Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2018
Dear children! This is a time of grace and prayer, a time of waiting and giving. God is giving Himself to you that we may love Him above everything. Therefore, little children, open your hearts and families, so that this waiting may become prayer and love and, especially, giving. I am with you, little children, and encourage you not to give up from what is good, because the fruits are seen and heard of afar. That is why the enemy is angry and uses everything to lead you away from prayer. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
December 2018
One month before Christmas, Our Lady gives us a beautiful Advent message, with “prayer,” “waiting,” and “giving” its keynotes. She begins, “This is a time of grace and prayer, a time of waiting and giving.” Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for us to fall into the “commercialization vortex” that makes December a time of “buying and spending, running and getting, rushing and consuming“—rather than “a time of grace and prayer…of waiting and giving.” Even saying the words, “grace and prayer…waiting and giving” has the effect of slowing us down from the frenzied, frenetic pace of our thinking, planning brain as it plots out the coming weeks of Christmas events. Our Lady reminds us of the spiritual significance of Advent, when our focus is meant to be fixed upon JESUS, the “reason for the season”—the One for whom we decorate, prepare gifts and foods, and arrange communal celebrations of love and joyous feasting.
For Our Lady, this month of Advent waiting is truly “pregnant” with meaning as she recalls the final weeks of prayerful, grace-filled anticipation of her Son’s arrival, His birth into our world—a Light shining in the darkness for the whole human race. Rather than becoming absorbed in the list of gifts we wish to buy for others and all our transactional agendas of “who will give and take what,” let us contemplate continually this next statement of Our Lady: “God is giving Himself to you so that we may love Him above everything.” Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation of our God—when LOVE, the Creator of all, emptied Himself and took on one lowly manifestation: the frail, limited flesh of human creaturehood—all for the sake of relationship, so that we human beings could enter into a bond of loving intimacy with the LOVE itself that created all that is. So the first and primary “giving” of Christmas (and every other day of our life) is “God giving Himself to you.” All of our giving is meant to be a humble echo, reflection or reproduction of this prior great act of Divine self-emptying gift. All of our relationships are meant to be grounded in this primary self-giving love that we experience as the love of God keeping us in existence each moment.
Starting from this perspective of spiritual awareness, Our Lady says, “Open your hearts and families, so that this waiting may become prayer and love and, especially, giving.” To “open our hearts and families” means to make them receptive and welcoming—to take down the walls of defensiveness, exclusion, fear, suspicion, selfishness, bias and bigotry that would keep others out in the cold, rejected and alone. For our waiting to “become prayer and love and, especially, giving” means that we stay PRESENT to Presence throughout the Advent waiting season, rather than mentally escaping into the future through obsessive planning or daydreaming about a particular upcoming date or event (Christmas Eve or Day, parties, gatherings, trips, etc.). It means that we take ACTION in the “now” of our waiting.
Our Lady highlights “giving” as our biggest Advent activity. Though we are in a season of “waiting,” we are NOT waiting to “give“! Yes, we may be gathering, storing, hiding and wrapping material gifts for loved ones to receive on Christmas Day, but the most important “giving” is the giving of OURSELVES that must be ongoing—active throughout Advent and the whole year. Kahlil Gibran famously wrote: “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” Mother Teresa often expressed the same sentiment, asking not for money donations to her ministry, but for people to find their own “Calcutta” and give of themselves to the poor, in service and love that recognizes each person as “Christ in disguise.” Jesus himself taught this lesson in commenting upon the “widow’s mite” in Luke 21; while others gave larger monetary sums “out of their surplus wealth,” the poor widow’s two small coins were truly worth much more, for they came from her poverty, representing her whole self and all that she had. This is the authentic, wholehearted, intentional sort of “giving” that Our Lady is asking for.
Finally, she says, “I am with you, little children, and encourage you not to give up from what is good, because the fruits are seen and heard of afar. That is why the enemy is angry and uses everything to lead you away from prayer.” Here Our Lady is widening the angle of our lens, “zooming out” to show us the bigger picture of our earthly reality. We are all caught up in something much larger than our little daily melodramas as we suffer various conflicts, pains and reversals of fortune. The “enemy” of our soul—the satanic ego run riot as the False Self—is “angry and uses everything to lead you away from prayer.” Every slight, every insult, every provocation, every physical malady, every injustice, every temptation to an addictive substance or activity—is warehoused by the False Self as resentment, rage, “hurt feelings,” self-loathing, guilt/shame, a sense of entitlement to “earned” pleasures, justifications for retaliation and revenge, and hateful withdrawal from relationships. All of these ego-centered “mental gymnastics” sap our time and energy and “lead us away from prayer.”
PRAYER is our intercourse with God, which leads us only to goodness, love, mercy, compassion, acceptance, forgiveness and PEACE—both within ourselves and with all other people (even those who have hurt us most). Our Lady encourages us not to “give up” this prayerful manifestation of “what is good, because the fruits are seen and heard of afar.” Thus the fruits of our intercourse with God in prayer are not just “localized” in our own private awareness; when we, through the grace of God in prayer, RISE ABOVE the petty resentments, fears, wounded pride, and passive-aggressive or openly vengeful reactions to our life’s troubles, Our Lady says, “the fruits are seen and heard of AFAR.” This means that every movement of Good/God/Love that we choose in defiance of our “enemy“—the satanic ego/False Self—has a FAR-REACHING impact, influence, and effect. How far?
