A few months ago, I wrote to a friend of mine from graduate student days who is still in the materialistic mindset we were taught as a given. I told him of the odd vision I had at the Museum of the Scrolls in Jerusalem, where an un-furled issue of Isaiah, copied by dedicated Essene ascetics 2,000 years ago, suddenly revealed dozens of faces very clearly in the Aramaic (I believe – a close version of Hebrew) script. I did not see them at first, but was alerted to them by an elderly woman by my side. Another woman to my other side could not see them at all. For days later, I believed that this scroll was only a copy made by modern methods, and that the faces had been cleverly included in the script. Once home, I found that I had been mistaken – that this was the original. I looked up information about it and could find nothing about anyone seeing faces in the script, although new high-spectrum technology had confirmed that other writings could be found underneath.
That could explain it in part, and this might have partially appeased my friend, who did not doubt my testimony, but sought more credible reasons for this “appearance”. He also thought it might have been caused by my imagination making faces from the designs in the script that I otherwise could not make sense of. This also might be true, but after thinking about it some more, I realized that the faces I had seen could not possibly have been contained in the script, which was only a fraction of an inch in height. The faces were clear and sharp, and on reflection, much larger than the script. Somehow the faces, then, had been magnified. I do not know how this would be done, and in the end I could not appease my friend’s genuine skepticism, which I frankly understood. I would have doubts about it, too, in his shoes. In fact, I still have a few myself.
But that is the nature of things that happen from the spirit. They come from another set of laws that we do not know and cannot imagine. Time might become irrelevant, as might size or even one’s history or life-long reality. It is why we question miracles and anything else that comes from this realm. They simply don’t make practical sense.
So it is, too, with prophecy and divine apparitions. In Donal Foley’s book, Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, the author tries to make sense of Marian apparitions as they relate to history, in a necessary after-the-fact way. Why, he asks, have Marian apparitions become so much more prevalent, especially since the Enlightenment, and more so, in the last one hundred and something years? Taking this reality, this increase in apparitions, he matches them to what was happening in history at the time, and what happened after the manifestations. We have, for instance, the first apparition of what Foley calls the new era (post Middle Ages), in 16th century Mexico at Guadalupe. The Aztec Empire had fallen, but the people themselves had stubbornly resisted any attempts at conversion to Catholicism. Then the Aztec Indian Juan Diego was treated to a vision of Mary, who gave him an imprint of herself on his cape, a cactus-fiber tilma, and a great bunch of roses that miraculously grew by her side in the middle of winter. The tilma and image on it remain intact and vibrant to this day. With these miracles, the entire Aztec nation, numbering some 7 or 8 million, converted to Catholicism, the greatest non-coerced mass conversion ever.
At this point, we understand the movement of the spirit, although we do not know how “it” could do what it did – it was to convert pagans to the true faith. What happened less than ten years later in Mexico, however, is harder to understand. A massive plague of unknown origin, one that is still only guessed at today, swept through Aztec land, killing 90 to 95% of the people. The scope of this tragedy is difficult to imagine. The population of Mexico would not catch up to the old numbers until the early 1900’s, almost four hundred years later. This changed almost everything about Mexico, from the legacy of Aztec culture to its world-wide political power. Why?
This pattern of apparitions and later devastation was to continue in Europe. There was one before the devastation of the Revolution of 1848 (La Salette), one during the formation of Darwin’s and Marx’s theories (Lourdes) and the most famous one of all, that in Fatima, Portugal, during the final year of WWI. Foley points out the connection between these: the Revolution continued the rationalization of Europe with the spread of industrial technology and unbridled capitalism, where Darwin’s “randomness” could take hold, as well as Marx’s godless appeal to the suffering masses, while Fatima marked the beginning of the struggle between spirituality and materialism on a world-wide scale. Of the latter, Fatima, the rise of communism in Russia was predicted a few months before it happened, as was WWII and the collapse of communism in Russia. And we should not forget the apparitions in Medjugorje before the fall of Yugoslavia and the Serbian massacre, and the appearance of Mary in Rwanda just a few years before that horrendous genocide. The small point being, be afraid if an apparition of Mary happens near you. But what is the larger point?
