Medjugorje Message: March 25, 2019
Dear children! This is a time of grace. As nature renews itself for a new life, you also are called to conversion. Decide for God. Little children, you are empty and do not have joy, because you do not have God. Therefore pray until prayer becomes your life. In nature seek God who created you, because nature speaks and fights for life and not for death. Wars are reigning in hearts and nations, because you do not have peace and you do not see, little children, a brother in your neighbor. Therefore return to God and to prayer. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
April 2019
Our Lady gave this message on the Solemnity of the Annunciation (the First Joyful Mystery of the Rosary)—the day we celebrate Mary conceiving Jesus in her womb by the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit. Greeted by Gabriel with the words, “Hail, full of grace!,” Our Lady gave her fiat—her “yes”—to an unfathomable mystery and extraordinary project. She decided for God in spite of her incomprehension of this supernatural origin of her pregnancy, then experienced the NATURAL miracle unfolding through her own body over the next nine months.
In this message, Our Lady recapitulates her Annunciation experience as she instructs us on our own current life situation: “This is a time of grace. As nature renews itself for a new life, you also are called to conversion. Decide for God. Little children, you are empty and do not have joy, because you do not have God.” In these painful opening words we are invited to look at ourselves honestly. While we see all around us the beautiful renewal of the natural world in the budding trees, blossoming flowers, and greening fields that are transforming before our eyes from the stark, barren landscapes of winter to the burgeoning of Spring—we must ask ourselves if there is any similar conversion from dryness of spirit and hardness of heart happening WITHIN US? Unlike Mary who was “FULL of grace,” she says we “are empty and do not have joy, because you do not have God.” Unlike Mary who readily and willingly gave her “Yes” to the divine (though incomprehensible, “impossible”) plan presented by Gabriel, we must now be coaxed by her and commanded to “Decide for God.”
Are we able to listen and hear the truth about ourselves as Our Lady sees it? In what ways can we perceive our own inner state as “empty” and “joyless” ? In what ways do WE ALSO need a renewed life of conversion and a new “deciding for God” ? One approach to our “empty” and “joyless” condition is to consider the things with which we try to “fill” our emptiness—the substances, activities, or objectified persons we try to use as “fillers” of the “hole” in our inner being: alcohol, food, drugs, sex, shopping, internet, unhealthy/codependent relationships, etc. Any of these things, when compulsively “used” to fill a void within our personhood, indicates that we “do not have joy because we do not have God” at the center of our life. What is the remedy for this sad situation?
Our Lady gives it to us, saying: “Therefore PRAY until prayer becomes your life. In NATURE seek God who created you, because nature speaks and fights for life and not for death. Wars are reigning in hearts and nations, because YOU do not have peace and YOU do not see, little children, a brother in your neighbor. Therefore, return to God and to PRAYER.” Once again, Our Lady is urging PRAYER as the antidote for our pathetic human condition, just as she has since the start of the apparitions in Medjugorje 38 years ago. She invites us to “pray until prayer becomes our life.” How can this happen? Clearly it is not possible or sustainable to spend every waking moment in formal prayer, as if we were cloistered contemplative monks and nuns!
Rather, to grasp Our Lady’s meaning, we need to broaden our understanding of “prayer.” PRAYER is more than words read, spoken or thought, more than the telling of our rosary beads, more than the psalm responses at Mass, more than hymns devoutly sung, more even than periods of silent meditation. Yet all of these deliberate, worthy efforts of formal prayer can help lead us toward “prayer as our LIFE” —which is an abiding, continual, perpetual state of “GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS” or “CHRIST-CONSCIOUSNESS” in which the Divine Indwelling Presence is a constant part of our AWARENESS. This awareness is now “our life” : an integral part of who we are, whether in church or out of church, engaged in formal prayer or not. When this happens, to be awake and breathing is to be conscious of God and therefore “PRAYING.” If we are breathing and awake, then we are also at “prayer” because God is in our conscious awareness at all times.
Besides cultivating formal prayer practices, is there any other way to reach this higher state of consciousness? Yes. Our Lady encourages us to TURN TO NATURE. There, in the glory of Creation we will encounter our Creator: in mountain “cathedrals,” forest “basilicas,” watery “sanctuaries” of oceans, rivers, lakes and streams, and “temples” of flowering meadows. Wherever Great Nature shines forth in sunshine, moon-glow, rainstorm, birdsong, or animal life, we find “God who created us,” for “nature speaks and fights for life and not for death.” When we consecrate hours deliberately spent in Nature, we are seeking God the Creator; to be immersed in Nature as an act of worship is tantamount to any other act of formal prayer—a sacred movement of devotion to God. Poet Dorothy Gurney wrote, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth,” and great American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Frost have conveyed the holiness of Nature and its spiritual power through their art that emerged from time spent outdoors. In these Spring months, a simple trip to the Texas hill country or the Gulf coast would be a worthy Lenten spiritual pilgrimage—as is ANY conscious communion with God’s creation in Nature when we step outside our house and under the blue mantle of the sky each day.
