Mark

SIGNS

Control! Control!

 

 

This word has been strongly placed on my heart again this past month. We are seeing it come to fruition before our very eyes with increasing government intervention into our basic freedoms for the sake of “safety”; interference into what we may eat, what we may teach our children, what information we should hear, and more and more, what we should think. First published April 19th, 2007:

 

WHILE praying before the Blessed Sacrament, I had the impression of an angel in the mid-heavens hovering above the world and shouting,

“Control! Control!

As man tries more and more to banish Christ’s presence from the world, wherever they succeed, chaos takes His place. And with chaos, comes fear. And with fear, comes the opportunity to control.

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on May 13th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Warnings in the Wind


Our Lady of Sorrows, painting by Tianna Mallett

 

THE wind is blowing hard today, as it often does when I sense Our Blessed Mother compelling me to give a warning. We exchange tears, and when the moment is right, I sit down to repeat what I believe she has been saying over the past few days, weeks, and months in a word that has finally ripened…

 

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on March 29th, 2012 | 3 Comments »

The False Unity

 

 

 

 

IF the prayer and desire of Jesus is that “they may all be one” (John 17:21), then Satan too has a plan for unity—a false unity. And we see the signs of it emerging. What is written here relates to the coming “parallel communities” spoken of in The Coming Refuges and Solitudes.

 
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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on March 17th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

The Verdict

 

AS my recent ministry tour progressed, I felt a new weight in my soul, a heaviness of heart unlike previous missions the Lord has sent me on. After preaching about His love and mercy, I asked the Father one night why the world… why anyone would not want to open their hearts to Jesus who has given so much, who has never hurt a soul, and who has burst open the gates of Heaven and gained every spiritual blessing for us through His death upon the Cross?

The answer came swiftly, a word from the Scriptures themselves:

And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. (John 3:19)

The growing sense, as I’ve meditated on this word, is that it is a definitive word for our times, indeed a verdict for a world now upon the threshold of extraordinary change….

 

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on February 3rd, 2012 | 1 Comment »

The Christmas Apocalypse

 

WITHIN the Christmas narrative lies the pattern of the end times. 2000 years after its first telling, the Church is able to peer into the Sacred Scripture with a deeper clarity and understanding as the Holy Spirit unveils Daniel’s book—a book that was to be sealed “until the end time” when the world would be in a state of rebellion—apostasy.1

As for you, Daniel, keep secret the message and seal the book until the end time; many shall fall away and evil shall increase. (Daniel 12:4)

It is not that there is something “new” being revealed, per se. Rather, our understanding of the unfolding “details” is becoming more clear:

Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries. —Catechism of the Catholic Church 66

By paralleling the Christmas narrative to our times, we may be given a greater understanding of what is here and coming…

 

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FOOTNOTES:

  1. cf. Is the Veil Lifting? []
Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on December 23rd, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Merciless!

 

IF the Illumination is to occur, an event comparable to the "awakening" of the Prodigal Son, then not only will humanity encounter the depravity of that lost son, the consequent mercy of the Father, but also the mercilessness of the elder brother.

It is interesting that in Christ’s parable, He does not tell us whether the elder son comes to accept the return of His little brother. In fact, the brother is angry.

Now the older son had been out in the field and, on his way back, as he neared the house, he heard the sound of music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean. The servant said to him, ‘Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ He became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father came out and pleaded with him. (Luke 15:25-28)

The remarkable truth is, not everyone in the world will accept the graces of the Illumination; some will refuse "to enter the house." Is this not the case every day in our own lives? We are granted many moments for conversion, and yet, so often we choose our own misguided will over God’s, and harden our hearts a little bit more, at least in certain areas of our lives. Hell itself is full of people who willfully resisted saving grace in this life, and are thus without grace in the next. Human free will is at once an incredible gift while at the same time a serious responsibility, since it is the one thing that renders the omnipotent God helpless: He forces salvation upon no one even though He wills that all would be saved.1

One of the dimensions of free will that restrains God’s ability to act within us is mercilessness…

 

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FOOTNOTES:

  1. cf. 1 Tim 2:4 []
Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on November 19th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

The Blessed Peacemakers

 

JESUS did not say, "Blessed are the politically correct," but Blessed are the peacemakers. And yet, perhaps no other age has confused the two as much as ours. Christians all around the world have been duped by the spirit of this age into believing that compromise, accommodation, and "keeping the peace" is our role in the modern world. This, of course, is false. Our role, our mission, is to assist Christ in saving souls.1 Jesus did not enter the world to make people feel nice, but to save them from the fires of Hell, which is a real and everlasting state of eternal separation from God. In order to withdraw souls from the empire of Satan, Jesus taught and revealed the "truth that sets us free." Truth, then, is intrinsically tied to human freedom, whereas Our Lord said that whoever sins, is a slave to sin.2 Put another way, if we do not know the truth, we risk being enslaved on a personal, corporate, national and international level.

