Marilla Ness shares her extraordinary experience.
Interview with Marilla will take you from the first days of apparitions to her vision.
Back in 1980’s walking across the fields from Bijakovici, on the way to St. James Church in Medjugorje, the pilgrims hear the lovely voice of a woman, which seems to emanate from the mountains, the trees, the very ground itself. “He touched me… He touched me….”
If you have ever walked those fields, you’ve heard English songs played from the loudspeaker at “Devotions”, the little store run by local Martinovic family. Marilla’s tapes are often played, to the delight of the walking pilgrims.
Marilla was born in Ireland, moved to England as a child, and didn’t start singing until 1980. By then she was a wife and mother with children, and has no dreams of becoming a singer. “I’d never had the slightes interest in singing,” Marilla declared. “Than we started a Charismatic prayer group in our parish and we tried to sing but it was really dismal without any music. So I decided to get myself guitar and learn to play it” She lauughted, “I thought it would take me three weeks. Of course it was a bit harder than I expected, but I preserved.”
Deeper Faith
Marilla said strange things started to happen. “Though the music, I began to receive a deeper faith myself. Other churches heard about my singing and I began to go to them and sing – mostly at healing Masses for priests who had a gift of healing.”
Marilla was also in a Marian prayer group at that time. “I’ve been in two camps, if you like,” she said in her melodious English accent.
“People began to tell me they where getting something from my singing. Some would say, “ We receive almost as much spiritually from your songs as we do from healing ministry of the priest.” The began asking me to do recordings. But I had absolutely no intention of recording anything.”
It was in late 1982, a little over a year after the apparitions began, that Marilla heard of Medjugorje. They where on a pilgrimage in Italy, which included a trip to Padre Pio’s tomb in San Giovanni. There they met some Americans who had just returned from Medjugorje. They had a video of young children who were receiving visions there. (Stan Karminski and Marge and their family made their first trip to Medjugorje. Yes almost certainly they where the Americans who where so excited about the apparitions and allowed Brian and Marilla to see the visionaries through the viewer of their camcorder. Stan and Marge Karminski returned home and put out the first video of Medcjugorje ever seen in this country.) The American excitement was contagious, and Marilla and Her husband, Brian, decided they must go to this place where Our Lady was appearing.
First trip
“But we had no way of knowing how to go or where it was. The Travel Agents never heard of Medjugorje,” Marilla said. It wasn’t until February of 1984 that they worked things out to go. “There were no English speaking pilgrims there. In fact I think we must have been the first pilgrims from England.” Marilla said they went out of the apparition room, on the side of the main altar, with everyone else. “Father Slavko could speak almost no English then, but he called into the Room of Apparitions to her our confessions. He heard them half in French, whit a little bit of English and a little bit of German. All the villagers were right there as we confessed. They wouldn’t move. We kept telling Father, “Wait a minute!” but he said, “It’s all right. They want hear you.” Everything went on in this little apparition room.
Marilla and her husband had no idea about significance of this little room. They went in, along with the other people, thinking it was a special prayer room. “These children are trooped in, and within a short time, they went down on their knees. No one spoke any English so we were praying it by ear. We knew they where the visionaries because we recognised them from the video the Americans had shown us.”
Marilla said they knew it was authentic and real from that first night. “We went back four nights straight and the same thing happened. And the children each night simply joined in the choir after their apparition. There was no celebrity status; no one treated them as out of the ordinary.”
Brian and Marilla took “loads of photographs”, a practice that is often curtailed today during the apparitions. They where fortunate in meeting a doctor named Antun Lisec, who was a second cousin to Marija. “He spoke English and introduced us to Marija, her parents, and others,” Marilla said. “He was sort of celebrity over there, a kind of ‘young man made good’.” He treated Vicka’s grandmother. Trough him, we where allowed to meet the children at a very early age. We shared dinner with Marija and her parents, something we would never been able to do if we hadn’t stuck up this association with Antun. In fact, on future we always arranged to meet with Antun. Today Antun spends all his time working for Pro-Life”
Brian and Marilla were not
really touched all that much by Medjugorje on their first trip, even though they
believed
completely in the truth of the apparitions.” “Jakov was just a little
boy,” Marilla said. “No child could fake that. We were mystified, but it was
only after we got homeland thought about it all that we knew that we had to go
back.” They returned three months later, in April of 1984. “With us it was a
gradual thing. Some go and have this tremendous experience, but with us it
wasn’t like that.”
Marilla was already close and devoted to our Lady before Medjugorje. In the late 1970’s in a little church built by St. Francis in Assisi, she had knelt and “poured out my heart to the Lord, asking Him to use me in some way. To tell you the truth I didn’t realy know what I was praying for.” She decided to become part of the third order of Franciscans and she and Briand found a Franciscan Friary near their home and begun attending First Saturdays devotions there. A priest at the Friary had a great love for Our Lady and joined his Marian prayer group.
However, Brian’s great love for Our Lafy today came from Medjugorje. Marilla said he always went with ther to the prayer group but it was his trips to the little village that brought his love for her alive.
Marilla went often to Medjugorje after their first trip. She had been more than 50 times. She madetwo or three trips a year, many times alone. “I began to feel an urgency, a mission, to make recordings, and I believed it was coming from Our Lady because of some things that happened to me there. It seemed I was always given some suffering in Medjugorje and I think it was a kind of purification. People tell me they had a such wonderful time. Well, I never had a wonderfull time. I suffered both spiritually and phisicaly. For instance, it would pour down rain, and I’d be in a house that was half built, or I’d have trouble with connectiong planes, or I’d be ill the whole time I was there.”
Undaunted,she kept going back. “one time when Brian went with me, I had flu. I dodn’t feel good, but I offered it to Our Lady. It was a late summer evening, one of those choc-a-block Medjugorje evenings. (Chock-a-bloc’ means overflowing, Marilla said.) We had to sit outside of the Church for Mass because it was absoulutely packed. I’d brought along the book “The Imitation of Christ”. I was reading it during the long Sermon in Croatian. At some point I looked up at Krizevac. I began to see a red glow behind the cross up there. At first I thought it was my imagination, but it grew redder and redder until it seemed there was a fire behind the cross. I must tell you that I had never seen any of the things others saw. I never saw the miracle of the sun, for example, and I’d stopped looking for the such signs. Now I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“Suddenly, from behind the fire, Our Lady came. She was huge, I saw her from a side angle with veil flowing. I was shocked I couldn’t even say to Brian, “Look!” I could’ speak. Then she seemed to disappear into a spiral smoke, and just as I told myself I couldn’t have seen this, it happened again. But this time, as I looked to the right, I saw St. Anthony. I couldn’t imagine why it was St. Anthony. It wasn’t until next trip that I looked around St. James church and saw that only statues there were on of Our Lady, one of St. James, and one of St. Anthony.”
Marilla Ness today
Over the last fifteen years Marilla has recorded nineteen Albums and two award winning music Video's, as well as having published her own Songbook which features many of her favourite hymns.
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Drago Martinovic