Medjugorje Message: October 25, 2016
Dear children! Today I am calling you: pray for peace. Leave selfishness and live the messages which I am giving you. Without them, you cannot change your life. By living prayer, you will have peace. By living in peace, you will feel the need to witness, because you will discover God whom you now feel to be far away. Therefore, little children, pray, pray, pray and permit God to enter into your hearts. Return to fasting and confession so as to overcome the evil in you and around you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
November 2016
Our Lady begins this message by saying, “I am calling you: pray for peace.” We have perhaps failed to understand her meaning in these three simple words: “pray…..for…..peace.” We take them as a directive for us to petition, solicit, or supplicate God to “give us peace.” But the context of her whole teaching at Medjugorje tells a different story–that Our Lady is not so much requesting our intercessory prayer to ask God for peace, but rather that we “pray [IN ORDER] for peace” to happen….that we “pray [IN ORDER] for peace” to be experienced in our heart, life and world. In other words, we can say prayers of petition to God for “peace on earth” ad nauseum, until the cows come home–as we have been doing for the past 35 years of Our Lady’s apparitions in Medjugorje–and yet peace does not come. Notice that she does not say, “Pray to God for peace,” but simply, “pray. for. peace.” Perhaps we have misunderstood Our Lady’s call, or interpreted it incorrectly–maybe in a shallow, superficial way that waters down the profound challenge it contains. This month she expounds upon this call in a way that clarifies her intention.
After her familiar call to “pray for peace,” she explains further: “Leave selfishness and live the messages which I am giving you. Without them, you cannot change your life.” Oh!–so Our Lady’s call is not about begging God to “wave a magic wand” to bring peace on earth or change our miserable life here, while all of humanity remains in its present low-level state of egoic consciousness. Her call is to “live the messages“–which involves OUR change of heart, mind, attitude, and behavior, in “leaving selfishness.” Through this living of the messages, we can change our life! Our Lady’s teaching on prayer at Medjugorje is the same insight once shared by St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “I used to believe that prayer changes things. Now I know that prayer changes US, and we change things.” What a huge difference there is between our “believing” (often magical and immature) and our “knowing” (grounded in lived experience) that Mother Teresa discovered, and that Our Lady has been trying to teach us for 35 years! It is the vast difference between a conceptual God of our “beliefs“–out there in the sky, far removed and absent from us–and an intimately “known” Indwelling Presence at the center of our being and the center of all Creation, whose Love transforms us from within.
So….what are the messages of Our Lady that we must “live“? Medjugorje is called a “school of prayer,” for prayer has been the centerpiece of her teaching there: “Prayer of the Heart” which leads to “conversion of heart.” Today Our Lady says, “By living prayer, you will have peace. By living in peace, you will feel the need to witness, because you will discover God whom you now feel to be far away. Therefore, little children, pray, pray, pray and permit God to enter into your hearts.” Here Our Lady reveals the path to peace on earth by describing PRAYER with greater clarity and precision than ever before:
The individual will experience peace first, within the heart, as the result of “living prayer.” Once the individual finds peace of heart through the discovery of God in prayer, there will be a “need to witness” because this God who will be discovered through “living prayer of the heart” is not an old man with a beard sitting on a cloud far away, to whom we “send up” prayers as if across a vast abyss of space and time. No, the God of our discovery in “living prayer” is the One whom we have “permitted to enter into our heart” by consent to His Presence and Action within us, in the silence of Christian meditation, centering, and contemplation–the “Prayer of the Heart” to which Our Lady Queen of Peace has been calling us in Medjugorje for the past 35 years.
The God of our contemplative prayer experience (not just conceptual beliefs learned from books or people) is One to whom we must give witness—sharing our profound, unshakable inner peace with everyone we meet. As we share the peace of “no longer I, but Christ living in me,” other hearts are touched and peace spreads, person by person, throughout the world as it is seeded and watered by the growing practice of contemplative forms of silent, interior “Prayer of the Heart.” In this way, the present low-level egocentric consciousness that is “running the show“of our whole culture and civilization, rooted in the erroneous idea of a “God whom we now feel to be far away,” can be transformed into the New Man of whom the Gospel speaks, reaching to the full stature of Christ Jesus in the great project of our human divinization–realizing, as St. Athanasius taught, that “God became man so that man might become God.”
Our Lady concludes her message by saying, “Return to fasting and confession so as to overcome the evil in you and around you.” How quickly Our Lady tears us from our “pink cloud” of divinity and hauls us back to the reality of our human condition! While we were indeed created with the potential to transform and evolve spiritually to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” to “think as God does and not as human beings do,” and to “have the mind of Christ,” we are yet in great need of conversion–the “working out of our salvation with fear and trembling,” as St. Paul says. Notice that Our Lady wastes no time with finger-pointing at the “eeeeevil” in the world outside of our self; instead, she lays responsibility squarely upon our own shoulders, calling for fasting and confession–two potent forms of self-renunciation–as means to deal with the evil we experience, both “IN” us and “AROUND” us.
