Custom · 1916 to present · Mixed
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A priest found a quiet hill for prayer around 1916. A vision was whispered about, a chapel lost its roof to the wind, and a mango tree saw generations married beneath it. Today people of every church climb Oke Maria.
Oka is a town in the Akoko area of Ondo State, set among rocky hills. At the top of the road out of the town, past ordinary houses where nothing hints at what lies ahead, a slippery path climbs a hill called Oke Maria, Mary's hill. In 2014 a Daily Trust reporter made the climb. She said it is under two kilometres, but she needed three stops to catch her breath, and by the time she was halfway, the smile of a tourist had gone and she found herself praying, thinking of the Stations of the Cross on the road to Calvary. A cool breeze kept pushing her on. Around her, green hilltops rose into low, foggy cloud.
The man who told her how all of this began was Rev. Fr. Anthony Adeboyejo, who had then been rector of the Marian shrine on the hill for about three and a half years. His account is simple. Around 1916, he said, a priest named Fr. Seminati came to Oka. He found the hill a very quiet place for prayer and meditation, so he kept going up there, and soon he began bringing people with him. Before long they had formed a small Catholic community. Between 1916 and 1921 Seminati built it into what the rector called a community of faith, and gradually people began coming to the hill to pray.
Then there is the part people most want to hear about, the vision. Here the rector was careful, and it is worth keeping his exact caution. There is, he said, an unconfirmed report of an apparition in the 1920s, and it seems to have happened only once. After that, people began coming to the hill to pray. That is all he would claim. He did not say who saw it, or what was seen, or on what day. A shrine that could easily have made a big story of it chose instead to call it unconfirmed, and still the hill drew people.
As Seminati's community grew and the hill was visited more and more, they needed somewhere for priests and lay people to stay during retreats. So they built a house of rocks and stones. It is the oldest building on the site, at least a hundred years old, and it still stands in its original shape. People now call it Father's House. It is home to the parish priest and his assistant and is looked after as a relic, so that children not yet born can see where their history began.
Before there was a church, the community met under a big mango tree. Masses were said there, and most of the community's marriages were celebrated beneath its branches. By 2014 the tree was close to a hundred years old, still bearing fruit and still giving good shade. The people of the parish treat it with great care. For many of them, the reporter wrote, it is their genesis, the place where their parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents were married.
When a church was finally built, the villagers built it by hand, carrying stones and mortar themselves. St Patrick's Catholic Church still has its unpainted stone and brick walls. It is a pre-Vatican II church, the rector explained, and that is why it has three altars. In those days the priest stood with his back to the people, and more than one Mass could be said at once in the same building. The changes after Vatican II put an end to that, with one Mass at a time and the priest facing the congregation.
There was one building that failed. Between 1972 and 1974 there was a plan to put a small chapel on the hilltop, but the wind kept tearing off the roof, and the work was abandoned halfway. What was built still stands, unfinished, up there in the wind. Then on 8 December 1974, the rector said, the whole diocese gathered on the hill to set up a statue of the Virgin Mary and consecrate the hill as a place of prayer. That large white statue now looks down on everyone who reaches the top.
Since then the diocese has used the hill as a pilgrimage centre, and the rector said it had become an international one. At the top, people take photographs, light candles, drop written requests into a box, or simply pray as hard as they can. The big national pilgrimage is in February, chosen because the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes falls around the 11th of that month, marking her apparition in France. The shrine on Oke Maria is dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. A few smaller groups come at other times of year. The rainy season is quieter, he said, because the hill is cold and wet, though some people still come privately to pray overnight.
What struck him most was who comes. Almost every night, he said, people hold vigils on the hill who are not even Catholics, and nobody stops them, because it is a place of prayer open to everybody. He remembered meeting a group from the Redeemed Church. One woman among them said she had come the year before to ask the Blessed Virgin to pray with her for a child. She had come back with her group to say thank you.
The parish itself is small, about 200 to 250 people by his count, and even that number moves. The rocky land leaves little room for farms nearby, so many farmers travel far away and stay three weeks or a month before coming home, and many of the young have left for work. Still, he said, whether you are Catholic or not, the hill has become a rallying point for Oka. He spoke of the old idea that going up a mountain brings a person closer to God, and of plans by the Bishop of Ondo, Jude Arogundade, to add hostels and chalets so pilgrims can stay longer.
It is a hill with a modest beginning: a priest who liked the quiet, a report nobody can confirm, and a community that kept climbing anyway.
