That you may proclaim the perfections of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. [1 Peter 2:9] A Look at What the Catholic Church Teaches About Visions Based on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the writings of St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila
A Look at What the Catholic Church Teaches About Visions When people hear of visions, they often think of St. Bernadette or the children at Fatima. To most non-catholics, such experiences seem a distinctly Catholic oddity. To most Catholics, they seem restricted to saints. Yet once you understand these spiritual experiences, you realize that they are not restricted to saints or even to Catholics. Everyone has them. Visions are simply God communicating with us, and he communicates with everyone everywhere, throughout time. But if you don t know this and don t have a clue that this is what the Catholic Church teaches, then when you do experience God in a supernatural way, you may seek answers outside the Church. This has led to a rapidly growing interest in New Age and occult religions. To understand that God communicates to you in this supernatural way and nearly every way God communicates is supernatural, beyond the natural you have to know a bit about God and these experiences. How God Communicates God is love [1 John 4:8], and everything he does is a communication of his love. Everything that is is an expression of his love, revealed to us as his goodness. God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was all very good [Genesis 1:31]. He communicates through the natural world, showing you his love through the goodness and beauty of all you see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Not only does he give you all that you need to survive, but he makes it delightful. The tangy sweetness of a grape, the splendor of the evening sky, the song of a bird, the smell of a rose, the comforting hug of a friend all are expressions of the goodness of God. God also communicates through the supernatural. This communication can be as quiet as a gentle understanding or as obvious as Jesus walking into the room and sitting down beside you. Once you understand these experiences, you realize that one is not more extraordinary than the other, and one does not make you more important than the other. A grand experience may only mean you weren t listening to God s quiet, gentle whispers. Whether you hear God depends on how still you are to the distractions of the world around you and the desires, plans, and fears within. You can be still to these by keeping your focus on Jesus and your heart open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, or you can allow the noise of life to command your attention and ignore God altogether, even disregarding his most obvious communications. God allows us to be immersed in worldly concerns, but if he wants your undivided attention, he can get it by bringing you to rapture. Rapture is a word that conjures images of swooning saints, trancelike and oblivious for hours on end. But the word simply means that you are rapt, with all of your attention focused on what is taking place before you. Nothing you do can bring you to true rapture. Only God can, by bringing you to perfect stillness so that the distractions of the world fade into the background and the distractions within evaporate. In this state, you don t try to reason out the experience, slot it into 2010, M R Malcolm, thatyoumayproclaim@gmail.com, Mequon WI 53092. May be reproduced for free distribution 1
a category, or control it. Your mind is absolutely still while your senses take in the experience. This perfect stillness, in which God communicates directly to you, can last several minutes or only an instant. Although not every supernatural experience of God takes place in rapture, they are all called visions in a general sense. These communications include apparitions, imaginary visions, intellectual visions, locutions, apprehensions, and understandings. St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross explain these experiences in great detail in their various works. We ll look at them on a surface level here. Types of Experiences Apparition During an apparition, someone, most likely a saint such as Mary or even Jesus himself, physically appears before you as real as anyone else in the room. The person may move about or stay in one place, but he is absolutely present in the space and can remain present for several minutes or more. No one else may see him, and no one realizes you are seeing anything unusual. In the experience, God will direct your gaze, causing you to focus on a particular part of what you are seeing, such as the person s hands or clothing. Later, as God desires, he will bring into your understanding the reason he showed you what he did. As St. John of the Cross teaches, during many experiences, God speaks a truth to your soul that you may not comprehend at the time of the vision. It will come into your awareness perhaps years later, as God desires. In every type of vision, this understanding is always far more important than what you see, hear, smell, taste, or feel, What you see, hear, taste, smell or feel is simply the tool for bringing you the understanding. Imaginary Vision In an imaginary vision, an image of someone such as a saint or something such as a medal or a cross appears before you. The vision is brief, almost instantaneous, and is often lit with a brilliant white light. God conveys the understanding immediately, and there is nothing to consider later. For example, you may be unsure how to respond to a conflict and suddenly an image of a miraculous medal appears before your eyes. You see it, and your impulse is to pray, a clear and effective message that pulls you out of your confusion by centering you on God. Imaginary visions can also have a physical component, such as the sense that Jesus has taken you by the hand. St. Teresa of Avila writes of an experience in which Jesus handed her a rosary. The sight of Jesus and the rosary and the feel of it in her hands were