Spiritual mentoring, dream analysis, counseling and psychotherapy, Dr. G. Scott Sparrow, dream interpretation, lucid dreaming, I Am with You Always, Blessed Among Women, Sacred Encounters with Jesus, Sacred Encounters with Mary, The Perfect Gift, spiritual guidance, spiritual direction.

A Preliminary Investigation into the Function of Secrets in the Apparitions of Mary G. Scott Sparrow, Ed.D. University of Texas-Pan American Abstract In the most publicized European apparitions of Mary, the seers have reported receiving personal and/or prophetic secrets from the apparition. In contrast to these famous accounts, contemporary private visions of Mary reveal an absence of secrets, supporting the idea that secrets are associated with encounters that eventually become publicized. Analyzing the phenomenon of secrets from a relationship dynamics standpoint, the author suggests that apparitional secrets establish a personal and distinct relationship between the seer and the vision, and preserve the seer’s role as the mediator between the apparition and the public. The author then examines the function of the apparitional secret from the standpoint of the Church and the laity, who seem to have accepted the phenomenon, and observes that Mary’s bestowal of secrets parallels the story of God’s dependence upon the biblical Mary, and thus may conform with the tacit expectations of the faithful. The modern era of Marian apparitions commenced in Europe during the middle 1800s, but anecdotal reports of encountering the mother of Jesus are by no means a recent development. Since the first century, there have been over 21,000 documented cases (Ashton & Ashton, 1989). Many well-known religious figures reported private visions of the mother of Jesus prior to the era of the major European apparitions. According to Gregory of Nyssa, Mary appeared to Gregory the Wonderworker in the third century. Accompanied by the apostle John, she reportedly appeared in the night, more than life-size, surrounded by light "as if a brilliant torch had been lit" (O’Carroll, 1982, p. 124). In Gregory the Wonderworker's vision, Mary told John to make the mystery of the true faith known to Gregory. John was heard to consent because "such was her wish." Centuries later, on returning to England from the Crusades in 1241, St. Simon Stock -- the leader of the Carmelite Order -- experienced a vision of Mary now well-known to Roman Catholics. He had been praying to the Virgin for relief from the oppression the Carmelites were facing from the more established religious orders in England. In his vision, Mary apparently told Simon that anyone wearing the brown Carmelite habit at death would gain immunity from eternal fire. Simon’s vision greatly enhanced the status of his order and aroused public interest in wearing the protective garment. Since then, countless people have worn a small piece of brown wool -- known as the brown scapular -- as a visible sign of their devotion to Mary and her protection. In spite of Mary's alleged appearances to such individuals over the centuries, the apparitions and visions seen by early saints "were incidental features in the lives whose legends they embellished: It was the saint who was the object of the cult” (Blackbourn, 1993, p. 9). Because the church treated the encounter as secondary to the saint’s religious life, neither the visions nor the miracles frequently associated with them became the focus of widespread devotion. Starting with the apparition in La Salette, France in 1846, the emphasis began to shift away from the seers to the messages conveyed to them by the apparitions, and to the miraculous events that took place around the apparitions. This shift may have occurred because the messages were changing to include statements about the world as a whole, and because the church and the public found it difficult to erect a cult around the recipients of these new apparitions, who were mostly women and uneducated children. Many of the books concerning the Marian apparitions reflect an uncritical appraisal of the apparitional phenomena, the messages conveyed, and the healings or “prodigies” associated with the apparition sites (Ashton and Ashton, 1989; Delany, 1960; Varghese, 2000). In commenting on Varghese’s book as an example of this genre, Britt (2002) notes that it lacks a consideration of “even the most minimal cultural and historical context.” However, a few notable works (Blackbourn, 1993; Christian, 1996; Zimdars-Swartz, 1991) have analyzed the social and political contexts in which Marian apparitions have arisen, and explored the complex relationships between the visionaries, the apparition, society and the Church. Looking at an apparition in the context in which it occurs provides an altogether different level of analysis than the one usually taken by authors who are simply motivated to spread the good news: It reveals how apparitional phenomena may emerge, in part, to satisfy the emotional and social needs of both the seers and the public, and how such phenomena can change over time under the pressures of competing interests. Without discounting the possible supernatural origins of an apparition, a contextual analysis can examine the function of various associated phenomena much in the way that a systems-oriented family therapist might analyze the function of a "symptom" in a family system without necessarily impugning anyone, or judging the symptom's functionality (Guerin, et al., 1996). The Phenomenon of Secrets In the most