Medjugorje Message: July 25, 2016
Dear children! I am looking at you and I see you lost; and you do not have prayer or joy in your heart. Return to prayer, little children, and put God in the first place and not man. Do not lose the hope which I am carrying to you. May this time, little children, every day, be a greater seeking of God in the silence of your heart; and pray, pray, pray until prayer becomes joy for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
August 2016
In this month’s message to our suffering world, Our Lady again links “joy” and “prayer.” She sees that we are both joyless and prayerless in this time of violent crisis, fear and anger. She says, “I am looking at you and I see you lost; and you do not have prayer or joy in your heart.” The Jesuit priest-paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin said, “Joy is the most infallible sense of the presence of God.” Lack of joy does not mean God is absent, but rather our “SENSE” of the divine Presence is missing, for to be aware of God’s indwelling presence at our inmost center is to be in a state of JOY. (If God were truly absent, we would all be vaporized in less than a nano-second; nothing would exist!) So how have we lost the joyful sense of the Divine Presence which is always here?
Our days are filled to overflowing with a continual bombardment of news, words, and images comprising a relentless narrative of fear, anger, hatred, violence, blame, suspicion, accusation, taunting, and profanity that fill us with dread of the next individual or mass attack that might affect our own life. Such an environment is stressful and traumatic to our human psyche, even if nothing tragic or horrible is happening to us personally, for we are all interconnected on a subtle, sensitive energetic level as one species of human beings gifted with self-reflective consciousness. The more we hear and see the negativity of the sub-human behavior taking place in our world and the low-level, ignorant, bigoted, hateful speech surrounding it, the more oppressed our inner spirit becomes as we fixate upon the personalities and ego-trips of the loud voices and famous people rising to the forefront of the daily news. Our minds are swirling with the rhetoric of politicians, celebrities, Twitter feeds, and social media reactions to the “breaking news” of the day. None of this is a recipe for “joy”; rather it is being “lost,” as Our Lady says.
She continues: “Return to prayer, little children, and put God in the first place and not man. Do not lose the hope which I am carrying to you.” Our Lady is calling us to conversion–to change the direction in which we are looking for happiness: away from the futile and deceptive false self programs for happiness that our dominant culture pushes upon us every day like a drug dealer pushing heroin, and toward God who is Love, indwelling our inmost being and the inmost being of all Creation. This conversion of our consciousness that will re-order our priorities and re-focus our attention, bringing healing and peace to us, can only happen through prayer. What is “the hope“ which Our Lady is “carrying to us”? She carries Jesus Christ–the Prince of Peace, who “makes the two one, breaking down the dividing wall of enmity” (Eph 2:14) and gives us the peace “that the world cannot give.” (Jn 14:27) As Queen of Peace, Our Lady at Medjugorje has given us the hope of her plan’s fulfillment: “Peace, peace, peace, only peace!” In dark times of despair on our troubled planet, we must not lose this hope.
Our Lady’s message ends with a specific instruction: “May this time, little children, every day, be a greater seeking of God in the silence of your heart; and pray, pray, pray until prayer becomes joy for you.” This last phrase has been repeated many times by Our Lady–“pray until prayer becomes joy for you.” If, as Teilhard said, “joy is the infallible sense of the presence of God,” then, according to Our Lady, prayer itself is meant to “BECOME” this “infallible sense of the presence of God” which is JOY (even in the midst of a world of trouble, and irrespective of any outward circumstances). We struggle a lot with prayer–understanding what it is, and how to do it. Is it saying words out loud to God? Is it reciting other people’s words or making up our own? Is it visualizing scenes from scripture or imagining a dialogue with Jesus? Is it repeating a verse or chant while fingering beads on a rosary? Is it praising, asking favors, giving thanks, expressing contrition for sins? Is there a formula to follow? A right way and wrong way to pray?
