28
Pompeii. Sodom. Ancient Rome. Fire. But a quandary remained: how did the axis of the earth and warfare — fire — go together, for while flames could come from a geologic eruption, the Fátima Enlightenment mentioned “war.” Certainly then, warfare was in the mix, and it was likelier by the year. Even if hostilities in Ukraine didn’t metastasize, the spirit of division was manifest in all corners, and Medjugorje, which John Paul II called the “fulfillment of Fátima,” had dialed into the idea of great military conflict when on January 25, 2023 in her monthly message Our Lady said, “Dear children! Pray with me for peace, because Satan wants war and hatred in hearts and peoples. Therefore, pray and sacrifice your days by fasting and penance, that God may give you peace. The future is at a crossroads, because modern man does not want God. That is why mankind is heading to perdition. You, little children, are my hope. Pray with me, that what I began in Fátima and here may be realized. Be prayer and witness peace in your surroundings, and be people of peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.”
It was extremely similar to what she’d said in 2022 on the day Pope Francis consecrated Russia, the idea of Satan, war, a “crossroads.” And it meshed with the Third Secret and its fiery sword.
In the imagination — from that Bible with missing or torn pages, left as clues — here perhaps it would be page 213 in the New Testament, which brings us to Revelation (8:5): “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar, and threw it to the earth; and there followed peals of thunder and sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake,” which sounded like “the tip of the spear as a flame.”
Geology and meteorology, yes, but also: a nuclear event in New York?
It wasn’t just Manhattan. Symbolically, Manhattan was the world. So yes, New York was high in risking its future.
But so did other places, especially in Asia, particularly mega-cities in Asia which were not as altruistic as New York and where atheism had such a stronghold as to evoke or resurrect their history of fantastic ancient catastrophe.
From the dark dense past would not only come those idols, that Mongol brutishness, but also quakes powerful enough to cleave earth into lakes or detonate volcanoes that could be heard at a distance — this had happened at Krakatoa in Indonesia — of two thousand miles.
If Gavreel were to show this, it would be chasms spewing tornadic geysers of grit and mud and massive sinkholes growing yet larger — gargantuan — a group of peasants in China near Guangzhou or in India or on the veldt of Africa, a look of deep fright carved into their faces, squinting down as farmers half a world away, in Peru, or a windswept bog in Ireland, gape and gasped with equal scare as hollows the size of Hells Canyon opened on yawing terrain. Creeks and trees swallowed. Rivers emerging from their limits. Dams instantly toppled. Therefore floods.
Surely, if this was in our destiny, Gavreel would show the hologram of a volcanic blast with heat-driven winds suctioning trees, the blast tunneling twenty-five miles up while it yanked out roots far below and everything in between.
Was this one of the “whirlwinds” Sister Lucia recorded? What if volcanoes popped in thunderous unison, dozens of places, a deafening orchestration of pumice clogging harbors hopelessly, floating even on roiled tides of the ocean?
War, geophysical events, and something — seen or unseen — from the cosmos?
Might unknown pulls of gravity tug at the uprights of earth?
On the same “missing” page: “The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters” (Revelation 8:10).
Already we see in the news forewarnings of geology. “A Russian TV crew flying over the Siberian tundra this winter spotted a massive crater thirty meters (100 feet) deep and twenty meters wide — striking in its size, symmetry and the explosive force of nature that it must have taken to have created it,” reported articles in September 2020. “Scientists are not sure exactly how the huge hole, which is at least the ninth spotted in the region since 2019, formed. Initial theories floated when the first crater was discovered near an oil and gas field in the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia included a meteorite impact, a UFO landing, and the collapse of a secret underground military storage facility. While scientists now believe the giant hole is linked to an explosive buildup of methane gas — which could be an unsettling result of warming temperatures in the region — there is still a lot the researchers don’t know, and the other holes have gone unexplained.”
There had been a flurry of small earthquakes in Iceland — thousands. Unusual. Europe had felt temblors. Turkey. In Iceland were at least a hundred and thirty volcanoes, many capable of turning that frost into the gruel of a seething caldron.
