METRO Wednesday, September 30, 2009 D Imagine your photography being seen by millions of Metro readers worldwide! Its that time of year again. Yes, the Metro Global Photo Challenge is back! This year the themes will be: People, Places and Climate Change. For your chance to see your work in print around the globe and win one of 3 trips for two to a Metro city of your choice simply submit your photographs by Sunday 18th October 2009. No entry fee required. Go to www.metrophotochallenge.com/ie for more details. Now let your imagination run wild! Upload your photos at www.metrophotochallenge.com/ie LET THE WORLD SEE THROUGH YOUR EYES sponsored by WIN A TRIP TO ANY METRO CITY WORLDWIDE! 6million: The number of pilgrims who visit the Lourdes Virgin Mary shrine every year The library with a divine nature Religious research: If novelist Dan Browns character Professor Robert Langdon is still looking for answers, Lampeter in Wales may hold the key BY ROGER TAGHOLM Virgin Mary sightings Lourdes, 1858 The most famous sighting came in France when Mary appeared to a 14- year-old girl named Bernadette. Mary instructed Bernadette to dig a hole in the ground, drink, and bathe in it, and this later became a spring of healing. Prouille, 1208 Domingo de Guzman was a Spanish preacher who went to southern France to oppose the Albigensian Crusade. While praying at a chapel, Mary appeared to him, gave him the Rosary and urged him to preach the Rosary as a remedy against sin. Domingo founded an order of preaching friars who went on to halt the crusade and establish monasteries all over the world. The order is commonly referred to as the Dominicans. Walsingham 1061 In Norfolk during the reign of Edward the Confessor, Lady Richeldis de Faverches was visited three times by Mary and shown the house in Nazareth where the angel Gabriel told her she would give birth to Jesus. Mary asked her to build a replica of the house. Knock, 1879 A range of people from five to 75 years old and including men, women, teenagers and children, witnessed what they believed was an apparition of Mary, Joseph, St John and Jesus, in the form of the Lamb of God, for over two hours in the parish church of Knock. The site is still a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of Catholics. Clearwater 1996 (pictured) An image resembling the Virgin Mary was seen in the reflection of a building in Florida. In 2004, vandals broke the glass in the windows and damaged the image. Someone throwing a corrosive liquid at it has also damaged it in the past, but the image later returned. James Day Edited by James Day features@metroireland.ie In Focus H oused within the walls of the University of Wales is the archive of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), an extraordinary collection of personal testimonies by members of the public who claim to have had a spiritual, religious or just unexplainable experience. Its X-Files mysticism, The Da Vinci Code intrigue and, er, Ghostbusters paranormality all rolled into one. Delving into the records, we find an account from a woman staying in Cornwall with her children during World War II. Every day they walk to the cliffs at Tintagel. While her children play, she reads on the grass. On one particular day, she remembers seeing a nearby church outlined by a stream of golden light. Then it happens. I turned and saw my double, my body, getting up and busying herself with the children, she says. So begins an out-of-body experience accompanied by an extraordinary happiness, as if all sadness and weariness at our altered circumstances did not matter anymore. She follows herself home and watches herself and the children stop to pick flowers. She wonders if she has died. Late that evening, after being reunited with her body, she says: The sunlight was as a weak candle glimmer to the light in which I must have been living without knowing it. Back came sadness, trouble, things gone that could never come again. Another account comes from Northern Ireland. A British soldier who disliked Catholics recalls being on patrol in the Falls Road area of Belfast with a fellow squaddie. At 2.45am, he suddenly develops a strong sense that they are not alone. From across the road the black shape of a Catholic Church seemed to draw my attention, he says. I saw in the sky a white light. As I looked, the light gradually took the shape of the Virgin Mary. My friend came into the courtyard at this moment and saw exactly the same as I did. She was standing, her arms outstretched towards us. I now know God, in his personal love for me, sent this manifestation of Our Lady to save me from hell. The RERC was established in 1969 by Oxford-educated marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy, who saw no contradiction between science and the divine. Adverts were placed in the media asking people to send in their experiences. The centre now has a huge collection of 6,000 letters and e-mails, and they are still coming in accounts of near-death experiences, of presences, of a sense of overwhelming love or of a guiding hand (sometimes physically felt), of telepathy, clairvoyance, inexplicable lights. In short, the whole panoply of our experience of the supernatural and spiritual. The centres director, Professor Paul Badham (below), 66, is a former Anglican priest who taught theology and religious studies at Lampeter for many years. What does he think these accounts mean? The contemporary accounts in the archive tell us spiritual and religious experiences still happen and still change peoples lives, he says. Surveys of spiritual or religious experience also tell us we are not living in such a secular world as people think. Somewhere between a third and a half of all those asked said they had experienced a power or presence different from everyday life. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, dismisses the experiences as the minds simulation software. Badham replies: All human experiences are mediated through brain activity. That doesnt mean the experience is simply a product of the brain. Of course religious experiences are going to be associated with something going on in my brain and neurologists can even locate where. But this does not mean such experiences are unreal, any more than what I see is unreal. index.html2.html3.html4.html5.html6.html7.html8.html9.html10.html11.html12.html13.html14.html15.html16.html17.html18.html19.html20.html21.html22.html23.html