In this month’s message Our Lady calls us to the contemplative dimension of prayer, asking that “every day be a greater seeking of God in the silence of your heart.” Our Lady knows that our joyless, troubled existence is partly due to the constant bombardment of WORDS and IMAGES upon our psyche; this has always been true of our human condition, but especially so today when we are rarely “unplugged” from the endless media “buzz-feed” of negative impressions pelting us from the outside world. Centuries before there was any electronic or mass media, the mystics of our Christian contemplative tradition–desert fathers and mothers, hermits, monks, cloistered nuns and devout laypeople–were wrestling with the inner bombardment of thoughts, words and images. Spiritual classics like The Cloud of Unknowing; The Imitation of Christ; The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection (St. Teresa of Avila); and Ascent to Mount Carmel, Dark Night of the Soul, and Spiritual Canticle (St. John of the Cross) were penned by those on the contemplative path of “every day being a greater seeking of God in the silence of the heart.”
These Christian mystics of all eras of history discovered what the mystical core teachers of every religious tradition have found: that an experience of the living God beyond thoughts, words, images, feelings, and senses is indeed possible, this side of heaven, within the SILENCE and stillness of the heart and mind at rest in a state of open, aware receptivity to Divine Presence. A daily practice such as Centering Prayer prepares and disposes us for this lived encounter with God that gradually becomes an attitude of consciousness: JOY in the Divine Indwelling Presence that nothing can take away!
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Going Deeper in Prayer . . .
Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude. — Wayne Mueller
Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place to which we may continuously return. Eternity is in our hearts, pressing upon our time-worn lives, warming us, calling us home to Itself. Yielding to these calls, utterly and completely, to the Light within, is the beginning of true life. — Thomas R. Kelly
If you begin to live life looking for God that is all around you, every moment becomes a prayer. — Frank Bianco
The Spirit is awakening the contemplative life among all God’s people. Today we offer our intention for stillness, oneness and unity with this short prayer: Beloved, we know that You are at our deepest center, uniting us in peace and harmony. For the good of all humanity, bless this precious time of silence. Amen. — Contemplative Outreach
Contemplation is the perfection of love and knowledge….Contemplation goes beyond concepts and apprehends God not as a separate object but as the Reality within our reality, the Being within our being, the Life of our life….Contemplation is a mystery in which God reveals Himself as the very center of our inmost self….Contemplation is the highest and most paradoxical form of self-realization, attained by apparent self-annihilation. — Thomas Merton
In Centering Prayer, one listens not to “hear” something but to become aware of the obstacles to hearing the voice of the Divine Presence inside. — Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
If we can understand how silent nature is, we can learn the redemptive purifying power of silence. Whatever is simply itself is silent. It does not matter whether it is talking or quacking or blowing in the wind. Silence is not influenced by noise if the noise does not try to take over anything else’s identity. Silence purifies. It restores us to our true nature and reverses the counter-currents of the unnatural….In the great discernment between needs and desires which silence brings us to, we are restored to a direct and harmonious relationship, a non-duality, with ourselves. The only victim of this is the phantom of our imagined self and its fears and illusions. — Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
Maintaining external silence provides a context for the interior silence of not thinking about any particular issue. External silence is a stepping-stone to contemplative prayer and to that presence that has different levels of intensity, all the way to experiencing the glory of God (God’s presence within). The latter is what contemplative prayer is–an interpenetration of spirits that is more intimate than any other human experience. Contemplation has its own agenda, and so is not something we can control. By repeatedly cultivating interior silence in formal prayer and attentiveness to God’s presence in our activities, moments of union will begin to pop up in daily life spontaneously. — Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
In his poetic eulogy, “The World of Silence,” the French philosopher Max Picard says that silence is the central place of faith, where we give the Word back to the God from whom we first received it. Surrendering the Word, we surrender the medium of our creation. We unsay ourselves, voluntarily returning to the source of our being, where we must trust God to say us once again. In silence, we travel back in time to the day before the first day of Creation, when all being was still part of God’s body. It had not yet been said, and silence was the womb in which it slept. — Barbara Brown Taylor
