This post became six for a single day. I managed to separate them out, but the six posts of this day are all to be considered as originating from the same stream of thought. The order in which they are read is unlikely to matter.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, who both happen to be on my list of my favorite actors. Darth Vader and Wyatt Earp in the same movie?  That’s some strange sort of crossover. The first time I watched this movie, it made so much sense to me, and it was on more than a few levels.  I could not properly articulate the scale of this until the last year or so. The old town doctor wandering the streets late at night on a walk to clear his head boggles my mind, because that’s exactly what I do all the time now, weather pending.  Granted, the movie would never call them what they actually are, but now I understand the familiarity I felt with that character, on a variety of levels.

I have walked the streets of my town so many times at some really strange hours of the night.  The local sheriff’s dispatch I’m sure can attest to my strange calls when I happen upon the sorts of things that require calling the non-emergency dispatch.  They’re also prayer walks where I ask for angelic protections over the homes and the guardian angels of the people inside to come alongside them.  I also process through a lot of other things and find myself walking to the point where I have emptied my own brain to allow for clarity of the prayers to come out unhindered, and some of they never fail to disappoint in their scope and scale, Holy Spirit guide my prayers sort of thing.

The epiphanies are often profound revelations of connections and interworking of various narratives going on in my life during that time.  There’s also the narrative of a young man, who started on a path in life that didn’t quite work out like he had intended, but when he got out of his own selfish and ambitious ways, he took the path of spending his entire life as a small-town physician.

It’s difficult to fully appreciate the importance of this specific narrative for me.  A town/region can be changed for the better if they are without a physician and surgeon when they arrive in town. This reality has been stolen in modern context of terrible healthcare industrial complex. A general/family medicine trained physician and a surgeon working together in a town is something to behold and is only discernable by those who are entrusted with the discernment to know.  Maybe that’s why it is treated with so much disregard by those making the decision that have consequence of us in the hospitals we inevitably will find ourselves in as patients.  The corporate and government bureaucrats are oblivious to the treasure and responsibility which they have been entrusted, and they destroy it like an idiot with matches, burning down the House of God (great book from the 70s about life in residency training at a huge hospital in Boston) in the relentless pursuit of more power and influence in the new House Without God, where an atheist can be a Chaplain.  I yearn for the return to the days where sacred things mattered and were venerated. The intensity of this narrative gathered my attention in a way I did not understand.

Then there’s the of narrative, “The young man who is called for a higher purpose but has to learn this the hard way through the failure of their own selfish ways.” It plays out visibly when the young man chooses to step out of the life he left behind and into the life he lived. It was one of those what if memory moments that some carry with them forever trapped, in the middle of the journey we are traveling each and every day.

Recall, Ray Kinsella is living his quiet farm life with a woman that sees her husband’s strength and loves him completely along with their young daughter.  The farm life has a rhythm that is tied to the pulsation and motion of the earth.  The only thing a farmer and their family can do is learn to live peacefully within the seasons and cycles of the earth for there is nothing they can do to change them.  They understand stewardship of the lands and home to a depth most do not know to exist. Projects started in the spring to address obstacles encountered the previous winter that go unfinished when winter sets in can result in more death and destruction.  It’s also a life filled with quiet and uninterrupted time that exists in abundance. Whether that be sitting alone on the tractor for days in a row at each of the points of the growing season, or simply walking through the fields and lands of the farm when the work of the planting is starting to show the fruits of one’s labor, the opportunity for conversations with God abound.  Make no mistake, farmers understand the importance of that relationship where prayer is how they persevere through the storms that try to destroy everything they’ve worked to build.

Ray Kinsella is wandering through his fields of corn living out the stewardship of which I spoke.  He hears the whisper in his head, “If you build it, he will come” while walking through his corn field. What the?  His response is reasonable. He brushes it off after what seems like a failure to have it validated by someone else after calling out to his wife a short distance away if she heard anything.  A bit confused by the question, she responds, “No…” Ok, no one else heard this.  How could he?  Soon thereafter, he hears it again.  He knew he wasn’t nuts the first time, and the second time he knew it was only being said to him, but he knew he still wasn’t nuts. It’s the clarity and simplicity of the words that allowed him to know it was coming from a trustworthy source.  It doesn’t scare him.  It only leads him to seek a deeper understanding of what he just experienced. “If you build it, he will come,” so he shares with his wife what happened. Instead of freaking out and throwing up walls for him, she enters the discussion and ensuing narrative with him as his wife and closest and most trusted person in his life.  What does it mean?  He starts to work with what seems like a clue or something.