And if an angel were around, perhaps as the Tiber threatened Rome, he would lament that the Church no longer could guide with power because it no longer believed in the mystical dimension, it no longer subscribed to prophecy. It is why so many left: no longer did they feel the Holy Spirit, only the cold calculus of theology. Only if it returns to its supernatural heritage — the mystical body, its true roots — will it recover from what it has been through since the Enlightenment. That is an ironic name for it,” an angel might muse. “The secular ‘Enlightenment’ was one of the darkest periods in modern history. It was when mankind put on blinders. It is when unenlightenment — Descartes, Voltaire, Bacon, setting the stage for Nietzsche, Darwin, scientism, Marx — cast its spell upon mankind.”
The real Enlightenment had come to Sister Lucia though a minuscule fraction – an infinitesimal few, even of Catholics, even of devout ones — had heard of it.
It wasn’t just a shortcoming, a minor point: the tedium of sermons. No: along with homosexual scandals, it had played a huge role in decimating attendance, causing a vast swath of the flock, especially the young, to lose closeness with Jesus. That distance opened both the laity and Church to demonic onslaughts, one after another. The general societal trend of irreligion, plus clerical aloofness, and religious feminization, including portraits of Jesus that made Him look almost genderless (far softer than what one saw with the Shroud or in His words) served to estrange men. When it came to the real Lord, powerful was the description of George G. Ritchie, a Virginia psychiatrist who as an army recruit in his youth had a “near-death” experience during which he claimed to have encountered the Lord. “This was not the Jesus of my Sunday school books,” he recounted. “That Jesus was gentle, kind, understanding — and probably a little bit of a weakling. This Person was power itself, older than time and yet more modern than anyone I had ever met. Above all, I knew that this Man loved me. Far more even than power, what emanated from this Presence was unconditional love. A love beyond my wildest imagining. This love knew every unlovable thing about me — the quarrels with my stepmother, my explosive temper, the sex thoughts I could never control, every mean, selfish thought and action since the day I was born — and accepted and loved me just the same.”
A sterile, academic Church, often at odds with itself, had left the flock with a distorted image of the real Jesus.
Oh, there were good priests. Many. There were great priests. Many also. And the younger, the more devout. There was plenty of room for hope.
But for the moment there was sterility, made worse by division: Satan was doing his inventive best to turn both liberals and conservatives against Rome (as well as each other), and disheartening was how Christian commentators felt free to treat the Supreme Pontiff like any political target. (This was especially true in Catholic bloggery, which too often was toxic).
It was true that Pope Francis was different, from a continent that never before had generated a Pontiff, a region that spoke differently with greater (and sometimes chaotic) candor. Also, Francis was a Jesuit. The surprise was not that he had liberal tendencies (along with some decidedly conservative ones); the surprise was that a Jesuit had been chosen in the first place.
Controversy had taken place almost before the last wisps of muted gray from the Sistine chimney.
Adding to the angst: in 1965, Garabandal seer Conchita Gonzalez had said a “great miracle” (similar to what was later indicated at Medjugorje) would coincide with “a singular event in the Church that happens very rarely, and has never happened in my lifetime.”
“It is not new or stupendous,” she added, “only rare, like a definition of a dogma — something like that in that it will affect the entire Church.”
Interesting it was that Garabandal occurred from 1961 to 1965, paralleling Vatican Two.
