I've spent the past two days catching up on all the things I missed in the Catholic world, and there is quite a bit I could write about, but I will save those thoughts for later. For now I want to relate two personal stories. The first happened the day before I left for Montana when I was packing up the last of my boxes to ship. The youngest of my cats bopped through the bedroom window to share her latest catch with me. It turned out to be a humming bird. This was the second such gift she had managed to catch. The first she had brought three months previously and it did not survive the giving. At the time I had this sinking feeling because humming birds represent joy in many Native cultures. It did turn out that next three months were not full of joy for yours truly. So being brought another apparently dead humming bird, right before I am to embark on another stage in my life, did not inspire a lot of confidence.
I managed to retrieve the humming bird which lay comatose in my hand and proceeded to take it to the front of the house with the intent to bury it. Along the way I get the distinct message that maybe I shouldn't be so quick to bury it. So I do a little intentional energy work and as I'm doing so the beak begins to open and close with the rhythm of my hands. I straighten out it's feathers and place it gently on the ground where it cheeps once and then zooms off, apparently none the worse for wear. In my head I hear the comment "Joy resurrected." It seemed to be a very good omen. Not to my cat though.
The next day as I began my drive back to Montana I did my standard meditation for a safe journey. In this meditation I visualize a cone of protective energy around my vehicle. This time I hear: "That's pretty selfish".
I'm seriously stopped in my tracks. What?, I ask. The response comes back that I could, if I wasn't being so selfish, extend the cone of protection out to about a fifty mile radius and include everyone sharing the road with me. I'm like, I can do that? The answer came back "No, but we can through you. We can use you and your vehicle as the center point and extend the cone out to more or less that radius." Since I didn't have any particularly good reason to deny the request I agreed. My version of a protective cone includes no accidents and no breakdowns. In the two days and over twelve hundred miles, I saw no accidents and no breakdowns, and I thought a lot about this particular interaction.
While I was driving through Denver I was hyper alert for accidents or breakdowns because statistics would indicate it was this time on the road where I would see accidents or breakdowns. I saw none and blew through Denver without even having to slow down. So I'm thinking to myself if this whole thing is actually true it would be quite a gift for a lot of unsuspecting drivers. At which point the same voice says: "Imagine what this 'trick' of ours would be worth to an auto insurance company? They might pay good money to make sure people with this kind of connection were always on the road in high traffic areas---that's just a practical observation."
Again I found my own musings brought to a halt by this observation. I can't say that I would ever have conceived of the effects this kind of thing would have on insurance companies. But it wasn't this practical application that contained the real lesson of this exercise. It was the spiritual. It was brought to my attention that this gift was extended to everyone who shared the road with me. Given the roads I was driving encompassed one of the major drug routes it meant the gift was extended to criminals, drug runners, abusers, drunks, druggies, the generally irresponsible, Protestants, Natives, Jews, Moslems, true Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and all and sundry without exception. Without exception. Just as Jesus fed the multitudes without exception or extended healing to all without exception, these kinds of gifts were meant to be given without exception--or merit or judgment. Just given. Period.
I am not intending to state that this scenario was actually in effect. One of my personal maxims is that one can not extrapolate from a data of point of one. All I know is that on this one trip I saw no accidents and no breakdowns and had a really fascinating mile eating mental conversation with some interesting ramifications.
Tomorrow I want to address some aspects of Catholic mysticism and some statements from Catholic mystics which do not necessarily fall into the usual categories of doom and destruction and hell and damnation. In researching some recent visionaries I came across this quote from Padre Pio as recorded by his fellow Capuchins:
Question: Padre, some claim that there are creatures of God on other planets, too.
Answer: "What else? Do you think they don’t exist and that God’s omnipotence is limited to this small planet Earth? What else? Do you think there are no other beings who love the Lord?"
Question: Padre, I think the Earth is nothing compared to other planets and stars.
Answer: "Exactly! Yes, and we Earthlings are nothing, too. The Lord certainly did not limit His glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did." (Maybe they didn't have quite the same free choice dynamic we do.)
One wonders if in Pio's 'travels' he didn't make some serious connections with other intelligent beings, or if he came to a different conclusion about the nature of angels and other 'supernatural' beings.
