhaps what we call mysticism is simply the act of listening--with the right kind of attention--to what the land, the saints, and the unseen continue to say. And maybe that is what I felt in 'Basicila di Santa Maria in Vado,' and what I experienced while living in 'Dromod'--not just the echo of an ancient miracle, but the ongoing pulse of a living field. A presence driven by texts and image-fields, that lingers, waiting not for belief, but for notice.
In an age of distraction, that may be the truest miracle of all.