An angel like Gavreel would bring visions not only of what was to come, but of the past. I saw flashbacks of the Middle Ages. I saw the dark corridors, the haunting specter, of the Great Bubonic Plague. I saw villages where no one survived and there was no one, local or visiting, to inter the dead, bodies stacked like firewood. I saw corpses so repulsive that wolves wouldn’t scavenge them. And the Church? Monasteries emptied. So did dicasteries. Priests, bishops, seminarians were counted among the dead. Once vibrant sanctuaries of faith now stood hollow and void, their holy occupants succumbing to the relentless grasp of mortality. I saw that physical infections have spiritual precursors. There were sex scandals before the Plague hit. Indulgences were sold, as was the right of clergy to marry. Cash was piled high at the papal palace, which had moved to France. There was narcissism. There were stage dramas instead of liturgies. It was the era they invented the vanity mirror. The parapets of palaces were bronze. Some were gilded. Peasants owned embroidered shoes. Starkly apparent it was that the physical afflictions besieging humanity in those dire times sprout from spiritual rootstock. The shadows of moral transgressions cast themselves before the arrival of the Plague. “Like your own time,” said Gavreel, “everyone felt rich. There had been warnings. They had been given signs. The Plague was preceded by storms, rumblings, phenomena. Tremors rang the bells of churches in Italy. Lightning struck steeples, which were made of bronze. If you look into it, you’ll find the origin of bacilli in cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, an area known both for ancient tremors and whispered tales of enigmatic UFO sightings, which likewise taunted Europe, where strange balls of light were recounted and where there were meteorites and weather had turned erratic, as in your time, as in this time when again everyone is rich.”
Meteors?
I learned that a train of small asteroids is thought to have hit the eastern Atlantic in this general era, a procession of bolides that found their mark in the vast expanse of the eastern Atlantic, causing tidal waves, especially in Portugal.
I was stuck on meteors, seeking to map myriad threads of this tapestry spun by Gavreel.
Gavreel’s celestial voice would resonate, imparting the wisdom of far bygone days. “In that era,” he might speak, “warnings were heralded. Signs were bestowed upon mortals, a prelude to the impending catastrophe. Plague arrived on the heels of tempests, thunderous rumblings, and anomalies that teased also the European populace. Strange orbs of luminescence danced across the night sky, and the day too — in at least one instance, exorcised urgently by a bishop, manifestations married to nature’s gasps, as the very fabric of weather turned capricious.
“Such parallels echo your present time, where opulence reigns supreme and embroidered shoes have transformed into luxurious pickups and SUVs. Once again, prosperity surrounds all, but its evanescence remains an ever-looming specter. In your occult — in your psychics, in your astrology, in your tarot, in your trance mediums, in your crystals, in your Santeria, in your mantras, in your witchcraft you ladle the caldron of ancients, your revive darkest gremlims, whose device it is to orchestrate calamity.”
After a pause, he would continue: “Epidemics can follow great disruptions, or shout their arrival,” Gavreel might explain. “In your epoch, they precede what is to come, as does the strife of your disobedience, of rebellion, which is as witchcraft, as disrespect shown authorities, including the Pontiff, who kneels in supplication as stones are thrown at his house, as Jacinta saw in a vision.”
The Angel of New York might then show a swirl of black smoke, one that circulated the earth. Around and around. A coiling snake. Another clear spot would open, then close; close then open. A region in this world would learn devastation — a region relied upon for resources. When Lot looked toward Sodom, said Genesis, he saw it go up “like the smoke of a furnace” (1-28).
Were there not mysterious strangers at Sodom?
Did they not come to warn, guide, and protect? Was one of them Gabriel?
Within the realm of this earthly plane, a particular region would bear the weight of unfathomable devastation — a region hitherto regarded as a bastion of sustenance, a provider for the many. This land would become a crucible of destruction, its very foundations shattered and its lifeblood tainted.
Would angels show herds of animals stampeding on the veldt of Africa, amidst a constant earthen regurgitation of noise, soon a roar? Might the stars seem somewhat askew as the planet turned channels? Cosmic order, once unwavering in its harmony, would undergo subtle yet perceptible shifts. Like a grand celestial puzzle, the arrangement of stars would hint at an enigmatic rearrangement, a choreography in sync with the metamorphosis unfolding below. About the end of time Saint Vincent Ferrer prophesied (in the year 1401), “You will see a sign and you will not know it, but note that at that time women will dress like men and will behave according to their tastes and licentiously and men will dress vilely like women.” In Grottaferrata, Italy, in a monastic settlement, an Orthodox saint named Nilus (1005) was said to have prophesied that toward the end of the next millennium (the 1990s), “the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable.”