imaginary visions. Visions of hell are imaginary visions in which the experience may be more abstract and consist largely of emotions. You do not necessarily feel the emotion but are aware of, for example, a sense of incredible anguish, chaos, and despair. Intellectual vision With an intellectual vision, you do not see or hear anything. Instead, you feel a sense of the presence of someone beside you, most often Jesus. You may feel him at your right side in the same way that you sense someone standing behind you. But in this experience, the nearness of God brings peace to your spirit. No words are spoken, and nothing is communicated to your soul except the reassurance that he is with you and he cares. These visions can be brief or last for a long time, even for many years. As David says, I have set the Lord before me always: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved [Psalms 16:8]. Locution During a locution, someone not physically present speaks to you, usually Jesus or a saint. These can be words from outside of yourself, the same as the words of anyone speaking to you. Or they can be interior yet clearly spoken apart from your own thoughts, coming from beyond yourself but not from outside of yourself. 2
Apprehension An apprehension is a crystal clear understanding of a truth of God that is interior, not audible but comes from beyond yourself in particular words. The words convey an understanding so undeniable that it instantly becomes a part of your truth, with your entire philosophy of life reshaped around it. You can later choose to deny this understanding and allow your philosophy to fall back into the shape it once had, but at the moment you hear it, the authority with which it is spoken is absolute. Understanding An understanding is an instantaneous comprehension of some truth of God that flashes through your consciousness. It gives a moment of great illumination and often leads you to further understandings in a domino effect, but the vision itself is very brief, like the first ray of light to leave the bulb when you turn on a lamp. You know it s there, but that ray speeds past indistinguishable from all the others that follow, leaving illumination behind it. You cannot grab onto the thought, but it instantaneously becomes a part of your understanding of God even though it is not knowable enough to rebuild your philosophy around as is an apprehension. In an apprehension, you know exactly what understanding you were given in precisely what words. They can impart precise knowledge, or they can bewilder you until some future date when the layers of meaning are revealed, whereas an understanding holds a less distinct truth. In this experience, you feel momentarily lifted up beyond worldly knowledge. Many people, perhaps all people, experience these more vague understandings. Most often, we credit these to our own intellect and fail to recognize that the illumination is from God. Even if we recognize the source, we would never think of these as visions in the traditional sense. St. Teresa of Avila explains how these are visions in The Book of Her Life. Once you appreciate that these are in fact visions, as you think of them in your own life and understand that they have a supernatural quality and a way of flashing truth before your eyes mentally without images and yet with substance, then you begin to understand the concept of even more substantial experiences of God. Apparitions, imaginary visions, locutions, and apprehensions come during the perfect stillness of a rapture, while intellectual visions do not. Understandings may come in a rapture, but if so, it is instantaneous and unrecognizable. But whether or not a vision comes in a rapture, they are all experiences of God. Seeking Out Experiences You cannot bring about an experience of God. Only God determines when, how, and what he communicates to you. Yet many do pursue means they believe will bring about an experience, and often they do so with what they think are good, spiritual intentions. They want to better know and love God. But loving God means giving up your own will in everything, including trying to control your relationship with him. He knows what will most effectively draw you closer to him. Perhaps he will lead you on a spiritual journey that includes many impressive supernatural experiences of him, and perhaps he will lead you on a journey that includes nothing more than quiet nudges. Catholics who do not understand these experiences or who desire to have them can fall victim to religions that encourage the pursuit of supernatural experiences, including the occult. They may think they ve seen a ghost or heard a loved one s voice, and they seek answers out of fear or the desire for more. They may even know the experience is of God and want to pursue a deeper relationship with him through having more such experiences. 3
When you understand what the Church teaches about death, about purgatory and the soul s eternal experience in heaven or in hell, then you realize there are no ghosts. No soul can wander the earth, lost or held down by unfinished business. No soul needs to spend more time on earth in death or in yet another body in order to finish his business. His earthly business ended at his death. Death is the end of man's earthly pilgrimage, of the time of grace and mercy which God offers him so as to work out his earthly life in keeping with the divine plan, and to decide his ultimate destiny [Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1013]. The Church teaches that heaven and hell are places, while purgatory is not a place but a spiritual state. Some think this means souls in purgatory are not yet in a place and can still wander the earth to resolve earthly attachments. But the Church is referring to places as eternal dwelling places where we will reside forever. Purgatory is a place of transition before entering heaven. While souls in heaven and hell will one day be reunited with their bodies, souls in purgatory will have moved on to heaven before this reunion. So, while heaven and hell will eventually have