In fact, in a nutshell, this is the story of the Book of Revelation, of the confrontation between a Woman and Dragon. The Dragon sets out to lead the world into slavery. How? By distorting the truth.

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FOOTNOTES:

  1. "She exists in order to evangelize…" —POPE PAUL VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 14 []
  2. John 8:34 []
Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on September 5th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Time, Time, Time…

 

WHERE does the time go? Is it just me, or are events and time itself seeming to whirl by at breakneck speed? It’s already the end of June. The days are getting shorter now in the Northern Hemisphere. There is a sense among many people that time has taken on an ungodly acceleration.

We are heading towards the end of time. Now the more we approach the end of time, the more quickly we proceed—this is what’s extraordinary. There is, as it were, a very significant acceleration in time; there’s an acceleration in time just as there’s an acceleration in speed. And we go faster and faster. We must be very attentive to this to understand what is happening in today’s world. —Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, O.P., The Catholic Church at the End of an Age, Ralph Martin, p. 15-16

I’ve already written about this in The Shortening of Days and The Spiral of Time. And what is it with the reoccurrence of 1:11 or 11:11? Not everyone sees it, but many do, and it always seems to carry a word… time is short… it’s the eleventh hour… the scales of justice are tipping (see my writing 11:11). What’s funny is that you can’t believe how difficult it has been to find time to write this meditation!

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on June 24th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

More on False Prophets

 

WHEN my spiritual director asked me to write further about "false prophets," I pondered on how they are often defined in our day. Usually, people view "false prophets" as those who predict the future incorrectly. But when Jesus or the Apostles spoke of false prophets, they were usually speaking about those within the Church who led others astray by either failing to speak the truth, watering it down, or preaching a different gospel altogether…

Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

 

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on June 1st, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Deluge of False Prophets – Part II

 

With all the hoopla of Oprah Winfrey’s finale this week, this meditation came to mind. First published April 10th, 2008. 

 

WHEN I heard several months ago about Oprah Winfrey’s aggressive promotion of New Age spirituality, an image of a deep sea angler came to mind. The fish suspends a self-illuminated light in front of its mouth, which attracts prey. Then, when the prey takes enough interest to get close…

Several years ago, the words kept coming to me, "The gospel according to Oprah." Now we see why.  

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on May 28th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

He Calls While We Slumber


Christ Grieving Over the World
, by Michael D. O’Brien

 

CHRIST IS RISEN, ALLELUIA!

 

INDEED He is risen, alleluia! I am writing you today from San Francisco, USA on the eve and Vigil of Divine Mercy, and Beatification of John Paul II. In the home where I am staying, the sounds of the prayer service taking place in Rome, where the Luminous mysteries are being prayed, are flowing into the room with the gentleness of a trickling spring and the force of a waterfall. One cannot help but be overwhelmed with the fruits of the Resurrection so evident as the Universal Church prays in one voice before the beatification of St. Peter’s successor. The power of the Church—the power of Jesus—is present, both in the visible witness of this event, and in the presence of the communion of Saints. The Holy Spirit is hovering…

Where I am staying, the front room has a wall lined with icons and statues: St. Pio, the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Fatima and Guadalupe, St. Therese de Liseux…. all of them are stained with either tears of oil or blood that have fallen from their eyes in past months. The spiritual director of the couple who lives here is Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, the vice-postulator of St. Faustina’s canonization process. A picture of him meeting John Paul II sits at the feet of one of the statues. A tangible peace and presence of the Blessed Mother seems to pervade the room…

And so, it is in the midst of these two worlds that I write you. On the one hand, I see tears of joy falling from the faces of those praying in Rome; on the other, tears of sorrow falling from the eyes of Our Lord and Lady in this home. And so I ask once again, "Jesus, what do you want me to say to your people?"  And I sense in my heart the words,

Tell my children that I love them. That I am Mercy itself. And Mercy calls My children to wake up. 

 

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on April 30th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Wisdom and the Convergence of Chaos


Photo by Oli Kekäläinen

 

I recently listened on the radio to a news story about a serial killer somewhere on the loose in New York. My first reaction was anger at the stupidity of this generation. Do we seriously believe that constantly glorifying psychopathic killers, mass murderers, vile rapists, and war in our "entertainment" has no effect on our emotional and spiritual well-being? A quick glance at the shelves of a movie rental store reveals a culture so dumbed down, so oblivious, so blinded to the reality of our internal sickness that we actually believe our obsession with sexual idolatry, horror, and violence is normal.

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Published in: DAILY JOURNAL, SIGNS | on April 12th, 2011 | 4 Comments »