Sleep Hallucinations or Miracles?: A Bit of Bibliographical Diary Keeping by a Secular Monk.

By Larry Burington

The author, who attempted to become a Cistercian monk more than two decades ago, lacked the humility to do so, so in short he failed. But the Lord God Almighty made him into a contemplative and had other plans for him anyway. So now he is a lay member of the Roman Catholic faith, and observes the practices of a secular monk. Meaning he keeps sev

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lawrence Van Reagan
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088059371

Book preview

One

The Joy and Torment of the Contemplative

Brief Introduction by the author: Many of the locutions or visions I get while going through life tend to be about as useful as the gas escaping my tailpipe and should just be ignored. But some tend to be interesting and are fun to write about and probably has much to do with the Communion of the Saints. I mean really, every time I profess The Apostles' Creed, I profess to believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen. And this is what this book is about. It should be noted that some persons call these hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations (relating to your state immediately before going to sleep or as you're waking up respectively). And every once in a while they look more like miracles.

            I am a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I am a member of the laity, I am not a member of any established religious order, and have no calling to be a priest; and most of the clergy has no idea who I am (most of those that did have died during the last 24 years).

            Furthermore, I consider myself to be a secular monk. Meaning, I stay in secular society; but observe at least Morning and Evening prayer, the two most important hours (and usually observe Midday and Night prayer as well). This is similar to that of the Secular Franciscan Order, who do not wear a habit, take vows, or live in community (they gather together in community on a regular basis). The community of secular religious living in Cochran, GA is a little thin; probably just me.

            I have a small stack of diaries/journals that I have kept over the last couple of decades (or more), and I use that stack as a source of material for writing this manuscript. And many of my original entries contain material that is no more important than the drool that escapes a sleeping man's mouth; so I will not be publishing those. But like I said, some of it is fun or interesting to write about. Nothing is this manuscript should contain anything contrary to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, to the best of my knowledge.

            We are all members of the body of the church, and Christ Jesus is the head; and any miracles that come by way of the Communion of Saints is through God. And PLEASE, don't go pursuing or desiring any of this vision/locution/sensory stuff, or like-as-not you will be getting into a lot of tailpipe gas, demons, and/or you may find a doll size image of Satan doing a little victory dance on your chest; definitely not a good position to be in. And remember, God chose the Virgin Mary to be the mother of Christ Jesus, it wasn't the other way around. But of course, we have our salvation because she gave her consent.

JE: 21 August 2022 - After lunch at my favorite Asian restaurant, where I enjoyed a nice noodle and shrimp dinner complete with a variety of vegetables, I decided to ride my bicycle over to the local cemetery that’s about a block from my apartment. Mainly because I was aborting my trip to the grocery and a walk through the old cemetery seemed like a good place to divert my trip to, since I was nearly there anyway. There was nothing at the grocery that I needed to purchase that couldn't wait until tomorrow, which would be Monday. And my doctor has been telling me I need to walk 30 minutes daily; apparently I have hypertension, high cholesterol, and a pot belly.

            I haven’t been over there in several years, so I parked my bike on a spot that didn’t look like somebody’s grave and hung my backpack on the bike's seat; then started walking about and reading the dates on the grave markers and doing a bit of mental arithmetic. Some of those characters made it into their eighties; some apparently died much younger; and many quite recently; probably due to Covid 19. For some reason, I had thought that women normally outlived their husbands; but not according to the grave stones that I had looked at that day.

            Some elderly guy wearing a Mohawk for a haircut, and a pot belly like mine, asked me if this was the Cedar Hill Cemetery. The gentleman didn‘t look much like a Native American, but that doesn‘t mean he‘s not a least part Native American. Regardless, he was probably just a wan’na-be member of a sub-culture attempting to look like a rebel without a cause.

