Medjugorje Message: March 25, 2016
Dear children! Today I am carrying my love to you. God permitted me to love you and, out of love, to call you to conversion. You, little children, are poor in love and you still have not comprehended that my Son Jesus, out of love, gave His life to save you and to give you eternal life. Therefore pray, little children, pray so that in prayer you may comprehend God’s love. Thank you for having responded to my call.
Annual Message to Mirjana: March 18, 2016
Dear children! With a motherly heart filled with love for you, my children, I desire to teach you complete trust in God the Father. I desire for you to learn by an internal gaze and internal listening to follow God’s will. I desire for you to learn to boundlessly trust in His mercy and His love, as I always trusted. Therefore, my children, cleanse your hearts. Free yourselves from everything that binds you to only what is earthly and permit what is of God to form your life by your prayer and sacrifice–so that God’s Kingdom may be in your heart; that you may begin to live proceeding from the Father; that you may always strive to walk with my Son. But for all of this, my children, you must be poor in spirit and filled with love and mercy. You must have pure and simple hearts and always be ready to serve. My children, listen to me, I speak for your salvation. Thank you.
River of Light
April 2016
In these two beautiful messages given at the end of Lent for us to ponder during this Easter season, Our Lady continues a teaching on love and prayer from last month, when she said, “I am calling you to conversion. Little children, you love little and pray even less.” Now she tells us, “God permitted me to love you and, out of love, to call you to conversion. You, little children, are poor in love and you still have not comprehended that my Son Jesus, out of love, gave His life to save you and to give you eternal life.” Once again, Our Lady is trying to reach us with the message of LOVE that we have somehow missed throughout our lifetime of religious instruction and upbringing–the core message at the heart of Christianity, that God is love and everything we have is from God and thus ours “out of love.”
Our Lady knows that we have neither “comprehended” nor internalized this truth, even though it is the doctrinal foundation of our faith. Sadly, it has remained just that, a doctrine of conceptual thought and words–to which we pay lip service and wax eloquent on occasion–rather than our lived, experiential reality. One need look no further than the evening news to see that our “Christian nation” is organized politically to foster an environment of hate at every level, often spewed forth most forcefully by those who claim the label “Christian.” And in our own private lives, if we’re honest we must admit that selfish ego often triumphs over sacrificial love in our daily choices and interior thoughts and feelings. In our fallen human condition, our dualistic minds naturally divide and compete, pitting one “side” against another in every arena of life, always maneuvering for the victory of “me, myself, and I” in each situation. Indeed, as Our Lady says, we “love little” and are “poor in love.” How on earth can we move from this egocentric condition to the higher level of consciousness to which Our Lady calls us, in which we “must be poor in spirit and filled with love and mercy, have pure and simple hearts and always be ready to serve“?
Our Lady’s answer remains the same as ever: prayer. She ends her message with the simple words: “Therefore pray, little children, pray so that you may comprehend God’s love.” Medjugorje has been called “Mary’s School of Prayer,” and in her annual apparition to Mirjana, she fleshed out this teaching in a clear and beautiful way. She said, “I desire to teach you complete trust in God the Father. I desire for you to learn by an internal gaze and internal listening to follow God’s will. I desire for you to learn to boundlessly trust in His mercy and His love, as I always trusted.” How different our lives would be if we took this teaching of Our Blessed Mother to heart! What “holy boldness” we would exhibit in confronting the challenges and obstacles of our daily journey, fully understanding our Lord’s words: “Fear is useless. What is needed is trust.”
There is an integral connection between LOVE and TRUST which Our Lady wants us to grasp. With a deep interior assurance of the Father’s unconditional love and endless compassion for each of us, proven beyond all doubt by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus our brother, we should have the same “boundless trust” in this merciful love that Our Lady had during her earthly life, never falling into great anxiety, quaking fear, or despondent despair when faced with the trials and troubles of life. This kind of trust and confidence in the Divine Assistance was irresistible to Jesus in his earthly ministry, as he repeatedly told those miraculously healed, “Your FAITH has saved you.” To comprehend God’s love is to drive out all fear from our minds and hearts, for “perfect love casts out fear”…and “one who fears is not yet perfect in love.” (1 Jn 4:18) The more we comprehend Divine Love, the less we fear anything that the world offers to scare us.
The kind of prayer that Our Lady wants to teach us is a prayer of silent attentiveness awaiting the still, small voice of God in the deepest center of our being–a prayer in which we “learn by an internal gaze and internal listening to follow God’s will.” In this prayer, we close our mouth and quiet our thoughts–not reading, reciting, or composing words of our own to pour out. Instead, we open the ear of our heart. (In prayer as in life, it’s good to recall we have one mouth and two ears, for listening at least twice as much as speaking!) Opening our hearts to contemplative prayer, we discover that God’s holy will is indeed written there, in our hearts of flesh (not stone)–more deeply engraved than on any exterior tablet or legislative text of rules and regulations imposed from outside ourselves. This “internal forum” of our human conscience is enshrined in the depths of our heart, built and placed there by God and awaiting our discovery and entering into it–the place where we can commune intimately with Him regarding every facet of our life.