Likewise was a prophecy — variously attributed to Saint Brigid, Saint Columbus, and even Saint Francis of Assisi! — that said, “The sign of these events will be: when the priests will have left the holy habit and will dress as common people, women as men and men as women.”
This was difficult turf. The internet was good at fabrication.
But the drumbeat of apocalyptic predictions meant something, and when it came to cataclysms, one scanned upward, at the great unknowns of this cosmos and perhaps universes beyond it.
Here, forces were in motion that could have untold effects on the galaxy, in stellar infrastructure, not to mention our minuscule planet. At Garabandal seer Conchita claimed the “warning” would be a cosmic event, “like two stars… that crash and make a lot of noise, and a lot of light… but they don’t fall. It’s not going to hurt us but we’re going to see it and, in that moment, we’re going to see our consciences.” (Many years ago, I had called Conchita but she steadfastly declined to say a word about the secrets.)
And elsewhere?
In Pasadena I was told at NASA that the likeliest “doomsday” scare would be a large comet materializing from around the blind side of the sun, entirely unanticipated. Gavreel would stare down at the sidewalk as he intoned in a low solemn cadence, “If man goes to the extreme, so will nature, and one day a comet will hang in the noonday sky, before your television cameras.”
*
And so the doomsday prophecies spun. Would such events even occur? Or would humans snap back into a morality that’d prevent disasters, beseeching a God Who kept all in order, Who fine-tuned gravity?
But for God’s Grace — and that was available in abundance — anything could happen.
How many knew that a decadent spit of land off the Rockaways called Hog Island (and patronized by gamblers, corrupt Tammany Hall politicos, and those seeking the services of prostitutes in the Rockaways) disappeared (in waves of thirty feet) in a hurricane in 1893?
Boiling, churning gas and ash.
Seismic events. Astronomical ones.
“They do not know the punishment that is coming their way,” said a reputed seer named Amparo Cuevas in Mexico, quoting Jesus on February 11, 1988. “The punishment is near, it will consist, my daughter, of the stars will collide with the earth, they are about to destroy the majority of humanity. The star Eros will illuminate all humanity, it will be horrible, my daughter, it will seem that the world is on fire, it will only be a few seconds, many of the humans will want to be dead at that moment. Even the just will see it, but it will not affect them at all. Many humans will also die from that great impression; it will be like a rain of fire, the whole earth will tremble, my daughter, it will be horrible.”
Few were the prophets who weren’t doomsayers.
Before her death in 1961, a beatified Italian sister, Mother Elena Aiello, quoted the Lord as lamenting that “in the dark they continue to live in their sins and move further away from God; but the punishment of fire approaches to purify the earth from the iniquities of the wicked. A firestorm will fall on the earth. This terrible punishment that has never been seen in the history of mankind will last for seventy hours.”
“The bad example of parents trains the family in scandal and infidelity, instead of virtue and prayer, which is almost dead on the lips of many,” she had said. “Stained and withered is the fountain of faith and sanctity of the home.”
New York, yes. But also Los Angeles: Oh, Gavreel would have much to project in visions here. He would have much to show in every city. He would have much to say to celebrities who mocked the Church, naked, with black candles. He would speak to those who hoarded money while Africans starved. He would address televised spectacles, the award shows flaunting their decadence for all to witness — the singers gyrating in garish attire of blood-red leather, dancers weaving through themselves in circles that called to mind the unhinged revels of Saturnalia — or worse, the clandestine congregation of a satanist’s ritual. Conclusively he would see through the cheap veil of entertainment for the worrisome idolatry, the alchemy, it was. It was all coming out into the open. Satan was showing what the Virgin of Medjugorje had called “his shameful face.”
