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Great Balls of Fire: Apparitions, End of the World, Judgement, and Infinity

Somebody asked me recently: "Deacon, do you think we are in the 'end times?'" I am assuming the question was prompted by the countless news items on television and the newspaper about tornadoes, unusual storm events, strange lightening and thunder events, the state of the economy, etc. Even the new Pope has generated all the fascinating speculations about his being "the last Pope" according to the prophecies of St. Malachy.
 
My answer was simple. We have been in the end of days since the birth of a baby 2000+ years ago. Will we see the skies darken and the sun turn red, exploding before our eyes? Yes we will because that is what the sun does. It explodes. We just can't see the nuances of the kinds of energies that explode off its surface area which i...s primarily gaseous. We tend to think of it as a solid when it is for the most part a pulsating ball of burning gas placed in the sky in a remote part of the milky way ironically at the unusually correct distance from another ball of a combination of gases, liquids and solids, the earth. That unusual distance is different than the mean distances between all the other planets and this ball of flame. Hmmm. I denote purpose here. Randomness? If so, lucky us. What my friend really wants to ask is whether or not we will see the second coming of Christ soon. Again, my answer is yes. His second coming will be at the moment I die. Ok, let me refine the question slightly more: "Will be experiencing the "general judgment" as opposed to the particular judgment soon? The answer is "yes". But let me explain.
 
Once we make it out of the bounds of space and time, we are instantaneously ushered into eternity and from that new perspective, I believe the particular judgment and the general judgment are hardly separable. What will be my perspective then, will be completely non simultaneous with the experience of the second coming of Christ on the Clouds someday (and only the Father in heaven knows the time). It could be next year, tomorrow, in a decade.... but I think not. But why are we seeing all of this strange weather and chaos?, my friend asks. Well, the laws of nature govern and we have indeed speeded up things by the massive amounts of consumption of natural resources, and we have placed our society at jeopardy to deterioration, disaster and war because of our failure to be disciplined in a way that calls a spade a spade. Instead, we call things that are really bad "good" and things that are really good, "bad." It is not unlike what happened to the Spartans, the Athenians, to the Hellenists, to the Romans, the Spanish Empire, and to the British Empire.
 
Will we Americans experience the kind of disaster that will be game changers in our sense of normalcy? You betcha.... itsa comin and there will be such an economic reckoning that a cascade of chaos will ensue and we will be flushed back into what was once called "the dark ages." What, doom? gloom? Let's learn to be self disciplined and alert for the moments our brothers and our sisters will need our help in their time of crisis. ...And that they will be ready to help us in our time of disarray. No matter what, we die. Are you ready? Does it matter? ...dying I mean. Will it be a nuclear crisis? Somehow I think not, although it is possible. If it is nuclear, it will be a nuclear crisis of a sort because it is the nuclear family that is on the precipice of existence. 

It has been said that there are an infinite number of stars in the universe. And because of that, there would be an infinite number of times in which a planet such as ours would be just the right distance from the correct size star so as to support life, maybe even intelligent life. The argument that the earth is not such a "select place" really is the Carl Sagan perspective. I have a lot of respect for Sagan's ability to convince audiences with spectacular visual snapshots on film and the accompanying audio soundbites. But this is where Galileo got into trouble in mathematizing language so that it reflects the fact we cannot see the finite universe's outer limits. (Remember the TV series?) Thus it is very easy to fall into a verbal conclusion that is not logical, the conclusion that there is an infinitude of matter and energy in the fabric of space and time. So here are my gleanings from such weighty issues that make the difference between whether or not you are a person of "faith" or a person of "no faith."

Infinity is where mathematics and theology meet; and the truth is, they really don't meet. Show me a 0 as a concrete "thing" and I will show you infinity. Yet we all acquiesce to the "big bang" which postulates there is a real "beginning", an explosion of sorts that up to know is only described "after" the bang occurs. What was "what" before the bang? Therein is the real "zero". The big bang infers that if there is a beginning of the dimension we understand to be space and time, there is some end to it albeit that the end is connected to the beginning as some kind of folded universe of "stuff". As long as this universe exists, existed, or will exist, someday we might be able to travel on this folded space and break the surly bonds of earth without a jet or a rocket or a spacecraft. We would be able to think ourselves into the past. But in "infinity" which is "eternity" or "forever", there is no past, present or future. The preposition "in" preceding the word "infinity" almost doesn't make sense. How can you be "in" that which has no context? Infinity is simply "being in itself" and the only "sumum esse" [intrinsic being] that is beyond the laws of nature and constructs of space and time is the big "I AM" or God. So I don't believe the term infinity is anything but a mathematical construct in verbal form to describe a finite point which we cannot see, understand, or even calculate. In other words, infinity is over the visual or intellectual horizon of our conscious and sentient capabilities. 

