Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2019
Dear children! May this time be a time of prayer for you. Without God you do not have peace. Therefore, little children, pray for peace in your hearts and families, so that Jesus can be born in you and give you His love and blessing. The world is at war because hearts are full of hatred and jealousy. In the eyes, little children, peacelessness is seen because you have not permitted Jesus to be born in your lives. Seek Him, pray, and He will give Himself to you in the Child who is joy and peace. I am with you and I pray for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
December 2019
In this Advent message, Mary, Queen of Peace invites us to allow the Prince of Peace—her Son, Jesus Christ—to be born in us and in our lives. This can only happen if we choose to seek Him through PRAYER. She begins: “May this time be a time of prayer for you.” The Advent season is meant to be a time of quiet, interior reflection and prayer during the shortened-daylight hours of winter darkness, in anticipation of the coming Light of the World at Christmas. Like nature itself, we are meant to nurture the mysterious seeds of faith, hope and love growing in the silent underground darkness of our souls, preparing ourselves spiritually for the birth of Christ our Light into the totality of our life. In the silent stillness of meditation this divine “gestation” occurs.
Our Lady equates this birth with the coming of PEACE: “Without God you do not have peace. Therefore, little children, pray for peace in your hearts and families, so that Jesus can be born in you and give you His love and blessing.” How important it is to pray for peace! When we pray for peace, we simultaneously and necessarily acknowledge our real helplessness and powerlessness to “produce” peace on our own. In praying for peace within my own heart, I am clearly admitting (implicitly or explicitly) that AS I AM, inner peace is absent and impossible for me. I’m admitting that the human condition, by itself, is intrinsically peaceless—without peace and incapable of peace. It is the Nature of the Beast: “Without God you do not have peace.”
Likewise, when I pray for peace in my family, I’m admitting that ON OUR OWN, we [all or certain] members of a family cannot resolve our differences and live, united and harmoniously, due to various personality conflicts that always overshadow and overwhelm our best efforts at togetherness. It is the Nature of the Family Beast: “Without God you do not have peace.” Yet Our Lady tells us that if we PRAY for peace in our hearts and families, “Jesus can be born in you and give you His love and blessing” —i.e. there can be peace!
Next, Our Lady describes our human family’s current sad state of affairs: “The world is at war because hearts are full of hatred and jealousy. In the eyes, little children, peacelessness is seen because you have not permitted Jesus to be born in your lives.” If we do not permit the birth of Christ in our lives—the Indwelling Divine Presence—through the opening of our heart in honest PRAYER that admits our powerlessness and humble need for God, then indeed, our eyes will reflect a tragic “peacelessness” …the anxious, fearful, insecure restlessness that always accompanies any bottomless pit of insatiable “lack.” And when MOST people on the earth are living in this ghostly state of isolation and willful absence from the Divine Indwelling Presence of God, then indeed, “the world is at war” —with or without armed military conflict.
Our Lady says, “The world is at war because hearts are full of hatred and jealousy.” The egoic False Self “programs for happiness” that will never work are the three obsessive pursuits of Safety/Security; Affection/Esteem; Power/Control. If these ego-centered programs are not mitigated, purified and healed by our open-hearted PRAYER that invites the Divine Indwelling Presence of God into our inmost center, then these overblown programs will instead give us “hearts full of hatred and jealousy.” For any time that we “poor two-legged’s” depend solely upon OURSELVES and our own limited human resources to provide for and fulfill the overblown, neurotic needs that ONLY God can satiate, we will end up in a brutal battle of unbridled competition with every other “poor two-legged” and even with sacred Nature and the environment—i.e. with anything that threatens or obstructs our fragile “peace” that’s being chased futilely, from moment to moment, in an endless hamster-wheel of anxiety and fear.
In addition to this individual angst of our “going it alone,” we can see the resulting peacelessness of our “world at war” in countless ways: in the endless military conflicts around the globe, in crippling addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, sex, spending, gambling, video-gaming and social media; in domestic violence, road rage, cyberbullying, gun violence, mass shootings, global and domestic terrorism; in political corruption and coverups, extreme partisan divisiveness, environmental destruction, and the escalating death rate from stress-related disease. All of these horrors result “because we have not permitted Jesus to be born in our lives“—choosing instead to “go it alone” with our False Self “programs for happiness” that will never work.