How can we validate as true Our Lady’s challenging words about us? How do we know we are “empty” ? That we “do not have joy”? That we “do not have God” ? That our life has not yet “become prayer” ? Quite simply, Our Lady states: “Wars are reigning in hearts and nations, because you do not have peace and you do not see, little children, a brother in your neighbor. Therefore, return to God and to prayer.” So this is our litmus test: As long as we experience “wars” reigning in our own heart—anger, resentment, unforgiveness, bitterness, rage, disgust, disdain, prejudice and ridicule for other human beings—then we “do not have peace” and we “do not see a brother in our neighbor.” If this is the case, then prayer has NOT “become our life.” Sacred scripture teaches: “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love…. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen….Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 Jn 4: 8,20)
Yet Our Lady says we “do not have peace and do not see a brother in our neighbor.” Who is my neighbor? Jesus answered this question in the parable of the Good Samaritan, which established that ANY HUMAN BEING—regardless of cultural background, social class, nationality, race, religion, or political party—is my “neighbor.” And in every “neighbor” or fellow human being, I am to SEE a “brother” (or sister). No exceptions, no exclusions. This is the high bar which Our Lady holds up to us: the Gospel standard set by her Son who said, “Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt 5:44) If I fail to “see a brother in my neighbor” —be it an unborn child, an unwanted immigrant, a dying elder, a criminal, a person of a different race, religion or nation, or a political opponent—then I can echo the words of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: When asked who is responsible for the brutal wars raging in the world today, he replied without hesitation, “I am.”
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Annual Apparition of Our Lady to Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo: March 18, 2019
My children, as a mother, as the Queen of Peace, I am calling you to accept my Son so that He can grant you peace of soul—that He can grant you that which is just, which is good for you. My children, my Son knows you. He lived the life of man, and at the same time of God: a wondrous life—human flesh, divine Spirit. Therefore, my children, while my Son is looking at you with His eyes of God, He penetrates into your hearts. His tender, warm eyes are looking for Himself in your heart. My children, can He find himself there? Accept Him, and then the moments of pain and suffering will become moments of tenderness. Accept Him, and you will have peace in your soul—you will spread it to all those around you—and this is what you now need the most. Heed me, my children. Pray for the shepherds, for those whose hands my Son has blessed. Thank you.
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Personal sin is the symptom of a disease. Therefore one has to dig deep into one’s heart to get to the bottom of the disordered behavior. For example, where is my meanness/jealousy/lack of forgiveness, etc. coming from? What energy centers are being threatened or disturbed? (Security/survival, affection/esteem, power/control) I need to be quiet and humble enough to be honest with myself, not rationalizing or justifying my actions. Contemplative prayer helps me to be in a space of stillness and surrender to God’s healing action in my journey of conversion.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Peace is not achieved by rooting out and destroying evil. When we become aware of our vices—anger, pride, greed, lust—the attempt to destroy them easily degenerates into self-hatred. Better than destroying your faults is to work patiently to implant the virtues—a slower and less dramatic work but far more effective. And by avoiding the dangers of religious hypocrisy and self-righteousness it creates a more pleasant working personality. Hidden in all our faults—our capacity for evil—there are also the seeds of many virtues. The terrorist may have had the seed of justice in him before his anger and delusion took him over. When we conduct war against ourselves we risk huge collateral damage: the destruction of our own seeds of virtue. Every kind of violence is a crime against humanity that deprives the world of unknown goodness. The first step in implanting the virtues that will eventually overpower the vices is to establish the foundational virtue of deep and regular prayer. Through this silent rhythm of prayer wisdom slowly penetrates our mind and our world. Wisdom is the universal power that brings good out of evil. The wise know the distinction between self-knowledge and self-fixation, between detachment and hardness of heart, between correction and cruelty.
—Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
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Whoever lives in me, whoever is taken up into me, is taken up in RESURRECTION. I am the transformation. As bread and wine are transformed, so the world is transformed into me. Neither does my Resurrection rest until the grave of the last soul has burst, and my powers have reached even to the furthest branch of creation. You see death; you feel the descent to the end. But death is itself a life, perhaps the most living life; it is the darkening depth of my life, and the end is itself the beginning, and the descent is the soaring up. Every horror became for my love…a wall through which to walk.
—Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The Divine action may turn our lives upside down. It may call us into various forms of service. Readiness for any eventuality is the attitude of one who has entered into the freedom of the Gospel. Commitment to the new world that Christ is creating requires flexibility and detachment: the readiness to go anywhere or nowhere, to live or to die, to rest or to work, to be sick or to be well, to take up one service and to put down another. Everything is important when one is opening to Christ-consciousness. This awareness transforms our worldly concepts of security into the security of accepting, for love of God, an unknown future.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
During the Easter Vigil, we will celebrate once more the moving rite of the lighting of the Easter candle. Drawn from the “new fire,” this light will slowly overcome the darkness and illuminate the liturgical assembly. May the Light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds, and enable all of us to relive the experience of the disciples on the way to Emmaus. By listening to God’s word and drawing nourishment from the table of the Eucharist, may our hearts be ever more ardent in faith, hope and love.
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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
