There are the rumblings. There has been that swarm in California -- little tremors, some not so little. There is the rumbling beneath Mount St. Helens, foretelling a potential eruption, and near a much larger volcano at Yellowstone. There have been significant quakes in Japan and most recently the capital of the Philippines -- a magnitude-six, none of them big enough to cause a major event, but omens.

Iran was shaken the other day, a country that has been the focus now of nuclear-terrorist concerns (just as Afghanistan was rocked by quakes soon after September 11), and last but not least, a tremor in Mexico shook a Catholic theological conference last week, a conference full of bishops, at the moment of Communion (or so it was reported over a major Catholic newswire).

All this raises the question of what the rumblings may portend. Are they just routine trembles of the ground or does it have to do with the the next stage of purification (after the lash in Florida)?

Christ indicated earthquakes (see Matthew 24) as part of Divine justice. Will we now see that? Or do the quakes point to an unexpected aspect of purification?

For those with ears to hear, the warnings, yet to peak (perhaps even quite a ways from their peak), have been intensifying since the early 1990s and bring the question of what's next in this period of purification. For years, folks have been reporting inexplicable rumbling sounds in the earth, from the East Coast through Ohio and on to the West. The prophecies in which we put most stock had correctly indicated that an event would occur in New York to break its "pride" (this materialized as 9/11) and regional weather events that would be accompanied (in the words of one) by "strange loud rumblings."

We had the storms, which were Florida's version of 9/11, and now there are the rumblings that lately are materializing not as inexplicable sounds but on seismometers.

Whether the more mysterious ones were a seismic phenomenon, an artifact, or a spiritual manifestation is anyone's guess. What we can say is that earthquakes in one part of the world often seem to presage others.

Is anyone listening? 

Something to do with the earth is almost sure to play into the series of coming events. And if it takes the form of quakes, small ones could lead to bigger ones. In 1906, the famous quake in San Francisco was accompanied by even more powerful quakes in Japan and Ecuador.

Indeed, shortly after the great San Francisco quake there was a huge tremor in the Aleutian islands, and just thirty minutes after that was a yet greater one in Chile.

There were major quakes that year in New Guinea, Australia, the Antilles, China, and again in Chile, bigger than any seen in years!

"Normally you have one magnitude-8 earthquake every one and a half to two years," we were told by Lowell S. Whiteside of the National Geophysical Data Center. "That year there were about ten of them."

Prediction: the period we are in will see a magnification of such historic events and there will be a "storm" of earthquakes that will focus on Asia but hit around the world, including in at least one unexpected area.

For decades seismologists believed that earthquakes were unrelated to each other and that it was just a coincidence when they came in a cluster. It is no longer looking like such is a "coincidence."

Instead it appears that when one tremor resonates through the earth, it sets off a chain of what are often larger ones.

In some cases, a quake in one part of the world will precede another by just hours -- the length of time it takes a seismic vibration to get there. According to Dr. Whiteside, the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake in San Francisco may have triggered seismic activity as far away as Hawaii.

Smaller quakes often presage a larger one.

And right now, the activity includes the notorious "ring of fire" -- that seismic hotbed that stretches from southern South America up through North America and across to Japan, the Philippines, and down to New Zealand.

Mount St. Helens is in this "ring" -- as are 11 other volcanoes in the Cascadian zone and the faults that haunt California.

There is something deeply mystical about the ring. The sulfurous smoke from the lower magma is most visible from the volcanoes on Hawaii -- where the Blessed Mother's rival, a fire goddess, was so revered and where there are still altars to her. 

Of all geologic disasters, a mega-volcano far bigger than Mount St. Helens, perhaps at ocean bottom, is the greatest concern. That could be followed by a quake or rock collapse causing a tsunami.    

As we head into a time of natural turmoil, we can expect some of God's warnings to come in the form of major and perhaps unprecedented seismic activity, activity that will rumble for days or weeks, that will be without modern precedent, that may even form major chastisements. It is just such regional events that have been indicated by some of the recent seers. Visionaries in Ireland have forewarned of sounds coming from the ground like claps of thunder and the sensation of a split in the earth and an immense wind. In Venezuela Maria Esperanza once warned that the earth's core "is not in balance."

"It's like putting a bullet in a gun," says Dr. Whiteside. "If the stresses are there and they're just waiting for a trigger, it's like putting a bullet in a gun. All you have to do is pull the trigger." 

That's if you want one.

If you don't, what it takes is faith. You can fast and pray and quell a quake (or for that matter -- see Matthew 17:20 --  affect a mountain).

October 2004

[adapted from Sent To Earth]