As the Church nears the end of the second millenium, there is much talk of dreams and visions, and what to make of them. In addition to perennial speculations about the stillundisclosed third secret of Fatima, we have the persistent phenomenon of Medjugorje, with its continuing messages to some of the seers. Stories of other apparitions and supernatural occurrences, like oil or tearexuding statues, abound, as do dark warnings of apocalypse. Many Catholics are joining with their Protestant brethren in foretelling a time of tribulation, with consistent details like three days of darkness and a chastisement followed by an era of peace.
Some Christian writers are focusing on the expected technological crisis of Y2K, in which older computers and programs attending to important functions will be unable to cope with the double zero in the year 2000 and will read it as 1900. This is expected to cause economic and social upheaval as government and business operations are shortcircuited. They link this predicted crisis with mankind’s millenial sense of unease, seeing a possible spiritual connection between the two.
Such emotional sightings of spiritual revelation (some no doubt genuine, others not) have been stirring for a few decades now, and some wise religious guides have weighed in with more cautionary material.
One of these is Fr. Benedict Groeschel of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in New York. A psychologist as well as a spiritual writer, his warm and humorous way of conveying truth has made him a favorite author, lecturer, and guest on EWTN. Because of his psychological training, Groeschel is especially thoughtprovoking (and convincing) on one topic that never was covered in parochial school when the nuns told the stories of Fatima or Lourdes or Guadalupe. That is the subject of human experience—and how all of it, even experience of divine messages in dreams, locution, visions, and the like, passes through the limited and individualized medium of a finite, faulty human being.
God must allow for that, as he allows for our ignorance or the way we are prone to distort good impulses, sudden “inspirations,” or private interpretations of the Godinspired gospel. We know what hash even brilliant minds like Teilhard de Chardin can make of that, when they set out to see what they can see for themselves. Even when God or his Blessed Mother specially illumines a humble, holy persons such as Bernadette or Juan Diego to bear a special message to us, allowance is made for some natural refracting of the rays of divine light, so to speak, as it passes through the human medium.
In fact, evidence of God and our Lady taking account of these human frailties run all through approved apparitions; our Lady, for example, tailors not only her language but her dress and appearance to suit her audience. What will her seers expect, and what would too greatly rock them off balance, setting off greater fear and anxiety? A middle path between the customary and the shockingly alien is most usual.
Juan Diego’s Madonna, for example, displays an Indian beauty and asks reassuringly, “Am I not of your kind?” Catherine Laboure’s vision of Mary before she charges the young novice with spreading devotion to her Miraculous Medal includes the soft rustle of silk as our Lady moves. The Portuguese peasant children of Fatima saw a lady in white (a color which would be far beyond the efforts of poor peasants to keep that way) as befitted the Queen of Heaven. Bernadette’s lady began to speak in French but moved smoothly into the Pyrenees patois more familiar to her listener. She carried a rosary and asked Bernadette to recite it, but did not herself recite the Aves, since she herself is addressed by that prayer.
In these and many other details (hair and eye color, wording, etc.), supernatural visions vary according to their audience. To unimaginative nineteenth-century atheists, this would be an argument against believing in any of them: Obviously, they would argue, pious women and children were imagining our Lady in terms of their timeandspacebound spirituality.
Yet the “obvious” answer is different. Almighty God and our Lady’s indulgence of our expectations and limitations inspires this supernatural courtesy. Even with such accommodations, those who witness visions are filled with fear (the fear of the Lord) as well as love and exaltation. They usually shrink from attempting to touch the visitor from heaven. (Catherine Laboure, motherless from childhood, is a rather spectacular exception. On one occasion she lays her head in her heavenly mother’s lap.) Juan Diego doubles back way around the site of his apparition in the vain attempt to avoid admitting that he has failed in the mission the lady entrusted to him. So the heavenly visitors accommodate details to our human state. But in the matter of the messages themselves, there are also variations in how we human beings receive them, and what we make of them, and how we subtly though unintentionally distort the emphases and implications here and there.
Further complicating the matter, we have the difference between our notions of time and God’s (“See, I come quickly,” he says at the close of Revelation, in what for us poor mortals must seem something of an exaggeration), and the conditional nature of some statements passed on by the seers (“If you do this, God will relent”). Some of the seers must identify with Jonah, whose doomfilled prophecies to the inhabitants of Nineveh were canceled by their profound repentance, much to his chagrin.