Over the course of the movie, the sequence of clues the movie portrays develop into actions with consequence and proof of the truth of what he was being told. It sends him on something like a pilgrimage through his past, through the history of the game of baseball that he loves so dearly. A love that was bestowed upon him by an imperfect father doing the best he could with what he had. The sad reality is that the narrative of our father in our lives is not one of the time they lived, but is timeless. Did we squander the blessing of our relationship with our children and did we allow our parents squandering us to harden our hearts preventing a relationships with them?  No one ever says I am glad I didn’t really know my mother or father and mean it.  It’s usually a defensive response from the hardened heart speaking.

Jack Kinsella, Ray’s father shows his son baseball because the father loves the game and wants to share something he adores with his son. Ray’s father passed away when he was relatively young in life, leaving him a legacy of what he adored through a love of baseball, but also a legacy of hurt feelings of a son that creates regret that is unresolvable in the worldly sense as his father is dead.  As Ray makes this pilgrimage, which started with the whisper in the field of corn, he starts to share his father with his daughter, a grandfather she never met.  Ray also shares the love his father so bumpily shared with his son with his daughter in a way he likely never had prior to this narrative God was writing through Ray.  What seems like a movie that is not about God, actually is about God seeking to heal the hardened heart of a single individual by allowing him to get to know his earthly father.  What this looks like in the Church is God seeking to heal our hardened hearts by helping us to get to know our heavenly father.

It’s a mysterious thing in our minds how we reconcile it, but as Saint Justin the Martyr had divinely revealed to him in the first century that history, and I would add time as we perceive it, has a secular and sacred nature with Christ in the middle of it.  I read that recently, and it applied words and a concept to what I already knew to be reality. The book of Job depicts this when a conversation occurs in the Throne Room of God and then physical consequences of said conversation play out on earth.  If was my wife who uttered the truth, there is not a single thing that occurs in the physical realm that has not already occurred in the spiritual realm.

That’s what a pilgrimage is. That’s what penance is.  That’s what purgatory is for those who run away from the truth and grace of God during their physical life.  It’s penance after death.  We all understand for mysterious reasons that a pilgrimage is a journey of some sort, where we will process through whatever it is that sent us on the pilgrimage, and it will result in some sort of revelation or healing. Penance is what we all have to do when we broke something that belongs to someone else, because of our own actions, be them intentional or unintentional.  The truth of this exists no matter where we are.  The courts of restitution where we pay to make things right, or time taken from us in payment of our actions.  It is noteworthy that the time that is taken from us is not given to the person for home the time was taken from us.

The over-the-top long-winded story above is intended to help the reader understand themselves and for the reader to evaluate the credibility of the messenger, me.  The glory belongs to God alone for all of it.  I am nothing like qualified for the calling He has and be it in accordance with His will and not mine.  His will and His will alone do I seek in sharing any of what is shared.

This method, best portrayed in Field of Dreams, of hearing from God is one of the methods through which God works through me.  I’ll label it, “I heard from the heavens.” This is the first time I have bothered to describe and label the method. Prior to this, I had no need to name it. The words come through to me as something like one-liners. Field of Dreams portrays it visually in the clearest depiction I have encountered.  They come very clearly into my head, most often through or in the middle of conversations with others where what He wants me to hear is verbalized and it’ll stop me mid-sentence to process what just happened.

The most recent one, “Go back to where it all started,” happened in a setting where that guidance was given to a patient and her husband as my first patient of the morning while having a pre-med student shadow on what I would later learn to be the last time I will see him for the foreseeable future. My time with him closed with both of us realizing the power of the statement we both understood while it was being revealed. Others include, “Let the side battles play out,” “Brace yourself,” ”It’s all connected” and the one that created such a wall of awful that God sent me an Aaron (my publisher Gary) “Write the narrative.”

The last one shifted a few times to “Remember that narrative, I told you to write?” and then to “Would you please right the frigging narrative already!”  That was last July.  Gary dumped a book on my lap that we published in December.

I didn’t even get to talk about what happened at the Stations of the Cross.  The first reading by the students brought me to tears. “Go back to where it all started.”  The song choice with each of the stations was divine.  The song with the first station melted me. I can’t even remember what song was played. I don’t have it in me to type all this out right now as I believe the multiple epiphanies that came through it will be the worthier narratives.  I’ll share one.

The largest failure of my life was not receiving the spiritual headship of my family, and then raising my sons in the Church.  That narrative is for another day. What I heard while at the stations of the cross was, “Go back to where it all started” again only this time it includes my wife and I taking our sons, now both adults, to the stations of the cross next week. I just now realize, it is how God begins to manifest my (and likely a multitude of others prayers) prayers of restoring my family’s inheritance and the blessing upon them, that which is the fullness of the Catholic Church that is so massive through my family’s spiritual ancestry as to make it something like that’s my church. The spiritual ancestry is the topic of a multitude of future posts and an uncountable series of, “I heard from he heavens.” Allow me to elaborate.  I know, you’re used to that now.

