These past ten days or so I have been having visitations.  Two of them. The one a visitation of sickness, some infection that made me miserable and for which the healing medicine made me feel ever so much worse. For this powerful drug was seemingly hallucinogenic and filled my days and nights with visions and nightmares and hallucinations which were so real they left me in no doubt of their reality.

I said to Br. Jude, with the map of Illinois in my hand, “Where was that chicken farm you took me to last night?” And he said, matter-of-factly, “There was no chicken farm. You never left your bed.” “And the hotel lobby we stayed in until the traffic thinned out?” “There was no hotel lobby.” I was astounded. And that was only one item.

In a few days the visions ended. And by then the second visitation was at hand: an archbishop from Madang in New Guinea. In 1982 he made a retreat at my hermitage before being made a bishop and I was at the outdoor ceremony on my way home. Now he begins his home visit with a retreat first of all at this abbey. Today he goes to his Society’s headquarters near Chicago and then on to Rome and an ad limina visit to the Holy Father with his fellow bishops of New Guinea — all 25 of them. Then on to Poland, his home, and to Bonn in Germany for the papal World Youth Festival this summer.

Of my encounter with the world of visions and fantasy, even some taste of a drugged world, is in a way what we do in daily life, then. What we try is to relate to the world around us, the world we experience as perhaps genuine.

If the world of the imagination is one encounter, so is our encounter with the world we live in: a weighing, a testing, a trying. Good and evil, success and failure, sunshine and darkness, are aspects of a world we all live in. Sorting them out, coping with, dealing with them is a serious dimension of our lives. And only in the light of the Gospel, the grace of God, the Spirit given us in Christ, can we attain the wisdom that keeps us neither remote from reality lest we see what is there, or overwhelmed by it and so submerged in darkness. How tempting to see the Church perfect, and how tempting also to see the Church a disaster. Neither version is near the truth. Only divine Wisdom can provide the light of faith to see the whole picture, the total scene.
If my efforts to understand what was going on in my mind could lead me to a proper understanding of it all, so in faith we can see the Church whole  — at once both human and Divine, full of human foibles, rich in God’s grace and power.

And so the archbishop would come by each day for an hour and talk of things. Things good and things not so good. Signs of hope, signs of discouragement and failure. An honest vision, but a vision made honest by the grace of God and the light of the Holy Spirit.

Giving upon the Church is nothing new. For many it is the answer to their experience. And yet, no experience, good or bad, is complete without the vision of grace. And to complete the vision in grace is our business and our function.

The 25 bishops of Papua, New Guinea who will meet with Pope Benedict this month will carry to him good news and bad. And at the feet of Peter will bear encouraging words about the beauty of what they do.

The nightmare born of drugs is a perfect picture of the hopeless mind barren of grace. The light of grace enables us to see what is real. What not.  In your life and mine. In the life of the Church.
 

“He summoned the 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits,
with power to cast them out and to cure all kinds of diseases and sickness.”