Sunday, December 08, 2002 7:16 PM
Some personal reflections
The following meditations are from Mary Zore
I was in an inter-denominational bible study and we were studying the Acts of the Apostles. At one point we discussed the Eucharist and I said I believed in the Real Presence of Christ and that if this belief was true, then some Christian denominations were missing something very wonderful. I said I thought it would be good for all to pray to know if this was true. Later I learned I had a complaint lodged against me for saying this. The leader of the bible study discussed this with me and she told me she could not come to believe in the Real Presence. At night I had a strange dream and it seemed like God gave me an answer for her. He told me that He is like a Mother who hides the medicine in the apple sauce so the child can eat it. This was a simple explanation to me for the miracle of Christ coming under the appearances of bread and wine. In the dream I was directed to read Psalm 77 (I realized God knew I had a Douay Rheims Bible later, because the number would have been different in other Bible translations). Psalm 77 (78) is a very long psalm which talks about the effects of apostasy or the bondage which comes with disbelief. I have written my reflections on the Psalm and how it relates to the ‘True Life in God’ messages.
Verses 18: This first part of the psalm seems to be a call to awaken, as God saying “attend”, or in my words ‘wake up, come to attention’.
“Attend O my people to my law: incline your ear to the words of my mouth.”
Then He says His words will come in parables, and they will have ‘propositions’ or great mysteries in them. God says His deeds, His powers, His works should be made known or passed to each generation and that when we don’t teach them to our children they are in danger of losing God’s law and becoming a “perverse generation”.
Verses 58: “And He set up a testimony in Jacob and a law in Israel, How great things He commanded our father’s that they should make the same known to their children; that another generation might know them..That they may put their hope in God, and may not forget the works of God and may seek His commandments. That they may not become like their fathers, a perverse and exasperating generation.a generation that set not their heart aright; whose spirit was not faithful to God.”
As I reflect upon this I hear what God the Father in the ‘True Life in God’ books tells us, that we have forgotten Him. He tells Vassula that our generation needs to have a rejuvenation in our spiritual memories. At one point in the books, He describes how He led Vassula into a desert, very much like the woman is Hosea, and how He came to her to revive her memory of God as her father.
The December 20 1990 message describes how God led her: “I had provided you with a guardian angel since the beginning of your existence to guard you, console you and guide you, but my Wisdom told your guardian angel to leave you and let you face the desert on your own.. then in your terror you remembered me and looked up to heaven searching desperately for Me.”
It was this reviving of her memory which brought her back from sin and death. Vassula said in her testimony, “Father, once before Your Majesty revived the memory of my poor soul, I had forgotten who had made me. The next moment You restored my memory, You asked me to lift up my eyes to heavens, then a ray of light shone on me and like a consuming fire, your Spirit rested on me.” (from Oct 5, 1992 message)
I can say it was like that for me as well. I feel I had forgotten God in my life, almost like I never knew Him, until He came to me and made Himself known, reviving my memory in a way. This was supernatural in its process. As I look around me in the world, I see others who are wandering with the same loss of memory. It is like our memories have been erased or jaded to the point of not believing in the works and power of God.
Some of this is our fault because we have failed to pass on our beliefs to our children. The way we catechize our children and our adults has watered down our beliefs so much that, of course, it is like we have no knowledge of God and His works. This has brought about a “desert” like condition in our churches and in our own faith lives. Jesus calls to our generation in one message: “All you who disbelieve and have made desolate my garden, come to me and repent!” (March 29, 1988 message)
Some of it is in the way we criticize and hurt and persecute each other as well. Without realizing it, we have left wounds on the body of Christ and these wounds can be portals for further attacks from the enemy. Some of these wounds were received many years ago. For example, it is hard to go into some groups without the pain of the period of time called the inquisition being brought up. Despite the fact that the Pope has humbly begged for forgiveness for any wrongs the Church did, I still have some Christian brethren bring this up. I can see how the enemy loves to keep these wounds open so He can continue division.
To embrace total forgiveness requires remembering that God is our Abba. Through our baptism we have been made His children. Rather than loving and at times, worshiping our wounds, we need to desire to be healed. We need to truly call out for that healing. If we call out to Him, He will come and release us from the slavery of unforgiveness. He will not let the enemy go through the wounds any more to cause fear and hurt and turmoil. Instead the wounds will be glorified and become portals for His grace. We will be captured in His net of ‘Love and peace”.
