Some of the most fascinating and persistent occult phenomena to afflict our planet are the continuing apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who first began to appear to the faithful in 352 A.D. and whose appearances continue in modern times.

It is tempting for non-Catholics to assume that the Church has a vested interest in certifying Marian apparitions, to impress believers and non-believers alike. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, and the elaborate bureaucracy and methodology for evaluating miracles conforms rather admirably to scientific method. The great majority of Marian apparitions – well over 95% – are flatly rejected because they don’t meet the miracle investigators’ high standards of proof. The miracles that remain, the intransigent few, are grudgingly dubbed ‘worthy of belief’.

One of the approved apparitions, and my personal favorite, is Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who appeared in 1531 to the peasant Juan Diego of Guadeloupe, Mexico. The Lady asked Juan to be her messenger to the local Bishop and, charmingly, provided not one but two miracles of manifestation to aid poor Juan in his task. One of these, a bouquet of flowers produced in winter, is long gone but the other survives to our day and continues to awe the credulous and puzzle skeptics. It is an image of the Lady herself, printed or painted on Juan’s tilma, an apron-like garment made of agave fiber. Though the tilma’s fabric is quite coarse, the image on it is photographically crisp, with no visible brush marks. No one has ever explained how such precise work could have been done in 1531.

So the image is one of these confounding things

But even more astonishing is the tilma’s very survival. Ordinarily, agave fabric disintegrates in 20 years or so, but for almost 500 years the Guadeloupe relic has survived exposure to candle smoke, incense, and handling by many thousands of believers. Even the colors of the image remain surprisingly bright and clear which is, simply put, impossible. The frail fabric even survived, unscathed, a 1921 bombing that shattered the surrounding building.

So the image is one of these confounding things, a persistent, incarnate mystery, like the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film or the Voynich manuscript; they don’t seem to really belong to our world and yet, unquestionably, they are in it.

When formulating an opinion about odd objects like the Guadeloupe image, it seems to me that there are two ways to go wrong. One is to reflexively deny the miraculous aspects of the object; the other is to accept it at face value.
Reflexive skepticism is a mistake because it pointlessly shrinks our world. It takes the mystery out of something that is, in fact, mysterious and, over time, diminishes our ability to accept the miraculous aspects of day to day existence.

Simple acceptance goes wrong by pretending to more certainty than is actually possible; after all, the defining feature of the Guadeloupe image is its inexplicability – and if we can’t explain the object, it is mere hubris to say we understand its maker.

We have to find a middle ground between these two responses – to acknowledge the miraculous intrusions into our world, while not blindly accepting the intruders story at face value.

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I was given a shot of Valium before my scrotum was shaved. At the initial consultation, several days earlier, the doctor had asked me not to shave it myself and though I have since taken up the practice I was, at the time, able to resist the temptation easily.

the surgeon held up a piece of vas deferens

Intravenous Valium is a wonderful thing, and I imagine it being administered on one’s first day in Heaven, for which our world is merely the initial consultation. At any rate, I instantly felt better about everything, relaxed and expansive. And talkative. I asked about the ceiling fixtures, which seemed unusually tasteful for an outpatient surgical theater. A nurse came in to assist with the cutting and snipping and cauterizing and such, and I began to talk about the three-and-a-half foot angel shark I had captured with a spear the day before, while scuba diving.

I had mistaken him for a halibut. Angel sharks resemble halibut in that they are both flattened out bottom feeders with sandy top halves, but the differences between them are striking, particularly in the region of the teeth. The angel shark’s mouth is broad, a great gash in its flat wide head, filled with the usual seven layers of hooked teeth. And angels are uniquely formed; in fact, they look a little weird, like grey-camoed death machines with meaty pterodactyl wings. Stealth fighters of the sea. So normally I wouldn’t have confused the two, but this one had set up ambush, riffling into the sand and obscuring his presence. But I could see him. He was a large rough diamond outline, a big halibut I thought, seeing what I had been looking for all morning. I floated several feet above, gloating at the size of the fish I was about to spear. The moment was calm: just the shark, the sandy bottom, and me. A lull before battle.