 

A mathematician might say, "is a Googolplex the end?" or "is a Googolplex a precipice to a “beyond” that which our minds cannot fathom?" These things we cannot know. Where mathematics ends by our very finite cerebral capabilities, therein "faith" begins. Some may be right that within the construct of our very "finite" universe, statistics may just be in favor or the hypothesis that the little blue marble “is not so special.” But "eureka" let us be surprised if we upon that floating ball of gas, liquid and gasses, of magma gurgling from beneath the surface, that this “terra” is in fact God's conscious choice for His own "personification" into this fabric of space and time and we came to know Him as the carpenter from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Wherever this place is in the finite universe that will end just as it began with the big bang, I suspect there are temporal conformities that are no different than our present moment and it is possible that God being who He "is" could very well have used the awesome laws of nature to be present even to some society a billion light years away.
 

God's schematic is huge and we are a fraction of time as you say....but a man came 2000 years ago who did things that defied the laws of science and He chose this solitary chunk of rock upon which to show His being as not some giant star, or comet, or mountain, or ocean, or the blackness of space.... but rather as "enveloping love ever creating his masterpiece, as a musician creates a symphony out of little black notes on a page which in another dimension becomes sweet music to the ears of man.
 
In the end, "faith" is like the musical sounds that are derived from little black notes on a page on a limited scale that when played to the ear, seem limitless and infinite and even removed from the confines of our reality. Listen to even the most structured of musical compositions and if played well, (not just precisely), and with an intrinsic God-embedded passion, you will hear a little piece o...f infinity born not so much from the composition on the page, but from the composition in the heart of the player. A very structured Bach piece like any of the Brandenburg Concerti will be a context out of which is born the stuff of "not context." The meeting of the soul of a musician and the restrictive mathematics of time signatures, and individual notations that make up the piece will cause a listener to experience an architecture that has a dimension that allows the finiteness and regularity of the notes to reach out past finite time, and touch the face of God while holding our mind like God holds our hand. 

But can "the immovable movability" pierce the walls of space and time in signs and wonders to give us a hint that our destination is not a galaxy 100 light years away? Well there has to be something that unexplainable phenomena is trying to explain by making their existence (at least in this reality) visible. There must be something "real" about phenomena like apparitions at Fatima, Tepeyac, San Miguel del Milagro, Nuestra Senora de Ocotlan, Garabandal, Medjugorje, Lourdes, or a virgin-like impression in the knot of a tree.

For one, all the created earth is a pattern. It is a pattern reflecting past, present and future. Time and space are like a quilt in motion, as though hands at both ends are making it undulate like... a wave creating the mystique of existing in the context of eternity within which context disappears. Here is my point. Images that the mind grasps as "familiar" and are readily identifiable as "iconic" (i.e. the Blessed Virgin Mary in the knot of a tree), are indeed real and inspirational. The miraculous nature of it is not so much in the fact of its mystical discovery; one minute it exists where it didn't before, or whether it had been there for a long time but was never recognized. But at a moment in time, someone sees the phenomenon as such; a phenomenon that jumps out at you and that seems as though it was placed there to shake things up.

Well, yes. Of course, not every shape fall into the uncommon category of coincidences as the "knot in the tree Virgin Mary, but we will be running into more and more other worldly "fractals" announcing themselves to a very busy high tech world; they will be announcing their intrinsic and embedded spiritual explosive meanings to the structure of this finite universe -- for the purpose of shaking it up. If it does not shake it up or cause us to change our lives, cause us to put "hearing aides" on our deaf consciences; and if such "breakthroughs" are treated by us as merely anomaly amusements to tease the mind, then the number and degree of such phenomena will become more frequent, and intense until such intensity will indeed be as though the skies will engage in "shock and awe" for our good. 


 

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