The Miracles at Jezus-Eik

Anyone taking the 'European route' E411 from Brussels to Namur or further down has to pass right next to a little place called Jezus-Eik. It's actually a tiny community on the outskirts of Brussels.  The expressway doesn't exactly cut across the village, unless you've taken the exit, but a driver's eye cannot miss the spire and an elegant Baroque edifice of the church. 

 I wonder how may people have actually found the name intriguing - a "Jezus-Oak" in Dutch. 

Well, I did. So I started researching. Finally, I came across a book that provided pretty much all the answers to my queries: Miracles at the Jesus Oak (2003)

This is a required reading for Belgium-based expats. Authored by Craig Harline, a professor of history at Brigham Young University, it tells the story of a series of miracles that gave birth to this once-thriving, but now-forgotten Marian shrine.  Professor Harline knows Belgium very well, not only as a great researcher, specializing in its ecclesiastical history, but as a former Mormon missionary. I admire him (have told him that) for bringing so much of Belgium's history, now considered obscure and irrelevant, to  many a secular contemporary reader.

As Harline writes in Miracles, he discovered the papers on Jezus-Eik in the Park Abbey library.  As he stepped into that space - sacred for it houses... books (recall The Name of the Rose) - he notes: "Beneath a towering, inefficient ceiling stand rows of yellowish calfskin registers, untidy heaps of vellum charters, and open chests containing human skulls and other once revered relics, all covered in everlasting layers of dust." It was  not to be everlasting, actually. Park Abbey has been undergoing renovation in recent years, so the atmosphere of the old monastic library may no longer linger. But, the way Prof. Harline described it is sublime. 

This digression aside, let me jump into the history of the place (a caveat: I'm borrowing liberally from Prof. Harline's book). The story starts around 1630. The Dutch revolt rages on. Known also as the Eighty Years' War it produces great upheavals, displacements, and violence. The clash of Catholics versus Protestants also fuels outbursts of fervent religiosity, as each side tries to prove its point, and, by extension, disprove the other's.  

The grocer, one Peter van Kerckhoven  was travelling along a dirt road from his home in Brussels to his family village of Overijse, where  he had some land. Crisscrossing the route, which ran through deep and dark Sonian Forest - a property of the King of Spain - he had plenty of reasons to be fearful. Thieves, bandits, mutineed soldiers and other deserters, not to mention demons (a favourite topic of anxiety in the Christendom) kept him on the edge. 

One day, he decided that to ward off evil spirits and troublemakers he would hang a holy icon or another sacred object on a tree, called the Devil's Oak. For centuries it had been used as a meeting place by hunters and thieves. Others had actually come up with the same idea and, in the past, hang a crucifix. Since it gave passer-byers reassurance, the tree was becoming known as the Dear Jesus Oak. However, by Peter's time the crucifix disappeared, so he decided to replace it.

He "went to a market in Brussels and bought a small wooden statue of the Virgin, about a foot tall, with the Christ child in her left arm, and vowed to God that he would hang it on the Jesus Oak." But, business affairs and other worldly distractions prevented him from making good on his commitment. Five years later dying from the plague in late 1635, he told his daughter of what burdened his soul. She in turn told her brother, Philip. He finally did what his father had wanted to do. In early 1637, he and two craftsmen set the statue, placed in a small casing, on the Jesus Oak. 

A 17th century casing preserved in the Jezus-Eik parish

The re-sacralization of the Jesus Oak affected the local population. Not only did it bring solace to the wary travellers, but in just few years the image became known enough that some people travelled to the spot to seek divine aid.

Source: C. Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak

The first beneficiary of divine intervention was a three-year old boy, Michel Reyaerts, from the village of Overijse. He was afflicted since birth with a fist-sized hernia. His mother had tried other shrines. In vain. Then, on 24 March 1642, after a prayer and candle-lighting, she got a cure she asked for. In gratitude, she left a customery token of remembrance and appreciation - the wrappings she had placed around his little body - as a witness to others of the cure. 

