I would spend this entire time in Jeanerette with my parents, a return home not at all unlike, in some ways, my return home to care for her and Dad three years ago when she was recovering from her death experience.
If you read Dear John and what is essentially a love story about me, Mary, Jesus, and my Mom and Dad, you will understand why I write this with such emphasis. I believe that the catapults of 2017 are absolutely finding there landing places in 2020. My personal journey and the rise of the spiritual war for all to see in America and the world have been on a parallel course. The locutions have been relating to both me and the world in a most frightening, yet beautiful, way.
As the days progressed, and new greens and new waters made their way into my world, as each and every day seemed to open up a new realm of communication with God that dwarfs anything I wrote about and went gaga over this past April, I could see materializing before me a most precise short season in which God would do some of his most mighty work inside me and this great nation during another quarantine, this time brought about by the destruction of a literal storm.
The day the time at home ended, I woke up to the end of a long dream that I believe the angel Gabriel showed me. The Saturday night before, for whatever reason that probably has to do with angel-loving Padre Pio and my thanksgiving novena to him, I felt an understanding I had been shoving to the side all year—the archangels Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel have been more present with me than they have been in years past. I have been shoving it aside because to this point, I have felt that they really haven’t come through for me. Obviously, I knew intellectually that my prayers were in motion, that these great angels were in fact working this whole time, but when you’re trying to hang on through a suffering season, it’s easier and nicer to pay more attention to the saints that seem to be winking at you from time to time. Even the cluster of locutions associated with the Raphael novena this month did not push me into full confidence in him and his friends as it should have. For this reason, this seemingly random inspiration to not only trust, but love, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, could only have been Holy Spirit-inspired.
I lay down on the couch and listened to some prayers and talks on Gabriel. Finally admitting how absolutely present he has been in my life this year was somewhat embarrassing. Of course as my thoughts went to Michael and Raphael too, I tried to make it more personal and applicable to Gabriel, he of the messenger in dreams. Right before I turned off my phone and went to sleep, I asked Gabriel to come to me to explain the visions as he does for a confused Daniel in the Old Testament. I asked him to bring me a clear heavenly message as he does with my dear father Joseph, and to a lesser degree, a new friend Zechariah.
As it turned out, I would indeed have one of those dreams, one of those unmistakable revelations that make a Facebook Messenger number sequence from Mr Ashton Mouton make sense a whole one year later. Moreover, it was powerful enough to seem not only like a new revelation, but also fundamentally just what I’ve been coming to in relation to the great cousins of God—his Divine Justice, and his Divine Mercy.
In the dream, I was back in high school, being led to my best friend’s room by his mother. My friend was suffering from a broken relationship. In real life, with this real-life situation decades ago, my heart went out to him, but in my ignorance of spiritual matters and of the fragility of the psyche, I wasn’t as kind to him as I should have been as I tried to “kick him in the butt” out of his funk. It was the typical Rocky mentality, the athlete’s posture, I had clung to since I had to recover from my own broken heart during sophomore year. My thought was that if that focused mentality worked to get me through the doldrums, it should work for him as well.
In real life, our relationship took a hit because of this, one we would periodically recover from, but one that ultimately drove us away from each other after graduation.
In the dream, I watched myself be different. I watched myself and how I felt back when I was in high school, and I watched how I felt now toward him in the dream—my heart still went out to him, but it stayed there. The compassion I felt for him eclipsed entirely any thought of silly athletic toughness. It was a long dream, it seemed to me when I woke up in the middle of it the next morning.
The understanding that Gabriel had indeed come to me as I’d asked was immediate. In miniature fashion, the whole twelve hours I’d just experienced was like the Fatima story when the angel comes to the children before the priest prays for Mary to come. God had intended Mary to come after the angel all along, but only after the angel appeared did he inspire the priest to pray for her.
Similarly, the stirring inside toward these great angels, which occurred before the dream Saturday night, was what inspired my prayer to Gabriel, which God intended to answer in the first place, which is evidenced by the initial stirring. In effect, it is the circle I have been reflecting on. By ourselves, we are nothing. It is all God, both inspiring the prayer and love inside us up to him and answering that very prayer through a sign of love that is a moment of unmistakable, lucid communication from him. At one time, he somehow made the journey I’ve been on seem stunningly new and newly confirmed at the same time:
Divine Justice is real. It is sometimes necessary, for purgative and redemptive suffering, both for ourselves and others.
But what God really wants, what he really wants, is to lavish us with mercy, his kind, sweet, Divine Mercy he pours out to us on the cross, a mercy that has no bottom to its depth.
None.