Last October, for reasons I don’t fully understand, God put it on my heart to begin to claim the blessing for my children and to start to intentionally pray barriers of protection for them, to begin to pray actively for the woman that God is preparing for them both. I had started this prayer process for my eldest son 7 years ago when he went off to Michigan State University. My second son just turned 18 and I have learned from my past failures. I came across a new album put out by Kari Jobe called the Blessing. The song, the blessing just called to me to worship and go to prayer. “Go back to where it all started” comes to my mind now as I am literally having another epiphany of “It’s all connected.” It’s been a strange day.  My life shifted the night of the live release of the Nativity episode of the series The Chosen where at the end, Mary Magdalene is smuggled by Luke to Mother Mary to record the Nativity that Mary had not shared up to that point  The show closes with a candle lighting scene where Mary is in her bed, eyes closed, praying the prayer of Numbers 6:24-26. I was shocked because I didn’t know the song the Blessing was nothing more than reading scripture while worshipping.  I have come to know when this happens, the power cannot be fully described.  I eventually met the guy who did the lighting in that scene of The Chosen over a period of three days at an encounter in Dallas, that was part of the First Dallas Pilgrimage narrative.

I was awakened that night at about midnight with very clear words, “Go learn about your grandfather.”  Ok then, there’s no point in even trying to go back to sleep.  I got up, turned on the Ancestry and went to work.  3 hours later, on this very late night of December 3, I now understand how the prayers of my father working through his long life running from God on earth manifested. My father passed away April 11, 2020 while I was working in Nyack New York in the middle of the COVID bubble in a hospital that was wrecked by COVID. That narrative is found in my book Alive Again. I’m quite sure there will be plenty more to come from that 32 days.  I barely scratched the surface of it thus far.  Anyway, my father’s birthday is December 5^th.

My father introduced me to my grandfather in a manner that is my version of how Jack Kinsella prompted his son to introduce him to his grandfather, and thereby helped heal a hardened heart of a son, so that he could establish a complete and full relationship with his earthly father, and in so doing pave the way for the reconnecting of the son’s relationship and now I realize as well, the grandson’s relationship with their Heavenly Father.  Wow… I gotta let that settle in for a minute.

That night, God, through my grandfather, introduced me to one of my great-grandfathers Sir Walter D’Autun in 1170, who is the first “Dalton” and patriarch of every Dalton from Ireland. and the Irish Legend (Pure Irish History and Truth) of his wife, a princes of France. I went to sleep three hours after my “I heard from the heavens”  wake-up call 95% certain I was directly descended from Louis VI, King of France. My existence shifted that night. I now know this lineage to be 100% truth, and a topic for some other time, again. This one is likely content for it’s own book, because it was also the beginning of what I had tentatively called, “The epiphany spiritual ancestry.”

The culmination of the last 15 months is the narrative of the deliverance of my father’s prodigal grandchildren by “take them back to where it all should have started” and  “A global reset” Ugg.

I have to keep this one short. My beautiful bride and I are both children of prodigal Catholic son fathers and mothers of protestant background. Neither of us ever entered the divine order of the Catholic Church through the sacraments. My eldest brother was baptized late, but my parents did not raise us in the Church.  For me, not being raised in any church, I was the equivalent of being spiritually abandoned, left to “figure it out on my own.” This narrative is more assuredly not appropriate for this particular narrative, except what is necessary here.

Let us return to Field of Dreams and the messages that Ray receives.

As I said, they’re something like one-liners. As I share them going forward in the context of events, they serve to connect what is happening at the time with what I heard in the past or what was recently told to me.

The most recent one, “Go back to where it all started” has led to some doozy revelations. Another one is “It’s all connected” and “Don’t bother trying to understand your wife, learn about your Church, and I’ll take care of guiding your wife.  Understand and your heavenly bride so that you can understand your perfect blessing of your earthly bride.” That one was a couple days ago, and I’m still working through the WHOA….

It was last week, while traveling to mass that I began to seriously ponder how this works.  What does an answered prayer look like?  Recall from a previous post of the mother’s answered prayer for a lost son manifesting through me. I’ll discuss how this sequence worked momentarily. Finding this at the bottom of the now 13 pages of single spaced-full page reading, recall what I said above.

“If you build it, he will come.”

I think it is much more intense than we can begin to fathom, but will soon understand for God is revealing himself to His chosen people again, so that they may turn their eyes back toward Him from the idols they have erected in His place that have enslaved us all.

I can find no other explanation to the manner in which I heard from the Heavens can be explained or attributed as anything other than divinely inspired and originating from the kingdom of Heaven.  I request someone to come up with a better explanation to help test the authenticity of the messenger and thereby testing the message’s authenticity.  Am I a trustworthy messenger and is what God is revealing through me trustworthy?

“Go back to where it all started”

Numbers 6:24-26 – The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace

Have a blessed day.  Thank you for your perseverance.

Logging out,

Poor Fellow Soldier of Christ