​ 
There is Playboy and LGBTQ and DMT and a whole lot of stuff we do or would like to do, and it is not cool at all with Mother Church.  We not only criticize her for her disapproving gaze, but give her a good kick in the arse, as the British say, and then walk away and forget about her (or her reformed Martin Luther recommitted allies).  For a while.  But life has a way of turning us back to the important stuff, whether through tragedy or impending death, or through simple grace.  In whatever case, grace is oddly enough.  It wasn’t always so, because it wasn’t always there, or so we are told; or so we are told by the very institutions we once kicked to the curb. We might not ever agree with all the rules, but it is hard to argue against grace.  And although the Church does not dispense it, it does lead us to it, and it is this that, for millions, makes all the difference in the world.
 
Practically, it shouldn’t.  Tell me to point to grace and I could not; tell me to go to my bank and push in the numbers to withdraw an envelope of grace and I cannot.  Like the Beatle’s love, money can’t buy grace and grace can’t be used like money.  As it is no-thing, it should then be worthless, but like love, it is a no-thing that counts for everything. 
 
But once, in a desert long, long ago, we are told that a people had nothing but spiritual hard cash money, or something like it.  I for one would like to have this divine money, but no matter: just like grace, it disappears; and unlike grace, it will never reappear, and most likely will never take us to the Promised Land.
 
Way back in the world of Technicolor – that would be the (19)50’s and early 60’s to you gamboling foals – we had blockbuster movies from directors such as Cecil B. De Mille taken straight from the Bible.  These movies made stars of its heroes, too.  We had Kirk Douglas as Spartacus and Anthony Quinn as Barabbas, and the greatest of all, Charlton Heston as Moses, whose mighty staff could not be pried even from his cold, dead fingers, or so we must believe.   It is by this latter movie based on the Old Testament that we were brought into the time of miracles, when God spoke straight out to people, from Abraham to our epic Moses, by (or for) whom the greatest miracles of all time were performed.  How often, in times that can be historically documented, do we have accounts of such miracles as the parting of the Red Sea, of manna from heaven, of boundless water from a rock in the desert, or of the flashing thunder and stone tablets of Mt. Sinai?  Who would not want to witness this stuff now?  I for one am sure that I would be convinced of the whole saga of the Good Book with just one little parting of a nearby lake.  My life and priorities would then be set.  Never again would I worry about the things of the world, and Holy would be my name.  Yet we are amazed when we see the chosen ones turn time and again against the mighty, bearded Charlton Heston-turned Moses.   Within weeks of the parting of the Red Sea, we find the people “murmuring.” They want to go back to Egypt, where they would be slaves but at least would have food and water.  They curse Moses.  So down comes manna, out comes water from a rock, and on and on it goes, from one miracle to the next as the people bitch and moan all the way to Jericho and the Promised Land.  How “stiff necked,” as the Bible says it, can people be?
 
The point is, “stuff” can never be enough, as incredible as it seems.  A miracle can be explained away, and if it is not, it is quickly subsumed by the ordinary standards of reality.  In fact, impossible things happen all the time.  Way back in the early years of this website I described dozens of these things, from Wee People to ghosts to miracle healings to ESP, most categories of the “impossible” attested to by multiple witnesses or subjected to scientific scrutiny.  And yet I do not see a great turning of the world towards the spiritual.  We are, like the Israelites, a stiff-necked people, so absorbed in our own pitiable sense of reality that we cannot see the forest for the trees, no matter what.
 
Enter grace.  In Catholicism, grace is represented by the Holy Ghost or Spirit, part of the Trinitarian (three in one) God.   No, no one understands the Trinity, just as no one understands the workings of the Holy Spirit, which is the deepest way (as far as I know) that God works through us.  The Church claims that the Spirit was made available to us through the sacrifice of Christ.  It is this spirit that is freely given to many, though none deserve it.  It is the core mission of most Christian religions – certainly Catholicism - to make us more open to the Holy Spirit.  The dispensation, or ability, to receive the Holy Spirit is called grace.  And it is this grace that allows us to believe even though we do not see, as opposed to the Israelites who could see without believing. 
 