Little wonder, then, that all the crazy beasts were reported, the skinwalkers and chupacabras and bigfoot and mothmen and aliens and giants and dwarves and ghosts and fairies and mapinguari and living dinosaurs, so very often in conjunction with the equally ephemeral sightings of UFOs. Here too was often an occult underpinning. Why would a man-ape leave behind — as was also true here — that sulfur smell or something comparably repugnant? How could so many be spotted — again like “UFOs” — without leaving final physical evidence (or at least, none that we yet knew)? In the case of mothman, who was first spotted in West Virginia, in 1966, the description was of a winged, red-eyed “man” who appeared just before a massive bridge collapse in Point Pleasant (which killed forty-six). Why would UFOs be spotted where bigfoot was — if both were not part of the same scheme (at least in many cases)? How brilliant it seemed, the part of the 2010 message that urged “the uncovering of those spirits which now install themselves as guardians for those who have invited into their hearts falsity” and said that “only those in union with God will be able to see in the darkness which so many expected and that already is upon the earth” while adding that “the dark spirits are now allowed to materialize in full due to the pretense and aspirations of man.” The world was not only stranger than we imagined but stranger than we could imagine, stranger than science. And deceptive.
It was the “final battle” Lucia had warned about.
It was not difficult to imagine “extraterrestrials” arriving as saviors — and as original Creator.
Anti-christ.
“Oh! how sad is My Heart to see that men do not convert (or respond) to so many calls of love and grief, manifested by My Beloved Mother to errant men,” Mother Aiello had quoted Jesus as saying. “Roaming in darkness, they continue to live in sin, and further away from God! But the scourge of fire is near, to purify the earth of the iniquities of the wicked. The justice of God requires reparation for the many offenses and misdeeds that cover the earth, and which can no longer be compromised. Men are obstinate in their guilt, and do not return to God. The Church is opposed, and the priests are despised because of the bad ones who give scandal.”
She allegedly saw the Madonna dressed in black with the seven swords piercing her chest, saying, “My Heart is sad for so many sufferings in an impending world in ruin. The justice of Our Father is most offended. Men live in their obstinacy of sin. The wrath of God is near. Soon the world will be afflicted with great calamities, bloody revolutions, frightful hurricanes, and the overflowing of streams and the seas.
“Cry out until the priests of God lend their ears to my voice, to advise men that the time is near at hand, and if men do not return to God with prayers and penances, the world will be overturned in a new and more terrible war. Arms most deadly will destroy peoples and nations! The dictators of the earth, specimens infernal, will demolish the churches and desecrate the Holy Eucharist, and will destroy things most dear. In this impious war, much will be destroyed of that which has been built by the hands of man.”
“The overflowing of streams and the seas” returned us, posthaste, to the Enlightenment of Fátima, where simplicity had so roundly trumped sophistication.
“Clouds with lightning flashes of fire in the sky and a tempest of fire shall fall upon the world. This terrible scourge, never before seen in the history of humanity, will last seventy hours. Godless persons will be crushed and wiped out. Many will be lost because they remain in their obstinacy of sin. Then shall be seen the power of light over the power of darkness. The rulers of nations make so much ado and speak of peace,” Mary said. “Tremendous will be the upheaval of the whole world, because men — as at the time of the Deluge — have lost God’s way, and are ruled by the spirit of Satan. Defiled in the mire, mankind soon will be washed in its own blood, by disease; by famine; by earthquakes; by cloudbursts, tornadoes, floods, and terrible storms; and by war. But men ignore these warnings and are unwilling to be convinced that my tears are plain signs to serve notice that tragic events are hanging over the world, and that the hours of great trials are at hand.”
29
Many predictions seemed premature. Aiello had recorded her messages in 1950, saying the scourge was “near” and that blood soon would be on the “streets of the world.”
That had not come to pass — not in the way it was portrayed. But this was a common puzzle when it came to a prophetic pulse: How much was simply in error, or simply the seer’s presumption, and how much was “premature” due to the timelessness of the spiritual realm?
One thing for certain: if Mother Aiello was transmitting actual missives from On High — a reckoning — it had not yet materialized. Or did it simply loom?
“See how Russia will burn!” the Madonna supposedly told Mother Aiello on Good Friday. And before the nun’s eyes “there extended an immense field covered with flames and smoke, in which souls were submerged as if in a sea of fire.”
“And all this fire is not that which will fall from the hands of men, but will be hurled directly from the Angels,” narrated the Madonna.
