Medjugorje Message: July 25, 2020
Dear children! In this peaceless time in which the devil is harvesting souls to draw them to himself, I am calling you to persevering prayer, so that in prayer you discover the God of love and hope. Little children, take the Cross in your hands. May it be your encouragement for love to always win, in a special way now when the Cross and faith are rejected. You be a reflection and an example with your lives that faith and hope are still alive and a new world of peace is possible. I am with you and intercede for you before my Son, Jesus. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
August 2020
Our Lady’s message was given on the Feast of St. James the Apostle—the son of Zebedee, brother of John the beloved, and patron of the parish church of St. James in Medjugorje. Interestingly, in the world’s first Marian apparition (in the year 40 A.D.), Our Lady appeared to St. James in Spain as “Our Lady of the Pillar” to encourage this disciple of the Lord who also became the first apostle martyred, a few years later. Thus both the first and last Marian apparitions in history (Spain and Medjugorje) are connected to the Apostle, St. James!
Our Lady does not mince words but begins her message straight up with this blunt line: “In this peaceless time in which the devil is harvesting souls to draw them to himself…” Yikes! Here Our Lady sets the stage by grimly asserting that our “peaceless time” is a “heyday” for Satan—a demonic “harvest time” in which the devil is freely gathering the spoils of our disunity and reaping “souls to draw to himself.” How sad and tragic is this statement! Yet how can we fail to see the truth of the devil’s “harvesting” presence and action in our world today?
The word “devil” derives from the Greek “diabolos” which means to divide or separate through slander or false accusation. It refers to one who tells lies to hurt others, who practices calumny, personal attacks, character assassination, or malicious gossip, thus bearing false witness (breaking the 9th Commandment). Throughout the bible we are warned of the “works, wiles, snares, temptations, wrath, oppression and deception” of the devil. The Hebrew word for the devil or Satan means “adversary.” When a relationship (or a whole country!) becomes “adversarial” —filled with conflict, argument, and contention that is grounded in “demonizing” opponents through these Satanic attacks (rather than fairly arguing only the issues)—human life surely becomes “peaceless.” And this demonic division, separation, breaking apart, and corruption of the unity, wholeness and oneness of God’s creation inevitably brings DEATH.
We can see that our world is currently in the grip of this devil’s harvest of death. The coronavirus pandemic is providing a huge daily victim toll on the physical level of biological human death. But this mirrors an even worse daily toll of spiritual death that is coming from a much deadlier virus than Covid-19: a virus by which Truth and Love are being systematically destroyed through the rampant, raging wildfire of malicious slander, lies, calumny, gossip, and false accusation assaulting and bombarding us every day through the toxic political rhetoric and propaganda that is polluting people’s minds via television, internet and social media. Our mass media—into which we’re “plugged” more than ever, now, during the pandemic—has been “turbo-charged” in its design to “trigger” our low-level reptilian brain responses of emotional reactivity to the “bait” we are fed.
This insidious influence upon our human psyche has all the traits of a killing illness; we even use the language of disease to say it is “going viral.” We are severely sickened in the depths of our heart and mind by ingesting the Satanic poison that has become our Steady American Diet (S.A.D.): the food of suspicion, doubt, fear, conspiracy theories, false accusations, gossip, deliberate misrepresentations, paranoia, verbal manipulation, speculation about others’ motives, unproven charges, “alternate facts,” gross exaggerations, and the endless distorting, polarizing “SPIN”—to either the “Right” or the “Left” extreme—of everything that happens each day.
This awful mental virus is killing us by annihilating our human capacity to LOVE and to HOPE. We are so saturated by our 24/7 exposure to cruel and hateful rhetoric about the “other” that our love dies, and we are so hardened by cynical skepticism toward basic human goodness that our hope dies. Without love and hope, we have reached the demise of the human person, the end of meaningful life on earth, and the soul-death that closes heaven to us. All of this has come about through the “wiles” of the devil, who through satanic ego has convinced us that our “enemies” are each other—“flesh and blood.” This is a LIE!
St. Paul tells us: “Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is NOT with flesh and blood, but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the air.” (Eph 6:11-12) Thus our enemies are NOT our fellow Americans on the “Left” or “Right”; our enemies are NOT our fellow human beings of a different race, gender, religion, or national culture than ours—though the devil is now “harvesting souls” from ALL sides by successfully pitting us against each other in lethal division. What can we do?
Our Lady says, “I am calling you to persevering prayer, so that in prayer you discover the God of love and hope.” Once again, as she has for the past 39 years, Our Lady re-directs our eyes UPWARD, above the pathetic worldly stew in which we flail and flounder, to PRAYER, which alone can transform our “peaceless” state to the “tranquility of order” that St. Thomas Aquinas defined as “PEACE.” Even more important than any outward change of circumstance or situation for which we might petition God, prayer is necessary above all for CHANGING US, the pray-ers, by leading us to “discover the God of love and hope” to whom our present, cruelly polarized world has blinded us, leaving so many people in the utter hopelessness of suicidal despair, or in the homicidal rage of murderous hatred and intolerance for the “other.” Our prayer must be “persevering” and continual—a daily commitment that will bear fruits of love and hope in our conversion of heart.