Thus it was that poor Moses was denied entry into the Promised Land.  It happened that at one point, the people were bitching and moaning again about God and His failure to provide for them.  They had already received the Ten Commandments and had suffered through the stupidity of worshipping the Golden Calf, and here they were again, wishing to be dead or slaves or what-not, anything but to believe in a God who had towered over them as a huge fire for weeks and weeks, and who had done wonders for them such as the world had never known.  Stiff-necked.  Anyway, relenting once again, God commanded Moses to raise his rod towards a rock and tell it, in words, to bring forth water.  Instead, Moses raised his staff and hit the rock, for he did not believe that mere words would be enough.  For his disbelief, God decreed that Moses would live to see the Promised Land but never enter it, because of his doubt at the site called Meribah (‘contention’).  In the end, then, not even Moses, the man of miracles, could complete the journey.
 
And so it happened that at the age of 120, still strong and with good vision, Moses died on Mt Nebo as he stared across the Jordan at the Promised Land. 
 
This, as it turns out, is not only Moses’s story, and not only Charlton Heston's story, but all of ours.  Each of us at some time in our lives is a slave to the world of security, so deeply afraid that we need something special – something like a wicked pharaoh – to get us moving towards the Promised Land.  If we then leave our secure place, we must suffer through a desert of deprivation, supported at times only by our faith.  If we hold it together long enough, we just might reach the river that separates us from the Promised Land, but once there, still will not be allowed to pass for our transgressions and our disbelief.  But now, unlike Moses, we are told that we can cross, with the aid of the Holy Spirit which descends upon us through saving grace.   
 
I admit that to most of us, this sounds like a script more likely bought by Walt Disney than Cecil B. DeMille, a story more suitable for children than adults.  How can we swallow such a large fish tale?
 
We can because it comes to us like the enigma of the serpent swallowing its tail, the Alpha merging with the Omega, all supplanted by a kiss.  We accept this story by experiencing the Holy Spirit through grace – that is, we accept the Holy Spirit simply by experiencing it.  We are drawn towards it through its infinite sweetness, opening to it willingly.  It comes as a wisdom that surpasses words.   As such, it cannot be conjured through our own volition, as Moss had thought.  It is not something experienced on the outside, like the physical miracles of Moses, but internally.  As such it becomes a part of us.  To question it is to question not one’s senses, then, but one’s very thoughts, including the thought of being.  It is, in essence, a non-physical experience more memorable to us than physical experience.  It is, as such, a reflection of its source: something un-graspable and unseen, but more real than what we can hold in our hands.
 
Such direct wisdom can be denied, but as it is imperishable, it is much harder to do so.  Still, the whole process is a mystery unto itself.  Such it is with the Holy Spirit, and such it is with our lives, each and every one a saga as grand in its own way as the life of Moses, just waiting to be played out.   Unlike Moses, we have the benefit of having the wings of Spirit to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land.   But, like Moses, even with grace we still have our failures at Meribah, our many doubts.  We must, then, look to heaven as a new people for the mercy denied Moses, to be forgiven our lack of courage for when we are given, but fail, to try our wings on the lofty heights of Mt Nebo.    

 
When I was first married and settled into a real house, not a student room or jungle hammock, I got a subscription to Playboy.  My wife hated it, and to this day I don’t really know why.  I did not buy it for “porn,” as, even thirty years ago, Playboy was the softest of the soft.  It was, after all, born in the 1950’s, when certain body parts could be shown only if they served a purpose higher than mere titillation (ie, “art”).  Of course I’d glance at the photos, but I really, truly got it for the non-censored articles and interviews.  The naughty jokes were clever, too, and there was always the great college football review every August.  The only things I could see wrong with it were the emphasis on expensive grownup toys (wretchedly materialistic) and the puffy, faux intellectualism of the Playboy Philosophy.  It’s not that I disagreed strongly with its luxury-padded libertarianism, but that it went on and on as if it were really about something more than a certain man’s need to explain to himself and to the world, and I think to God, his obsession with sex. 
 
