Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2016
Dear children! In this time of grace, I am calling all of you to conversion. Little children, you love little and pray even less. You are lost and do not know what your goal is. Take the cross, look at Jesus and follow Him. He gives Himself to you to the death on the cross, because He loves you. Little children, I am calling you: return to prayer with the heart so as to find hope and the meaning of your existence, in prayer. I am with you and am praying for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2016
In this mid-Lenten message from Our Lady we receive some gentle motherly reproof as she says, “In this time of grace, I am calling all of you to conversion. Little children, you love little and pray even less. You are lost and do not know what your goal is.” Notice that Our Lady is addressing “ALL” of us in this call; none of us is exempt or excused from her challenging words. The call to conversion is a hallmark of the season of Lent, but for Our Lady it has been a perpetual plea in her 35 years of apparitions at Medjugorje. The Greek word for conversion is “metanoia” and means a reversal of direction, a turning around, a change of mind, heart and attitude. It means changing the direction in which we are looking for happiness.
Our Lady alludes to this need by saying, “You are lost and do not know what your goal is.” Imagine a basketball court or football field where we grab the ball, then run about chaotically, unaware of the direction in which the ball must be carried, or of the hoop and goal post toward which we should aim. In a similar way, many of us are chasing after things not even on the playing field of our life’s aim. We spend the precious days of our transitory sojourn on earth seeking the symbols that our lost and confused culture dangles before us as the “goods” that bring happiness–symbols of safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control, and sensual pleasure. To attain these things, we believe, will mean living the “good life.” But in reality these are the “emotional programs for happiness rooted in the energy centers of our egoic or false self” that will never work. Jesus addressed all of them in the desert of temptation, and during our 40 desert-days of Lent we, too, are urged to confront them realistically and see through the demonic lies they tell us.
Moving from this important first phase of conversion, we may have renounced the feverish pursuit of material wealth, other people’s high opinion, status symbols of our culture, dysfunctionally dependent relationships, domineering control, and the self-medicating effects of drugs, alcohol, food, and other pleasurable substances. We may feel we’ve come into a clearer vision of our spiritual goal and at least have the “ball back on the field.” But in our fallen human condition deception follows us even (and especially) into the realm of our religious and spiritual striving. For the same energy centers and emotional programs of the false self are at work no matter which “ball” is in play–whether our “spiritual” or our “secular” pursuit of meaning and happiness. Egoism and selfishness invade our religious practice just as insidiously as any other area of life, as was so clearly depicted in the gospels, where our Lord’s harshest exhortations were for the pious, ultra-religious scribes and Pharisees.
In Christianity we are well-versed in the three theological virtues of “faith, hope, and love.” But the satanic ego finds ways to hijack even these lofty goals. St. Paul and Our Lady both point us in the direction we need to go. St. Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a clanging gong or a clashing symbol. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing….So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13) St. Paul’s teaching flowed naturally from the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, who told the religious leaders of his day, “Go and learn the meaning of these words: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” (Mt 9:13) To his questioners he affirmed that the first and greatest commandment is love of God (as the Mosaic law taught), and the second was likewise love: loving the neighbor (i.e. any other human being) as oneself. All other commandments rest upon these two, Christ taught. (Mt 22:37) Going further, he taught his disciples not only love of friends, but love of enemies, as well, in order to love as God loves.
Our Lady began her message, “Little children, you love little and pray even less.” After saying that we are lost and unaware of our goal, she bluntly commands us: “Take the cross, look at Jesus and follow Him. He gives Himself to you to the death on the cross, because He LOVES you.” Hello??!!! We can almost hear a note of exasperation in Our Blessed Lady’s voice as she says these words; shall she take up a crucifix and hit us over the head with it? LOVE LOVE LOVE!!! The cross is about LOVE! Jesus’ life and death on this earth are about LOVE! God is LOVE! The meaning of human life and its only real goal is LOVE! In this Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis is working to redirect our whole “lost” world–both Christian and non-Christian–to the one and only legitimate and universal “goal”…by putting love and mercy first. In line with the Pope’s thinking, William Sloane Coffin wrote, “Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think ‘the greatest of these’ is faith, defined as infallible doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the heart. If faith can be exclusive, love can only be inclusive.” Today these are important and relevant words for followers of all religious traditions in our torn and broken world.
