I dream very, very rarely...maybe a few times a year at most. But the past two nights I have woken up from disturbing dreams. And I believe they were messages from Our Lady to convey the importance of relying on her in the final days when it is grace alone that will give us the final perseverance needed to sustain our faith to the end to teach me a lesson on not taking it for granted.
The dream I had the other night I was at a party. Since I had just been to Phoenix to visit friends and we had a great big Catholic party, maybe it was on my mind. But this party in the dream was dark in its pleasure-seeking hedonism. There was no faith, no virtue--only the pursuit of dark pleasure. I realized I was grateful for my Catholicism and my Catholic friends that we could have fun without sinning, but that without faith, the temptation to sin and subsequent misery in the world today is formidable. Our faith is holding back the tidal wave.
On to the second dream. I typically attend First Friday and First Saturday Masses as a devotional practice. Unfortunately, do to circumstantial events, I was not able to make it to Mass this last Friday. I did make it to Mass this Saturday morning, but while I typically take time to pray the rosary and spend 15 minutes keeping Our Lady company while meditating on the Mysteries (as part of the devotion) before Mass, I was a few minutes late, and had to leave right after Mass, so I was not able to do so in church. When I got home, I was tied up with the kids, and also wiped out, falling asleep on the couch in the evening but not before setting my alarm for 11:30pm to give myself time to do so.
I hit the snooze button when my alarm went off at 11:30 and went back to sleep, waking up a few hours later. I headed up to bed and lazily scrolled some YouTube videos. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, "I should pray my rosary, even though I'm dead tired." But I didn't. I fell back asleep a few minutes. Just before 3am.
The dream that took place is as I recount it, now, at 4:30am. I was traveling for work, and at a recruiting event in another city at a kind of convention center. At some point there was a commotion, and I realized there were crowds of students who were seeking reparations for something. Everyone in the area had fear in their eyes. The crowd of students about eight across and twenty or thirty deep were making a kind of wave towards where I was; I figured I would go out and meet them and try to reason with them. There was a militant, merciless fortitude in their eyes when I got to the front of the wave.
Eventually they forced me back to a dark part of the convention center. They wouldn't listen to anything I had to say, there was no reasoning. They were intimidating, but I figured were just students, what could they do. They were militant in nature, something between the Nazis and the Black Panthers. I couldn't figure out what to do and not knowing what they really wanted. There were large TV screens in the convention center. "Cut to London" one of them said, eventually tiring of my efforts to ask questions or reason with them. The TV screens appeared with the chaotic and fire-charred outside streets of UK police groveling on their knees before the crowd. It panned over to the right to another smaller group of police officers who were not on their knees, but on their backs. One by one, the members of the mob were taking giant bolt cutters....and cutting off the police officers legs who refused to submit to them, one by one, at the knee cap. "If you won't kneel to us," one of them said to me as I watched in horror, "we'll make sure you can't kneel at all."
When I awoke from the dream, it was around 4am. I realized it is Our Lady who promises to those who devote themselves to her through the First Saturday devotion, "I promise to assist at the hour of death with the graces necessary for salvation." And I had lazily and foolishly neglected to fulfill it for no good reason.
The martyrs for the faith relied on grace to persevere to the end. In the dream, the woke mob was cutting off the legs of those who resisted them (police officers, no less) without mercy. I have no doubt many of the Christian martyrs had suffered such or worse fates at the hands of totalitarian regimes of merciless persecutors. It's happening today in Nigeria, in China, in the Middle East. Our Lady has come time and time again to warn us of what is to come and to prepare us, in this life with acts of mortification and prayer. When we engage neglectful excuses not to follow her heeding, should we be surprised then if we do not have the fortitude (a grace of the Holy Spirit) to resist apostasy when the instruments of torture--or even our warm, comfortable beds--call us to deny our faith without resistance? Our Lord and Our Lady have also come to Muslims especially in dreams, and many have come to faith in Christ by way of messages to them in such states when their conscious states were not fertile ground to receive it.
The children of Fatima saw a vision of Hell--the fate that hides beneath the surface of this world for those who deny its existence and refuse to repent--and would have died of fright had Our Lady not been there with them. In my dreams, it felt like I had been given a vision of my weakness apart from Our Lady's assistance at the hour of death should I continue to neglect to heed her call and make devotion to her Immaculate Heart a priority.
I have been so lazy, so slothful, so presumptive. When we were contracepting for years not realizing the peril we were putting our immortal souls in, it was Our Lady who finally stepped into our lives (by way of the Miraculous Medal) to wake us up and convict us. We consecrated our family to the Immaculate Heart of the 100th Anniversary of Fatima and made the promise to pray the rosary every day, a promise I have been neglecting to fulfill here and there out of laziness recently. Because I'm so slow to realize things on my own, I don't doubt our Lady was sending me a warning by way of these dreams that we will not survive the coming days without her aid. The grace of final perseverance, after the gift of faith, is the most important grace. Because as Scripture recounts, "the one who perseveres to the end will be saved." (Mt 24:13)
Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Kibeho, pray for us! And Lord, forgive me!
"I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown."
(Rev 3:11)
No comments:
Post a Comment