book review

Our Lady of Kibeho, Immaculee Ilibagiza, 2008

Most of us know Rwanda only from the appalling news of the 1994 genocide. Around one million Rwandans were brutally hacked to pieces in an orgy of killing of one ethnic group by another.

This book gives an entirely different view of this country. It is a young woman's account of several people who began receiving visions and messages from heaven in 1982 and following. These messages were overwhelmingly exhortations to love each other, and messages of how much God loves them. There were a few messages and visions of the coming slaughter, but most of the time the messages were inspirational.

These visions happened in the remote village of Kibeho, in southern Rwanda. They began with one visionary, a young student at a Catholic school. Soon several others begin receiving visions, including one girl who had bullied the first two visionaries!

Word got out and people began flocking to Kibeho to witness these apparitions. Over a period of years thousands and thousands of people saw and heard what was happening in Kibeho. The Roman Catholic Church, initially sceptical, soon had to acknowledge these apparitions as legitimate.

The apparitions were almost exclusively Mary, the mother of Jesus, appearing to these students. The feelings experienced by the visionaries was of unbounded love and peace. Though only the visionaries could see and hear Mary, they would relay messages to the audience. Often what the audience could hear was one side of a conversation. During these trances the visionaries were totally oblivious to outside stimuli. As the Church was investigating these apparitions they would try all sorts of things to try and distract the visionaries, including noise, pain, slapping, pinching, pouring water over them, etc.

I found this story very compelling. It was certainly a picture of Rwanda I had not experienced before. Immaculee's story is well-written; her dedication to broadcasting these events is very evident. She does not want her country known only for brutality. She has written of her own protection from the killing in other books; in this book the genocide receives only brief treatment.

As Rwandans have picked up the pieces of their lives and their society following the genocide, it is heartening to hear and see what is happening there. Again, using Kibeho as a focus, people have been healing from their torturous past by flocking once more to this village to honour Mary and Jesus. A shrine, a church, accommodations for guests, a school, have all sprung up in this village during the last decade.

My own reactions:

1) This story is written from a very Roman Catholic perspective. As such, I have to look past much of the RC piety and see the spirituality and messages contained in this story.

2) I think God's grace is evident: to Roman Catholic people the divine appears as Mary. This is what they expect, and Source accommodates! I must put aside my judgementalism of Catholicism.

3) Protestants have lost much sense of the feminine in the Divine by largely ignoring Mary. It was lovely to sense the motherly love the female visionaries received from Mary. We protestants have to work so hard to recapture some sense of the feminine in "God".

4) One of the threads running through the messages received by the visionaries is that our time is short. This corresponds with my own perspective. We as a human race need to get our s__tuff together! History is coming to a culmination of some sort.

5) God speaks in many ways. We cannot sit in judgement of how he might choose to appear or speak, or where or to whom.

6) God continues to speak today. The Creator still cares deeply for his creation. There is an unbounded love and acceptance of the Divine towards us. I think this story is only one of many ways in which the King of the Universe is speaking to his creation today.

7) It is ironic that it takes this, but in a way, the impact of the apparitions is increased by the genocide. If the genocide had not happened, would we be reading this book? Maybe the Divine knew this? Maybe the apparitions happened in Rwanda because of the upcoming slaughter?

I would recommend this book, with the proviso that the reader is able to look beyond the Roman Catholicism inherent in the story. It is a hopeful look at a country, a people, able to put behind them some of the worst imaginable atrocities and once again build their lives and their society into a positive environment.