Synopsis
Book by Harline Craig
Extrait
ONE
MIRACLES AT THE JESUS OAK
A HOLY PLACE
In the Sonien Woods, near Brussels, around 1630. The grocer Peter van Kerckhoven traveled often on the rutted dirt highway that ran southeast from his home in Brussels. Most of the time his destination was the middling village of Overijse, some eight miles away, where he was born more than fifty years before and where in his spare time he oversaw the family properties. Though the journey was by now long familiar, it was also unfailingly stressful, for it required him to pass through the Sonien Woods, deep and dark.
Despite their lofty overlord, the king of Spain himself, these royal woods were, like most woods, notoriously dangerous. Peter feared their lushness, with oaks, beeches, and elms so dense that not even a midsummer sun shone through, for this was what hid unknown enemies. He no doubt trembled at their peace, which magnified and made threatening even the smallest sound. And who would have blamed him for ignoring the freshness of their air, so less pungent than the unrelieved streets of Brussels?
For working most of all on his mind were the stories. He knew well the gruesome tales of ill-fated travelers who, on this very road, had been shot, stabbed, or strung up by professional thieves or disbanded groups of soldiers in between campaigns. To make matters worse, he knew also, like all the world around him, that such out-of-the-way places were favorite haunts of the devil and his demons. Even when companions were along, foreboding and apprehension, not calm, dominated Peter's passage through the woods.
That was why, during yet another nerve-racking trip through the Sonien, he resolved to do what many Catholics of his time did to combat dread: he would sacralize this place, or make it holy, by affixing to it a sacred object. This centuries-old practice reassured the anxious of God's presence even in the most forsaken places, thus confirming that He was mightier than the devil even on the devil's own turf. In fact, long before Peter some other believer had had the same idea, and had attached a crucifix to the most famous landmark along the forest road: a gigantic, gnarly, lightning-riddled old tree called the Devil's Oak, used for centuries as a meeting place by hunters and thieves. As long as it bore its crucifix, the oak in the forest seemed less sinister. For decades comforted travelers uttered hopeful prayers as they passed by, and even began calling the tree the Dear Jesus Oak. But by Peter's day this crucifix was gone, and he decided it was time to replace it.
After that decisive trip, Peter went to a market in Brussels and bought a small wooden statue of the Virgin, about a foot tall, with the Christ child in her left arm, and vowed to God that he would hang it on the Jesus Oak. But he grew busy and forgot his vow; children visiting his home even played with the statue as if it were a doll. Only when dying from the plague in late 1635 did Peter finally remember. Fully aware that unfulfilled vows were a danger to one's soul, but lacking both time and inclination to have his vow waived by a priest, a fading Peter whispered his secret to his grown daughter, who in turn told her brother Philip, who understood what he must do. Finally, in early 1637, Philip and two craftsmen placed the statue in a small casing, carried it to the forest, then climbed a ladder they had brought along and set the statue on the Jesus Oak.
Just as Peter van Kerckhoven had hoped, travelers began noticing the new image, and therefore crossed themselves or uttered a short prayer when passing by. Criminals must have noticed as well, but did they think twice before committing their evil deeds in the Sonien Woods? Whatever the case, by early 1642 the image was known enough that some people began attaching even greater importance to it: now they traveled to the newly sacred place for the express purpose of seeking divine aid.
The first person said to receive such aid was a three-year-old boy named Michel, from the village of Overijse, and afflicted since birth with a fist-sized hernia. His mother, Barbel Reyaerts, had tried other shrines and undoubtedly other remedies before visiting the Oak. But only at the Jesus Oak, on March 24, after engaging in the usual rituals of prayer and candle-lighting, did she find a cure for Michel. Gratefully she left behind the customary token of remembrance--in this case the wrappings she had long placed around his little body--as a witness to others that a cure had happened here.
Word soon spread, to family members and friends, from one village to the next, and a flow of pilgrims to the Jesus Oak began. Thus deep in the woods was born a shrine.
