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Appearance
 I’ve always envied people who see Jesus at the end of the bed or hanging from the chandelier. I mean sane people, who have had some sort of strange confrontation of a favorite saint or a form of The Virgin Mary, of course, who has appeared so many times in so many places. There are at least 386 cases of Marian apparitions, although the Church doesn’t accept all but about 86 of them as the sure thing, - the last one was 1985 when the Virgin Mary appeared to Maria de Luz who became a nun and adopted the religious name Adelia. I’ve visited many of the Holy sites and watched people in pain crawling on their knees from who knows where but to reach the altar to touch the fabric or the image of the Virgin Mary in whatever form she might be.
About as close as I have gotten to a visual gift from God has been the amazing sunsets that blast color across the Rio de La Plata, giant circles of orange or even bright red, which I hope others lift up their eyes from whatever they are doing to acknowledge what God can do and does if we just pay attention. The most extraordinary sky art I’ve seen, and have already mentioned, was performed by a FedEx plane on an early pink morning, as it put on a pink robe as such to cross the skies over my condominium. It was a comforting gift that I was back home after trekking around the earth a bit too long.
But I guess one has to be a dedicated worshiper. Maybe an innocent one, or someone who has survived torture and sadness and pain and just happened to stumble up a hill or around a block or into a chapel and Wow! There is some image, a precious young lady, someone with a message and an uplifting spirit that needs to be shared among people who have suffered or been through hell and back as in Rwanda. I would hope there to have been all sorts of appearances to the Africans who have been tortured, slaved, abused, and treated like snakes. Just to be safe, find a candle and light one or two or three for whomever is in your heart at that moment. And thank the Virgin Mary who had been there for a moment.
If I had my druthers, I would want to hold the hand of gentle Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the more modern one, although Mother Teresa de Avila was also an image that stirred up my spirit to serve the Lord. My daughter and granddaughter and I visited her grounds and environment before we set off on the Camino de Santiago. She was known for her mysticism and meditation and discernment of four stages in the ascent of the soul to God: Mental prayer and meditation; the prayer of quiet; absorption-in-God; ecstatic consciousness. Her father was a successful wool merchant and one of the wealthiest men in Avila. She lost her mother at 11 yrs. old. She loved popular fiction and medieval tales of knighthood and works about fashion, gardens, and flowers. Bernini’s sculptor in the Basilica of Santa Marisa Della Vittoria in Rome is the precious Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, twisting her body to see the angel welcoming her. But St. Avila’s own statue, her parts, have been scattered, I guess like so many of the saints. Her right foot and upper jaw are embraced in Rome; a hand in Lisbon, a left knee and left hand in Ronda, Spain; left arm and heart at the Museum of the Church of the Annunciation at Alba e Tormes; one finger at Church of Our Lady of Loreto in Paris, and finally one finger at Snucar de Barrameda.
Do you ever think about your own body? Very few of us are saints of any sort but is there anything about us individuals that might be of importance to someone who walked in the waters or the fields to know better who we were, what we did, how we survived. Were we really saviors and angels and saints or, well, just common people who cared about so many things. Most of us never received heaven merit badges, or hollers from above, or songs written about them, or blogs and poetry that gave a bit of a glance of who we were, if anyone cared or read about us, if we made them laugh, cry or just compared the walks of life that we all seemed to have in some similar way, because we came from God and tried to stir up faith for everyone and tossed out those bright and beautiful church songs each Sunday, and wrote novels and books that sort of shared what we wanted to say about life and its pain or glory.
Look at it this way. Adam started sin. Yep. And Eve strung along behind him - not necessarily beside him, she was probably messing with her leaves to get them in the right places - we women still do that. After sin, came death which apparently had not been in the books at that time. Once sin exploded onto the scene, it messed up a lot of things God was trying to do to get the earth folk going straight and not playing with sin and disaster and jealousy and envy.
What arose was death, which separated us from God, in such a way that He was hanging onto mankind as He learned things in a new and maybe not easy way, and that sin stuff just wouldn’t disappear until, I gather, mankind learned his lesson and saw the light - that light that would give them hope that everything was going to be alright.
In those days, even the good guys and women had to suffer death, the separation from God - and I always feel we may be separated from Him by our actions, our crazy search for power, our greed and jealousies, but, there was some sort of road through prayer or action that would bring us back, like a yoyo string when our time was ripe and we paid attention to what we should be doing or becoming. Even if we were not active, intentional sinners, we let those guys in between our fingers and our heart and therefore God had to deal with some sort of lesson to teach them the real truth- through His son, who was sent to walk parts of the earth and show how the good, bad and ugly could be separated, recycled and put into some form that made the plebes and the humans trying to figure out life anyway. And that was joyful for God, that His Son knew what He had to do and did it with glory and honor.
Look put a law out there, and someone is going to break it and/or find a way to tweak it or turn it around or slap you in the face. Really, even today, the more laws man makes, the more people are going to line up to serve time in jail. We deal with sin, and we deal with grace. Sin doesn’t cure or clean out the mess in one’s soul. So many are trying to get around things, to skip over things, to sneak and escape from things so that they miss the whole point. All one has to do is turn around and see God’s Son Jesus - watch His steps, His touch, His love, His patience, His determination to gather into His heart and soul everything His Father set him up to do, to complete His message and salvation for us all, even the ones who don’t have many points in doing good.
Remember - neither death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Remember too, we were all nailed to that cross with Jesus, whether we believed who He was or not. But one way or the other, we have the gift of resurrection into the Kingdom of God. And because every step Jesus took, every person He touched, every pain He suffered until crying out in the end, was done for us, to save us, to love us, to promise He will see us again in the Heavenly Kingdom, where we all can dance like the Masai dance every evening before dinner, with a joy that makes another day of life better, brighter, and more beautiful, so we can walk to the doors of Heaven which are forever open to us who believe and behave and care about each other.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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