That certain man was the originator himself, Hugh Hefner, who I first read about in an interview in his own magazine.  His parents, he said, were Waspish Episcopalians (as I recall) who were the very picture of staunch puritanism, which included, we need not be told, their attitudes about sex.  Heff, like most young men, loved sex.  At the same time, he didn’t want to outrage his parents over something so venial.  I am sure he didn’t want to go to Hell, either.  So he made an artsy, tasteful mag for the gentleman of distinction, which he hoped would eliminate the sordid reputation of the sex act itself - no matter that, whatever the class or the financial status of the person, to rut is to rut.  Bow ties do not a torrid night make, but Heff thought that the pretty bow would excuse the drooling done once the bow tie came off.   
 
He was a person of his age, as most of us are, with a need to excuse his behavior, a need which went beyond my own generation’s.  I, for one, rarely felt guilty about sex before marriage, but rather was concerned if I had engaged in it with proper mutual respect.  Today’s youth, it seems, does not even care about that, as free porn videos, many of them self-made, have flooded the internet and made the whole thing almost wearying.  The down-grading of sex since the Age of Hefner – the first person in the US, I believe, who sold porn (however soft) right out in the open – has not gone as planned, as men back then got more excitement from a pair of legs than the young folks now get from full and frontal live action, but I precede myself.  Rather, I want to return to the reason for Hefner’s magazine, besides profit, in the first place: to normalize his prurient interests to all those on heaven and earth.
 
As a near- post-war man, I understand his problem.  He did not want to be seen as the slimy sex trafficker of his parents’ age, when sex itself was supposed to be viewed largely as a procreative act which was otherwise to be suppressed.  He wanted to move us all beyond this notion that was both made and promoted by most of the Christian churches of the day (not to mention most other religions).  We baby boomers carried his wish further, and today, many of the Protestant denominations have turned away from the prudery of the past.  Not all have, however, and most especially not the original nomination, the Catholic Church.  Not that I have thought of it that much, having become an active member in the Church again only well after married and middle-age life.  But recently a peculiar set of circumstances sent me back into Hefner’s day.  It has bothered me ever since.
 
It happened while talking in confession to a priest.  Besides my general selfishness and orneriness, I don’t really do much of anything anymore.  I should have seen that for the sin of omission that it is, but instead I looked for something that might interest the priest.  When he mentioned in passing “lust,” I grabbed onto that.  Yes, I lust, and the advertisers know it.  Every time they show a hot babe next to a product I reflexively lust, and, according to advertiser philosophy, associate that longing with the product, which I then go and buy, never really knowing why and never really understanding why it doesn’t bring me the pleasure I think it should.  It was not a good idea to bring this up because I do not feel bad about this occasional lust, only stupid, but the priest grabbed at it (as I should have known he would), and said that, what the heck, it was not of great importance.  I agreed.  He continued: “except if it led to”…then he said it, the taboo-ed word itself: “masturbation.”   
 
For men  – I do not know about women - there is nothing more universally scorned in public and more practiced in private than masturbation.  From what I’ve heard, they used to love to rage against “onanism” in the pulpit in the olden days, but now most clerics are (gratefully) silent about it.  I think this is because of the Hefner Conundrum – that is, that religion will be avoided if it condemns something that most of us do and will continue to do.  People no longer feel they have to go to church, and the church needs people.  Driving them away with something so common and, to the naked eye, so harmless, doesn’t make sense in the greater scheme. 
 
I, however, had to know what the Church thought, and so asked the priest if it condemned masturbation as a mortal sin – that is, as a sin that will send you to Hell if not confessed.  He said, a little to my surprise, “yes.”  I arched my eyebrows in genuine concern, and then shifted the load from us happily adjusted and bow-tied gents to the youth: “But the young guys!  They have ready porn whenever they want!  What do you think they do?  Most are too embarrassed to confess this to you.  Are they all going to Hell?”  He replied that it is a matter of grave concern, yes, but that it is not a mortal sin if the passion is too great to bear. 
 
