Medjugorje Message: May 25, 2016
Dear children! My presence is a gift from God for all of you and an encouragement for conversion. Satan is strong and wants to put disorder and unrest in your hearts and thoughts. Therefore, you, little children, pray so that the Holy Spirit may lead you on the real way of joy and peace. I am with you and intercede before my Son for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
June 2016
Our Lady uses the word “presence” in this monthly message from Medjugorje. She says, “My presence is a gift from God for all of you and an encouragement for conversion.” Indeed Our Lady’s apparitions as Queen of Peace are a supreme blessing and gift in our troubled times and unpeaceful world. But her message goes on to reveal that each one of us–if we are living in conscious contact with the indwelling Holy Spirit–should be able to say the very same thing: “My presence is a gift from God for all of you and an encouragement for conversion.” By being “present to Presence“–awake and aware of the Divine Love indwelling ourselves and animating all of reality at every moment–each one of us, in the quality of our own Spirit-infused presence, shall be for those around us “a gift from God” and “an encouragement for conversion.” Why do we often fail to experience this quality of “Presence” in ourselves and in others?
Our Lady says, “Satan is strong and wants to put disorder and unrest in your hearts and thoughts.” Quite simply, the satanic ego never sleeps but works relentlessly to subvert, dominate and sequester every event of our daily life as fuel for the False Self programs of gaining safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control through our own
autonomous, self-centered effort, struggle and manipulation. This is why so many incidents or events in our day–all neutral and benign in themselves–seem to have the power to throw us off balance, to steal our peace and joy, to destroy our “good mood” and make us gloomy, grouchy, nervous, angry or ill. Someone cuts us off in traffic; we’re slighted or ignored by a salesperson who should respect us; we receive an unexpected piece of news (either good or bad); we’re rejected by an employer, colleague, relative, friend, or acquaintance from whom we want acceptance, approval, esteem, or some need met; we get an unfavorable doctor’s report on our medical tests; we’re unable to convince our child to make the life choices we think best; we have a financial or job setback that threatens our economic security; we lose a battle of wills with another person over some particular decision or project….on and on go the endless daily scenarios in which events both big and small exert their influence upon us.
Many times, as Our Lady says, in our egoic reactions to these events, “Satan is strong and wants to put disorder and unrest in your hearts and thoughts.” We find our hearts suddenly cast into a sea of unrest and our thoughts into a chaos of disorder. We become distracted, preoccupied, or even obsessed by the triggering event, no matter how petty or insignificant it is, objectively. When this happens, we are no longer “present” to our life; we have lost our “presence” to the Divine Presence undergirding everything in the NOW of each moment. We have spun out of the peaceful, present-moment orbit of the interior Holy Spirit who holds all things in the confidence and equanimity of perfect trusting abandonment to God.
How do we regain our footing when, through our own reactions to life events, satanic disorder and unrest knock us off balance? Our Lady says: “You, little children, pray so that the Holy Spirit may lead you on the real way of joy and peace.” As always, Our Lady’s answer and antidote to the plight of our human condition is PRAYER. When we close out the compulsive murmurings of the satanic ego (voicing fear, anger, grief, alarm, worry, revenge, etc.) in favor of our prayer practice–rosary, lectio divina with scripture, Holy Mass, Eucharistic adoration, chaplets, devotions and novenas, charismatic prayer, and especially the silent non-conceptual meditation of contemplative prayer that opens our hearts and minds to God’s presence and action within us–the Holy Spirit will truly “lead us on the real way of joy and peace.” This “real way” is the path of Ultimate Reality in which we learn to “LOVE WHAT IS” in total abandonment to Divine Providence, seeing with the “eyes of faith” God’s Presence in all that is, moment by moment.
In this “Real Way of Joy and Peace,” the up-and-down roller coaster events of daily life no longer have the power to unhinge us from the interior balance and confidence of the Holy Spirit–the Divine Inner Presence to which we are present with all three centers of our being (physical, intellectual, emotional) and with all our faculties of heart, mind, soul and strength. Present to Presence, we ride the waves of each day–hour by hour, minute by minute–in the steady confidence of the “Real Way” (or “Way of Reality“) that is joy and peace with all that is, resting in the Divine Order of God who is “all in all.”