The nurse followed my story with interest, commenting and asking questions while looking intently at my penis, and the incisions that had begun to appear in my scrotum. But the doctor seemed unimpressed, even bored. The Valium kept me from being truly annoyed and in retrospect I have reason to be glad of his disinterest. But at the time it rankled, a mild, far off irritation like, well… like the scrapings of a knife slicing into my testicles, muffled by sedatives and local anesthetic.

Hanging there in the hazy blue calm, I passed my hand through both of my spear’s rubber slings and looked intently at the shark’s blurred outline, deciding where I would pierce his body. We were both so ignorant. I was ignorant of the angel’s teeth, and that he was, you know, a shark, a shark known as a man-biter. And the shark was ignorant of my ignorance. He assumed I knew of his special immunity in these waters; being at the top of the Central Coast’s food chain meant that he was deferred to automatically, like a mafia don in Little Italy. Sticking a spear in an angel shark simply isn’t done.

But I thought he was a halibut. So I cocked the spear, holding it tightly in my fist and drifting down like an angel of angel shark death. The shark, for his part, seemed a little bored, like my damned surgeon. My spear struck home and I was instantly being bucked, shaken about like a puppet on a stick.

The surgeon held up a piece of vas deferens, interrupting me. It was about a half-inch long, and looked very like a section of string bean, badly overcooked. He seemed to expect a response, but I could think of nothing jocular to say and merely grunted approval. He returned to his slippery task and I returned to my story.

It occurred to me, much later, that having an angel shark at one end of a five-foot spear, and me at the other, was the marine equivalent of having a tiger by the tail. But at the time I reacted with an instinctive brio that I have never since attained, deciding instantly and without benefit of logic that the only thing worse than a shark on the end of one’s spear was a shark that had recently escaped from the end of one’s spear, and it struck me as imperative that this particular shark not wriggle free. I pumped hard with my fins, trying to keep him pinned against the ocean floor. The contest had the flavor of a bull ride, and could last no longer; one way or another, my relationship with this shark was about to change.

I remembered that snake charmers sometimes kiss their colleagues on the back of their hooded heads, safely, because cobras are not able to strike backwards. I concluded that angel sharks must have a similar deficiency—such is the way my mind works under stress. So I threw my free arm around the angel and hugged him to me, forcing the spear entirely through his body. I grabbed the other end, holding him like a skewered roast. Now I had him. He could buck and snap like a bronco, but so long as I held tight with both hands he was mine.

I surfaced, inflated my buoyancy control vest, and let it support the shark and me while we rested. I looked toward shore and almost sobbed. It was a half mile away, a long kick against tide.

The nurse was a runner, and the introduction of an aerobic challenge revived her interest, which had flagged somewhat. She peppered me with questions in a voice as high-pitched and irritating as a smoke alarm. I was okay with her voice. My blood was full of Valium.

Did he try to bite you? she asked. Yes indeedy, I replied. The angel shark’s mouth is adapted for ambushing passing fish, and in addition to the impressive teeth his jaws are able to extend beyond his mouth, a startling discovery to make when one is hugging him close. But this was a relatively small shark, I said modestly. Had he aspired to bite my arm off, he would have required two or more bites to do so.

And did he bite you? she asked. No ma’am, I said heartily. He made not so much as two small incisions in my tender flesh.

A silence fell. I did not tell of the long swim back to shore, the fatigue I felt as adrenaline drained out of me, the clingy kelp, the intermittent activity of the dying shark… though significant to me, the tale lacks drama. The doctor snipped and tugged and cauterized. I sniffed occasionally, but could smell no searing meat. I felt almost nothing. It could have been happening to someone else.

I thought about my clumsy butchery of the shark. Lots of incisions, long and ragged. And inside, along with peculiar organs, a packet of eggs. They were round and yellow, exactly like the yolks of chicken eggs. So this shark had been a female, a momma; a fact I suppress.

The doctor was putting in sutures now, tugging firmly, explaining that they were synthetic catgut and would eventually dissolve. We talked about the days when catgut was really catgut, and what a heckuva job someone once had, producing that stuff commercially.

Three days before a vasectomy, by California state law, a man—and, if he is married, his wife—must view a video. The video explains, repeatedly and emphatically, that “sterilization” is “potentially irreversible”. And I thought, ‘I need a video to tell me that something is potentially irreversible?’ Because after all… what isn’t?

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