But to truly be a “heart of flesh” upon which God can write His will and communicate to us his gentle compassion and mercy, Our Lady says we must prepare: “Little children, cleanse your hearts. Free yourselves from everything that binds you to only what is earthly and permit what is of God to form your life by your prayer and sacrifice–so that God’s Kingdom may be in your heart; that you may begin to live proceeding from the Father; that you may always strive to walk with my Son. But for all of this, my children, you must be poor in spirit and filled with love and mercy. You must have pure and simple hearts and always be ready to serve.” Perhaps no one can better guide us in practical ways to fulfill this teaching than the soon-to-be-canonized Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She wrote:
“In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. To make possible true inner silence, practice: Silence of the eyes, by seeking always the beauty and goodness of God everywhere, and closing them to the faults of others and to all that is sinful and disturbing to the soul. Silence of the ears, by listening always to the voice of God and to the cry of the poor and needy, and closing them to all other voices that come from fallen human nature, such as gossip, tale bearing, and uncharitable words. Silence of the tongue, by praising God and speaking the life-giving Word of God that is the truth, that enlightens and inspires, brings peace, hope, and joy; and by refraining from self-defense and every word that causes darkness, turmoil, pain and death. Silence of the mind, by opening it to the truth and knowledge of God in prayer and contemplation, like Mary who pondered the marvels of the Lord in her heart, and by closing it to all untruths, distractions, destructive thoughts, rash judgments, false suspicions of others, vengeful thought and desires. Silence of the heart, by loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength; loving one another as God loves; and avoiding all selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, and greed….in the silence and purity of the heart God speaks.”
Since Feeling is First
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
~ e.e. cummings
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Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
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The Resurrection: Life in Christ & Our Present Crisis
“There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) This Pauline insight throws the social and the mystical into the same pot. Like Jesus himself, it undermines every power structure by which the distinctions between people are elevated to an absolute level–the class, religious, economic or cultural systems in which we live locally. It confronts the safe environments of the local with the disturbing, heady vistas of the global where horizons collapse inwards. As they fall, the universal emerges–always more as a way of perception than an object of perception.
To meet the risen, cosmic Christ is to be “in Christ.” As is made clear from the resurrection stories, he cannot be grasped as an object merely looked at. As soon as we try to do this he disappears. He needs to be seen and we can only see him from that level of consciousness that the phrase “in Christ” tries to describe. It is easier to describe the effects of this experience than how it happens. So, Paul who knew the experience first-hand and was, by his own account, transformed by it, tells us that: “if anyone is in Christ the new creation has come. The old has gone and the new is here.” (2 Cor 5:17)
The resurrection sends us back to this world in a new way with renewed vision and understanding. The new creation is a way of living in the world, freed from the old compulsions, from addiction to violence as a way of resolving conflict and from the repeated patterns of oppression and exploitation that have culminated in our present crisis. Identifying our crisis with the Christian mystery does not mean that we solve the problem by baptizing everyone. The meaning of mission has changed for the modern Christian because of the ways the world has changed. Christian identity evolves–is enriched and elevated–when we risk our faith in a real encounter with the problems of the world. To stand above the fray, judging from a position of superiority is to end with a fortress mentality, a fundamentalism and exclusivism which eventually destroys faith because it erodes compassion. To believe in a new creation, however, means that we can help to tip the collective crisis towards hope and positive change rather than into despair and catastrophe. —Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
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Easter Wisdom from Pope Francis
Entering the tomb . . . . That is why we are here: to enter, to enter into the mystery which God accomplished with his vigil of love. We cannot live Easter without entering into the mystery. It is not something intellectual, something we only know or read about . . . . It is much more!
To enter into the mystery means the ability to wonder, to contemplate; the ability to listen to the silence and to hear the tiny whisper amid great silence by which God speaks to us. To enter into the mystery demands that we not be afraid of reality: that we not be locked into ourselves, that we not flee from what we fail to understand, that we not close our eyes to problems or deny them, that we not dismiss our questions.
To enter into the mystery means going beyond our comfort zone, beyond the laziness and indifference which hold us back, and going out in search of truth, beauty, and love. It is seeking a deeper meaning, an answer, and not an easy one, to the questions which challenge our faith, our fidelity, and our very existence.
To enter into the mystery we need humility, the lowliness to abase ourselves, to come down from the pedestal of our “I” which is so proud, of our presumption; the humility not to take ourselves so seriously, recognizing who we really are: creatures with strengths and weaknesses, sinners in need of forgiveness. To enter into the mystery we need the lowliness that is powerlessness, the renunciation of our idols . . . in a word, we need to adore. Without adoration, we cannot enter into the mystery.
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Mark Your Calendar
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To reject the contemplative dimension of any religion is to reject the religion itself, however loyal one may be to its externals and rituals. This is because the contemplative dimension is the heart and soul of every religion. It initiates the movement into higher states of consciousness. The great wisdom teachings of the Vedas, Upanishads, Buddhist Sutras, Old and New Testaments, and the Koran bear witness to this truth. Right now there are about two billion Christians on the planet. If a significant portion of them were to embrace the contemplative dimension of the gospel, the emerging global society would experience a powerful surge toward enduring peace. If this contemplative dimension of the Christian religion is not presented, the Gospel is not being adequately preached.
– Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