The spirit that is healthy is the spirit of an explorer. We are not terrified by the beyond. We are not too tired to seek what is ahead. The spirit that is truly healthy knows that there is no future for us unless we set out into it wholeheartedly. Silent prayer is simply a way of coming to that basic healthiness of spirit, to the state wherein our spirit is not assailed and weighed down by trivia or what is merely material; a state wherein we are open to ultimate truth and to ultimate love. We are summoned to live life not out of the shallows but to live our lives at the source…. The discipline of the daily return to prayer is simply that commitment to turning aside from everything that is passing away and to living our life out of the source of all being. That is why we must leave behind all images, all thoughts, all ideas and imaginations; and we must be silent, as profoundly silent as we can, in the presence of the author of life, the author or love. — Fr. John Main, OSB
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August 15: The Assumption of Mary
Wisdom surpasses in mobility all that moves, pervades and permeates all things. She is a breath of the power of God, an emanation of glory; nothing impure can enter her. She is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of God’s action and an image of God’s goodness. She is but one, yet Wisdom can do all things and, herself unchanging, she renews all things. She enters souls, making them prophets and friends of God….She is indeed more beautiful than the sun and surpasses all the constellations; she outrivals light, for light gives way to night, but evil cannot prevail against wisdom. — Wisdom 8:21-29
The Wisdom of the Father clung round her neck and in her arms rested the Power that moves all things….She progressed further and further in love, and her spirit burning in her ever-wakeful soul was fixed upon his divine glances. For love of her Son she feared neither toil nor grief nor dangers nor poverty nor want, neither terrors nor death nor the rage of the wicked king. She was most pleasing in her activity, full of joy in what she did, prompt in obedience, devoted in her service, humble in her submission. In everything she acted with success; she ordered all things vigorously and wisely. — Bishop Amadeus of Lausanne
Mary is a model for the Church’s mission–that of being a dwelling-place for the Word, preserving it and keeping it safe in times of confusion, protecting it from the elements. Hence she is also the interpretation of the parable of the seed sowed in good soil and yielding fruit a hundredfold. She is not the thin surface earth which cannot accommodate roots; she is not the barren earth which the sparrows have pecked bare; nor is she overgrown by the weeds of affluence that inhibit new growth. She is a human being with depth. She lets the word sink deep into her. So the process of fruitful transformation can take place in a twofold direction: she saturates the Word with her life, putting the sap and energy of her life at the Word’s disposal; but as a result, her life is permeated, enriched, and deepened by the energies of the Word, which gives everything its meaning. First of all it is she who digests the Word, transmuting it; but in doing so she herself, with her life, is in turn transmuted into the Word. Her life becomes word and meaning. That is how the Gospel is handed on in the Church; indeed, it is how all spiritual growth and maturity are handed on from one person to another and within humanity as a whole. It is the only way in which mankind can acquire depth and maturity…the only way to progress. — Pope Benedict XVI
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
The welfare of the family is decisive for the future of the world and the Church….We do well to focus on concrete realities….We look to the reality of the family today in all its complexity, with both its lights and shadows….The tensions created by an overly individualistic culture, caught up with possessions and pleasures, leads to intolerance and hostility in families….We rightly value a personalism that opts for authenticity as opposed to mere conformity, [but] if misdirected it can foster attitudes of constant suspicion, fear of commitment, self-centeredness and arrogance. Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others ….There is no sense in simply decrying present-day evils, as if this could change things. Nor is it helpful to try to impose rules by sheer authority….We need to be humble and realistic, acknowledging that at times the way we present our Christian beliefs and treat other people has helped contribute to today’s problematic situation. We need a healthy dose of self-criticism. We often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation….At times we have also proposed a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families. This excessive idealization…has not helped to make marriage more desirable and attractive but quite the opposite. We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families…We find it difficult to present marriage more as a dynamic path to personal development and fulfillment than as a lifelong burden. We also find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.
(from Amoris Laetitia—Apostolic Exhortation on the Synod on the Family, ch. 2)
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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