publicized Marian apparitions of the last 150 years, Mary has reportedly conveyed secrets to the visionaries. These secrets have been comprised of confidential personal messages, prophecies usually relating to the consequences of the world’s sinfulness, or a combination of both. In La Salette, France in 1846, cowherds Melanie Calvat and Maximim Giraud claimed to have received both personal and prophetic information that the lady in their vision asked them not to reveal. A few years later, Bernadette of Lourdes claimed also to have received confidential messages over the course of 15 separate encounters, but in spite of the pressure to reveal them, she insisted that the messages were for her alone and never disclosed them. In 1917, the Fatima apparitions produced three famous prophetic secrets that were turned over to the papacy. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1942, but the third secret remains undisclosed. Garabandal (1961-63) and Medjugorje (1981-present) have both laid out a sequence of warnings and chastisements, but the exact time frame for these events remains unrevealed. In the case of Medjugorje, the apparition has also communicated a series of 10 secrets to each of the six young visionaries according to a different time schedule. Interestingly, once the seers receive the full complement of 10 secrets, they can no longer see the apparition except on special occasions, as though the internalization of the apparition's message makes Mary's outer appearance no longer necessary. The First Secrets Melanie and Maximim of La Salette were the first visionaries in the era of modern apparitions to receive secrets from an apparition. While tending their cattle, the children witnessed the presence of a beautiful woman who spoke with them about God’s displeasure with his people. The woman cited recent crop failures as as example of his punishment, and warned of famine and further hardships unless the world repented. At first, the public accepted the children’s account without question. But in time, some people seized upon the idea that the woman -- whom they identified as the Blessed Mother without the children's help -- must have said more. When the children were asked if she had told them more, they initially refused to comment, but eventually admitted that the woman had given them messages that they were told not to reveal. . They claimed that the woman had spoken privately to each of them; thus neither child was able to confirm or deny what the lady had revealed to the other. Some of what she told them was personal and some of it pertained to future events of general interest. Historians now find it difficult to assess how much importance the children themselves originally attributed to these private messages. Further, there is some speculation that the secrets grew more elaborate as the public's interest in them increased. Regardless, one should keep in mind that the La Salette secrets established a precedent that carried over to subsequent apparitions. Obviously, whatever takes place in a visionary experience becomes privileged information, if for no other reason because we can know of it only through the visionary's willing disclosure. Given the private nature of the encounter, suspicions may naturally arise about the possibility of withheld information. This is how the speculation about Mary's secrets rose to such a fever pitch at La Salette: The public's desire to know more and the Church's authority collided with the visionaries' loyalty to their private experiences. A predictable escalation of tensions naturally ensued. As Zimdars-Swartz (1991) says, “When people become convinced that a seer harbors secrets, speculation about their nature and content becomes inevitable, and the seer is pressed for anything and everything that might be of public relevance. Indeed, the seer's ability to withstand such pressure has often been understood as evidence of the authenticity of an apparition (p. 135).” It is easy to understand why the public might suspect that there could be more to the story. For, the purported messages communicated by the apparitional Mary have never ventured very far from familiar biblical passages. As Pelletier (1971) says about Mary's messages, "the spoken message in its essential parts is never more than a reminder of the gospel, of things that we already know or should know (p. 89)." Consequently, an understandable escalation of mistrust naturally ensues between the seers -- who alone experience the manifestation -- and the public, who may not believe that Mary would manifest only to reiterate familiar spiritual truths. The Function of Secrets In a qualitative study of modern visions and dreams of Mary (Sparrow, 1997; 2002), 87 respondents were interviewed about their experiences with the understanding that their identities would remain confidential. Many of the accounts bear striking similarities to the famous historic encounters. For instance, a school teacher who said that she had experienced the presence of Mary on several other occasions, reported an initial vision that resembled the first appearance of Mary at Fatima, where the three children saw her in the midst of an orb of light hovering over an evergreen tree. I was on the edge of a cornfield just at the entrance to a forest . . . I felt a presence just above me, so I raised my eyes . . . There was an incredible buzzing sound, and I was intensely aware of the rapid vibrations of absolutely everything. It was as if everything