That, to me, is about as clear as mud, and Heff must be rolling in his grave.  But Heff did not die a happy man.  He had a heart attack around age 70, and then went through a period of deep depression.  He made the talk show circuit for a while after and told the interviewers that he was over that dark period.  Viagra was a part of his new happiness, and he was proud to let us all know that he was now living happily with twin platinum blonds who looked all the world like Vegas gold diggers from the 50’s.  Not long after – he was then going into his 80’s – he died.  They say he was lonely and confused and in fear towards the end.  Apparently, not even Heff thought his explanation to God for his obsession would work.
 
I think it was Heff’s Conundrum – wanting to have sex without being told he was offending God – that started the whole ball of humanity rolling down the aisle of ‘wokeness.’  Sex is a powerful drive, and young people often have weak ties to traditions that they do not make.  Heff helped exploit that, and now we are left with the fruits of it.  The list of broken families, confused youth, the tremendous increase in suicide and the unexpected decrease in sexual satisfaction that the young now are experiencing suggest to us the possibility that the expression of certain things – including sexual things - often leads to more problems than their suppression would.  
 
And that is the Church’s conundrum.  They do not want to lose parishioners because of excessive rules against sex, but they have known since Biblical times that sex can lead to all sorts of unholy behavior and cultural chaos.  It seems to me that they no longer know where to draw the line.  If not at masturbation, then where?  At heavy petting among singles?  At oral sex among married?  It is even probable that priests, at least the young ones, are nearly as guilty of onanism as the great unwashed.   Does it benefit God, if not the world, if they beat their chests and beg forgiveness each time?  Or would it be better if they just admitted to an “overwhelming passion,” said a little prayer for general forgiveness for being human, and then moved on?  Would the latter send them to damnation, or would it help to avoid excessive concern over it, something that could cause problems, too?  
 
I have no magical answer for this.  That few Catholics know that masturbation is a mortal sin, or that certain sexual acts in marriage are sinful, underscores the Church’s conundrum (I do not know even now which acts within marriage are considered mortal sins, if any).  Most would rather let it go, emphasizing holy humility and good works and mutual love and respect, but the rules are there, and according to them, a whole lot of people might be going to hell from an act of common human weakness and from an inability to confess out of embarrassment.  If I can declare anything, I would say that if they believe these rules, they should make them clear to everyone, for it is their job to save us from Hell.  If not, they should remove them.  Otherwise, we can rightly say that they are playing with fire here.
 
So it comes down to this: the Church has trapped itself in its own conundrum.  Fifteen-plus years ago, when I was first going back to church, our local church would bring in a very old, scarlet-faced priest once a year who would tell us in no uncertain terms how sinful most sex acts were.  Looking around, it was easy to see that some were embarrassed by the harangue, some were amused, while others simply rolled their eyes, but none looked convinced.  It is fairly obvious that most who still attend do not believe in the old-time sex sins, period.  The Church nominally does, but…what?  Should they recant and join the New Age movement?  Admit to centuries-old mistakes?
 
Might it be that masturbation makes monkeys of us all? 
 
By the rules, mortal sins send us to Hell, but God can do anything, and no one is really deserving of saving grace.  It is awarded out of mercy, and anything made or thought of by man is in need of it.  Perhaps that should begin the best sermon about this whole conundrum.  Maybe that would allow those poor red-faced boys to continue as faithful followers without bringing before them the threat of damnation or the demanding dregs of humiliation for something the Church is, more often than not, too embarrassed or too afraid to talk about. 
 
[As is often the case, today’s liturgy is exactly about sexual acts, including Paul in Romans 12, and the Gospel from Luke 12.  In Luke 12:48, we hear Jesus tell us, “Much will be demanded of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be entrusted with the person entrusted with more.”  That, I think, makes explicit what the Church warily implies: that some things are beyond the novitiate, but are demanded of the elders or acolytes.  This would absolve the young from their solitary acts, while demanding more from us oldsters, which is certainly an easier task – if one is not named Hugh Hefner.]