More specifically, Our Lady continues: “Little children, take the Cross in your hands. May it be your encouragement for love to always win, in a special way now when the Cross and faith are rejected.” We have an incarnational and sacramental faith, in which the material substances of our physical reality are happily integrated into our spiritual practice—elements like bread, wine, water, oil, salt, candlelight, palm branches, ashes, beads, saints’ relics, icons, statues, medals, scapulars, crosses and crucifixes. Being our mother, Mary knows how much it helps us to physically touch, hold, and embrace a Cross or crucifix and gaze upon the wood and image of our crucified Lord—seeing there the ultimate manifestation of GOD AS LOVE: as unconditional, self-emptying, infinitely sacrificial Love.
Our Lady wants the Cross we hold to “be our encouragement for love to always win.” It can remind us—if we are lost in the weeds of our satanically divided world of savage conflict and brutal competition in the many raging “us vs. them” ego-wars—that our goal, as children of the GOD OF LOVE, saved by Jesus on the Cross, is not about “us” or “them” winning, but only “for LOVE to always win.” If we who are followers of Christ lose sight of this goal by turning our eyes away from the Cross, then Love does not win; rather, through divisiveness the devil wins, who is “harvesting souls” in this time, as Our Lady says, “in a special way now when the Cross and faith are rejected.” What exactly is being rejected today in our world’s rejection of the Cross? What do we see when we “take the Cross in our hands” as Our Lady asks?
We see at the intersection of two diametrically-opposed bars—a vertical and a horizontal bar—a fully human being who is also fully divine, pinned, with arms outstretched and hands and feet nailed, so that both bars are included in his suffering, tortured, dying embrace; both bars are wet with blood and red with blood—His blood flowing out. St. Paul said, “He is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh….that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it.” (Eph 2:14-16)
As the Mystical Body of Christ, WE are now meant to be that “ONE NEW PERSON in place of the two” created by Jesus on the Cross. Wherever any two opposing forces are whipped into deadly conflict by Satanic ego in our world, we are meant to “reconcile both with God” by “breaking down the dividing wall of enmity.” We are “ambassadors for Christ,” the one who has entrusted to us “the ministry of reconciliation.” For “the love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction” of what really happened on the Cross for our human salvation; thus “from now on we regard no one according to the flesh.” (2 Cor 5:14-20) Rather, we view everything through the “Cross-eyed” lens of FAITH in the GOD OF LOVE.
As always, Our Lady is calling us to be radically countercultural, especially “now when the Cross and faith are rejected” by a world enthralled by devilish division and separation into dualistic, adversarial, ideological camps-at-war. Her message concludes: “You be a reflection and an example with your lives that faith and hope are still alive and a new world of peace is possible.” In a few short lines, Our Lady has taken us from “this peaceless time” to “a new world of peace.” We ourselves are called to be the bridge that unites these two distant realities by the example of faith, hope and love that we give in our own small corner of the world. Just as the Mass concludes with the words, “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life,” Our Lady says that we must demonstrate “with our lives” that “faith and hope are still alive and a new world of peace is possible.”
How can we do this?
1) Keep our eyes fixed upon the Cross, with the prize and goal of sacrificial love for the whole world ever before us;
2) View each person “no longer according to the flesh” (as the “other” or the “enemy”), but as someone for whom Christ died;
3) Never think that our true enemies are “flesh and blood” (whether “liberals,” “conservatives,” “socialists,” “fascists,” “different” from us, etc.), but always see through that deception of the devil to the larger spiritual battle that constantly tries to divide and divert us away from LOVE as the only goal.
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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A Prayer for Our Troubled Times
Dear God, please,
Keep my anger from becoming meanness.
Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity.
Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking.
Keep my anger turned towards justice, not cruelty.
Remind me that all of this—every bit of it—is for love.
Keep me fiercely kind. Amen.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us that before we go out to witness for justice, we have to make sure that we can love and respect those with whom we disagree. Imagine the surrender necessary for those who have been oppressed for hundreds of years to continue to work peacefully for justice. How do we get to that deep place where we do not want to publicly expose, humiliate, or defeat our opponents, but rather work for win-win situations? Seeking win-win solutions, not win-lose, takes a high level of spiritual development and conversion.
