Prophecy in Retrospect

Recently, I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother, and once again it occurred to me just how similar the character Marshal and I are. Save gender, there's a lot of things about the character I personally identify with. The fact that he was raised in a smaller town in Minnesota gives him similar attributes that I acquired growing up in small town BC - love of outdoors, a large family, and a certain set of values I associate with living in a smaller community. I also identify with Marshal's tendency to sing what he is doing. This is a trait I've been known for, and just the other day Mr. C caught me singing a ditty about the load screen for Dr. Who: Worlds In Time. But, this episode put some light on Marshal's beliefs in the occult, and where it comes from. I, like him, read those stories as a child and saw them as almost a form of religion. It wasn't fake, it was all real, all of it. The possibilities were endless, and all things plausible. I mean, come on, it's a big huge amazing world, and if a book told me that it was possible for certain paranormal phenomena to exist it must exist.

I know a lot of kids who have big wide open imaginations, but I don't think I knew anyone who took it as seriously as I did. I was kind of the Luna Lovegood of my elementary school, as I see it. I was weird, I believed in everything, and kind of encouraged other people to open their minds too. I did projects about aliens, could of gone to a public speaking event for elementary students in grade four or five for a paranormal research speech I gave, if I had said yes but I didn't because I was kind of embarrassed by it. Because even though I believed it, with all my heart, I knew that the other kids thought I was kind of weird for believing it the way I did.

Eventually I learned my lessons in believing in everything you read or hear, and trusting sources and all that sort of stuff. It took awhile, but eventually I learned that sometimes a ghost story is just a story, not a fact.

But you know what? A part of me still does believe in all that paranormal stuff. I just can't close out that part of my mind, no matter what.

So when I randomly found a mysterious book in my house called "Mysteries of the Unexplained" a book published by readers digest in 1982, I was thrown back into my childhood. It wasn't the same book series my Mom has on her shelf that I read to death as a kid, but the stories were similar enough and some of them were even the same that I found my mind being taken to insane realms of possibilities once again. This is the stuff science fiction fantasy is made of, the stuff of my youth. It's a nice way to reminisce while at the same time explore the realm of what could be rather than what is. As a person who dabbles in writing sci-fi fantasy, it's the perfect way to relax and take your mind to new places. At least for me.

So far my favourite section has been about prophecies, and here's why.

The first thing that caught my eye when I opened the book was this image. Which made me think, respectively, of the TARDIS and Balloon Boy. Which made me laugh to imagine someone predicting balloon boy. Then I read the blurb (the book is written all in short blurbs laid out in a seemingly random pattern) which states that these are images from Cyrano de Bergerac's early science fiction works Voyage to the Moon and Sun published first in 1656. First off, I was happy to learn that Cyrano was a real person, it just made me love the play a little more. Second, I was shocked to learn that he was considered a prophet, and that he made references in his works of fiction to rocket propulsion. But there it was. He was the first to write of electricity, light bulbs, tape recorders, hot air balloons, berm houses and mobile homes. Oh, and he also wrote a short story about a Doctor from the sun who travelled through space and time in a box.

The book was published in 1982, so some of the prophecies printed hadn't hit their time yet. By that I mean, there are a few of them talking about the future, and one in particular caught my eye because of current events. It's about the papacy. I thought I'd share.

Basically, the blurb-article talks about the historical popes, and how this Saint Malachy of Ireland predicted what the popes would be known for in only a few words written in Latin. He said there would be 112 popes, and he wrote about each in order. Some of the predictions were really vague, but many of them were considered quite accurate given the facts we know about each popes reign (is reign accurate?). Of course, I looked into it more out of curiosity (here's the wiki on it!), but it seems to me that this St. Malachy was kind of a legit prophet to some extent. The prophecies were short, but they were also kind of eerily accurate. And, if it is to be believed , after this pope comes the end of the papacy as we know it.

So I looked at the state of the church, the papacy, and religion in our modern world. I could easily believe that there's going to be a big change in the church soon, I mean look at the way society is starting to view religion in general. Things are changing, a lot.

That being said, I'm kind of curious to see what happens here. I'm not routing for the end of the papacy, not exactly. I'm routing for the prophecy to wind up being accurate. So that I can confirm or deny it. And this looks to me like a prophecy that may actually be likely to happen in my lifetime. I mean, anyone can try and tell me Nostradamus acurately made prophecies, but his works were published in no specific order with no time frame references. They were kind of a mess, and are rather hard to translate, so you can sort of just slap a "Nostradamus predicted that!" on any global event and it can sorta kinda seem accurate.