 
In the classic movie, Forrest Gump tells us what his mama always told him: “Life is like a box of chocolates: you have to bite into them to see what they are,” or something like that.  Which is true but only so far, like most metaphors.  We know that, while you might get the pasty artificial strawberry flavor or the sought-after caramel nugget, both are going to be sweet (unlike so much of life).  It can also be said of books.  For instance, I got a book on audio for our long trip up north last week that was titled The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter, featuring the return of Bob Lee Swagger as the seasoned man of action.  Like the chocolates, we know what the overall flavor will be: action adventure with lots of gun play.  But we don’t really know until we read (or hear) it what other flavors, or information or messages. it might give us.  
 
This one, by Hunter, has given me quite a bit, from the interesting –but- not- unexpected to the totally unexpected.  On the expected side, we are given an alternative scenario of the Kennedy assassination, which our man Swagger is tracking down some fifty years after the fact.  It appears that a rogue section of the CIA was responsible, but was able to cover it up so well that the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, continues to take all the blame.  What is interesting in this fictional cover-up is how well this book, published in 2012, mirrors the manipulations of the CIA, as well as the state department and the upper levels of the FBI, in their attempt to take down our oddest of presidents, Donald J. Trump.  This book nails it, so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Hunter, or whatever his real name might be, is a rogue former spook who is taking his former company to task.   Really excellent stuff. 
 
What was unexpected, though, was how the ‘social glue’ among those in the government agencies detailed by Hunter was so pivotal.  I was also surprised by how affected I have been by the old blue-blood Ivy League status symbols that form this social glue.  It just might be, I found not long after this book, one of my worst personal devils among so many.   
 
In the heartland, this form of snobbery is much less pronounced, with status leaning primarily on quantities of money, but in the East, especially the Northeast, knowledge of the blue- blood code is central to all the social climbers.  It is also troublesome for a lot of otherwise-contented people who are confronted with this snobbery on a more or less regular basis.  In this social climate, where you ‘came from’ is paramount, even if you don’t believe it yourself, because the connected people often run the innards of government, and own the most desirable properties.  It is these people who call themselves the Best and the Brightest, who live the most enviable lives in material advantages and who tell you what you should think if you want to be acceptable to them, the trend-setters.  No matter that they might take a 180 degree turn in policy or opinion on some cultural matter, they are always right, and if you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, but wrong in a vulgar, ignorant peasant sort of way.  You are obviously not of the manor born.  But they are, and they run things.  If you are not of the class, or have not pushed your way into the class by admission to Harvard or Yale and fulfilled your role there as someone compliant with the ruling class, you are lesser, and your opinion worthless.  Fight them or their power, and you will be destroyed by their righteous (and class-protective) wrath.  As Hunter says of Kennedy in his book, the president was assassinated because he was running policy counter to the opinion of the ruling class, even though his family had made inroads into the very same class, albeit by immoral means.  This conflict with the ruling-class is precisely what, I believe, is causing all the astounding drama whipped up since the inception of the Trump administration. 
 
All interesting in an objective sort of way, but during a night not long after hearing this book, my old nemesis the unconscious struck again.  I felt once again the pains of being outside of the class that my parents had so wanted me to belong to, even though they disliked it with a passion.  And that was the rub – we, my parents and I, were made to believe that we wanted to be part of the aristocracy while still maintaining disdain for it.  But you cannot do that if you wish to belong, not unless your pedigree goes back to the Mayflower and your treasure is as great as Midas’s.  I had never thought that I bought into the northeast class snobbery, but it is quite clear by my dream that I did, because the feeling of failure I felt during the dream was so palpable.  I had also thought that any sliver of that sense of class that may have snuck into me would have been cleansed in light of the greater wisdom brought by age.  Again, that is apparently not the case.  
 