I remember how I felt extreme sorrow over my own sins and especially the use of birth control in my marriage. After spending a day with a very good conservative Catholic couple who I knew had never sinned in this way I felt I was very attacked by a spirit of unforgiveness. I could not feel loveable. I did not feel able to forgive myself even though I had taken this sin to confession with true contrition. I fell asleep with tears over my own unfaithfulness. In a dream Jesus came to me and He was wearing a cloak of diamonds.. light was streaming from every part of His being. I later felt that the light was streaming from the glorified wounds of Christ. There was a large jewel on His shoulder and I understood this was the wound where He carried His cross. I heard Christ say “I am your Father. I know you.” This recognition filled my soul. “I am His child.He knows me.” I felt like I fell into a net of silvery light and felt indescribable peace. So when we say we cannot overcome the wounds of the past, is it not out of lack of faith that we are speaking? Cannot God, our Father, do all things?
In the ‘True Life in God’ messages, God says our generation has apostatized. I did not know what “apostasy” was until I read those books. “Apostasy” is a denial of faith in God. I have thought about what it means to be guilty of “apostasy” and I now believe that there are many different ways to have this a real condition in your life, and maybe our modern world is even more dangerous because it is so rationalistic and scientific. I see apostasy all around me. Apostasy is depending on ourselves and not on God. It is declaring our good works as if they come from us and not God’s Holy Spirit and His grace in us. It is in modern theology which denies Divine power and the truth of the gospel chipping away at the faith of many. I have witnessed authorities in the Church saying that the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes has a natural explanation. Other stories, such as the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, they claim are fabricated and not true in a historical sense, but only in the “message” or theological meaning.
I now realize that I was guilty of apostasy at times in my life not knowing or verbalizing my sin as a lack of faith. Every time I attended a mass in a luke warm , inattentive way, not “remembering” the Real Presence, I was acting as an apostate. Using birth control in my marriage was not believing that God gave His Church a moral teaching authority, not understanding God was present in my marriage and wanted to be a partner in our marriage union. We are in apostasy when we don’t listen to the testimony of people receiving messages from God in our times because we think we don’t need those messages.
We think God is not as ‘real’ now as He was in the past and that He would not work in miraculous ways for our generation. Yet in the ‘True Life in God’ messages God is bending down to us with the medicines we need to be healed. I see apostasy in people who can not believe in the power of God to act miraculously and change the world. I see apostasy in our failure to believe in the power of the sacraments and thus our failure to go and receive them on a regular basis. All of this lack of belief comes from our inability to “remember” that God is alive and real and all powerful and everywhere.
Concerning the Eucharist, we have forgotten it is the true Presence of Christ. We have failed to believe in God’s power to make that bread become the Presence of the Living God. I think the words of the Psalm talk about this process of apostasy and the terrible vacuum it creates allowing evil to enter in and plunder us. God is calling out to us through the prophecies of today to “awake and attend” and become alive in Him again. The fact that we can not receive Holy Communion at one table together because of the way division has split the church is a living testimony to how much we have lost and how far from God we are.
Verses 9-20 These verses seem to talk of the many ‘works’ God wants His people to remember. The ‘works’ witness to God’s ability to do anything, to truly be “omnipotent” in His care of His people.
Verses 1216: “Wonderful things did He do in the sight of their Fathers.. He divided the sea and brought them through; .He conducted them with a cloud by day; and all night with a light of fire. He struck the rock in the wilderness and gave them to drink as out of the great deep. He brought forth water from the rock, and made streams run forth as rivers..”
In many ways, I think of the ‘True Life in God’ messages as being streams of water which have gushed forth from God’s own Sacred Heart. With these waters He washes us clean of our disbelief and restores the true teachings of His church.
June 1991 message: ” The stream will keep on flowing profusely out of My Heart-it will flow everywhere, breaking into several parts, separating into other and several rivulets going into all direction and wherever this healing water flows, EVERYONE, sick, lame, blind, will be healed. Even the dead shall come back to life again.”
He uses the messages to strike the hearts of others so that they too become fountains in the desert and witnesses of His Love.
(July 1990 “Your heavenly Father rained down bread upon His people and from the rock at Horeb. He let water flow from it so they may drink, and I, have not I, multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the thousands? O men of little faith, how is it you can not tell the times? Why do you doubt that My Holy Spirit of Grace is being poured out so manifestly upon you in your wilderness? I said, “I am going to water my orchard..had you penetrated the mystery of the manna and the mystery of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, you would have understood today fully the outpouring of my Spirit.”
God tells Vassula that He is feeding her, reviving her with the messages and that He uses the messages to feed all His sheep and intends to resurrect His Church into full unity.
