By Barb Ickes
OH me of little faith. I?ve tried to see the Virgin Mary in her reported return to earth in an apparition on a bridge pillar along the Rock River in Moline. But all I can see is concrete and water.
Maybe her historic manifestation as Our Lady of Guadalupe really is making a ghostly reappearance and I am simply too cynical to see the truth. Maybe not.
But many Quad-Citians insist that they can see the Virgin Mary from a boat landing just west of the 27th Street bridge over the Rock River. She appears, they say, in an apparition that casts itself onto a pillar of the next bridge to the east, Interstate 74.
Those who have seen her say the best time to do so is at dusk and into the early evening hours because the lights on the bridge help create the image. The first recorded sighting of Our Lady of Guadalupe was near Mexico City almost 500 years ago.
Even though it wasn?t dark yet, I made my own pilgrimage to the Rock River on Monday, hoping the overcast sky had triggered the bridge lights. No such luck.
But I saw plenty of evidence of the faithful. There were at least a half-dozen bouquets of flowers lining the riverfront. Perhaps they were simple offerings or maybe a specific tribute to her legend.
The Virgin Mary is said to have directed the man who saw her in Mexico to pick Castilian roses and present them to the bishop as proof of her appearance. Though roses were not in season in Mexico at that time, they miraculously appeared ? along with another image of the Virgin Mary, emblazoned in the man?s cloak.
At least four collections of fresh roses lay in bunches along the Rock River shoreline Monday. On a rock jutting into the water near the bridge was a religious candle. The rain, I?m guessing, had snuffed it out.
There were four other occupied cars in the parking lot when I got there. I couldn?t tell whether they also were hoping for an eyeful, and I didn?t bother knocking on their car windows in the cold rain.
A cross was tied to a sapling along the shore and a mallard pair ? hen and drake ? stood on a log, facing the bridge. Maybe they, too, were awaiting nightfall?
I vowed to return to the river at dark and try again.
Meanwhile, I found interesting reading in the many interpretations of the Virgin Mary?s reported appearance in Mexico. One well-regarded author of the 1600s described the image as the Woman of the Apocalypse from Revelations 12:1: ??a woman, arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.?
If the streetlights from the bridge can be interpreted as the sun, the moonlight on the river most certainly would qualify as the moon ?under her feet.? I?m coming up short on the crown of stars. But I wish I had an answer.
Everybody needs hope, and plenty of people are finding it on a bridge pillar in Moline.
They are not to be ridiculed. They are to be envied.
Source: http://www.qctimes.net/articles/2006/03 ... 097296.txt
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