Documenting the Divine

This is a piece from the Are.na Annual 2025.

There were no miracles in 1948.

It was not a miracle when the earth quaked and petals covered the Carmelite Monastery in Lipa, Batangas. Not when the Virgin Mary appeared to Teresita Castillo at five in the afternoon. Nor when Mary returned for fifteen days at the same hour to the young Carmelite, speaking secret words. Not too, when Teresita's body was found after the visions, outstretched — as if crucified. Teresita's head collapsed at the strike of three, just as Christ's, and it was just as naked when Teresita was exiled, stripped from her titles, and growing ill. All the proof was burned. The devotion, banned. Nothing was deemed worthy of belief.

Regardless, newspapers reported it all. Over 500,000 devotees arrived in following months to this small Filipino town, in pilgrimage. They swore the petals rained on them.

Our Lady of Lipa is one of many reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary deemed inauthentic by the Roman Catholic Church. Declared as having nothing “supernatural in origin,” it caused tension between devotees and the Catholic hierarchy for decades. I never question miracles themselves. Mary manifests and the miraculous is mundane. But I wonder, how would you document the divine?

The history of Marian belief is a history of dispute and innovation. Faith is tested as appearances are contested. Already, these occur around the divisive figure of Mary, whose veneration is often challenged. Does her message draw away from Christ or bring us towards Him? What is worthy of belief? It is the burden of believers to prove, lest the reward for their devotion be branded as delusion. 

It is no surprise that Mary is such a central figure in the Philippines, a nation that understands these very natures. Filipino Catholicism's deep veneration of Mary draws from a history of colonialism, animism, and religious resistance. In pre-colonial times, feminine shamans (babaylans) spiritually nourished communities in maternal and healing roles; indigenous animist beliefs centered the spirituality of everything physical and non-physical and had been reconciled with the Catholicism of colonization. As a result, apparitions fuel collectivity amidst political upheaval. Marianism flourishes in its harmony with folk practices and peasant attitudes, fueling optimism, faith, and resistance. Alongside Filipino religiosity is their positioning in our technological landscape: a workforce outsourced and exploited for their labor, hidden in the peripheries – just like Mary. Our bodies are interfaces to the modern world, at risk of disappearing if we continue to be unseen.

While material artifacts like rosaries, scapulars, icons, and statues have long existed as devotionals, apparitions defy physical bounds to bridge the material and immaterial, the seen and unseen. The demands to verify apparitions go against the very nature of these encounters, further complicated within modernity. The proliferation of apparitions, complicated authentication protocol, and attempts to capture sightings fuel and scrutinize Marian devotion all at once. Is the point of faith not that it is beyond us?

These days, my relationship to spirituality doesn’t feel unlike my relationship to technology. Both circle around faith and visibility, contending with the thin line between the domestic and divine…always, a begging to be believed. In digesting these encounters, I've begun considering Mary's role as a container.

Mary is framed as a living tabernacle. Her womb provided earthly dwelling for the body of Christ; in her humanity divinity was embodied. In this role she becomes a sort of infrastructure: a technology holding, situated, serving – but also sacrificial, pure, immaculate. Operationally, she works as an intercessor, veneration towards her points us towards God, an interface towards Christ. A more regressive framing of her role might position her as submissive or passive, such as when she was selected to serve by bearing God-in-flesh. (Did Mary have any choice but to say yes? In the words of the Feminist Server Manifesto, the feminist server "questions the conditions for serving and service," and in this case, submits.) In Container Technologies, theorist Zoe Sofia writes that “unlike the tool,” such as rosaries or other devotionals, “which needs manipulation to perform its function, the container can perform its holding-function automatically.”1 Mary, in her passivity, is already an active, living interface — the miraculous environment of faith itself. Like a computer.

Computers, like other feminized technologies, are often invisibilized, designed for unobtrusiveness and serving in silence. Mary is no different in her maternity, so embedded into domesticity that her nurturing of the divine has led to her infrastructuring. A subtle disappearance that comes with all that carry.

But in Mary’s appearance, the feminine body becomes a miracle. In an apparition, the unseen becomes seen. Reality comes apart to realize faith. An encounter that is a momentary intervention between the human and the divine. A glitch against reality.

Apparitions and glitches are mobile, materializing towards those who lack power. Legacy Russell's notion of glitch2 feels relevant: apparitions appear as errors of reality but reveal fundamental truths, the divine becomes briefly human as a glitch. Visions often occur to peasantry, women, and children at the peripheries as direct interventions that bypass church messaging. In rural communities, the accessibility of Marian devotionals bridge faith where traditional services (such as mass) are scarce — strengthening her intercessory role. Against an often-exclusionary church, apparitions are a subversive interface. In glitch, the apparition's infrastructural materiality calls us to witness. Mary as a feminist technology seeks to interface with us, interceding for us in return.

Many technologies have complicated how we perceive faith. Religious scholar Jill Krebs writes, “the highest number of reports of apparitions does not come from regions with the highest numbers of Catholics but from areas where more Catholics can access the Internet.”3 But anthropologist Paolo Apolito writes that on the Marian internet, on the prime medium of modernity itself, there is “perhaps even a full-fledged ideology of rejection and opposition to modernity.”4

Faith does not flow through the internet cleanly. While Mary’s infrastructural presence is sustaining, the internet’s can be surveillant and controlling: fundamentally altering how we perceive and produce religious phenomena in a spiritually-starved world. Algorithms and networks serve similar roles to Mary, at risk of obfuscating her role or clouding discernment. Performative devotional practices are centered over private revelation — characteristics that have always been present in communal devotion. Faith is complicated by the apparitional glitch that is difficult to replicate and to reproduce, a crisis of the miraculous against modernity.

Perhaps apparitions also respond to the spiritual and material hungers exacerbated by modernity. Historically, apparitions occur in times of crisis. Take Our Lady of Fátima amidst World War I-era religious persecution, or Our Lady of Kibeho that preceded the Rwandan genocide. Our Lady of Lipa occurred right after the end of the Japanese occupation in the Philippines. Plagued by climate catastrophe, underdevelopment, and poverty, seeing the motherly miraculous manifest provides a desperate healing to a bereft nation. Mary is the infrastructure that tethers the world where there is no other, a constant.

In a feminist infrastructuring of Mary, we might begin to consider technology and spirituality more expansively, each as ways of “mediating relations with the unknown or unknowable,”5 provoking questions around supply, security, access. I’d like for what has been domesticized to still feel divine: emblematic of the mundane that precedes the miraculous, against a world that demands documentation of the sacred. Technology is not incompatible with faith. The two have always co-created the other, always affording us a space for transfiguration. Technologies can also be enchanted, mystical, and deeply spiritual: the computer, a rosary, prayer, Mary herself.

If any technology could allow us to propagate and prove the miraculous, maybe the technology of modernity is our own marginalized bodies. Our proof is our witnessing, our body the testament in our faith. What if we glitched ourselves into visibility? If we were to apparate, what would the world behold?