Tag Archives: phenomenology

In the Spring of 1985 I concluded my Master’s Thesis and its theme was an unusual one: An Approach Towards Transcendent Exposures, A Greater Ministerial Awareness of The Significance (or Non) of Visions and Apparitions. I coined the term “Transcendent Exposures” to represent all those occurrences wherein, throughout the Millennium, people have had actual or purported exposure to something manifesting itself from the Transcendent Plane of reality—like the Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje that were most pronounced at the time. I say unusual, because whereas the others in my class were exclusively focusing upon conventional concerns in the area of ministerial praxis, I went out on a limb to portray a “transcendental dimension” which at the time was not looked upon too favorably within the scholastic field. In this sense, I was forever The Rebel {grin} amongst my peers; from the earliest days of my seminary training, right from the start as we all shared together in the classroom what brought us to the calling of priesthood, when I described my “mystical encounters” with the writings of St. John of the Cross, there were “grave looks upon the faces of the priests” present in the room. Indeed, theirs was a world centered on “historical consciousness” framed methodologies as any reference to spiritualities that bespoke of apophatic mysticism had fallen on bad times. read more