The Gathering and Depletion of Psychic Energy Around the Holy Site

The Gathering and Depletion of Psychic Energy Around the Holy Site is the novel’s account of a force building among the crowds at St. Joseph’s Church. The gathering is more than a backdrop to Alice Pagett’s reported miracles: in Monsignor Delgard’s and Gerry Fenn’s developing theories, the hopes and beliefs of many people become psychic energy, capable of being concentrated and directed through Alice. Its apparent effects run in both directions. The sick seem able to overcome physical limitations, while those nearby experience weakness and machinery fails. The pilgrims’ shared expectation is presented as a power source, but one that exacts a cost and may serve something other than healing.

The crowd as a source of power

The force gathers with the people. Before the Sunday service, a rumor that Alice has been told the Lady wants to see her again draws unusual activity to Banfield: traffic increases, and people stream toward the church grounds despite cold, drizzling weather. At the entrance, pilgrims, believers, and the merely curious press together. Gerry Fenn notices people being helped along, including a teenage girl with chorea and a boy in a wheelchair. Their families’ visible hope sharpens his awareness that the crowd has come expecting something to happen, and that hope makes the gathering emotionally charged before any manifestation occurs.

The later pilgrimage is larger still. Long before the Mass, thousands fill the field, pressing toward the benches and altar. Some want to see the Miracle Girl; others hope to be near enough for her holiness to reach them. The sick and disabled face the practical difficulty of moving over ground churned by so many feet, while stewards and ushers try to organize the congregation and consider how to accommodate wheelchairs. The assembly therefore has two aspects: a carefully managed religious event and a mass of individual needs and expectations. Monsignor Delgard, looking out at the faces, feels the congregation’s emotion as waves and fears that disappointment will damage the faith of those who have come seeking help.

The people do not all arrive for the same reason. During the later candlelight procession, a broadcast describes participants who had not previously held deep religious beliefs, alongside those who have traveled from far away. Gerry Fenn encounters pilgrims singing hymns and praying, but also people drawn by curiosity or the prospect of an unusual spectacle. These different motives do not prevent a collective atmosphere from forming. As the procession enters the field, singing swells, faces shine with rapture, and even Sue shares the crowd’s visible emotion. The contrast matters: psychic energy is associated not simply with settled religious conviction, but with many people converging on the same charged place and moment.

Delgard and Fenn interpret the force

After the Sunday manifestations, the Church’s discussion offers no settled explanation. Some churchmen argue that not everyone saw Alice levitate and that no television or still camera recorded it; others treat the blank film as evidence of paranormal interference. The opposing position does not establish that the event was holy. The bishops adjourn without a conclusion, intending to continue their inquiry in London and eventually issue a carefully phrased statement. For Monsignor Delgard, the failures of the cameras and lectern microphones are part of a more troubling pattern: he wonders whether a parasitical force is draining bodily energy and disrupting machines.

Delgard’s suspicion is reinforced by his own physical experience. During the Sunday event, weakness brings him to his knees, and people close to him fall as well, though they may later describe their posture as homage. Later, as he reflects on the power around the church grounds, he connects this depletion with the earlier machinery interference and the unusual atmosphere. He considers whether energy is being taken from living people to create a new form. In his account, the phenomenon is not merely an inward religious feeling; it seems to have consequences for bodies and electrical equipment alike. His explanation remains a hypothesis, but the recurring conjunction of crowd, weakness, and malfunction gives it weight within the story.

The manuscript gives Delgard a historical framework for what he has witnessed. He reasons that Einor could draw the wills, energies, and beliefs of others into a collective power that exceeded ordinary human forces. In this interpretation, Einor did not directly cure the sick: they healed themselves, while she acted as a psychic director. Delgard believes that the same power now acts through Alice with greater force. He wonders whether death allowed Einor’s psychic ability to develop further and whether the long interval before its return changes the scale of the danger. His ideas link the present-day crowds to the earlier history of the field, without turning the Church’s uncertainty into an official explanation.

A theory of healing and depletion

Gerry Fenn reaches a parallel account by combining the old manuscript with what he has observed. As he approaches Banfield amid the traffic, the illuminated shrine seems to draw travelers toward it. He senses a peculiar vibrancy among the pilgrims and compares the scale of the shared atmosphere to that surrounding the 1981 Royal Wedding and Pope John Paul II’s 1982 visit to Britain, while judging the energy around the shrine to have a distinctive potency. To Fenn, Alice’s power depends on this gathering, as Einor’s once did. He understands faith healing as the direction of other people’s psychic energy: belief enables some people to overcome disabilities, but the process scavenges energy from those who give themselves over to it.

That explanation changes the significance of a cure. What might appear to be a private gift belonging to Alice becomes, in Fenn’s view, a collective event whose participants provide the force behind it. Their faith is neither a decorative response nor proof, by itself, of divine intervention. It is a resource that can be drawn together and directed. The same model helps explain why apparent healing and depletion coexist: the power that enables one person to change may be taken from the psychic vitality of others. Fenn’s conviction is strengthened by the sixteenth-century priest’s writings and the accounts of later priests, but conviction does not give him the public proof he needs.

The theory’s weakness is also part of its importance. Delgard and Fenn interpret failures of equipment and bodily exhaustion as evidence of an energy process, while the Church’s inquiry remains divided over what the Sunday events establish. The distinction between a phenomenon and its religious meaning remains unresolved. Even if levitation or healing has occurred, neither observation alone determines whether the force is holy. The novel lets competing readings persist: mass hypnosis and paranormal influence are both considered, while the possibility that a real psychic force may be morally dangerous unsettles the usual assumption that extraordinary power confirms sacred authority.

The field at the climax

At the candlelight gathering, the relationship between crowd and force becomes immediate. As the procession moves into the field, Gerry Fenn feels static shocks when touching Sue and recognizes a wider pattern of atmospheric disturbance. The amplifiers produce sudden feedback; the storm clouds gather, and the illuminated Oak in St. Joseph’s Field stands out against the sky. For Fenn, these signs intensify his dread rather than becoming harmless technical mishaps. The field seems charged, and the crowd’s singing and shared anticipation amplify that sense of charge.

When Alice appears, Fenn experiences weakness again. He sees the crowd transfixed and feels vitality being drawn from himself and those around him into the figure at the center of the light. Alice rises above the platform as the congregation responds with cries and a collective moan of rapture. The scene joins the two sides of the psychic-energy idea: a mass of belief gathers around Alice, while people nearby are diminished. Fenn’s perspective makes the apparent miracle inseparable from its cost. What the worshipers experience as an invitation to trust is, to him, evidence of a malignant force using their attention and energy.

The account does not resolve whether the force can be measured or conclusively distinguished from mass suggestion. Instead, it develops through repeated, connected signs: the crowds’ shared expectation, Delgard’s and Fenn’s weakness, interference with cameras, microphones, and amplifiers, and Fenn’s perception that Alice draws energy from those around her. The holy site consequently becomes a place where devotion is both sustaining and vulnerable to exploitation. The same collective belief that appears to enable healing may empower a force whose purposes the worshipers do not understand.