As always, it is Our Lady’s conviction and teaching that “prayer with the heart” is the path we must take to conversion and fullness of life in Christ. She says, “Little children, I am calling you: return to prayer with the heart so as to find hope and the meaning of your existence, in prayer.” Our Lady knows with full confidence that if we will only pray, if we will only enter into silence with nothing but our consent to God’s presence and action within us, we will find Love—Divine Love–the meaning of our life and the one goal toward which we, no longer “lost,” will begin to strive each day.
Paschal Mystery
From your red sweat
of agony
some drops are seeping
through my pores
into this dark and anxious
garden night
when everyone is sleeping through
the tension of unresolved paradox.
Thank you for this wincing
wakefulness this sore awareness
of yielding my will
to the suffering necessary
for transformation.
Our sorrow is one.
From your bloody back
a brutal whiplash is
bending me over,
flaying my flesh
my careless presumptuous
bodily stewardship in a
quickening burst of pain,
blessing me with the
humiliation of my pride.
Our scourging is one.
From the raw meat
of your burdened shoulder
the weight of this cross falls
upon me intentionally laying down
my life in the false self,
in bitten tongue and chastened choices
taking up your
abundant life within by
carrying my share forward.
Our way is one.
From your heaving wracking sighs
my own breath grows short
and labored,
stretched beyond endurance on
this ego-killing wood,
abiding silent unto completion
of this high-stakes conversion
of consciousness
to the last dregs of the bitter end.
Our death is one.
Green grass
springs up beneath my feet.
You, dew-glistening
breeze-blowing Freshness
who approached from without
to awaken within,
pleased to let me be
in my True Self resurrected
each morning
from the tomb of the false self
with its death-dealing
fears needs insecurities
into the glory hallelujah of Love:
Risen Christ,
my Self Absolute,
triumph now in
infinite possibility!
Our life is one.
— m.m.
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Christians are not people of the cross. Christians are people of the empty tomb, the ones who know that every step on the way to the Light is the Light. — Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
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God truly dwells in this place, and I did not know it, Jacob once said. Thus you seek God, too, and meanwhile he is everywhere. Everything proclaims him to you. Everything gives him to you….You fret and fuss over an idea of God and meanwhile in essence you already possessed him. You chase after perfection, while it lies in everything that meets you unsought for. In the shape of your sufferings, your activity, of the impulses you receive, God himself comes forward to meet you. All the while you strive in vain for exalted notions that he refuses to clothe himself in…. Don’t we know that divine love wants to unite with us through all creatures and events? That only for this reason does it cause, arrange, or allow all events that surround us and happen to us, so that we come in this union, which is their only purpose? But if that is how things are, what prevents every moment of our life from being a kind of communion with divine love…?
The kingdom of God…is here and now, in us. It is the Divine that expresses itself in and through us. If we take the step out of paranoia into metanoia–if we awake from the illusion of ego, from this dreaming condition–and enter the reality of God, harmony and peace will come to dwell in us….In the depth of our being, there is a reality that lies outside time and space. As we stand on the edge of this abyss, we have to acknowledge that the problems can be solved only through a new consciousness. As Christians, we can call it Christ-consciousness; others may call it Buddha-consciousness or Krishna-consciousness….Regardless of the label, the solution of the problems takes place first of all in us, and only then in the world around us. The destructive element in the world grows out of our ego’s pigheadedness. When we resist the kingdom of God in ourselves, we resist the evolution of humanity and fight against this divine plan. In our stubborn egotism we end up struggling against our real happiness. But through our metanoia–through the awakening of Christ-consciousness within us–comes the transformation of ourselves and the whole human race. —Fr. Willigis Jager, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis for the Jubilee of Mercy
“How much wrong we do to God and his grace when we speak of sins being punished by his
judgment before we speak of
their being forgiven by his mercy.”
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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
