“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Act 1 Scene 5, Hamlet
My Bride and I and our son Donald John went to Mass yesterday. We noticed that the windows were down in our car which meant that my late son, Larry, was about. This is Harvest Days’ Weekend in Dwight, our annual Village festival in Dwight. Larry always loved it in life, and I assume this was his way of letting us know that he was observing the fun.
I have been reading this weekend They Flew: A History of The Impossible, by Professor Carlos M. N. Eirie, Cuban refugee, as a child, and Professor of Religious Studies and History at Yale. It will be published on September 26, 2023. His thesis is quite simple: what if accounts of levitating saints and others are accurate? His chapter on the Flying Friar, Saint Joseph of Cupertino, notes the massive nature of the contemporary accounts of his levitating and flying. The Church reacted to these feats of the supernatural by moving him from monastery to monastery to hide him from the World. That Saint Joseph of Cupertino flew is better documented than almost all other facts from his century, the seventeenth century. These accounts are rejected as untrue by many because of an a priori assumption that miracles do not occur. That a priori assumption is clearly wrong and this fact will eventually lead to a shift in how the miraculous is viewed. I hazard to say that ultimately the view of miracles will be rather akin to that of the Church: miracles can occur, but they need not be accepted on faith without looking at the surrounding facts and weighing the evidence, without prejudice either for or against the alleged miracle.
For myself, long before the activities of my late son, I believed that the supernatural was real: first on faith, as a child, and then as a matter of historical research. Larry brings to my own life an awareness of a fact that is going to be one of the great intellectual conflicts in the coming decades: the reality of the supernatural.
Yes.
He was observing the fun and loving his family from a very thin veil away. Yesterday was St. Padre Pio’s feast day, if my memory is correct.
God granted him many supernatural graces too.
Bilocation being only one of them.
I believe that God is immensely gracious with souls. His love for us is truly unfathomable.
His sharing of gifts and graces is but a fraction of what’s to come for those who love God. Those who share HIS love with others.
Larry is a perfect reflection of that love.
Like a still lake at sunrise. Beautifully reflecting the magnificent canvas of the supreme artist at work.
God is indeed so very good to us.
“Would that we were appreciative as we ought to be! How happy we would be simply in our creation and the faculties we are endowed with and the divine promises of eternal reward.”
—Blessed Solanus Casey—
That is a fascinating prediction, Donald, and I think you may be on to something there. My bride awakened in our hotel room the night before her father’s funeral to see a vision of an angelic figure in white, flanked by two demons. She “heard” in her head a female voice saying the demons were “after your husband” and that my wife needed to get me to become Catholic. (At the time, I was a baptized but non-practicing Presbyterian.) She spent the rest of the night praying, but never said a word to me until months later. The next day, in the funeral Mass itself, I experienced a sudden conversion of heart and knew, without thinking about it, that I was going to seek to enter the Church. This thought had never before even remotely occurred to me as something I would do. No one is ever going to convince me the supernatural is not real.
I think Plato had it right Frank in his allegory of the cave. Our material life is at best a pale shadow of what awaits us in Eternity.
And this:
Often, the scientism adherents embark on the most fabulous “scientific explanations” as to why the miraculous has not really occurred, but that there was an hitherto unknown scientific explanation. These explanations are marvels of Rube Goldberg complexity.
I recently noticed an example like the “explaining away” of S. Joseph of Cupertino’s levitations with the most fantastic attempted explanations as to why the body of Sr Wilhelmina, the Benedictine abbess and founder of Our Lady of Ephesus monastery in Gower, MO, was found to be incorrupt. “Oh, it was the Missouri earth.. Oh, it was the perfect Missouri ground temperature..” “Oh, the ground was perfectly damp and cold…” “Oh, the ground was perfectly dry and cold..”
(Anyone who has lived in Missouri —I have—-knows how the humidity hovers around 80-90%+, the ground is usually wet, wet, and wet, and summers are sweltering steamy pressure cookers). From there, some commentator ventured examples such as that S. Bernadette’s (of Lourdes)’ body was incorrupt, because “the water solution of the River Gave is like soap..and this mummified her body.”
But in neither example is the persons’ bodies “mummified”—-which is a notable desiccation and drying out of the organs and tissues. A mummified body looks like… gack.
How about dispensing with the phenomenally complex and silly explanations—when the miraculous is the simplest, most direct explanation? Hmm?
And there is a God.
Great examples,@Steve Phoenix. I hadn’t seen the spin moves concerning Sr. Wilhelmina before. Another of my favorites is the tired old claim that the 70,000 people at Fatima experienced a “mass hallucination”, which is said to be proven by the fact that a handful of people claim to have been there and to have seen nothing remarkable. One slight problem with this theory is that, as far as I know, there has never been an historical example of such a “mass hallucination” anywhere. Fatima is the only one. Sure, that works. 🤦🏻♂️
The miraculous has a nasty way of defying “scientific reasoning.”
Since as Philip mentioned, this is around the 55th anniversary of Padre Pio’s passing (23 Sep 1968), so why did a small boy, who yet was not Catholic, dying of Leukemia confirm with the greatest certainty that Padre Pio was visiting him nightly:
https://www.churchpop.com/padre-pio-mysteriously-visits-boy-with-leukemia-the-little-known-visions-of-an-anglican-boy/amp/
As Frank says, time for the “hallucination” card trick. By those of the scientism faith.
which is said to be proven by the fact that a handful of people claim to have been there and to have seen nothing remarkable.
There were socialists and atheists there who attested they saw the sun dance.
Meet The Witnesses a record of testimonials given by some of the pilgrims, naysayers and skeptical individuals who were present on October 13th, 1917.
The atheists account is exactly as the faithful’s account, with one exception. He didn’t see the Virgin of Mt. Carmel and the child Jesus and St. Joseph’s after the Sun returned to it’s normal position. Not everyone was given the graces to see the Holy Family. He couldn’t understand how everyone’s clothing was clean, when just minutes before everyone had mud on themselves from hours of rain. The field was filled with mud.
America Needs Fatima offers the book.
The rational human soul is metaphysical. Free will is metaphysical. Conscience is metaphysical
Our Blessed Virgin’s personal space is framed in an oval frame in the Miraculous Medal. Mary is inviolable. Yet Jesus suffered every conceivable torture violating his divine and sacred Body, but no one was able to compromise his soul or remove Christ’s divinity.
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