We will perhaps know the answer to this question only after we die. But even our physics has learned the “Butterfly Effect” of very small events (like a butterfly flapping its wings) having extremely large non-linear impacts (a tornado or hurricane thousands of miles away). Very small localized changes can make very large differences elsewhere in a complex system. “Everything affects everything” in this interconnected, interdependent, Trinitarian creation of God—so every act we perform is important in ways we cannot possibly see or fully fathom. Advent is the perfect “time of grace and prayer, of waiting and giving” in which to ponder with awe-filled gratitude this mystery we witness in the eternal/universal impact of a tiny baby born in a cold remote animal shelter in Palestine 2,000 years ago.
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Dec. 8: Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary
Who is she? She is nothing in herself, like all other creatures, but thanks to God’s work she is the most perfect among creatures. The most perfect semblance of the divine in a purely human creature….The Immaculata never had any stain of sin, which means that her love was always full, without flaws. She loved God with all her being, and love united her with God in this perfect fashion from the first instant of her life, so that on the day of the Annunciation, the angel could address her saying: “Full of grace, the Lord is with you.” She is therefore a creature of God, the image of God, the daughter of God, in the most perfect way possible for a human being.
She is God’s instrument. In full awareness, she lets herself be guided by God. She conforms to his will. She desires only what he wants, operates without any deviation of her will from his. Such love toward God reaches such heights that it produces divine fruits of love. Her union of love with God reaches such a point that she becomes the Mother of God. The Father entrusts his own Son to her, the Son descends into her womb, and the Holy Spirit, from her body, shapes the most holy body of Jesus.
—St. Maximilian Kolbe
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The basic text for Christian practice is “the Father and I are one.” Christ came to save us from our sins, but only as the essential preliminary to our ultimate destiny. The source of all sin is the sense of the separate self. The separate-self sense is, of course, the False Self. The False Self is to be surrendered to Christ through the LOVE of his sacred humanity and the divine person who possesses it. Christ is the way to the Father. His human nature and personality is the door to his divinity. By identification with him as a human being, we find our True Self—the divine life within us—and begin the process of integration into the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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If you can accept that the finite manifests the infinite and that the physical is the doorway to the spiritual (“incarnation“), then all you need is right here and right now. Heaven includes Earth. Time opens you up to the timeless, space opens you up to spacelessness, if you take them for the doorways that they are. The realization that the concrete opens you up to the universal might be the only possible path, because that is how sensate humans normally operate. Much religion is ideology more than any real encounter with Presence. But abstract theology will not get you very far. As Pope Francis says, people all over the world are rightfully rejecting this ideological (top-down) form of religion, for it is not the path of Christ himself.
By taking the mystery of the Incarnation absolutely seriously and extending it to its logical conclusions, the seeming limitations of time and space are overcome. The Christ Mystery refuses to be vague and abstract; it must be concrete and specific. When we stay with our daily experiences, we see that everything is a revelation of the divine—from rocks to rocket ships. The divine is disclosed everywhere for those who have eyes to see. The mystery of Christ is revealed, and the Christ “comes again” whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person.
Only inner experience can bring about a healing of the human-divine split. You must shift from thinking of God as “out there,” to also knowing God “in here”…realizing your union with God right here right now—regardless of any performance or achievement on your part. Authentic Christianity overcame the “God-is-elsewhere” idea through the Incarnation: God in Jesus became flesh; God visibly moved in with the material world to help us overcome the illusion of separation. And God as Holy Spirit is known as an indwelling and vitalizing presence. The Incarnation and Indwelling Spirit are known only through participation and practice—not by intellectual assent to these truths alone.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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In Imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in His INCARNATION:
“Dive deeply into the miracle of life and
let the tips of your wings be burnt by the flame,
let your feet be lacerated by the thorns,
let your heart be stirred by human emotion,
and let your soul be lifted beyond the Earth.“
—Pir Inayat Khan
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JESUS didn’t come to make us Christian;
JESUS came to make us fully human.
—Hans Rookmaaker
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Christ was a man; but he still is; he is always a man. He is always someone living, whose face we know, to whom we speak, and who speaks to us. Vigils, sleep, agony, death—God shares all of these states of the human condition with us because he was also a man, but a man present everywhere because he was God. He is present in the Church; he is present by his grace within us as he is present in the Sacrament of the Altar; he is present wherever two or three are gathered together in his name as he is present in each one of us. There is no encounter in which we do not encounter him; no solitude in which he does not join us; no silence where his voice is not heard deepening that silence.
—Francois Mauriac
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Mary gave birth; she gave us Jesus, the Light of the world. A simple story that plunges us into the event that changes our history forever. Everything, that night, became a source of hope. The faith we proclaim makes us see God present in all those situations where we think he is absent. He is present in the unwelcomed visitor who walks through our cities and our neighborhoods. This same faith impels us to make space for a new social imagination, and not to be afraid of experiencing new forms of relationship, in which none have to feel that there is no room for them on this earth. Christmas is a time for turning the power of fear into the power of charity.
In the Child of Bethlehem, God comes to meet us and make us active sharers in the life around us. He offers himself to us so that we can take him into our arms, lift him and embrace him. So that in him we will not be afraid to take into our arms, raise up and embrace the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned….In this Child, God invites us to be messengers of hope. He invites us to become sentinels for all those bowed down by the despair of encountering so many closed doors. In this Child, God makes us agents of his hospitality.
Moved by the joy of the gift, little Child of Bethlehem, we ask that your crying may shake us from our indifference and open our eyes to those who are suffering. May your tenderness awaken our sensitivity and recognize our call to see you in all those who arrive in our cities, in our histories, in our lives.
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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
