Monday, July 14, 2003 10:35 AM

TLIG changed my life

Christer Brandt forwards this new testimony from Sweden.

My name is Johan Andersson and I come from Sweden. I’m going to give my personal testimony of Vassula’s revelations. Perhaps the most important testimony is my own life, but hopefully I can write something of what the revelations have meant (and still mean) for me.

I grew up in a small suburb outside of Stockholm, and had a boyhood filled with different sports and activities. My parents raised me in a secular religion with no Church practice except baptisms of infants, marriage and funeral in church that is so typical for the middle class of Sweden. Still I had something of a sense of the presence of something greater, trying to catch my attention.

Something of a change in my life came when I started in a nearby high school. The school lay in the suburbs of Stockholm, not far from where I grew up, and it showed me a poverty that I didn’t think existed in Sweden. It changed my view on money and made me search for “that greater sense” I felt so deep in my heart.

I had prayed almost every night for all my childhood (or something near a prayer) and knew that this “greater source” made me start reading the Bible. It soon came clear to me that the greater sense/source was the Almighty Father, whom I had read about in the Holy Scriptures. In school I met Muslims and Christians especially from the Middle East, and especially Syrian Orthodox Christians. The Syrians showed me the Christian faith, Jesus crucified for us all, with their great golden crosses.

After one year my family moved to the suburb where the high school was lying, and not far from our house was a church. In the suburb, Christians were people with a cross around their neck and it didn’t matter so much if you were Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. I decided to go to the nearby church the first Sunday in our new house, and that started a process that ended in my getting confirmed and becoming a youth leader for the younger confirmands.

At the beginning everything seemed wonderful and I grew in my own faith and the relationship towards God got stronger and stronger. My Orthodox friends had different views than I had (from my church), especially about female priests. At that time I didn’t see any problem with women priests. “Why couldn’t they be?” But soon, I would learn that this congregation did things that I didn’t know could happen in the church. After a Sunday Mass, a church lay-woman came up to the priest (I was standing just a few meters from him) and asked: “What should we do with the remaining wine?” and he answered: “Some people pour it out in the bushes, but you can just throw it in the sink”.

This shocked me, and I knew that this was not right. But I didn’t know anything about how to treat the Eucharist and my priest just didn’t seem to have any problem with it, despite the worries I told him in our private conversations. One of my Syrian friends is the son of a priest and we had different theological discussions. On one occasion he told me: “My body shakes when the Holy Spirit turns the bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Lord”.

A great interior battle was fought inside me: “What shall I do with this problem?” Things would get even worse. At a camp we had with our confirmands, my priest celebrated a mass, and afterwards he asked me: “Could you, please, take care of this?”, meaning that I should pour out the wine (the Blood of Christ) outside the house. When he asked me, it was like an angel took his sword and stuck it in my heart because something pulled me back. I said: “No. I just can’t do it”. He then took the wine (said “OK”) and went outside to pour it out. This made me even more confused and ask: “What shall I do?”

A few months before this camp I had decided to examine the opportunities of visiting a monastery, and with the help of my priest I got the address of a Lutheran monastery at Sala, Ostanback. I had been there in February (this happened in May) and saw some of Vassula’s revelations. I had, at that point, decided to come to this monastery in the summer for a three-week period, and that would change my life forever.

I still went to communion in my church, and I could not tell anyone of my interior pain over this. But God would show me the way, and here Vassula’s revelations enter. I then went to this monastery, and the first day of my three-week visit I opened up a little booklet that was about “True Life In God”. I saw in the bottom of a page the words: “You can’t pour out my holy Eucharist, or in other ways treat it as if it wasn’t holy”. Now I finally got the answer I was searching for, and in some way already knew. Now what to do?

The first night after reading this I could not sleep. Everything was upside down. Everything that I had developed in my Christian faith and in relation with my priest seemed wrong. The day after, I started to do some work at the monastery and after a little reprimand I could not hold in my pain that was so strong inside. It all ended in me sitting in my room and crying my heart out. I have never cried so much in my whole life. The most remarkable circumstance is that this happened the 1st of July, once the feast of the precious blood of Christ.

I knew that I no longer could go to Holy Communion in my congregation. I started to write a letter to my priest, telling him about Vassula’s revelations and that I must stop communicating in his church. By Gods grace, the monastery helped me to start a new spiritual life during these weeks, and when I was leaving, I felt so happy and thought that God wanted me to become a priest (which I had thought about before the experience), but when I got back home to the “normal” life, after a while, everything had changed. My girl friend and I separated, my old congregation did not understand, why I didn’t followed them up to the altar during the Holy Communion. All ended in many tears and in many heart-breaking separations. After a while, I found a congregation (which the monastery had recommended), and I felt pretty good, but something was still missing, and after my experience I knew I had to follow Jesus, and only him.

I started at a seminar for preparing theological studies, but this was not right, I just knew it. And the official Church of Sweden has an strange ecclesiastical structure. Actually, the politicians decide over the church’s faith. So they have stopped those who stick to the catholic faith, from ordination.

Soon God showed me the way (like he always did in my experience), and it all ended where it all began, in the monastery.

Now I’ve started my way towards becoming a monk. Despite the fact that I am in the beginning of my journey in this monastery, I want to tell about my experience of “True Life in God”. I have read some of the testimonies on “True Life in God” which report that “True Life in God” has strengthened their faith, and that’s wonderful, but for me, Vassula’s revelations, “True Life in God”, have not just strengthened my faith, they have changed my life.

They opened my eyes for the Pope, the holy prayer of the rosary (which now is my most cherished prayer outside the common prayers in the monastery) and the importance of Christian unity. And it is for the cause of unity that I’m writing all this about my experiences. Because if this can help towards the acceptance and recognition of the revelations of “True Life in God” by the church authorities, my own little journey seems like a drop in the sea.

Perhaps this testimony is nothing unusual, but then the greater my joy, because then it would mean that “True Life in God” is gathering people all over the world, to the one and only holy catholic church, and one day Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants can join and live the life of the Nicene creed, “and one holy catholic and apostolic church”.

May God change us all, and bless us with his Holy Spirit so that we all can follow Jesus with our hearts, minds, souls and lives.

Yours sincerely in Christ,
Br. Johan (Postulant O.S.B.)