As for the descriptive color and imagery of the apparitions, some of that derives from the stock of images already stored in the human mind. God mostly works with the materials already present in us. In our own day, for example, cataclysmic images are likely to take the shape of mushroom clouds or comets colliding with the earth. This is not to say that predicted cataclysms won’t someday take reality in that form, but they are not bound to do so simply because the prophecy is clothed in that imagery.
Too many Catholics drawn to rumors of apparitions treat them like codes to be cracked, poring over each word as oldtime Kremlinologists used to treat the most casual utterances of Soviet leaders in the years of the Cold War. They argue endlessly about what this or that means or when such and such is likely to take place. Far more admirable and spiritually healthy was my mother’s reaction to unexplainable spiritual occurrences like the incorruptible bodies of certain saints. “Isn’t that amazing?” she would ask, filled with a kind of wondering gratitude to God for his willingness to think up such astounding demonstrations of his love.
Most apparitions counsel prayer and repentance and warn of the repercussions of sin and spiritual deafness. But we should understand that the underlying purpose and motivation for these warnings is the same as that for healing miracles or for the great miracle of the Incarnation. It is love—God’s loving care for us and his Blessed Mother’s love, ever fruitful, because once long ago she consented to bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We are now begged to be bearers of that love and of the Good News to one another, so that we will shortcircuit the destructive effects of hatred, indifference, and resentment. Visions and apparitions and recorded locutions and weeping statues and all other sensory manifestations of spiritual reality are misinterpreted or misrepresented or misappropriated unless they rouse in us greater wonder, gratitude, and assurance of God’s neverfailing love for his wayward people.
This does not mean we should be complacent, or resist calls for greater ascetism—prayer, fasting, penance, almsgiving—and apostolic zeal. It means we should seek within ourselves a deeper trust in God, come what may—whether what comes is three days of darkness or the end of the world or “merely” a family member’s cancer or unemployment. We should pair with that trust a greater humility, a teachableness that would not find itself at a loss if the details of a given prophecy do not unfold in the way we expect. Paul writes that events in the past (he is speaking of sacred events, recorded in the Bible) were written for our instruction, but biblical prophecies usually hid as much as they revealed to their original hearers. We know that most of the Jews did not recognize the Messiah when he came. We who live after the fulfillment of those prophecies should not feel superior to those who did not puzzle them out right beforehand.
It is true that, in the light of the Risen Lord, so many verses of the Old Testament seem to shout Jesus’ name. But if we were set the task, before the arrival of the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom of God, of combing Scripture for a portrait of the promised King of Israel, we too might be confused by conflicting descriptions and take a wrong turning. At the time of Jesus, the person most likely to recognize the Anointed of Israel perhaps would have been a pious Jew well up on his Scripture studies, but most of all humbly zealous for the Lord’s will to be done.
That is what we find set down in the Gospel of Luke. There, in chapter two, we come across a venerable old man named Simeon, “righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him” (Luke 2:25). Simeon, like the subjects of Joel’s prophecy at the beginning of this article, received a revelation from God, which told him “that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ” (Luke 2:26). Not another word is said about the content of Simeon’s revelation from God (unless you count his prophecy to Mary, in which he tells her that her child “is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel” and that “a sword will pierce through your own soul also”). We know only that he did indeed recognize the Christ: “And inspired by the Spirit he came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus . . . he took him up in his arms and blessed God” (Luke 2:27).
What follows is a prayer so dear to the Church that it is still prayed nightly in the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen the salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, and for glory to thy people Israel.” This beautiful prayer of peaceful reliance on God is both the hallmark of a genuine private revelation and the model of the proper response to one. Simeon is not seeking some rigid conformity to his idea of what the Christ should look like, or who his parents should be, or where they should come from. He accepts the great grace of God, who first made this promise to him and then, as faithful Simeon knew he would, fulfilled it. Simeon’s gratitude is chiefly for God and his goodness: the unveiling of this seemingly ordinary baby’s destiny is almost secondary to Simeon’s belief and trust in a God who saves, a God who keeps his promises.
That is one of the most beautiful examples of private revelation in all Christian history, and it is a lesson to us in how to judge and respond to private revelation in our time.