was vibrating at a very high speed. On a tree branch just above me, I saw a circle of light begin to form. The light concentrated more and more while at the same time radiating outward. Then in the center of that light I saw Mary. She was small and she moved along the branch towards me. The power and intensity of the apparition were phenomenal, so much so that my mind and being could not contain the experience. Mary hovered on or just above the branch for a few seconds and then either she disappeared or my mind snapped out of a level of being able to attune to her . . . A few months later my mother was diagnosed with very advanced stages of cancer, and my family was plunged into the agony of her suffering and of having to shift our entire world view. It was then I knew why Mary had come to me. She had come to protect me, to be a comfort and reassuring essence, to pour love into me as I went through a terribly, terribly shattering phase of my life. (Sparrow, 2002, p. 115-117) Another recipient, who was alone in a hotel room, awoke to a luminous presence beside his bed. His experience resembles in many ways Bernadette’s first vision at Lourdes in which she saw a young woman carrying a rosary, who silently invited Bernadette to join her in prayer. It was March, and a stormy March at that, when my wife and I began having sexual problems due to her illness. We were on the verge of breaking up, when I was practically forced to accept an out-of-town job. One stormy night, I had gone to bed when an area-wide power failure occurred. Not knowing this, I awoke to find my hotel room flooded with light. I looked around and I saw our Blessed Mother, half seated on the low dresser beside my bed. She was dangling a long rosary from her right hand, with the Crucifix lying on the backs of her fingers. Not really believing my eyes, I propped myself up on one elbow, but the vision was still there. She never spoke a word. She merely extended her hand. I was somehow directed to kiss the cross, and I did. Then she smiled -- a benediction -- and disappeared. The light was gone, too. Needless to say, I found sleep very difficult. I lay awake and thought about what had happened. I would have dismissed the whole thing as a dream, except for one thing. The next morning the owner of the hotel stopped me as I came down the stairs and asked me about the brilliant light in my room . . . He had been on the street asking a utility crew how long the blackout would last, and he had seen my room ablaze with light. It happened that the job finished in a few days, so I returned home -- without any notion of separation. For almost 30 years I nursed my wife until her death . . . (Sparrow, 2002, p. 188-199) While the encounters reported by Sparrow convey much of the evocative power and life-changing impact of the historic apparitions, none of the 87 respondents reported receiving secrets during the encounters. Significantly, the experiences reported to Sparrow had never been shared with more than one or two close relations, and had never become a matter of public record. The decision to keep the experiences private may explain why the accounts were devoid of secretive communications. As Sparrow (1997) suggests, “there is no need for secrets when the relationship is already private” (p. 65). A private exchange of information between two persons rises to the level of secrecy only when a disclosure is intentionally withheld from someone else. A triangular dynamic -- considered a stable but usually unhealthy structure in human relationships (Bowen, 1978; Guerin, et al., 1996) -- arises once a third person learns of the exchange, wishes to know more, and is denied access. Under increasing pressure from spurned third parties, confidential information may be guarded even more assiduously out of a desire to protect the intimacy of a relationship. The visionaries of the major European apparitions have protected Mary’s secrets with remarkable resolve. Even Melanie and Maximim, who reportedly exhibited obvious weaknesses of character, demonstrated uncharacteristic strength of mind whenever they were interviewed about their encounter with Mary. This may seem remarkable given the pressures they faced -- but there were benefits in protecting the presumed secrets. First, the vision provided a source of comfort that had been previously lacking in their lives. Most of the seers -- including the La Salette visionaries -- had been subjected to emotional loss and extreme hardship prior to the Mary’s appearance to them. Blackbourn notes that “dependent or outsider status, as much as sheer poverty, are the recurrent themes in the lives of the visionaries. To these we should add the experience of emotional vulnerability resulting from bereavement or fractured family circumstances (p.190).” Blackbourn goes on point out that the relationship with the apparition was, for most of the major visionaries, the first time they’d experienced such profound comfort and love. Thus, it is easy to understand why the visionaries wished to protect the uniqueness of their relationships with the apparitional being. Another benefit of keeping secrets has to do with the social power that they confer. If the apparition had only given them a message to deliver, then their importance may have been short-lived. But in keeping secrets, the visionary’s influence is effectively preserved until the secrets are revealed, or the public’s interest subsides. Ultimately the La Salette seers recorded their secrets and sent