This is a big deal, not only for myself but for all of us.  Class envy is not merely a silly butt-sniffing ceremony we are compelled to repeat as humans, but a source of horrendous conflict, some of it almost deserved.  Communism is based upon it, and communism has killed at least one hundred million people over the last century, with Chairman Mao, who is still revered in China, taking the dubious prize as biggest mass murderer in history.   Class envy is not merely a social thing – it often dictates who gets fed and whose ideas run the nation – but it is largely so.  All societies above simple family hunting bands have a class system, and in it the commoners are often stung by the notion that they are inferior. Regardless, they are compelled by the upper class to accept their status, as the upper class has most of the power and the money, but the rest resent it greatly.  Add a little starvation or a losing war to this formula, and you get revolution and often-times mass slaughter.  As I said, it’s a big deal for us all.
 
It is especially disappointing to me to find this sense of inferiority and envy still in myself because of my high regard for the greatest social class buster himself, Jesus of Nazareth.   We are all well aware of his slighting of the rich and powerful.  It is not that having wealth is the problem, but rather, that having wealth requires one to be both generous and wise.  In the story of Lazarus, the rich man allows Lazarus to starve to death while he dines voluminously, where even his dogs eat better than he who sits dying outside his door.  In the end, Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell for not caring for his fellow human beings.  In another parable he tells us that one cannot serve two masters…that “You cannot serve both God and money.”  If we are to be rich, it cannot be for its own sake, but as a consequence of worthy action or work that does not take us away from our primary duties: to love God with all out heart, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  These duties themselves, if properly followed, would cleanse the field of envy and greed and abuse of power. 
 
It is what the founders of Plymouth colony, under Cotton Mather if I remember correctly, tried to do: create a ‘shining city on the hill’ to mirror the New Jerusalem, where all shared all and worshiped God continuously.   This failed within the first full year, just as socialistic governments usually do and for the same reason: some were slackers who made those who worked, and had to share, justifiably angry.  Saint Peter was well aware of this when he stated from his Christian community that “if one does not work, one does not eat.”  But it is one thing when under the management of a living apostle, and quite another when under the management of mere men who are naturally subject to the culture of their birth.  With the relinquishment of the dream of the perfect Christian community, the pilgrims went on to create Beacon Hill and the American version of aristocracy – whose members are exactly those who now rule our government from within, as well as create our cultural standards.  They are the people of God who went from the “Shining City on the Hill” to Beacon and Capitol Hill in a few short centuries.  It seems that it is not only my life that is affected by social status, but even those who once claimed the greatest of moral intentions. 
 
It is this that is the greater point: that we all have to deal with our dark side.  It is not only wealth and status that control us, but many other things inherent in our human nature.  I wrote recently of the ethnic slaughter in Rwanda, where neighbors killed neighbors in such a frenzy.   In this slaughter was not only hatred of the ‘other,’ but also hatred built on pride and all those other deadly sins such as envy and lust.  We know, if we dare to know, that we are not far from the consequences of these failings ourselves.  We, too, are a mess, and, just like the Pilgrims, are so far internally from our conscious ideals that we seldom can make our great moral plans actually work.  It is this darkness that we have to acknowledge and confront if we are to make a better world. 
 
We are told in the New Testament that this darkness can only be overcome by grace, a gift that is neither deserved nor guaranteed, but granted to those who make themselves available – as well as to some who do not.   Prayer helps, because, besides communication, real prayer is a willingness to admit our failings and to act on the ultimate commandments: love God and neighbor.  To do that, we cannot serve the masters that are money, or status, or prestige, for those build a house that cannot stand.  So it has always been with societies, which always crumble.  But we do not have to.  Or if we do, we should know where next to turn.   With a little grace and humility and a lot of mercy, we can find our way out of the dark underworld that relentlessly turns every City on the Hill into a city that has lost its ideals, then becomes lost in time.        