a physical component, purgatory is a purely spiritual state. Souls in purgatory are spiritually working out their ties to the physical world. They are being purged in their intellect, memory, and will, and even on earth, these are purged only when we move beyond the physical and allow God to purge us spiritually. So, these souls do not need to resolve their concerns in the physical world. But we often feel a person who has died has not said all he had to say or done all he had to do. We miss him, or we want him to set things right. Rather than appreciate the joy of the unity of every soul in heaven or how things will be set right through judgment, some seek ways to accomplish these in the here and now. Can You Communicate with the Dead? You can communicate with the dead through prayer. But can they communicate with you? Not at your will, their will, or the will of another, such as through channeling. If the dead communicate with you, it is at God s will. God can make a person who has died visible or audible to you to encourage you to pray for that person or to teach you. When he does so, what they communicate will point you to God and leave you humbled. They will not advise you on your love life or financial future. They will not terrorize you. They don t need to go through another person in order to communicate to you. Nothing they say will leave you feeling empowered or proud nor will the experience leave you wishing for more. Instead, you will be certain you will never have another. If you persist in pursuing experiences, though, you will have experiences. But they will not be of God. They will be either of your own imagining, which is quite different from an imaginary vision, or they will be the work of evil. Satan is never hesitant to bring you experiences that give you a sense of empowerment and control and lead you further and further away from God. People who do pursue supernatural experiences are not necessarily evil in themselves. They can be very loving and well-intentioned souls, struggling with the trials of life and the sorrows of death. They can be people searching for God. They can be Christians. They can be Catholic Christians. But rather than accept (or even understand) that to pursue a relationship with God you must give up control of everything in your life, they look for any way possible to keep their grip on a life they cannot control. As Satan grants their wish, they may become more and more drawn into the occult, moving further and further away from God. With increasing fervor, they seek out people with such power or they seek out ways to develop such power within themselves in order to control their own lives and the lives of those around them, in fulfillment of their own will. And they seek to control most that which is ultimately beyond their control, the future and death. 4
How Can You Know if an Experience Is of God? You can t know for certain if an experience is of God. Because of this, you should never desire an experience, and if you have one, don t dwell on it. If God wants you to recall a vision, he will bring it into your thoughts, and when he does, you will feel only deep humility and gratitude and love for God. If you have a vision and feel any trace of pride because of it, dismiss it. Those who pursue the occult may truly have had profound experiences of God, such as apparitions or locutions. But even if they are life-long Catholics, they most likely have no idea that the Catholic Church believes ordinary people experience God in extraordinary ways. So, they seek answers elsewhere and get false direction. As you search for guidance and answers, stay away from any religion or spiritual guidance, even Catholic spiritual direction, that seeks to empower you or help you to bring about a supernatural experience of any kind, even of God. Also stay away from any person who purports to receive communications for you from God. God doesn t need anyone s help to communicate with you. In his Church, God gives you safe guidance as you come to understand what he says and does. Again, such guidance should not empower you but should always leave you humbled, grateful, and seeking only to know this wonderful God better. Should you feel compelled to share an experience, he will lead you to a person within the Church who can offer safe, sound direction. If he doesn t, then the compulsion is not from God. If an experience troubles you or you feel a desire for more, share this with your priest. Otherwise, ignore it, and pursue God through the tools he gives you, especially reading Scripture, reading the writings of the saints, and receiving the sacraments. If you share an experience with a spiritual director who offers sound guidance, the director will neither dismiss nor encourage the experience. He (or she) will instead lead you on a journey in which you pursue a relationship with God (not an experience of God, but a relationship with God) using the tools mentioned above. Most of all, your director will guide you along the way by showing you how to follow Jesus. As you walk with Jesus, fear vanishes and desire melts away. You begin to see his goodness shining all around you. And you find that every moment is an experience of God. 5
Booklets Available in this Series A look at What the Catholic Church Teaches About: Angels Dogma, Doctrine, and the Difference Gabriel and the Annunciation: A Moment of Revelation God Is Love How to Live the Life God Gave You, Find Joy, and Become a Saint The Book of Revelation, The Mass, and the Hour of Death The Dark Night of the Soul Visions To view or download a free copy of any of these booklets, please go to https://sites.google.com/site/catholicchurchteachings/ To obtain a free copy of any of these booklets via email, please send request to thatyoumayproclaim@gmail.com These booklets are based on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the writings of the Doctors of the Church, especially St Augustine. St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, St Catherine of Siena St Thomas Aquinas St Francis de Sales St Thérèse of Lisieux