When we hurt, we want to hurt back. This is our ego’s natural defense mechanism. We all move toward the ego and even solidify it as we get older, unless something exposes it for the lie that it is. True contemplation is the most subversive of activities because it undercuts the one thing that refuses to give way—our natural individualism and narcissism. Once freed from that, we can finally act with justice and truth. People don’t change by themselves. God changes us, if we can expose ourselves to God at a deep level.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Silence and prayer are not a form of defection. They are the strongest weapons against evil. Man wants to “do,” but above all else he must “be.” In silent prayer, man is fully human. He resembles David before Goliath. For prayer is the noblest, most sublime, most vigorous act, which elevates man to the level of God. Silence is not a form of passivity. By remaining silent, man can avoid a greater evil. It is not an earthly dereliction of duty to place your trust in heaven….Persevering patience, supported by providence, is an ally in all our daily battles. The combat against evil plays out over time, and it is important to persevere and not lose hope. Evil never has the last word. In the darkest night, God works in silence. We have to enter into God’s time and into this great silence that is a silence of love, trust, and active abandonment. Never forget that silent prayer is the strongest and surest act in the struggle against evil. The devil sows discord and incites us to pour out our hatred upon each other. The devil will not be able to reach us in the stronghold of silence.
—Cardinal Robert Sarah
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Eucharist is the sacrament of evolution. Eucharist in an unfolding universe is the bringing together of diverse elements, people, ideas, values, traditions, in the breaking of bread and sharing of wine, toasting the fullness of life. When we share life together, God appears in our midst as Life itself, and we rise up together beyond the resistant forces around us and within us; this is the Body of Christ.
Christianity reveals that death and resurrection are part of the evolutionary path toward wholeness—letting go of isolated existence for the sake of deeper union. So the chaos of our times is, in a strange way, a sign of hope. Something new is being born within. Out of chaos, a star is born. Breakdown can be breakthrough if we recognize a new pattern of life struggling to emerge.
The old structures of power and greed are fighting tooth and nail against the forces of evolution, but they are dying out. We are living in the midst of a great epochal shift and we need a new religious awareness to help us realize that God is the power of this great shift; absolute Love can never remain incomplete or partial. Realizing that God is change itself, we must overcome our selfish selves by reaching out to others in love, reaching across the tables that divide and separate us.
To know that we are not alone is the beginning of our peace. If we realize we are not alone, then death has no power over us. Even if we succumb to physical death we will live in a new power of cosmic life, the life of the whole in which we will find our true personhood for all eternity: “I believe in the resurrection and the life.“
God is struggling to breathe new life into this world; to gather all peoples, all creatures, all that exists, into a new unity so that we may become a new earth community where God is at home in the unfolding of life and the dynamism of love. It may take a number of existential threats for us to realize that God needs us to be divinized, and we need God to be ourselves. We are in this together and no matter what happens, God is Love and God will always be our future.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
“The Jerusalem above is freeborn, and she is our mother.” —Gal 4:26
The Blessed Virgin Mary, assumed body and soul into heaven, is herself God’s promise to Israel kept in full. The heavenly Jerusalem is her emblem and our hope of future glory.
“And so we hope that those who meditate upon the glorious example Mary offers us may be more and more convinced of the value of a human life entirely devoted to carrying out the heavenly Father’s will and to bringing good to others. In this magnificent way all may see clearly to what a lofty goal our bodies and souls are destined.”
—Pope Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution defining the dogma of the Assumption
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August 22: The Queenship of Mary Over Heaven and Earth
The Assumption and Coronation of Mary are not a distraction from the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Cross of Jesus Christ. Mary’s glorification in heaven is an integral part of how God desires to make his love known to human beings, and of how he pours out his grace. Mary’s glory as Mother of God and Queen of Heaven is not hers by right, but is a gift of pure grace flowing from and leading back to the creative love of the Trinity. But this gift, which is given to her alone, is not given for her alone. Mary invites us not merely to see what God is doing for her, but to participate in that great mystery ourselves. In our Christian lives, we look at Mary looking at us; considering her leads us to see the staggeringly personal love of the Trinity given to us in Jesus Christ. We can see in her Queenship the glory we are made for.
—Fr. Gabriel Torretta, O.P.
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Mystery of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The Church invites us to contemplate this mystery which shows us that God wills to save the whole human person—body and soul. The privilege given to Mary gives us the confirmation of our own glorious destiny. The “resurrection of the body” is an element proper to Christian revelation and a pivotal element of our faith. The Assumption reminds us of the unity of the human person, and that we are called to serve and glorify God with our whole being. Serving God only with the body would be an act of a slave, while serving Him only with the soul would be in contrast with our human nature.
If we have lived in this way, in the joyful service of God expressed in generous service to our brothers and sisters, our destiny, on the day of the resurrection, will be like that of our heavenly Mother. It will be given to us, then, to realize fully the words of St. Paul: “Glorify God in your body!” and we will glorify him forever in heaven.
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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