Let us not miss the significance of this teaching. A follower of Jesus Christ is not to judge another but to look for sin and evil in only one place: “the man in the mirror.” The ongoing battle between the upward calling of the Spirit within us and the downward-directed, death-dealing egoistic false self is more than enough to keep each person busy with inner work on the “plank” in their own eye, with no time or energy left for judging the “splinter” in another’s eye. Our Lord said, “Resist not one who is evil“; rather, we are to “overcome evil with good.” By continually “sweeping our side of the street” without critique of our neighbor’s mess, utilizing the great gifts of the Church for cultivating humility–the discipline of fasting and the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession)–we can keep our own awareness keen and our consciousness sharp and awakened to Reality, ever mindful and thankful for the grace of Divine Mercy holding us up at every moment. In this month of All Saints and All Souls, Our Lady has given us much over which to ponder and pray!
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Autumn is the season of reflection. The foliage changes, the weather changes, the time changes. Seasons follow a cycle so that the earth might enjoy all the things its Creator designed for it to enjoy. Our lives, in many ways the same: multiple seasons, peaks and valleys, change and colors. — Charles Swindoll
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November 1: ALL SAINTS DAY
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of–throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. — C.S. Lewis
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November 2: ALL SOULS DAY
When you do things from your soul,
you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another section,
the feeling disappears.
— Rumi
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November 24: THANKSGIVING
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
— Charles de Foucauld
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November 27: First Sunday of Advent
Deepen your experience of Advent in silence and stillness,
allowing the Spirit to quicken in you . . .
through Lectio Divina with Scripture from the liturgy . . .
through Musica Divina with the sounds of the season . . .
through Visio Divina with sacred art . . .
through connection to contemplative hearts worldwide!
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November: Month of Death and Dying–
to the Old Year and the Old World
The whole Christian tradition tells us that if we would become wise we must learn the lesson that we have here “no abiding city.” The wise of ages past and present say to us: to have life in focus we must have death in focus. Talking about death is hard for the worldly to understand. Indeed the principal fantasy of much worldliness operates out of the opposite point of view: not the wisdom of our own mortality but the pure fantasy that we are immortal, beyond physical weakness. Meditation is a way of power because it is the way to understand our own mortality. It is the way to get our own death into focus. It can do so because it is the way beyond our own mortality. It is the way beyond our own death to the resurrection, to a new and eternal life, the life that arises from our union with God. The essence of the Christian gospel is that we are invited to this experience now, today.
All of us are invited to die to our own self-importance, our own selfishness, our own limitations. We are invited to die to our own exclusiveness. Our invitation to die is also one to rise to new life, to community, to communion, to a full life without fear. I suppose it would be difficult to estimate what it is people fear most–death or resurrection. But in meditation we lose our fear because we realize death is death to fear and resurrection is rising to new life. Every time we sit down to meditation we enter this axis of death and resurrection. We do so because in our meditation we go beyond our own life and all the limitations of our life into the mystery of God. We discover, each of us from our own experience, that the mystery of God is the mystery of love–infinite love that casts out all fear. — Fr. John Main, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Responsible parenthood does not mean unlimited procreation or lack of awareness of what is involved in rearing children, but rather the empowerment of couples to use their inviolable liberty wisely and responsibly, taking into account social and demographic realities, as well as their own situation and legitimate desires…..Each child has a place in God’s heart from all eternity….Let us pause to think of the great value of that embryo from the moment of conception. We need to see it with the eyes of God, who always looks beyond mere appearances…. Expectant mothers need to ask God for the wisdom fully to know their children and accept them as they are….It is important for that child to feel wanted. He or she is not an accessory or a solution to some personal need. A child is a human being of immense worth and may never be used for one’s own benefit. So it matters little whether this new life is convenient for you…or whether it fits into your plans and aspirations…. Your child deserves your happiness….Ask the Lord to preserve your joy, so that you can pass it on to your child…..The weakening of the maternal presence with its feminine qualities poses a grave risk to our world. I certainly value feminism, but one that does not demand uniformity or negate motherhood. For the grandeur of women includes all the rights derived from their inalienable human dignity but also from their feminine genius, which is essential to society…..Mothers are the strongest antidote to the spread of self-centered individualism….for mothers are always, even in the worst of times, witnesses to tenderness, dedication and moral strength….A mother who watches over her child with tenderness and compassion helps him or her to grow in confidence and to experience that the world is a good and welcoming place. This helps the child to grow in self-esteem and to develop a capacity for intimacy and empathy….
In some homes authoritarianism once reigned and, at times, even oppression….In our day, the problem no longer seems to be the overbearing presence of the father so much as his absence, his not being there….Motherhood is not a solely biological reality, but is expressed in diverse ways….Christian marriages enliven society by their witness of fraternity, their social concern, their outspokenness on behalf of the underprivileged, their luminous faith and their active hope….We must not forget that the mysticism of the sacrament of Eucharist has a social character. When those who receive it turn a blind eye to the poor and suffering, or consent to various forms of division, contempt and inequality, the Eucharist is received unworthily…..Our contemporary experience of being orphans as a result of cultural discontinuity, uprootedness and the collapse of the certainties that shape our lives, challenges us to make our families places where children can sink roots in the rich soil of a collective history….consolidated by an educational atmosphere of openness to others, a great school of freedom and peace. In the family, we learn how to live as one.
(from Amoris Laetitia—Apostolic Exhortation on the Synod on the Family, ch. 5)
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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
