Medjugorje Message: September 25, 2016
Dear children! Today, I am calling you to prayer. May prayer be life to you. Only in this way will your heart be filled with peace and joy. God will be near you and you will feel Him in your heart as a friend. You will speak with Him as with someone whom you know and, little children, you will have a need to witness, because Jesus will be in your heart and you, united in Him. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
October 2016
In this message, once again, Our Lady “cuts to the chase” by saying, “Today, I am calling you to prayer. May prayer be life to you.” Not a new message or a new call, but the same saving words she has spoken for 35 years in Medjugorje: “MAY PRAYER BE LIFE” to us. This month, Our Lady paints a succinct verbal portrait, a concise picture of what this life of prayer looks like. According to Mary, this is the essence of prayer: “God will be near you and you will feel Him in your heart as a friend. You will speak with Him as with someone whom you know and, little children, you will have a need to witness, because Jesus will be in your heart and you, united in Him.”
This month we celebrate the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, first female Doctor of the Church–one of our most revered mystics and teachers of prayer. Like Our Lady, Teresa also characterized prayer as friendship, saying, “Prayer is nothing else but a conversation between friends, and being many times alone with Him whom we know loves us….We need no wings to search for God, but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us.” She and her fellow Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, are the premier teachers of the mystical life of contemplative prayer. Agreeing with them, Our Lady’s description of the prayer that must be “life to us” is an image of relationship–of a “friendship” that has grown from mere acquaintance to casual ease and openness, to deep intimacy and a naked transparent sharing of everything that we are–much like our human experience of relationships that evolve from a brief first meeting all the way to the depths of spousal bonding in marriage or profound spiritual union, including and embracing every aspect of our life and identity, withholding nothing. Because the Trinitarian God is a dynamic spinning relationship of love, all of reality is structured in the same interconnected and relational way, including our human body in all its centers and interactions, both earthly and heavenly.
Our Lady says that through prayer we will “feel God in our heart as a friend.” What a different experience this is from a merely intellectual “concept” of God as a distant Being outside of ourselves, or a childish “image” of an old bearded man sitting on a cloud gathering thunderbolts to hurl in fury when we sin! Yet in all honesty, this is the immature, anthropomorphic vision of God that many adult Christians still hold, if they have not yet experienced the indwelling God of whom Our Lady speaks–the Divine Love whom we encounter deep within our own hearts when “prayer becomes life to us.” She says of this very real God: “You will speak with Him as with someone whom you know.” The implication here is that much of our prayer language sounds stiff, formal, rote, and insincere–as if we are speaking to a total stranger, a fictional character, or a foreign dignitary in an unknown language for the first time, with no real feeling, understanding or empathy, but perhaps with fear, doubt, skepticism and intimidation. Or perhaps with complete apathy, boredom and disinterest. In any case, it is an “absent” or “distant” God to whom we speak in our stilted phrases. This sounds awkward and unpleasant, but such is the mode of our prayer language, much of the time–which may be why we pray so little! Teresa of Avila said that “every problem in prayer comes from praying as if God were absent.”
It is said that God’s first language is SILENCE, and, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote, “It is in the silence of the heart that God speaks“–just as in our most intimate human relationships, speech ultimately gives way to silence and we can remain comfortably together for long wordless pauses, simply enjoying the quiet presence of the beloved in a communion with no need for dialogue or verbal exchange. Our Lady says that when we, as people of prayer, experience this “prayer that is life to us,” we will “have need to witness because Jesus will be in your heart and you, united in Him.” In the Gospel, Our Lord acknowledges this compelling human need we have to witness to our deepest truths, saying, “Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Lk 6:45) Once we actually experience the “Prayer of the Heart” which Our Lady teaches at Medjugorje (and which all the great mystical saints of the Church have taught), we will be compelled to share this experience of the Divine Indwelling Presence with others, knowing that God lives in the secret “inner room” of every human being on earth, though many have not yet discovered or experienced this interior life of Love in which we are all united at the deepest, core level of existence–our mutual Source and Ground of Being that may be contacted consciously through meditation and silent prayer.
At this contemplative Center, we are One with all humanity and all creation. We come to realize that as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, secular humanists, men, women, citizens of every nation/race/culture/creed /political ideology, along with all of nature–we are, as Our Lady says, “UNITED IN HIM.” This is the WITNESS of peace and love for which the world is thirsting and starving at this dark moment of our history–the recognition that the same burning heartbeat, pulsing in an endless relational Circle Dance of Trinitarian Love, throbs inside the core and center of everything in our world.
