The horrific massacre in Tucson, Arizona happened on January 8th. Six innocent people died tragically and twenty were injured.
What I am going to write are some of my thoughts, just ideas, but I thought readers of my blog might find these thoughts interesting.
When at the beginning of January thousands of birds died mysteriously and fell to the ground, in different places in the world and there were fish die-offs as well, I wrote a blog titled, "Are These Warnings?" which stated my concern about ecological degradation that is becoming more and more problematic in our world. In any event, after looking at the images of the dead birds, I was struck by something. One of the types of birds that had a massive die-off was the red- winged blackbird. When I looked at the pictures of the videos of the dead birds, what struck me was the color red on the wings of the birds. That's what caught my eye, it could have just been a coincidence but that drew my attention for some reason. I then looked through a New Collegeville Bible Commentary by Catherine Cory that I have on the Book of Revelation and on page 53 I found the following line, "In Revelation, red is the color of violence and bloodshed." I read that after I saw the images of the birds and I remember thinking, "What does this mean?" In Revelation, the "evil one" is imaged as a red dragon.
I watched an intersting video clip by Fr. James Martin on the America website. I thought it was good. In it he talks about the massive bird deaths and all the talk about Apocalypse. It's worth watching at YouTube. It's titled, "Apocalypse When?" One of the things that he said was that we shouldn't try to look into the Book of Revelation and try to interpret it literally......oh well, too late for that!
Let's pray that the rest of the year will be less violent and more peaceful. Please God!
NJA