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An urge is not always heaven-sent.   For instance, a few weeks ago I went to the library to get books on CD, because I thought – too optimistically – that I would be heading up north.  As I passed the “new book” section, a certain book, Ratsnake, caught my eye.  Reading the cover blurb, I found it was the autobiography of an undercover cop for the Tobacco and Firearms department (ATF).  He set up large buys from drug dealers off the Florida coast or infiltrated biker gangs for drug peddling, sometimes keeping in character for years.  It cost him his first marriage.  It also, as I found reading it later, cost him a sense of – well, I don’t know how to put it.  He was a good writer; the adventures were truly adventures; but after 70 pages or so, I felt I needed a good dose of penicillin.   I couldn’t continue, and it sits downstairs now waiting to be returned to the library. 
 
But some urges do seem to be heaven-sent.   We have had some old folk’s health problems going on here, and it so happened that not long ago I had clicked into the site, ‘Lady of Good Hope,’ for the one approved Marian site in the US, right near us in Champion, Wisconsin.  There, they were having a special healing service, as they do nearly every month, where Mary and, of course, the Holy Trinity, are called upon for special graces so that one might either be cured, or “healed” (where the affliction is not cured, but the reason for it is revealed).  It was a good experience overall, but I can’t say that I was transported to heaven, or that either one of us kicked up our heels like youngsters.  We did, however, go to the gift- and -stuff store afterwards, where a particular book, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Immcaculee Ilibagiza, called out to me loud and clear.  I have just finished it, and it has made my week.  Such books that recount recent miracles that have been scientifically verified are just the thing for Doubting Thomas’s such as myself.  And, as any such book should, it also has put the fear of God in me.
 
Anyone over thirty knows what the nation of Rwanda stands for, besides gorillas in the mist: massive genocide.  Up until 1994, that nation had been ruled by Hutus, who were lording it over the Tutsis, who in colonial times had lorded it over the Hutus.  As the year 1994 approached, things got worse and worse for the Tutsis, beginning with a severe quota system that kept them out of government schools and positions, and ending with the kind of hateful rhetoric we associate with Hitler.  Then the genocide happened, where about one million people, mostly Tutsis, were murdered by their neighbors with the consent and prodding of the government.  What followed next was civil war, more oppression, and then an unlikely truce.  I think the Tutsis got back in government, but in any case, the murder and bigotry has stopped and Rwanda is now a very unlikely peaceful country in the midst of many nations in turmoil.  In my opinion, there might be a spiritual reason for this newfound peace, one that the author Immaculee, an ethnic Tutsi who lost most of her family to the purge, writes about so sincerely: the Mother of Sorrows, the local apparition of the Virgin Mary in the tiny town of Kibeho.
 
During the genocide the village was torn apart, but beforehand it had drawn tens of thousands of people due to the visions of three girls at the local Catholic school.  The first happened to Alphonsine in late 1981, then to Anathalie, then to the fiercest of critics of the two, Maire –Claire.  There, the girls went through and became lenses for what has become standard since Fatima: deep trance states, mass visions of Mary, rainbows, a spinning rainbow-colored sun, and many miracles including documented healings.  Within a year or so, many other children from Rwanda were touched by Mary, and even Jesus, and were drawn to Kibeho to display similar behavior and pull in similar visions and miraculous healings.  For a few years before the late eighties, Rwanda was on spiritual fire.
 
Perhaps one of the most astounding well-documented cases involved a young girl who had been called to Kibeho, named Vestine.  Like Alphonsine and Anathalie, Valentine was called to heaven, but this time by Jesus.  The vision and request was recorded live (I believe) by Radio Rwanda a week or so before Easter Sunday, where she told an enthralled nation that Jesus was asking her to die for him.  He (Jesus) promised that if she accepted, she would be taken up on Good Friday and returned on Easter Sunday.  She would be dead, but not permanently.  Again and again Jesus spoke through her, telling all others not to bury the body during this time.  She would come back to life on Easter.  The moment when Vestine accepted the request was on live radio. 
 
