Encountering the Divine in sky apparitions

Cloud-watching to this day, for me, remains a constant source of inspiration—I bet yours, too. I believe it began when flying kites in the summer with my cousins; though I could neither make a kite nor fly one, I tagged along anyway, sometimes to their chagrin—when to keep a steady hand in silence, I’d be chattering tales I drew from the shifting shapes of clouds.

I recall one that amuses me to this day—about a lamb that strayed from the adoration in Bethlehem. It took years before a shepherd found him, whose voice it heard and so bleated; this Master, I related, had carried him on his shoulders back the flock. My cousin, Eric, though he wondered aloud where in the Bible I copied it, liked it anyway, and had let me hold the string of his kite as it swayed high above among rows and rows of grazing lambs.

I know of adults, who cloud-watch as a morning perk. And if shifting forms do turn into just-the-message or the joy hankered for in the night, hence, a small miracle. I recall how Felix, my late husband, gauging perhaps that he could trust me with what others would judge “crazy,” showed me several shots he captured with his Yashica as an animated face of God the Father—bulbous textured clouds that, indeed, looked like an impasto image of Him. Apparently the experience refreshed a drought of faith during an ebb tide in his soul.

Where my daily grind in Manila stuck me as if forever in traffic, thanks to Polaroid sunglasses, and what else to do but gaze at the sky, I did experience not a few epiphanies, which had saved me from the rut of sinking into a seething hole of heat, soot, noise, and finger-drumming with the minutes piling on my time card. Like one high noon, streaming clouds on a moderate wind appeared to me as a band of angels, carrying on a palanquin the Queen of Heaven—a “vision” that uplifted me for days.

Private apparitions, are they? Or simply illusions of wearied spirits? Not so, according to science, which has recorded hundreds of these. A sky phenomenon sometime ago, which most, like me, I’m sure had missed really seeing it—or it would have caused a mild conversion in hardened worlds— was a “celestial object that resembles the ‘Hand of God’,’’ in the words of Nasa that captured it as an X-ray image. Added Nasa, it has shown how, though not often, religion and astronomy (science) overlap.

The Nasa-released news item went on to describe how the image that “… depicts a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova…” resembled a hand as per NuStar investigator (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) Fiona Harrison’s statement—apparently a composite of articles, including a red cloud. Part of the news item mentions that, “Scientists aren’t sure whether the ejected material actually assumes the shape of a hand, or whether its interaction with the pulsar’s particles is just making it appear that way…” Another statement by Hongjun An, of McGill University in Montreal, casts doubt if the shape “is an optical illusion” that to her with NuStar “looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues.”

As if to thicken the haze in their admission that religion had perhaps intervened in this image, the news also included yet another scientific angle to how the pulsar image could have been possibly perceived: Somehow the brain does “create it” in a condition called “…pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon of perceiving familiar shapes in random or vague images.” Seeing the man in the moon, a dragonfly or a band of winged humans that looked like angels, which I did, but especially faces often like an encounter with God, have been known to be common manifestations.

I could add that pareidolia seems vivid during certain states as in extreme stress, worry and especially despair, based on my own, Felix’s and many others’ experiences. As the Church warns us against “looking for signs,” it has not deterred the faithful in finding them and gaining a fortified faith. On the other hand, the Nasa item closes with yet another caveat, “Despite its supernatural appearance, the Hand of God was produced by natural astrophysical phenomena.”

But such sky apparitions haven’t been limited to individuals; more commonly known because of the masses that claimed to have seen it, had been the Dancing Sun in Medjugore, which remains a mystery to this day. For many pilgrims that had included quite a number of Filipinos, what they ‘saw’, healed most, transformed a few, reformed those prayed for, all somehow quite impossible without perceived Divine intervention.

Most Catholics do understand why it hasn’t been pronounced as a miracle—it could take centuries of rigid investigation as in all the apparitions. And yet, when turning skyward, who could deny or dismiss the small miracles from cloud forms that revive spirits broken in parts by a world getting more and more divisive through mere words?