For one, it seems we need help. Mankind has always made at least parts of the world a brutal place, but for the religious, it is obvious we need help now more than ever because of the steep, unprecedented rise in atheism and secularism in general. That is absolutely true, and probably gives us a good explanation for the proliferation of Marian appearances – if one is religious, that is. For others, it is a sign that the decrease in religious believers is causing people of faith to hallucinate a savior mother to (vainly) buttress their childish security blankets as reality brings these silly wrinkled ideas closer and closer to irrelevancy. Both these ideas are understandable reactions to the apparitions. But what of the “thought” behind the apparitions themselves?
First, we must believe the apparitions truly happened, which many will not admit even given enormous amounts of evidence; for instance, several thousand people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, including stone-cold Marxists and skeptical journalists, who could not help but believe afterwards - and yet how many still doubt? Moving forward in belief from there, we must also admit to fundamental elements that confound human thought, let alone logic. Consider the reason for the apparitions, which is to increase (Christian) spirituality for the greatest amount of people, so as to avoid atrocious events. Some of these events will be caused by humans, and can be made logically accountable, but some will not; some will be pestilential or geological or astronomical in nature, beyond the control of humans. God’s hand, then, is raised to punish us unless we repent. However, God knows all; God knows our hearts and what we will do. Will He give us an apparition that will convert enough people to avoid catastrophe? Or will He convert so that the already doomed souls will go to heaven? Or will He give us just enough so that we might consider conversion, and so base our belief on faith, which is an act of the Will? If so, where is the omniscience in that? Also, are we to believe that a simple change of heart can cause meteors to stop and dictators to fail (or not – we don’t know)? Where is the science in that? And what about the miracles themselves, which are often meaningless, as far as we know, except for being impossible. Why these and not, say, the appearance of a fifty -mile -high alabaster tower that Man could not erect, and whose reality could not be denied?
We don’t know the answers to any of the above, at least not for sure. Why did I see the faces in the scrolls? Why not the image of a brilliant angel with flaming sword telling me to proclaim Jesus from the Olympian heights of the Washington Monument? Why such a thing that has no apparent meaning and only is of passing interest to others? We might see these spiritual things as Carl Jung saw more casual events, as “synchronic,” in tune with some side of reality that we cannot understand. The problem is, that some of these anomalies are potentially of great importance, and that such things share this unknowable quality is greatly frustrating to most of us. Tell it to us straight, we demand; stop hiding things in some supernatural code, Spirit, if you want to really tell us something!
Of course, if we believe scripture, we have been given certain things in very simple and specific terms. But the big stuff – the really big stuff regarding the meaning of life and afterlife and all that – remains intangible, evidential but never quite touchable.
I do not think God is playing games with us, at least not with these things of obvious spiritual import. Rather, I think that we cannot even begin to think like God. The very way the manifestations occur gives evidence of other ways of thought that we can only wonder at – like omniscience and free will running side by side. Or dancing suns as a proof of divine authenticity. Or faces in scrolls, given to me and another for some reason not yet imagined, let alone found. Or the real meaning of life and existence and action and morality and on and on. We don’t know. We don’t know because the reality we know does not allow us to know. We see, as St Paul said, in a glass (impure old-fashioned mirror) darkly. What comes to us in apparitions and synchronic events, and ultimately in everything we experience, has a significance that is simply beyond us. How does one teach calculus to a chimp? A straight-forward answer in our terms would not answer the question, but would most likely obscure the answer with our own incorrect thoughts.
So we also might wonder at Foley’s analysis. It seems potentially correct in hindsight, but we still do not have foresight. The people who saw the vision that came during the onset of unbridled capitalism at La Salette could not know that this was a warning that such ruthlessness would bring us godless totalitarianism. Maybe we, too, are being told something else from these apparitions, something far greater that we cannot grasp. Maybe another code is hidden in the series of apparitions that are speaking of things far greater than the things of normal history. My bet is that they are, but that what they are saying is as hidden as the meaning of the faces in the scroll are to me simply because we are incapable of understanding – at least for now. Which gives us a clue as to the real importance of faith.
