There are many things happening around us, a good number coming from the ground. Holes in the earth's crust have developed from Siberia to Indiana to Louisiana. There are rumblings of volcanic activity from Iceland to Yellowstone. The strongest earthquake in Napa Valley in more than a quarter of a century struck over the weekend, followed by significant if not destructive trembles in Chile and Peru. This is of particular note because historically major quakes have come one after another despite distances between them of thousands of miles. We really don't understand the earth. Shortly after the great 1906 earthquake in San Francisco 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. Some of the sinkholes and quakes (see: Oklahoma) are caused by drilling. But it is way beyond what humans do. We do not create volcanic activity.  Some of it seems to reflect on an alleged prophecy from the famous apparitions of the Blessed Mother at LaSalette, France, where it was asserted (in a part of the messages that did not meet with official Church approbation) that "nature begs vengeance on account of men, and she shudders with dread, awaiting what must happen to the crime-stained earth. Tremble, earth, and you who profess to serve Jesus Christ, while interiorly you adore yourselves, tremble; for God will hand you over to His enemy, because the holy places are in a state of corruption; many convents are no longer houses of God, but pastures for Asmodeus and his own... The seasons will be changed, the earth will produce only bad fruits, the heavenly bodies will lose the regularity of their movements, the moon will reflect only a feeble reddish light; water and fire will lend convulsive motions to the earth's sphere, causing mountains , cities, etc., to be swallowed up."

This all is interesting in light of recent claims that in January of 1944 Sister Lucia dos Santos, seer from Fatima, while in front of the tabernacle in the convent's chapel (imploring God for enlightenment as to His Will, as far as writing down the "third secret"), "felt my spirit flooded by a light-filled mystery which is God and in Him I saw and heard: the point of the flame-like lance which detaches, touches the axis of the earth and it [the earth] shakes: mountains, cities, towns and villages with their inhabitants are buried. The sea, rivers and clouds leave their bounds, they overflow, flood and drag with them into a whirlpool, houses and people in a number unable to be counted; it is the purification of the world from the sin it is immersed in. Hatred, ambition, cause destructive wars. Afterward I felt in the increased beating of my heart and in my spirit a quiet voice which said: ‘in time, one faith, one baptism, one Church, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic. Heaven in eternity!’" This allegedly comes from an unpublished diary alluded to by her fellow sisters in an official publication of the Carmel of Coimbra.

If authentic (it was reported by a well-known Vatican journalist, Antonio Socci), it hearkens back to LaSalette and forward to apparitions -- likewise approved -- at Kibeho, Rwanda, where one of the sanctioned visionaries,  Anathalie Mukamazimpaka, told us she had a vision of an event in which "I saw mountains crashing into each other, stones coming out of the earth, nearly as if they were angry. I saw storms crashing against each other and fire coming from them. I don't know what this means. I was told that people are causing this and that it is coming."

It is very interesting in this time of "rumblings" (which we will be addressing in a special way next month, at retreats in California, and then New Orleans). No one is saying it's a "rapture" or the "end of the world." We are speaking of purification -- as told to seers who have the approval of the formal Church.

While we long had assumed that the image in the third secret -- of an angel ready to torch the world -- had to do with potential nuclear conflict (for it involved fire, and Fatima focused on the threat of Russia), or a comet, the diary entry, if valid, gives us pause and causes us to think in geologic terms.

The earth: is it beginning to convulse? And when it comes to pareidolia, did you ever note, in those volcanic clouds, the angry "faces"?

Rumblings. Fish die-offs. Climate swerves.

One day, we will realize a deeper component to nature.

--MHB (8/26/14)

[Michael Brown's books]

[See also: Retreats: signs of the times: Los Angeles and Santa Barbara]

[See also: volcanic images]