Our Lady concludes her Advent message by saying: “Seek Him, pray, and He will give Himself to you in the Child who is joy and peace. I am with you and I pray for you.” What a beautiful and joyous pledge from Mary, Queen of Peace! Surely we can trust our Blessed Mother when she says that Jesus WILL give Himself to us in the fullness of an incomparable, unearthly joy and peace: “Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” (Jn 14:27) The only requirement for receiving this gift of Christ indwelling our hearts with the Divine Presence of Peace is that we “seek Him” and “pray for peace in our hearts and families.” For Jesus himself promised: “Ask, and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened unto you; for EVERYONE who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door is opened.” (Mt 7:7-8)
During this holy season of Advent, let us enter frequently into the silent stillness of meditation, opening mind and heart and thus emptying ourselves so as to become receptive. In this way we may effectively pray for PEACE within the whole family of Creation: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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Advent: Season of Holy Waiting and Expectation
Now Christ comes to be born in the narrowness of our lives, to be incarnate in us, to give his love to the world through us, through our flesh and blood….The reason why we are where we are this Christmas—in this house, family, workplace, hospital or camp—is because it is here in this place that Christ wants to be born, from here that he wants his life to begin again in the world.
Peace is Christ’s culminating gift…promised by the angels at his birth, and by himself after his death, in the first words of his resurrection: “Peace be with you.” The condition of peace is courage…when courage seems most difficult. The courage peace demands is in fact to relax, to throw all our care into the lap of God. We must take the risk of trusting God’s love, believing Christ’s word, loving one another. As Advent closes, the longing of the Church for light and for the spring, the budding forth of the savior, is culminating in the mystery of Christmas; we put aside our cares to make the house of our soul ready for the Child, with simple prayer, rocking the cradle of peace.
—Caryll Houselander
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O Consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, come upon me and create in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, that I may be another humanity for him in which he can renew his whole mystery.
—St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
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Whenever God is given highest value, order is established both within the worshiper and in the society that surrounds him or her…”Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of good will.” Think of that as a spiritual formula: peace, integrity, right order follow from right worship. Consequently, trouble comes from incorrectly directed praise—from considering something or someone other than God as absolute. When wealth, or privilege, or ego, or country, or power becomes the central preoccupation of one’s life, disintegration follows, as surely as night follows day. This is why the Prophet Isaiah exults in seeing the whole world come to Mount Zion. Don’t interpret this as a narrow nationalism of ethnic triumphalism. It is simply spiritual physics: from worshiping the true God comes peace. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
—Bishop Robert Barron
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December 12: Our Lady of Guadalupe
“A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child.” (Rev 12:1-2)
In Tepeyac, the “Mother of the True God” (her own words), and Ark of the New Covenant who is Christ, reveals the beauty of the redeeming Christ in the beauty of humanity at its lowliest. Appearing to an Aztec peasant as a pregnant Aztec maiden rather than one of the conquering Spaniards, she echoed the message of the Incarnation: Christ took on our lowly mortal flesh to transform us into divinity according to God’s mercy.
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If we remain alone with our own strength we do not succeed in building our life as a firmly established house. Our strength and our wisdom are not enough for that. Is human life therefore absurd—a meaningless path towards death? The Gospel tells us: there is the one who is truly wise; he has found the rock, and he himself is the rock; he has laid the foundation of the house. We are wise if we leave the foolish isolation of self-realization that builds on the sand of our own ability. We are wise if we do not try in isolation, with everyone acting for himself or herself, to build the purely private house of our own individual life. It is our wisdom to build the joint house with him so that we ourselves become his living house.
—Pope Benedict XVI
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The tradition of the Christmas crib helps us contemplate the mystery of God’s love that was revealed in the poverty and simplicity of the Bethlehem grotto. The crib can help us understand the secret of the true Christmas because it speaks of the humility and merciful goodness of Christ, who “though rich made himself poor for us.” His poverty enriches those who embrace it, and Christmas brings joy and peace to those who, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, accept the angel’s words: “Let this be a sign to you: in a manger you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.” This is still the sign for us, too, men and women of the third millennium. There is no other Christmas.
—Pope Benedict XVI
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Bethlehem is the turning point that alters the course of history. There God, in the house of bread, is born in a manger…as if he wanted to say: “Here I am, as your food.” To us, who from birth are used to taking and eating, Jesus begins to say: “Take and eat. This is my body.” (Mt 26:26) Today too, on the altar, he becomes bread broken for us; he knocks at our door, to enter and eat with us. At Christmas, we on earth receive Jesus, the bread from heaven. It is a bread that never grows stale, but enables us to have a foretaste of eternal life. I want to come to Bethlehem, Lord, because there you await me. I want to realize that you are the bread of my life, so that I, in turn, can be bread broken for the world. Loved by you, I will be able to love my brothers and sisters. Then it will be Christmas….
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Mark Your Calendar [ai1ec view=”agenda”]
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
