Saul of Tarsus was of the same opinion. His faith certainly didn't require being blinded and having his name changed, but that's what he got. And we got St. Paul! (Thanks, Hope, for that wonderful example.) In the stories that have been recounted here, I don't get even a hint of anyone "requiring" extraordinary events from God. They are gifts.
Oh boy BH! Don't take this too personally but you need to lighten up a bit. Buy and have a read of Padraig's book on the apparition he had with the Blessed Virgin Mary and then come back and tell me it was illusory. http://www.lulu.com/gb/en/shop/padr...-learning-to-pray/ebook/product-17515333.html
Kathy you opined ""Believers" who scoff at the idea of such encounters expose a sad lack of faith in a real God. " I didn't scoff - that was your defensive reaction to my open musings/observations on other alternative ways of looking at these things. ..I observed a range of other valid views on these matters (including the Church's) which don't intrinsically imply lack of faith in God as you assume here. Unlike yourself I don't equate possible natural explanations for these experiences with lack of faith in God. And my reason is very simple, faith in a real God does not primarily come from such experiences. So if such personal and private experiences do have a natural cause (who knows?) it wouldn't worry me at all. God still lives and is seen to touch us regardless. I don't understand why you are threatened by this common sense and Catholic observation. Nor do I understand why you feel the need to denigrate the faith of those who are indifferent to such allegedly "supernatural" experiences.
For the holy saints, mysticism and the supernatural were not 'experiences' but a natural participation in the mystical life of the Church. They are our role-models in faith. http://www.mysticsofthechurch.com/
Done some time ago. Let's remember the context, "most of these unusual experiences are considerably less "divine" (and indeed largely illusory in this respect) than a boring single act of charity to another person in need." Yes, wrt the presence of the "divine" I was far more touched by the divine when Padraig did an act of charity in re-admitting me to MOG than when I read his book. Buy and have a read of Jospeph Smith's book on the apparition he had with the angel and the gold plates. Then come back and tell me it wasn't illusory.
Unusual for me to play mediator , but please not get to hot. I have enjoyed reading and believing many personal experiences shared on this thread. I, perhaps like BH dont have any to share. Although I once did come across an unusual temptation.But I think the whole point of our Faith is to believe without seeing.' Blessed are they who have not seen' thats why it is called faith? Of course the Divine affecting our lives happens every day. The stories I could tell regarding answered novenas are mind blowing. Yet could be answered by sceptics as coincidence.
Thanks Mac for refereeing. But I am of the opinion that the mystical is the reality for the holy. That I have had only one 'mystical' experience in my life tells you and me that I am (not yet) holy. The denial of the mystical is a common trait in Protestantism. The power of your novenas indicates your strong faith. I am impressed
Thanks Garabandal . And God will always answer everyones novenas everytime . He is not deaf. Unfortunately he usually answers NO. Because what we usually ask for what is not what we really need . Like praying for good health if we are seriously unwell,when God already knows if he restores our health we will only betray Him.But we must always pray and ask.Leave the rest to Him,through his Mother.
Greg: The last years of her life, mom became a huge promoter of the Divine Mercy devotion. When dad told us of that dream, it just confirmed the Truth of Divine Mercy for me, and also the state of her soul. Dad later gave me her copy of Saint Faustina's Diary which still has mom's notes inside. That dream, and this diary, continue to keep me focused on thanksgiving for God's Mercy incarnate, and on making daily petitions for myself and everyone I know to be perfected as instruments of His Mercy every day.