Since the late Roman Empire, a common feature of Christian miracles was their association with a specific place. To some believers this was simply an extension of the doctrine of Incarnation: thus, God had become incarnate in a particular person, at a particular time and place, in Jesus Christ, and it only made sense that He would continue to manifest His presence in still other times and places and ways. Other believers were influenced more by leftover pagan notions about otherworldly powers being concentrated in special locations and objects--including oaks. But however it was learned, just about everyone believed that though God was everywhere, His powers were more evident at some places than at others.
These special places, or shrines, were in turn almost always associated with specific saints, present in their powerful relics or--since the eleventh and twelfth centuries--represented in images of potentially equal power.* The connection of the divine to thousands of specific earthly places and holy objects helped to make God more than an abstraction in Christian minds--and after the Reformation more specifically in Catholic minds. Whatever He may have been in official theology--invisible, three-in-one, and incomprehensible--in everyday practice His powers could be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and even tasted at a specially chosen place just down the road. Here people came not only in search of miracles, but to pray, to seek protection from disaster or misfortune, to find forgiveness from sin, and to make or fulfill vows. But the most popular shrines inevitably became so because of some spectacular show of divine power--in other words, a miracle, especially the dramatic cure of an endless array of illnesses.
Many such holy places--in parish or monastic churches, in cathedrals, in minuscule chapels along urban streets or country byways--were made sacred during the Middle Ages. By the time of Peter van Kerckhoven they were therefore hardly new. But what did seem new was the stunning increase of holy places, especially in such war-torn, desecrated areas as the Spanish Netherlands. Though the powers of older shrines were not denied, the new age and all its blasphemous violence called for new miracles, new intermediaries, and new places.
The stories of how these new shrines came to be closely resembled the pious accounts told for medieval shrines--namely, a shrine emerged because God's power showed itself there. Such power might be evident at the very founding, and star a host of otherworldly characters and events. The famous shrine of Loreto, in Italy, for instance, was said to have begun when angels transported across the heavens the house of the Holy Family from the Holy Land. Popular in the seventeenth century was the mysterious appearance of a statue of the Virgin in a tree, usually an oak, where miracles suddenly began to occur. Or miracles might occur, as at the Jesus Oak, through statues set in place by human hands. Whenever it occurred, the essential thing was some convincing manifestation of God's power--no miracle, no shrine.
Also essential in the emergence of a shrine, however, were influences of a decidedly earthly character, such as location, investment, patronage, or personality. These influences were rarely elaborated upon in the official chronicles of shrines because they were considered secondary, or traceable to God anyway--so why belabor them? The chronicler of the Jesus Oak preferred to focus on the place's early miracles rather than its considerable worldly struggles--not because he was unaware of those struggles, but as a matter of emphasis. If God kept his eye on such trifles as sparrows, then believers could safely assume that He was most assuredly in charge of this new holy place, directly and indirectly, and saw not only to the necessary miracles but the right earthly people, conditions, and events.
To whatever extent contemporaries saw the finger of God conducting worldly forces, they grasped perfectly well the immediate importance of those forces in the life of a shrine. They simply made plain their understanding outside of the official histories--in records rarely noised abroad or even preserved at all. But for the Jesus Oak such unnoised records survived in uncommon abundance.
THE BATTLE FOR THE HOLY
June 1-July 5, 1642. After the healing of her son in March 1642, Barbel Reyaerts told her stepmother, Anna Eregiers, about the Jesus Oak. When the fifty-four-year-old Anna developed an unbearable fever, in late May, she too made the three-mile trip from Overijse to the Jesus Oak, prayed before the image of Mary and the Christ child, and on June 1 was suddenly healed.
In gratitude, Anna did more than utter a prayer of thanks or leave a simple object of remembrance. Rather she decided to walk daily to the Oak and sell candles to passersby, in order to raise money to embellish the statue. At its most theological, lighting a candle at a holy place symbolized Christ the light of the world, or the presence of God, but at its most earthbound it was a straightforward, old-fashioned bargain: offering goods in exchange for divine help. Whatever their motives, people bought enough candles from Anna at the Oak that she could afford to hire a carpenter to build a small roof over the already encased image, thus protecting it twice from wind and rain.
After a month of this, Anna had raised enough money...
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