Our Lady says of her call to prayer: “Only in this way will your heart be filled with peace and joy.” Peace and joy–our own and the world’s–can only ever be an “INSIDE JOB.” This has been Mary’s clear and consistent teaching for decades. Peace and joy will never be found “out there,” in the exterior world where we constantly look and futilely search. Peace and joy can be found only through our own interior–where God dwells as the loving Friend of our Soul. Indeed, we have made great strides as a species on this planet, plumbing the mysteries of the universe, outer space and distant galaxies. Yet world peace eludes us, for we have failed to plumb the “inner space” or find what Teresa called the “Interior Castle” through silent Prayer of the Heart. As the Jesuit Fr. Teilhard de Chardin famously wrote: “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.”
Practice: Spend 15-20 minutes twice a day in sacred silence to experience the peace and joy to be found with your own beloved, in your own “interior castle.”
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Prayer for Leadership as We Hold Our National Election
Give us, O God, leaders whose hearts are large enough
to match the breadth of our own souls
and give us souls strong enough to follow leaders of vision and wisdom.
In seeking a leader, let us seek more than development for ourselves–
though development we hope for–more than security for our own land–
though security we need–more than satisfaction of our wants–
though many things we desire.
Give us the hearts to choose the leader who will work with other leaders
to bring safety to the whole world.
Give us leaders who lead this nation to virtue without seeking to impose
our kind of virtue on the virtue of others.
Give us a government that provides for the advancement of this country
without taking resources from others to achieve it.
Give us insight enough ourselves to choose as leaders those who can tell
strength from power, growth from greed, leadership from dominance,
and real greatness from the trappings of grandiosity.
We trust you, Great God, to open our hearts to learn from those to whom you speak in different tongues and to respect the life and words of those to whom you entrusted the good of other parts of this globe.
We beg you, Great God, give us the vision as a people to know where global leadership truly lies,
to pursue it diligently, to require it to protect human rights for everyone everywhere.
We ask these things, Great God, with minds open to your word
and hearts that trust in your eternal care. Amen.
— Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
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In Times Like These . . .
Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. We have to be catholic–that is to say not bound by so much as a thread to any created thing, unless it be to creation in its totality. We are living in times which have no precedent, and in our present situation universality, which could formerly be implicit, has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life. Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment–a new saintliness, itself also unprecedented. — Simone Weil
In a time of mass shootings, refugee crises, and environmental degradation, it is hard to speak of the need for art and creativity. One wonders what, if anything, they have to do with changing the heartbreak of the world or serving a greater good than personal growth and pleasure. Yet why is it that those who would control and bully us feel threatened by musicians and artists and poets? How can we envision a better way if not by searching deep within the imagination and stirring creative reservoirs into a provocative, life-giving “re-presentation” of the world and our place in it? It is important to tap these wellsprings for the sake of our own souls’ transformation. But it is also time to send these creative energies out into the world because we are in desperate need for resistance, for saying no to death and destruction, for boldly setting forth an agenda of life and love and respect. That these works are beautiful and inspiring and authentic is what arrests attention, what causes people to listen and see, to stop and think. We need soulful media, less rhetoric and more poetry, less shouting and more music. Photographers’ craft is all about capturing the light. And we are all in desperate need of light. Annie Dillard says, “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?” — Friends of Silence, vol.29
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OCTOBER: Month of Mary’s Rosary
No one has penetrated the profound mystery of the Incarnation like Mary. Her entire life was patterned after the presence of mercy made flesh. The Mother of the crucified and risen one has entered into the sanctuary of divine mercy because she participated intimately in the mystery of love. — Pope Francis
Make time during the month of October to pray the Holy Rosary, perhaps using the short meditations found on this website (side tool bar, “Rosary Intentions“) taken from the book, Mary, Matrix of Change–Personal and Global Transformation through the Rosary by Michele Maxwell. These brief intentions for each of the twenty mysteries of the Rosary are designed as “darts of love” to pierce and penetrate the essence and heart of each profound mystery of our own human Incarnation in conformity with Christ’s.