As in the Middle Ages, prophets had risen on all sides, including psychic ones. During the summer of 2008, a soothsaying medium published a book that said, “In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”
Were we in for another contagion?
Such folks spoke frequently of “earth changes,” including the most famous of them, Edgar Cayce, who “channeled” visions of the future in a hypnotic clairvoyant state and pronounced cataclysmic events that, occult or not, brought to mind the Fátima Enlightenment. “He claimed the polar axis would shift and that many areas that are now land would again become ocean floor, and that Atlantis would rise from the sea,” noted Wikipedia. “The belief that the California coast would slip into the sea — a common feature of Earth Changes predictions — originated with Cayce’s alleged prophecies. Belief in earth changes is also found among Native Americans, some of whom refer to the concept as ‘the Great Purification.’ These beliefs have occasionally been associated with Christian millennialism and beliefs about UFOs. Some New Age adherents believe that earth changes will preface a ‘Golden Age’ of spirituality and world peace.”
Said the director of Cayce’s own institute — further calling to mind Lucia’s verbiage — “We like to think of our planet as a stable home, but, in fact, its crust is always moving, it wobbles on its axis, and it is flying around in a space containing other objects, two of which [asteroids] passed so close in 2010 that they were inside the orbit of the moon.”
On May 28, 1926, Cayce made a link between temperature changes in deep ocean currents and weather changes on the surface. “As the heat or cold in the various parts of the earth is radiated off, and correlated with reflection in the earth’s atmosphere, this in its action changes the currents or streams in the ocean,” said the “sleeping prophet.”
Did the connection to psychics negate similar Christian ones, tying them into New Age) and raising question of their source, or — in a left-handed way — confirm them?
It was tricky territory. The devil certainly had glimpses of the future. And certainly, something was afoot. Average temperature in the United States was 54.62 degrees Fahrenheit in 1998, which placed it in a virtual tie with 1934 as the warmest year in records dating to 1895. It only got warmer in subsequent years. Climate swerves were always a sign, and despite all the politics, when I spoke to the director of the National Climate Data Center, this man who had served under both Republicans and Democrats and had access to the world’s greatest store of readings told me point blank that temperatures were arcing higher than they had not in centuries but in thousands of years.
In 2023 oceanographers were stunned by spikes in Atlantic heat, warning rightly or wrongly of unknown consequences as temperatures neared what they feared to be a historic and unpredictable “tipping point.”
“Prophets” were less reserved. “That day will be most fearful in the world!” Mother Aiello, now beatified, had relayed. “The earth will tremble, all humanity will be shaken! The wicked and the obstinate will perish in the tremendous severity of the justice of the Lord. The world will be once more afflicted with great calamity; with bloody revolutions; with great earthquakes; with famines; with epidemics; with fearful hurricanes; and with floods from rivers and seas. But if men do not return to God, purifying fire will fall from the Heavens, like snowstorms, on all peoples, and a great part of humanity will be destroyed!
“Russia will march upon all the nations of Europe, particularly Italy, and will raise her flag over the dome of St. Peter’s. Italy will be severely tried by a great revolution, and Rome will be purified in blood for its many sins, especially those of impurity! The flock is about to be dispersed and the Pope must suffer greatly.
“But soon terrifying manifestations will be seen, which will make even the most obdurate sinners tremble!
“If the people do not recognize in these scourges the warnings of Divine Mercy, and do not return to God with truly Christian living, another terrible war will come from the East to the West. Russia with her secret armies will battle America; will overrun Europe.
“The river Rhine will be overflowing with corpses and blood.”
The most potent in modern time had been a magnitude-9.5 in Chile, which in 1960 had generated a tsunami and killed thousands, felt as far as Japan.
That had been followed by a magnitude-9.2 on Good Friday in 1964, in Alaska, a jolt lasting for four and a half excruciating and roaring minutes.
The most powerful recorded quakes went back only to the 1930s; we knew only that in ancient times, civilizations had mysteriously and completely vanished in places like coastal South America, Egypt, and Turkey.