them in sealed envelopes to the Pope Pius IX. Maximim was clearly relieved to be rid of the secrets, saying "One no longer has any need to ask me anything, one can ask the Pope." His relief was echoed by Conchita of Garabandal over a hundred years later when she expressed relief that the apparitions had finally ended, and that her spiritual life was no longer on public display: "I prefer to have the locutions to the apparitions, because in the locutions I have her within me. Oh, what happiness when I have the Blessed Virgin within me! (Blackbourn, p. 6)" In reference to the stress that the Fatima seers experienced, Zimdars-Swartz (1991) says, "It is clear that they . . . suffered great physical and emotional strain as great numbers of people intruded on their formerly very private world (p. 88)." By the time that Melanie and Maximum recorded the La Salette secrets, the secrets may have been altered or embellished due to external pressures and the passage of time. Melanie, in particular, was accused of embellishing the "authentic secret" with popular ideas that occurred to her before she finally wrote down her full account. While she emphatically denied the charge, many people who believed in the authenticity of the La Salette apparition were relieved when church authorities declared that the mission of the seers had ended. Believers have understandably been reluctant to address the possibility that the apparitions and the subsequent recounting of them have been molded by the seers' expectations and beliefs. Regardless, whatever the children witnessed at La Salette -- or in the other major apparitions for that matter -- one can be virtually assured that an apparition experience becomes a "malleable product" (Blackbourn, p. 23) shaped by the intense pressures placed on the seers from the public and from church authorities. The Acceptance of Secrets Given the way that Mary’s bestowal of secrets clearly empowers a visionary and preserves his or her role as a mediator between heaven and earth, it is important to consider why the Church and the laity have accepted the phenomenon of secrets so readily. Indeed, secrets have become an expected part of any apparitional drama. When one tells a secret, one confers power upon, and becomes vulnerable to the other person. Unless our judgment is impaired, sharing secrets is only something that we do with our most trusted friends: We give them our secrets -- and thus the power to betray us -- in exchange for intimacy. Or we may share privileged information if the other person has the capacity to do something that we cannot do on our own behalf. If one can believe the visionaries, the apparitional Mary has consistently depended on children and uneducated women to protect her most sensitive communications, much in the way that an ordinary person might depend on a close friend. Why would such an arrangement, which confers so much privilege and power upon ordinary people, fail to raise more suspicion among the Church and the community of the faithful? Other aspects of the apparitions -- most notably, their “supernatural” status as it is defined by Catholic doctrine (Bouflet & Boutry, 1997) -- have been rigorously scrutinized by Church authorities and often found wanting. Famous apparitions such as Garabandal and Medjugorje still await the Church's approval. In contrast, the tacit acceptance of Mary’s bestowal of secrets indicates that this aspect of the apparitional phenomenon somehow conforms to expectations, even if an apparition's status is still in question. Perhaps the bestowal of secrets is so readily accepted because it resonates with a familiar theme. Specifically, the role of secret bearer in modern apparitions parallels, if not reenacts Mary’s biblical role in the "secret" conception of Jesus. Indeed, Mary’s dependence on the visionary clearly mirrors God’s unprecedented dependence on her in the incarnational process. As Catherine Halkes says, “If people want to talk about dependence, they should recognize that here God made himself dependent on a human being, and the human being was responsive to God (Shillebeeckx and Halkes, 1993).” Halkes asserts that Mary -- in accepting God’s invitation -- was the “first of the believers of the new covenant” and the first in the Christian tradition to enter so completely into a cocreative relationship with the divine. In receiving Mary’s secrets, the apparitional seer enters into a similar kind of relationship in which he or she receives the "seed" of a new dispensation. From thereafter, the seer must bear alone the elements of an undisclosed vision, and accept the consequences of remaining true to the vision’s request. It is, of course, impossible to determine whether the secret has a supernatural or spiritual origin, or arises in the psychosocial crucible comprised of family, society, and the Church -- or some combination thereof. While we can never separate subjective from objective when it comes to such phenomena, the human drama that unfolds once a secret is bestowed is a familiar one. While securing a relationship that is sacred and personal, the secret further isolates the seer from those around her. It is a process that, in many ways, mirrors the biblical annunciation and subsequent ordeal of the mother of Jesus. References Ashton, J. & Ashton, J. (1989). Mother of all nations. New York: HarperCollins. Beevers, J. (1954). The sun her mantle. Westminster, MD: Newman. Blackbourn, D. (1993). 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