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October 4: St. Francis of Assisi & the Franciscan Charism
Both Francis and Clare of Assisi lost and let go of all fear of suffering, all need for power, prestige, and possessions; any need for their small self to be important; and they came out the other side knowing something essential–who they really were in God. Their house was then built on bedrock, as Jesus says. Francis and Clare had an ability to really change and heal people, often the fruit of suffering and various forms of poverty, since the false self does not surrender without a fight to its death. If suffering is “whenever we are not in control,” then some form of suffering is absolutely necessary to teach us how to live beyond the illusion of control and to give that control back to God. Then we become usable instruments because we can share our power with God’s power.
Such a counterintuitive insight explains why these two medieval dropouts, Francis and Clare, tried to invite everyone into their happy run downward, to that place of “poverty” where all humanity finally dwells anyway. They voluntarily leapt into the very fire from which most of us are trying to escape, with total trust that Jesus’ way of the cross could not be wrong. They trusted that His way was the way of solidarity and communion with the larger world which is indeed passing away and dying, but always with great resistance. They turned such resistance into a proactive welcoming prayer instead. By God’s grace, they could trust the eventual passing of all things and where they are passing to. They did not wait for liberation later–after death–but grasped it here and now.
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world and do not spend our lives running from necessary suffering, we will encounter various forms of “crucifixion.” Pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial and sense of wrongness or injustice about the pain. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’ voluntary acceptance of undeserved pain as an act of total solidarity with all of the pain of the world. Reflecting on this mystery of love can change your whole life. Francis of Assisi brought the mystery of the cross to its universal application, for he learned that both the receiving of love and the letting go of it for others, are always a very real dying to our present state. Mystics like Francis and Clare lived from a place of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God; such union was realized by surrendering to it, not by achieving it. Isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and deeper levels of existence. The Francisican friar St. Bonaventure speaks of life in God as a mystical death, a dying into love. Healthy religion is always about love.
— Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Every mistake or lapse on the part of a spouse can harm the bond of love and the stability of the family. Something is wrong when we see every problem as equally serious; in this way, we risk being unduly harsh with the failings of others….The truth is that family communion can only be preserved and perfected through a great spirit of sacrifice. It requires, in fact, a ready and generous openness of each and all to understanding, to forbearance, to pardon, to reconciliation….Today we recognize that being able to forgive others implies the liberating experience of understanding and forgiving ourselves….Blaming others becomes falsely reassuring. We need to learn to pray over our past history, to accept ourselves, to learn how to live with our limitations, and even to forgive ourselves, in order to have this same attitude towards others. All this assumes that we ourselves have had the experience of being forgiven by God, justified by his grace and not by our own merits. We have known a love that is prior to any of our own efforts, a love that constantly opens doors, promotes and encourages….
Married couples…see their spouses’ weaknesses and faults in a wider context, recognizing that these failings are part of a bigger picture. All of us are a complex mixture of light and shadows. Love does not have to be perfect for us to value it. The other person loves me as best they can, with all their limits, but the fact that love is imperfect does not mean that it is untrue or unreal. It is real, albeit limited and earthly. The other person can neither play God nor serve all my needs. Love coexists with imperfection….Love trusts, it sets free, it does not try to control, possess or dominate everything. A family marked by loving trust helps its members to be themselves and reject deceit, falsehood and lies….Conjugal love is the greatest form of friendship…Promising love forever is possible when we perceive a plan bigger than our own ideas and undertakings, a plan which enables us to surrender our future entirely to the one we love….Marriage is an inevitable mixture of enjoyment and struggles, tensions and repose, pain and relief, satisfactions and longings, annoyances and pleasures, but always on the path of friendship.
The love of friendship… enables us to appreciate the sacredness of a person, without feeling the need to possess it….Committing oneself exclusively to another person always involves a risk and a bold gamble….In the family, three words need to be used: “Please,” “Thank you,” Sorry.” Three essential words!….The right words, spoken at the right time, daily protect and nurture love….A celestial notion of earthly love forgets that the best is yet to come, that fine wine matures with age. The perfect families proposed by deceptive consumerist propaganda do not exist. In those families, no one grows old, there is no sickness, sorrow or death. Consumerist propaganda presents a fantasy that has nothing to do with the reality which must daily be faced….In our own day, sexuality risks being poisoned by the mentality of “use and discard“…Should man aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity….Still, our human equilibrium is fragile; there is a part of us that resists real human growth, and any moment it can unleash the most primitive and selfish tendencies.
(from Amoris Laetitia—Apostolic Exhortation on the Synod on the Family, ch. 4)
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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