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
and every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Faith transforms the earth into a paradise. By it our hearts are raised with the joy of our nearness to heaven. Every moment reveals God to us. Faith is our light in this life. — Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade
St. Bonaventure describes this path. As he sees it, contemplation is the real purpose of the Christian life, and to it everything, including philosophy and theology, must render service. — Fr. Willigis Jager
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The New Testament naturally associates peace and joy as expressions of a life centered in Christ. As is the danger with all vocabularies, these words have often become mere Christian jargon. We talk of peace, love and joy and the fruits of the spirit because they are things that should characterize our life together, but rarely do. Nor can they, unless the journey to the center has passed from the external to the interior. Meditation is a way of peace because it pushes us forward, or deeper, into that inner center of the heart where all the illusions, pretense and self-deception that block us from peace are dissolved. Because we often rationalize our desires and prejudices we need a way such as meditation that takes us to a perception deeper than reason.
We will never find peace in the midst of our worries and problems by thinking our way through them. Thought is a false labyrinth that always returns us to the same confused starting point. Prayer is the true labyrinth that takes us deeper than thought and leads us to the peace that “passes all understanding.” Letting go of our anxieties is our greatest difficulty, which shows the negative resilience of the ego….In many ancient labyrinths it was a monster that was found at the center, a thing of fear and threat to life. The Christian labyrinths positioned Christ at the center of all the twists and turns of life. In Christ we find the dissolving of fear in the final certainty of love. Meditation is the work of love and it is by love, not by thought, that God ultimately is known: the knowledge that saves is the knowledge of love. — Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
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Morning Prayer
Lord, in the quiet of this morning hour
I come to You for peace, for wisdom, power,
to view the world today through love-filled eyes;
to be patient, understanding, wise;
to see beyond what seems to be, and know
Your children as You know them, and so
nothing but good in anyone behold.
Make deaf my ears to slander that is told;
silence my tongue to anything that is unkind;
let only thoughts that bless dwell in my mind.
Let me so kindly be, so full of cheer,
that all I meet may feel Your presence near.
O clothe me in Your beauty, this I pray,
let me reveal You, Lord, through all the day.
— Ella Syfers Schenck
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Our Heart and the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus & Mary (June 3-4)
The Mother of fair love will rid your heart of all scruples and inordinate servile fear. She will open and enlarge it to obey the commandments of her Son with alacrity and with the holy freedom of the children of God. She will fill your heart with pure love, of which she is the treasury. You will then cease to act as you did before–out of fear of the God who is love–but rather now out of pure love. You will look upon Him as a loving Father and endeavor to please Him at all times. You will speak trustfully to Him as a child does to its father. If you should have the misfortune to offend Him, you will abase yourself before Him and humbly beg His pardon. You will offer your hand to Him with simplicity, and lovingly rise from your sin. Then, peaceful and relaxed and buoyed up with hope, you will continue on your way to Him. — St. Louis de Montfort
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The Only Way to Achieve Peace
“Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit the land.” The meek are those who do not get angry in the face of insult or injury and who have begun to dismantle their need or demand to control other people, events, and their own lives. When they experience an insult or humiliation, they do not feel it as a loss of power. Hence, they are free to continue to show love. The meek refuse to injure others regardless of the provocation. They are not judgmental. They may not approve of someone’s conduct, but they refuse to make a moral judgment about the person. Rather, their freedom from their power/control center enables them to have great compassion for those who are still imprisoned in the straitjacket of power needs that never rest and that can never be fulfilled.
The teaching of Gandhi, who preached the practice of nonviolence, points to a new kind of consciousness in which, instead of returning an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, one goes on showing love. Nonviolence is not a passive attitude but one that actively shows love no matter what happens. The love is so delicate and sincere that it refuses to take advantage of one’s persecutor when he is vulnerable. The meekness proposed in this Beatitude is not passivity but the firm determination to go on loving no matter what evil another person does to us. It believes that to show love is the true nature of being human. This behavior undercuts violence at its roots. There is no end to the chain of violence until one of the contenders refuses to respond in kind. The determination to go on in spite of immense provocation is the only way to achieve peace among families, communities and nations. This presupposes and manifests the inner freedom to which the Gospel invites us.
— Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
The Synod process allowed for an examination of the situation of families in today’s world….The complexity of the issues that arose revealed the need for continued open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions. The thinking of pastors and theologians, if faithful to the Church, honest, realistic and creative, will help us to achieve greater clarity. The debates carried on in the media…range from an immoderate desire for total change without sufficient reflection or grounding, to an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules….I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us towards the entire truth (Jn 16:13), until he leads us fully into the mystery of Christ and enables us to see all things as he does…. This Exhortation is especially timely in this Jubilee Year of Mercy…because it seeks to encourage everyone to be a sign of mercy and closeness wherever family life remains imperfect or lacks peace and joy….I will examine the actual situation of families, in order to keep firmly grounded in reality….Finally, I will offer an invitation to mercy and the pastoral discernment of those situations that fall short of what the Lord demands of us.
(from the Preface to Amoris Laetitia—Apostolic Exhortation on the Synod on the Family)
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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