[P.S. : After writing the above, it came to me that the Faces I saw were an indication that Scripture could become alive and personal for me. That answered, it still leaves the question of how that would or will be. ]
A few months ago, I wrote to a friend of mine from graduate student days who is still in the materialistic mindset we were taught as a given. I told him of the odd vision I had at the Museum of the Scrolls in Jerusalem, where an un-furled issue of Isaiah, copied by dedicated Essene ascetics 2,000 years ago, suddenly revealed dozens of faces very clearly in the Aramaic (I believe – a close version of Hebrew) script. I did not see them at first, but was alerted to them by an elderly woman by my side. Another woman to my other side could not see them at all. For days later, I believed that this scroll was only a copy made by modern methods, and that the faces had been cleverly included in the script. Once home, I found that I had been mistaken – that this was the original. I looked up information about it and could find nothing about anyone seeing faces in the script, although new high-spectrum technology had confirmed that other writings could be found underneath.
That could explain it in part, and this might have partially appeased my friend, who did not doubt my testimony, but sought more credible reasons for this “appearance”. He also thought it might have been caused by my imagination making faces from the designs in the script that I otherwise could not make sense of. This also might be true, but after thinking about it some more, I realized that the faces I had seen could not possibly have been contained in the script, which was only a fraction of an inch in height. The faces were clear and sharp, and on reflection, much larger than the script. Somehow the faces, then, had been magnified. I do not know how this would be done, and in the end I could not appease my friend’s genuine skepticism, which I frankly understood. I would have doubts about it, too, in his shoes. In fact, I still have a few myself.
But that is the nature of things that happen from the spirit. They come from another set of laws that we do not know and cannot imagine. Time might become irrelevant, as might size or even one’s history or life-long reality. It is why we question miracles and anything else that comes from this realm. They simply don’t make practical sense.
So it is, too, with prophecy and divine apparitions. In Donal Foley’s book, Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, the author tries to make sense of Marian apparitions as they relate to history, in a necessary after-the-fact way. Why, he asks, have Marian apparitions become so much more prevalent, especially since the Enlightenment, and more so, in the last one hundred and something years? Taking this reality, this increase in apparitions, he matches them to what was happening in history at the time, and what happened after the manifestations. We have, for instance, the first apparition of what Foley calls the new era (post Middle Ages), in 16th century Mexico at Guadalupe. The Aztec Empire had fallen, but the people themselves had stubbornly resisted any attempts at conversion to Catholicism. Then the Aztec Indian Juan Diego was treated to a vision of Mary, who gave him an imprint of herself on his cape, a cactus-fiber tilma, and a great bunch of roses that miraculously grew by her side in the middle of winter. The tilma and image on it remain intact and vibrant to this day. With these miracles, the entire Aztec nation, numbering some 7 or 8 million, converted to Catholicism, the greatest non-coerced mass conversion ever.
At this point, we understand the movement of the spirit, although we do not know how “it” could do what it did – it was to convert pagans to the true faith. What happened less than ten years later in Mexico, however, is harder to understand. A massive plague of unknown origin, one that is still only guessed at today, swept through Aztec land, killing 90 to 95% of the people. The scope of this tragedy is difficult to imagine. The population of Mexico would not catch up to the old numbers until the early 1900’s, almost four hundred years later. This changed almost everything about Mexico, from the legacy of Aztec culture to its world-wide political power. Why?
This pattern of apparitions and later devastation was to continue in Europe. There was one before the devastation of the Revolution of 1848 (La Salette), one during the formation of Darwin’s and Marx’s theories (Lourdes) and the most famous one of all, that in Fatima, Portugal, during the final year of WWI. Foley points out the connection between these: the Revolution continued the rationalization of Europe with the spread of industrial technology and unbridled capitalism, where Darwin’s “randomness” could take hold, as well as Marx’s godless appeal to the suffering masses, while Fatima marked the beginning of the struggle between spirituality and materialism on a world-wide scale. Of the latter, Fatima, the rise of communism in Russia was predicted a few months before it happened, as was WWII and the collapse of communism in Russia. And we should not forget the apparitions in Medjugorje before the fall of Yugoslavia and the Serbian massacre, and the appearance of Mary in Rwanda just a few years before that horrendous genocide. The small point being, be afraid if an apparition of Mary happens near you. But what is the larger point?