In the verses of the psalm we find the people impatient and testing God. (Verse 20: “because He struck a rock and the waters gushed out, can He also give bread, or provide a table in the wilderness?”) The people of today are not different from the hard hearted people of the Old Testament. Like the people who tested Moses and the other prophets we are always testing God and asking for more than we receive showing that we are dissatisfied with God’s gifts and are greedy for more. This reminds of the fact that we have such a tendency to be lacking in faith that we always tend to rationalize and doubt God’s capacity. The people in John’s gospel did not believe Christ that He could provide a spiritual banquet by becoming “bread” for us to eat. They walked away from Him even though He had given them great signs to help them believe such as the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and fish to feed the multitude
Was the Protestant reformation a similar “walking away” when the reformation leaders changed the belief in the Eucharist from a belief in the Real Presence to a more symbolic notion of the Eucharist? In my own church I find the disease of lack of faith as well. I think the lack of interest in adoration in some churches where the tabernacle which holds the Eucharist is left deserted for hours and days is testimony to the lack of faith that Jesus is truly present as a living God in the Blessed Sacrament. I have sadly found this lack of faith in both clergy and laity at times.
Verse 22 of the Psalm declare the lack of faith the people had “Because they believed not in God and trusted not in His salvation. Yet God mercifully provides His food for them still Verses 23-25: “And He commanded the clouds from above, and had opened the doors of heaven. Man ate the bread of angels: He sent them provisions in abundance.”
The second part of the Psalm (Verses 40-65) is a litany of the signs God gives in the way of curses and plagues, from the plagues of Egypt to the punishments which later befall the Israelites when they fall into apostasy. It says God “removes His tabernacle of Silo, and the people are imprisoned and are as a people despised.. Then God “awakens”. “And the Lord was awakened as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that has been surfeited with wine. And He smote His enemies…”
Just as the Old Testament events for the Passover and exodus were types for Christ’s victory, even so the plagues can be types for spiritual deaths and disasters. In the church we see various parts of tradition being lost, trampled upon or altered. The Church of Christ has been plundered in a way by the apostasy of Christ’s followers. Some Churches no longer have the sacrament of confession. Some have lost the belief in the intercession of the Saints. Some have lost other sacraments or have altered them into pure symbols. The spirituality of the arts has been lost and some Christians do not accept sacramentals as being portals for God’s grace. Hardness of heart has set in and we can not talk about things together or refuse to sincerely search for truth. We don’t act as brothers and sisters but as strangers set apart and yet we think we can approach God’s sanctuary as if we are clean and whole. So, I do think the plagues of Egypt.the death, the destruction, the slavery of sin is part of our present condition. We have spiritual leprosy and refuse to acknowledge our condition.
But God is like the strong man who has “awakened”. (July 1990 message: Open your heart so you may understand fully My Message of Love. I descend. I Who am King and Sovereign, all the way to remind you of the love I have for you and of My Sacrifice. I come to remind you to whom you belong. I have redeemed you all with my sacrifice and you belong to Me… you can not say anymore “where is my God?” The pastures of the heath I shall turn green again so that you find your rest in them. My vineyards, I shall keep multiplying and my fruit trees shall yield abundantly – you will eat to your heart’s content from My heavenly stores”
This part of the Psalm reminds me of the way God says He has come down to help us through ‘prophecies’ in our time. In the Vassula messages it says He will give us ‘Prophecies and teachings like rivers’, a very similar image to the smote rock with the stream of waters. He says He is coming to “feed His Sheep”, just like the last verses of the psalm which speak of David the Shepherd.well, Christ is the Shepherd for the flocks in the ‘True Life in God’ messages.
To SummarizeI read the Psalm as a story of salvation. Even the number of the psalm which is 77 reminds me of the Lamb in the book of Revelations which has seven eyes and seven ears symbolically portraying the omnipotence and omniscience of God. The verses of the psalm recall God’s works but also reveals the need for constant vigilance and at times for God’s intervention, in order for His works to be safeguarded from the tendency we have to grow forgetful and to lose our faith. I see the condition of the present church in the Psalm. I see the fruits of generations of apostasy being actualized in our present condition of division. I see the bondage that we succumb to when true teachings are lost. But the psalm gives hope hope for God’s constant vigilance even when we are unfaithful. Truly Christ is the rider of the Book of Revelations who bears the title “Ever faithful, Ever True”. I believe God is providing a banquet table in the midst of the desert through the ‘True Life in God’ messages. I believe Christ is feeding us through these messages and that He wants to re-establish His Church in unity and truth on His holy Mountain. Verse 69 of the psalm: “And He built His sanctuary as of unicorns, in the land which He founded forever.”
And what is the significance of the word ‘unicorn? I believe it is the call of God to establish within us hearts which are totally singular in their allegiance, so that we are like ‘unicorns’, belonging to God alone in all our thoughts and actions.