Pilgrims started to flock in greater numbers. Other miracles followed, including a healing of a blind peasant girl Dimphna Gillis from the village of Oppem, north of Tervuren in July 1642. This made a great impression on the local population. Thanks to the support of the  governor-general in Brussels a wooden chapel was erected. And, thus, a shrine was born. 

 
Jesus-Eik developed into one of many oft-visited Marian shrines in the Spanish Netherlands. As Belgian researchers put it, "Like other European regions implicated in confessional strife and bordering Protestant territories, the Southern Netherlands laid claim to a dense network of miraculous manifestations of the Virgin May, considered a protection and a guarantee for the eventual redemption of the land." A guide to such "Marian topography" was produced in 1657 - Atlas Marianus, written by a Bavarian Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg, listing 100 miraculous images of the Virgin. The authoritative inventory published later in Latin however comprised 1200 such Marian images or statues with miracle-making powers.

 

A 17th-century listing of miracles

Going back to Jezus-Eik, for years after the shrine was born, a highly charged dispute raged between the Tervuren and Overijse parishes over the jurisdiction of the new shrine. Ultimately, backed by the Park abbots, Tervuren won this ugly spat. 

Between 1650 and 1680 a new brick church was constructed. Pilgrims continued to flock. However, Jesus-Eik could not "compete" with the grand Marian shrine in the land - the Sharp Hill (Scherpenheuvel). Harline writes: "The miracles at the Sharp Hill were simply more numerous and powerful." A sumptous royal patronage of the pious archdukes Alert and Isabella, also did wonders to Scherpenheuvel's development. In turn, the Brussels court, with all their respect for Mary's dispensation of favours, had to be mindful of the prime royal hunting ground upon which the Jesus-Eik shrine stood (not to mention, they had given permission for two monasteries to be built in these woods, not far from the Jesus Oak, and that there was another local popular spot for cures - the Chapel of Our Dear Lady of Lovely Fragance nearby)...  [As a side note: Scherpenheuvel to this day remains the largest Marian centre in Belgium, while Jezus-Eik is all but forgotten.]

By the end of the 17th century, Jezus-Eik became a parish. A decline ensued. The wars of King Louis XIV had something to do with it, as did the fact that the chief sponsors of the shrine, the abbots of Park, had coffers that were not expendable. 
By 1766, the place recorded 24 houses. The pre-French Revolution period held out a glimmer of hope for the shrine. There was a renaissance of its popularity, reflected in the series of portraits gracing the walls of the church. These commemorate particularly well the children who were healed. 

As the French revolutionary terror struck, in 1797, a pastor of the Jesus-Eik, sent the miraculous Virgin Mary to his brother in Brussels for safekeeping. He did what hundreds of other caretakers of Marian shrines across today's Belgium were doing at the time...

Over time, the shrine survived. 

After World War I, it was declared a national monument. In 1924, Cardinal Merciel crowned the image.

If you ever set out for walk in the Sonian Forest, or relax at one of the cafes around the church (a witness to the pilgrimage culture?) I encourage you strongly to step inside the church. 

I guarantee you'll be transfixed by the series of mainly 18th-century portraits lining the walls of the church. The pictures of the healed children, commissioned by their grateful parents are mesmerizing. They not only hark back to another era - which the age of Rationality has supplanted. They are attractive in their own right. It is a story of total devotion. Not just supernatural. Metaphysics aside, these ex-votos express a very intimate and heart-warming bond between loving parents and their loved ones. 

How many of us, particularly non-believers, facing a dire health emergency of our children, finding all "earthly" means of aid exhausted, would not have kneeled down and prayed?

A memento of the original tree, built into the main altar

 References: 

• Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
• Maarten Delbeke et al., "The architecture of miracle-working statues in the Southern Netherlands," Revue de l'histoire des religions, 232 - 2/2015, 211-256.