For one, it seems we need help. Mankind has always made at least parts of the world a brutal place, but for the religious, it is obvious we need help now more than ever because of the steep, unprecedented rise in atheism and secularism in general. That is absolutely true, and probably gives us a good explanation for the proliferation of Marian appearances – if one is religious, that is. For others, it is a sign that the decrease in religious believers is causing people of faith to hallucinate a savior mother to (vainly) buttress their childish security blankets as reality brings these silly wrinkled ideas closer and closer to irrelevancy. Both these ideas are understandable reactions to the apparitions. But what of the “thought” behind the apparitions themselves?
First, we must believe the apparitions truly happened, which many will not admit even given enormous amounts of evidence; for instance, several thousand people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, including stone-cold Marxists and skeptical journalists, who could not help but believe afterwards - and yet how many still doubt? Moving forward in belief from there, we must also admit to fundamental elements that confound human thought, let alone logic. Consider the reason for the apparitions, which is to increase (Christian) spirituality for the greatest amount of people, so as to avoid atrocious events. Some of these events will be caused by humans, and can be made logically accountable, but some will not; some will be pestilential or geological or astronomical in nature, beyond the control of humans. God’s hand, then, is raised to punish us unless we repent. However, God knows all; God knows our hearts and what we will do. Will He give us an apparition that will convert enough people to avoid catastrophe? Or will He convert so that the already doomed souls will go to heaven? Or will He give us just enough so that we might consider conversion, and so base our belief on faith, which is an act of the Will? If so, where is the omniscience in that? Also, are we to believe that a simple change of heart can cause meteors to stop and dictators to fail (or not – we don’t know)? Where is the science in that? And what about the miracles themselves, which are often meaningless, as far as we know, except for being impossible. Why these and not, say, the appearance of a fifty -mile -high alabaster tower that Man could not erect, and whose reality could not be denied?
We don’t know the answers to any of the above, at least not for sure. Why did I see the faces in the scrolls? Why not the image of a brilliant angel with flaming sword telling me to proclaim Jesus from the Olympian heights of the Washington Monument? Why such a thing that has no apparent meaning and only is of passing interest to others? We might see these spiritual things as Carl Jung saw more casual events, as “synchronic,” in tune with some side of reality that we cannot understand. The problem is, that some of these anomalies are potentially of great importance, and that such things share this unknowable quality is greatly frustrating to most of us. Tell it to us straight, we demand; stop hiding things in some supernatural code, Spirit, if you want to really tell us something!
Of course, if we believe scripture, we have been given certain things in very simple and specific terms. But the big stuff – the really big stuff regarding the meaning of life and afterlife and all that – remains intangible, evidential but never quite touchable.
I do not think God is playing games with us, at least not with these things of obvious spiritual import. Rather, I think that we cannot even begin to think like God. The very way the manifestations occur gives evidence of other ways of thought that we can only wonder at – like omniscience and free will running side by side. Or dancing suns as a proof of divine authenticity. Or faces in scrolls, given to me and another for some reason not yet imagined, let alone found. Or the real meaning of life and existence and action and morality and on and on. We don’t know. We don’t know because the reality we know does not allow us to know. We see, as St Paul said, in a glass (impure old-fashioned mirror) darkly. What comes to us in apparitions and synchronic events, and ultimately in everything we experience, has a significance that is simply beyond us. How does one teach calculus to a chimp? A straight-forward answer in our terms would not answer the question, but would most likely obscure the answer with our own incorrect thoughts.
So we also might wonder at Foley’s analysis. It seems potentially correct in hindsight, but we still do not have foresight. The people who saw the vision that came during the onset of unbridled capitalism at La Salette could not know that this was a warning that such ruthlessness would bring us godless totalitarianism. Maybe we, too, are being told something else from these apparitions, something far greater that we cannot grasp. Maybe another code is hidden in the series of apparitions that are speaking of things far greater than the things of normal history. My bet is that they are, but that what they are saying is as hidden as the meaning of the faces in the scroll are to me simply because we are incapable of understanding – at least for now. Which gives us a clue as to the real importance of faith.
[P.S. : After writing the above, it came to me that the Faces I saw were an indication that Scripture could become alive and personal for me. That answered, it still leaves the question of how that would or will be. ]
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