Good Friday came, along with a host of priests and doctors set to document and inspect every aspect of the promised “death.”  Vestine appeared as normal as usual as she sat by her bed awaiting the time, surrounded by the doctors with an array of instruments to record her life signs if anything happened.  It did.  At precisely 3 PM she was forced back with a sudden jolt onto her bed, where she then lay as if dead.  The pulse was taken, the equipment clicked away, and all the doctors agreed that she had fully died.  They did not know what else to do but wait.  After an hour, Vestine took one great breath and then stopped again, her pulse still.  For the next 40 hours she continued to take one breath every one to two hours until, after that biblically magical number of 40, she suddenly sat up with a smile, grabbed a towel near her bed, and began to walk into the bathroom to clean up for Sunday mass.  Of course they stopped her and re-measured her now -normal vital signs, and then asked her what heaven was like.  She told them that it was indescribable; that music had colors, that colors had music, that everything was so different that words could not describe it.  Then she finished with, “But I can tell you this: I begged Jesus from the bottom of my soul to let me stay there.  He said that it wasn’t my time, so that I must leave.  There has never been a sadder moment for me.”   
 
After several years of such miracles, though, all the visionaries coming up onto the stage that had been built at Kibeho had a day of terror.  They were given (and conveyed) images of massive piles of rotting corpses without heads, of torrents of blood, of hellish destruction and waste.  They screamed and sent many in the audience running in terror.  The Virgin Mary told them (through the visionaries) that they had not listened!  These visions of horrors continued on into the months, so much so that Radio Rwanda ended their broadcasts of the visionaries.  Then in 1994, at the urging of the government on radio, the madness began.  It would take years and years to undo whatever damage could be undone.
 
I cannot find it right away in the book, but I believe the Virgin told the visionaries that “the world was first destroyed by water.  The next time it will be by fire.”  She most certainly told them that the end was coming soon, where Jesus would cull his flock.  The chosen would include those of all religions and beliefs, as long as they had lived according to God’s will, but many would not be saved.  Her message stated clearly that the world’s people, including but not exclusive to those in Rwanda, held evil in their hearts.  Need we, she could have added, anymore proof?  And of course we were told that all of us need to mend, to atone - for the end is nigh.
 
We have heard that ‘the end is nigh’ ever since Christ let us know that there would be a final day of judgement, but many things give this current warning more weight.  For one, it was accompanied by shared visions and hundreds of miracles, many scientifically documented; and for another, several other collective visions of Mary since the 1960’s have said the same thing, from Egypt to Argentina to Japan and to Yugoslavia: that the end is nearing and that we better get our houses in order.  All those, too, were accompanied by supernatural signs and miracles. 
 
And so I have my miracles, my proof, and the horror as well.  When Mary comes to town these days, there is reason to worry.  She often is giving fair warning of local disasters: ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, religious cleansing in Egypt, or wholesale slaughter in Rwanda.  But she is also telling all of us that this evil is in us all.  A day will come, she says, and not too distantly, when we will have to account for ourselves.  See the miracles, she says, and believe that this is true.  And then do something about it.
 
It, the end of the world, will probably not happen in my or most of the readers’ lifetime.  It might not happen for 6,000 years, as God’s time is most certainly not ours.  But each of us has only a limited time on earth, and that end is coming very soon by any broad-view standards.  One way or another, that end will begin our day of judgement, or so we are told; or so we are told, not by some madman on the street, but by an apparition that is appearing with greater and greater frequency throughout the world, accompanied by great and impossible signs.  I for one both want to believe, but also to not.  Belief, at least for Christians, has always been a double-edged sword of great comfort and great terror.  But one thing is for certain: life is short, and we cannot take our gold, or any other thing, to the grave.  It might well be that all we take with us is the essence, the sum total of our life’s work on earth.  In light of eternity, the only thing these miracles could wish to convey would be the authenticity of the message.  With such startling signs of both evil in the world and of powers beyond the world, we could well say that, yes, we have been given fair warning.