            At that moment in time I had no idea what the name of the cemetery was and said so; and the maybe Native American walked off. After I looked around and sort of noticed that there were a lot of cedar trees on this hilltop cemetery; at least the part of the cemetery that had not been completely leveled and cleared of trees; I did an Internet search on my phone, and sure enough, the name of the cemetery was indeed Cedar Hill Cemetery. So I went looking for the old guy with the pot belly and found him sitting in the driver's seat of an old Baptist Church’s van; I could barely make out the lettering on the side of the van; but it was still legible. The gentleman was sitting with his phone in his hand, so I asked him if he had Googled the cemetery's location too. He said yes.

            In the conversation that followed, he told me that it had been 15 years since he had last been here; and he couldn’t find the families grave lot, but he was needing to put two relatives in it. His statement made me sort of wonder what happened, but I didn’t ask. The bodies could have been in the back of the van for all I knew.

            This is an older cemetery, and some of the graves date back to the civil war and earlier. I also noted that a few of the older grave sites were being embraced by the adjoining woods to the south part of the cemetery; I couldn't even read the names on the markers. I peeked back into that section of the woods; it was densely overgrown; and I could see concrete markers or parts of an old house foundation back in there, not sure which. I guess the surviving family members, if there were any, neglected to pay the maintenance fees on the graves.

Speaking of former cemeteries, I ran across an interesting article on the Internet that mentioned a group of medieval Augustinian friars were having their graves messed with by researchers from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archeology. I guess with the proper permits and legislation (Henry VIII's break with the Roman Church), and respect; poking around in a person's grave looking for evidence of intestinal parasites is perfectly OK. If I read the article(s) correctly, the University of Cambridge was breaking ground on a museum renovation and discovered the former cemetery in 2017. Reference the International Journal of Paleopathology.

            Apparently, not all persons buried in the friary grounds were actually clergy (they weren't wearing friar's belts anyway). I believe wealthy persons from the local town could pay to be interred at the All Saints cemetery as well; I think that was a common practice in the friar's time. In the 1900's, I believe some influential citizens in South Carolina paid the Trappist monks for the right to keep their hunting lodge on the monasteries property; the monks had more than a thousand acres, so there was plenty of room for the hunting lodge and the monks. I also remembered driving by it in 1989; I think Br. John was driving; but my memory isn't what it used to be. The hunters harvesting the deer on the abbey's property prevented the animals from eating to much of the monk's corn while it was drying on the corn stocks. The monk's in 1989 had 20,000 chickens, and 20,000 chickens can eat a lot of chicken feed. The monks sold eggs for a living at that time. Nowadays, the monks run around the abbey chasing mushrooms instead of chickens. Or maybe the monks simply find it easier to care for the mushrooms; and mushrooms don't usually bite.

            Getting back to the influential members of the friar's time, I guess these wealthy person's influence and power were no longer in effect; for they had samples of soil taken from around their pelvises as well. So much for paying to have your bodily remains left in peace. I bet they had no idea that some heavy earth moving equipment was going to be cracking their skulls several hundreds of years later. (The latter is an assumption that I made based on the photographs of the bones in the graves.)

JE: As an aside, while reading some of my older journal entries (JE), I ran across this: (I believe it's called a hypnopomic hallucination; and some parties will say that it's nothing to be concerned with.)

            15 February 2000 - I saw a dang fish this morning when I woke up about 6:30 AM. It was swimming in the air above a text book on my desk. The roof had dripped on top of that book last night; condensation. I made a mental note to myself to move my computer desk over to the right about a foot. The fish looked very much alive and big for its size. It also had spots on it.

            Later in the day, I learned that the county water system was considered contaminated; and stayed that way until about 2 PM .

            So I guess a vision of a fish with spots can symbolize the need to move to a different town. Someplace where the toilet paper doesn't come up out of the sewage system and float down main street when it rains really hard for a long while; for example during a tropical storm. And I've never been crazy about tea colored drinking water coming out of the water faucet; and that happened on occasion in Panama City (and Lynn Haven), Florida.

            The book titled SIGNS & SYMBOLS IN CHRISTIAN ART by George Ferguson, and published by Oxford University Press, New York; offers a different opinion: The most frequent use of the fish is as a symbol of