Of course nobody should contest that the Christian life is primarily about character and daily obedience rather than the search for 'peak experiences'. This is nonetheless an interesting and IMHO revealing conversation in that it demonstrates a tension between very different views about theological epistemology. In much of academic theology today, it is fashionable (and has been at least since Bultmann, probably since Kant) to sidestep the whole question of the relationship of the supernatural to Judeo-Christian origins. Not necessarily to attack it, although obviously liberals of all stripes have been doing that ever since F.D. Strauss's Life of Jesus back in the 1830s, but certainly to ignore it for the sake of apologetics in the hope that this will make Christianity more acceptable to the scientific mindset. I would go as far as to say that this is the default position in huge swathes of theology at university level. A popular and sophisticated form of polite reductionism is the 'Yale School' or grammatical-linguistic approach to theology (pioneered by George Lindbeck, a Lutheran observer at Vatican II) which effectively restricts the inquiry into Christian faith to a study of its own internal development without ever asking the question of how that faith came about in the first place, i.e. through direct encounter with the Risen Christ and the explosive power of the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost in signs and wonders. Take those away and you have no Gospels, no Paul, no epistles of Peter saying that 'we ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain'. The problem with sidelining the whole question of mystical experience - and this has come out in some of the exchanges on this thread - is that doing so meshes very poorly with the Scriptures seen not merely as a literary/ethical text but a witness to the phenomenological experience of the people of God in lived encounter. Starting with the patriarchs - the call of Abraham, Jacob's Ladder, Joseph's dreams - then the Burning Bush, Moses's direct conversations with God ... going through to the whole prophetic tradition, to which mystical experience is absolutely foundational (how can you even begin to understand Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel(!) without it)? The same is obviously true of the New Testament from the Annunciation all the way through to the Johannine Apocalypse, which it should be remembered presents itself as private revelation and took centuries to be fully approved. For the first millenium at least of Christian tradition, theology was mystical theology, and nobody questioned that. Only with i) the separation with the Christian East in 1054 and ii) the rise of scholasticism and the primacy of logical analysis in the late 13th century did this change. As many commentators starting with Etienne Gilson have pointed out, that's when systematic theology and mysticism went their different ways, and we've been paying the price for this ever since... The interesting thing is that there have been times when a definite effort was made by some of Christianity's brightest minds to reconnect the mystical with the intellectual. The twentieth century renouveau catholique in France was a particularly striking and I think inspiring example of how this reconciliation can work: this was a time when the leading lights of French intellectual life (Bloy, Claudel, Maritain, Bernanos, Massignon ...) saw no contradiction between the life of the mind and their pilgrimages to La Salette. In music, Francis Poulenc was converted at Rocamadour, Olivier Messiaen publicly stated his belief in the apparitions of Garabandal... Eminent Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel and leading patristic scholar Jean Daniélou took seriously the messages christiques of Roland de Jouvenel received posthumously by his mother by 'inspired writing'. And, remarkably, nobody excluded them from public intellectual life for any of this, which is more or less unthinkable today. Probably the final representatives of this tradition - besides Hans Urs von Balthasar across the border - were the philosopher Jean Guitton (author of a remarkable biography of Marthe Robin) and René Laurentin, who might be called the dernier des mohicans in some ways. My hunch, however, is that there is going to be a big renaissance of this line of thought not only in France but elsewhere as Christian thinkers eventually realize that the only result of ignoring the mystical is to push the growing 'spiritual but not religious' constituency into the arms of the New Age. This may come as unwelcome news for academic theology, but there are lots of people out there who have had transformative 'limit experiences' (NDEs, visions, pre-cognition) and are searching for explanations of what may not understand but know to be real. If the Church does not listen to them, there is a very good bet that you will find them turning at best to charismatic evangelicalism (which has many merits but is like spinning a roulette wheel theologically), to Deepak Chopra, Oprah and the ouija board at worst. It's time to wake up. [Actually, speaking personally both as a matter of faith and observation, my conviction is that as world events unfold, mystical experiences that we think of as exceptional are going to become the 'new normal'. Surely that is what was promised in Joel 2 and prayed for by St John XXIII when he asked heaven for a New Pentecost]
Exactly. It would be naïve to assume that all false revelations are illusory, just as it would be to assume that all mediums and psychics are charlatans (although doubtless a great many are). I am increasingly coming round to the view that the biggest false private revelation of them all - the Koran - may not necessarily have been simply a result of Mohammed's raiding and twisting the Jewish/Christian scriptures, although of course this is not unlikely. What of the possibility that either a) he was visited and deceived throughout by an 'angel of light' or b) initially received an authentic visitation from Gabriel which was subsequently pirated by the enemy with disastrous and tragic consequences? It should perhaps be added that the notion of the 'Satanic verses' within Islam itself indicates that b) is not necessarily a far-fetched possibility.
Yes well spoken. That is my only point here with my friendly tease Garabandal. The experience of apparitions may be "the lifting of a veil." But to uncritically assume it is the veil between heaven and earth or the divine is a little unbalanced and not actually what our Church teaches. We all know the Catechism distinguishes between "actual graces" (which can include "supernatural" pyrotechnics) and "sanctifying graces" (usually ho-hum so far as Man thinks). The former do not save, the latter do. The former can lead to a true conviction that God is real. Yet even this is not enough to save. Yes such experiences may sometimes be a sort of experience of the "divine" (our very created existence from God's Hand's is also such an experience isn't it?) . Yet even that "divine" is not really what the Church means by "Divine". It is a primitive religion type understanding of "divine". We should not seek it or be fascinated by such experiences or linger on them or put much store on them even should they be overwhelmingly positive. They do not mean we are in any way special or close to God, in fact we could still be God's enemies all the same. Such things are stumbling blocks to true mysticism and Catholic faith which is not based on fireworks or apparitions. This is what the leading mystics teach very explicitly. I don't really understand why you have an issue with me observing such a strong Catholic teaching in this discussion.