Might there occur a magnitude-10 — more than five times stronger than Chile? And really, was there a final limit (short of the earth splitting in twain) when it came to magnitude?
It forced one to contemplate the raw, chaotic power of the very ground beneath our feet, a seemingly stable foundation that, in truth, belies a boiling cauldron of roiling energies waiting to be released. We already knew that Manhattan was sinking under the weight of all that steel and cement, and that extraction of groundwater around the earth was causing it to slightly wobble. Are we then, mere dust motes in the face of such monumental fury, impotent to do anything but speculate on the unthinkable, tremble at the unfathomable?
But for God: yes.
There were those who fretted that “tectonic blocking” pausing great quakes was ongoing but soon would end.
Might a quake be felt by everyone in the world at the same time?
Was this one of the things that could occur if the angel Lucia saw unlatched the axis?
Or if Gavreel did?
One could also visualize the angel of New York waving a hand to materialize the holograph of a sinkhole beginning a rapid, voracious expansion, sending startled onlookers — residents nearby — to flight and swallowing an entire countryside. The desert shaking. Cascading into it. Like rapids into a vortex. One day, might we read of sink holes in places such as Siberia or Louisiana or upper Canada or New Jersey along with the desert locales where such chasms would plunge a thousand feet deep?
How about more if something in the vasty depths, in earth’s unknown cellar, were to implode?
In New York, we can envisage the pedestrians, those undulating waves of bobbing heads, first quizzical, then apprehensive, if suddenly the ground beneath them were to telegraph deep rumbles. On Fifth Avenue, many would flee to Saint Pat’s, staring with anxious, yearning looks at the stone vaulting along with the exquisite woodwork behind the high altar under the bronze baldachino — peering up as if watching for anything falling. From a pew one would hear shuffling feet, the distant ding of an inopportune text, the whispers from a group that looks Midwestern. No more clacking of cameras. The missing page from the Bible here, 219, New Testament, a chapter called “The Fall of Babylon: Kings and Merchants Lament Over Her,” which when found would read, “And kings of the earth, who committed fornication, and lived in delicacies with her, shall weep, and mourn over her, when they see the smoke of her burning. Standing afar off for fear of her torments, saying, ‘Woe, woe that great city Babylon, that mighty city: for in one hour is thy judgment come” (Revelation 18:9-10).
When one considered, in that same chapter of the Apocalypse (17:1), a “great harlot, who sitteth upon many waters,” one thought of the Hudson, the East River, the Harlem, the Bay of New York, and the Atlantic beyond. When one saw a “kingdom which hath dominion over the kings of the earth” (17:2), one saw the United Nations on one of the waters. When one saw “all manner of precious stone” (18:11), one looked to West 47th Street and the diamond district. When one saw “fornication” or “sodomy,” one saw this (18:1-3) in callgirls, streetwalkers, hookups, porn productions, gay bars all over town. When one saw a “great city, which was clothed in fine linen,” one saw storefronts on Madison, or 57th Street, or the models. When one saw “merchants made rich,” this was Manhattan. And when it came to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1): this was seen in towers, in high rises, in hospitals, at universities, in the hood, in corporate headquarters, in corner stores and delis, in train stations and airports, for every language in every dialect was spoken here.
“Woe, woe, that great city, wherein all were made rich, who had ships at sea, by reason of her prices.” Again, check.
In one hour (Revelation 18:19), “desolate.”
New York, and what is symbolized, was going to fall.
There might not be anyone else in the pew, wood vibrating, a steady quiver, then a wobble and undulation that suddenly but inauspiciously halts.
Tremors would begin anew, this time with greater intensity, the flames of candles strobing, as if to indicate in one direction after another, as if fanned and then deprived of oxygen. A prance of erratic shadows. One would look toward the narthex and see befuddled tourists consulting other befuddled tourists and natives no longer cocksure, their confidence gnawed by the unknown. Was it noise from beneath, a subway explosion, or Isaiah 24:12-13:“Desolation is left in the city; and calamity shall oppress the gates. For it will be thus in the midst of the earth, in the midst of the people.”