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.
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.
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