It's a shame that mysticism and genuine spiritual charisms become marginalized (and even perverted) into new age or paranormal categories. It seems as if it has been altogether too easy for darkness to hijack these phenomenon. Just walk into a Barnes & Noble book store these days and witness the hunger for the supernatural in entire categories of literature recently deemed significant such as "Paranormal Teen Romance Fiction". How ridiculous is this?!? It is sad that the large part of humanity that has been indoctrinated into the scientific belief system (reason, without faith) can be duped into a belief (faith) in big bang/evolutionary theory (absent of God, negating need for salvation), and therefore cannot see that God's Justice and His Mercy and His plan of salvation are more pure and perfect that any science any of us could ever attempt to reason. That the Law/covenant of Grace through Christ both fulfills and supersedes the old law/covenant (yet still every last penny is paid to fulfill His Justice) is so astounding and tremendous that to combat this secular/modernist attack, it sometimes takes supernatural manifestation and genuine mystics in modern times to demonstrate or explain the deepest of these Truths when sacred scripture and Tradition (or lack of attention to them) still leave ambiguity or misunderstanding of how absolutely necessary our salvation through His Son actually is.
Hello Peter. there's a lot in your post so I just cherry-picked the salient observations above. I agree with your main observations though I prob have different views on the cause or the meaning or the historical unfolding of the tension. Of course this almost polar tension between charism and institution, Paul and Peter has been present from the beginning and is especially evident in Acts. It is a tension in all human affairs in my experience. That we have a single feastday for both Peter and Paul suggests there is hope for reconciling these almost polar opposites and suggests there is no intrinsic polarity between these extremes. Then again, the fact that the Early Church went to such political effort to put up a brave front of united leadership suggests the tensions got pretty deep! The basic problem for "the sciences" (including the soft ones) and Religion (esp Christianity) I suppose is that the primary Christian experience (the Resurrection experienced by the Apostles and the 72) is not considered a "historical fact". That truism doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means it is so unique, unrepeatable and disconnected from the rest of human experience it is essentially opaque to scientific enquiry. Of course the Resurrection, for Catholics at least, is far more historical than an apparition. It was objective, "real". You are right about university theology (or rather Biblical hermeneutics) there is a huge divide between the Jesus of the Bible and the Christ of faith. It is the unspoken assumption that miracles did not happen and their recording in written texts is always oral or textual devices for conveying a truth of faith. That was my experience studying along-side seminarians as a lay person. Cardinal Ratzinger spoke on this assumption in some interesting philosophical lectures he gave in the late 1990s that I was reading recently. Basically he said there is nothing wrong in starting out with this Ocham's Razor type approach as long as we are philosophically open to the possibility of the "Other" breaking into our fixed experience of life with something completely new (ie what we would call a miracle). The problem is that Bultman et alia are not open in this way. HU von Balthasar was unusual in that he was open, I need to read more. Anyways have no more time to write - off to Sat morning mass. Thanks for your insights. BTW My main observation would be that Christianity (and Judaism) is not really founded on mysticism or mystical experience. The Resurrection was a real event not a mystical event. Actually, it would prob be truer to say that in the resurrected Jesus the mystical and the actual were perfectly united. This side of death they are not unfortunately.
Kind of ludicrous when you put it that way..... Arguing about Christianity and its founding, as if you can somehow separate its eternal reality from the temporal (either then or now) misses the entire Truth of our existence and the reason for salvation entirely. "Mystical experience" is just another way of saying "things not explained by the natural or temporal order or known physical laws"..... Of course Christianity was founded on both observable temporal events AND mystical: -Annunciation -Conception and birth of John the Baptist in the spirit of Elijah (as Elijah himself according to Jesus words) -Baptism of Christ -Transfiguration -Healing, multiplication, deliverance, and many other miracles -Resurrection -Ascension -Pentecost
Yes! I've always been fascinated with the idea of "thin places", many in Ireland, where the veil between heaven and earth is thin. In the days to come, I think we will all be living in a "thin place."
I don't really understand your insight here Jon... Not aware I was arguing anything in that respect was I - other than that Christianity stands or falls on the reality of the Resurrection? The difficult part in discussing this with yet-to-be-believers is what exactly do we mean by "reality." Its even a problem with believers - take Archbishop Spong for instance. His understanding is quite different from that of Catholicism. Hmmn. I don't think so. Sure the word "mystical" simply means "hidden." When I see a bumble bee flying (no one knows how it is scientifically possible) I wouldn't really call that a mystical experience but it is possible I suppose. Scientific contemplation on the mysteries of the universe is a form of mysticism (whether that involves God or not) I suppose if that is what you mean. Your definition above would also apply equally well to Biblical "wonders" (which are not the same as miracles). But that doesn't seem to be what people mean by mysticism/apparition experiences here. We all seem to have very different understandings of the meaning of such experiences ranging from the "unexplained natural" to "being touched by God.". Not quite sure what you mean. The Resurrection is in a primary class of its own compared to these other, less seminal, significantly theologically interpretted events. As St Paul states.
