Medjugorje Message: January 25, 2020
Dear children! Today I am calling you to pray even more, until you feel the holiness of forgiveness in your heart. There must be holiness in the families, little children, because there is no future for the world without love and holiness—because in holiness and joy, you give yourselves to God the Creator who loves you with immeasurable love. This is why He sends me to you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
February 2020
In Our Lady’s message to the world this month, she challenges us to “pray even more, until you feel the holiness of forgiveness in your heart.” Indeed, this may be the hardest standard yet requested by Our Lady in her many years of pleading for our prayer in Medjugorje: that we pray until we feel forgiveness in our heart! She equates this heartfelt forgiveness with “HOLINESS”—calling it “the holiness of forgiveness.” That’s because this particular “feeling” is a grace of God—not an emotional “warm fuzzy” or hit of dopamine that our Ego/False Self seeks constantly for stimulating pleasure in an addictive, compulsive and illusory way. Rather, it is the “feeling” that arises when we have moved from the “head” to the “heart” in our prayer—no longer just “thinking forgiveness with our mind” but “feeling forgiveness in our heart.” It is a sign that our prayer has deepened and evolved from a “head-only” exercise to a HOLISTIC experience that includes the whole of our being.
Holiness is “that which makes whole,” and the state of “being whole.” In our tragically divided world today, there are gaping wounds of disrespect, incivility, old injuries, bitter resentment, and direct attacks that make communication between nations, political parties, neighbors, friends, and even family members into a MINEFIELD in danger of exploding into violent conflict at any moment, given but a small incendiary remark that sparks the hot flames of contention. In this toxic environment, to “feel forgiveness in our heart” for an adversary is the only possible path to “making whole” what has been torn apart in our virulent, vitriolic, entrenched positions of radical (“head-based“) disagreement with each other.
In these times, when people of good will and strong faith have such conflicting opinions and beliefs—all seemingly rooted in their deeply-held spiritual principles and moral values—there is a total impasse and stalemate regarding “who’s right,” for both sides are irrevocably convinced of their own correctness. In such a hopeless dead end of ideological division, we must STEP BEYOND our binary, dualistic minds of rationalistic, dialectical debate and INTO OUR HEARTS, instead, where it is possible—with enough openness, humility, and receptivity to grace—to “feel forgiveness” toward our adversary, with whom we may never have a “meeting of the minds,” but with whom we can have a union of hearts.
We cannot possibly think, reason, or argue our way to this “holiness of forgiveness.” It can come only through PRAYER, Our Lady says, for our human ego or False Self system is far too powerful to override on our own. Rather, to be able to forgive, we are totally dependent on GOD’S GRACE, sought and received, through Prayer of the Heart.
Our Lady continues: “There must be holiness in the families, little children, because there is no future for the world without love and holiness—because in holiness and joy, you give yourselves to God the Creator who loves you with immeasurable love.” Here Our Lady unites the destinies of the “micro-” and “macro-” levels of Reality, saying that the family’s holiness (wholeness) is intrinsically related to the entire world’s survival—that the two are interdependent. The world’s love and holiness—necessary for its survival—must begin with, and be built out of “holiness in the families.” For ultimately, we are not only our “nuclear” or “biological” families, but also a “family of nations,” a “human family,” and the “family of All Creation.”
Yet how many families do we know (perhaps beginning with our own) that are suffering a gaping wound of division somewhere among the members? A division based on old hurts, differences of opinion hardened into unyielding positions of conflict, false accusations, misunderstandings, gossip, the forming of alliances or factions, betrayals of trust, etc. Almost every family has some type of division in its ranks—big or small, serious or petty. These “holes” in the family fabric can last a lifetime, preventing the “whole” cloth of holiness from ever taking shape—all because the “holiness of forgiveness in the heart” is never experienced or cultivated through PRAYER.
This sad state of affairs builds a wall or dam that stops the flow of LOVE that is the natural “ocean” in which we are meant to “swim” through life. The “dam” is built, day by day, of the “stones” of our hardened hearts. Our hearts are hardened through the workings of our human mind “after the Fall”—our dualistic intellect constantly arguing “for” and “against,” ever “building a case” to exalt the Ego/False Self and condemn the “other” whom we perceive, through constant comparison/competition, as an enemy, rival or adversary. This natural working of our human brain—if not frequently interrupted, mitigated, and reeled in (at least twice daily!) by SILENT LISTENING PRAYER OF OPENNESS—will result in our hardening of heart and the building of a “heart-stone” DAM blocking Love’s flow. Once our heart is hardened against anything or anyone, the only hope for wholeness/holiness to be restored is through “feeling forgiveness in our heart” for that person or situation.
And this genuine “feeling of forgiveness in the heart” comes only from GOD, the Divine Indwelling Presence that we contact through silent listening prayer. When this “holiness of forgiveness” happens, our “heart of stone” softens into a “heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26) It is as if a dam breaks within us and the FLOW of DIVINE LOVE begins anew, and we, “in holiness and joy, give ourselves to God the Creator who loves us with immeasurable love.” Thus the Divine Two-way Flow rushes afresh into the world, starting with our lives and the lives of all we touch with our soft, forgiving, patient, merciful, compassionate Heart of Flesh. Our Lady says that it is for the sake of this Godly, holy, and “whole-hearted” Love that she is with us: “This is why He sends me to you.”
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
—The Jesus Prayer/Prayer of the Heart, based on Luke 18:13
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In the freedom with which you freely choose to give yourself in love to the love that gives itself to you, in that reciprocity of love, your destiny is fulfilled, and God’s will for you is consummated. All of life, when you distill it out to its simplest terms, has to do with the intimate, always utterly personal, way that each of us serendipitously stumbles upon this great truth. When everything is said and done, only love is real, only love endures. Outside of love, there is nothing, nothing at all.
—James Finley
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Alongside all our knowing must be the equal and honest “knowing that I do not know.” That’s why the classic schools of prayer spoke of both kataphatic knowing—through images and words—and apophatic knowing—through silence and symbols. Apophatic knowing allows God to fill in all the gaps in an “unspeakable” way, beyond words and within the empty spaces between them. The Desert Fathers and Mothers gave us the deep insight of “apophatic” knowing as the nature of faith that was eventually called the “cloud of unknowing” or the balancing of knowing with not needing to know. Deep acceptance of ultimate mystery is ironically the best way to keep the mind and heart always open and growing.
The apophatic way of knowing was largely lost to Western Christianity during the Reformation in the 16th century, and we have suffered because of it. As the churches wanted to match the new rationalism of the Enlightenment with solid knowing, they took on the secular mind instead of what Paul calls “knowing spiritual things in a spiritual way.” (1 Cor 2:13) We dismissed the unique, interior access point of the mystics, poets, artists, and saints.
Faith is a kind of knowing that doesn’t need to know for certain and doesn’t dismiss knowledge, either. With faith, we don’t need to obtain all knowledge because we know that we are being held inside a Much Larger Frame and Perspective. As Paul puts it, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, just as I am fully known.” (1 Cor 13:12) It is a knowing by participation with—instead of an “observation of ” from a position of separation.
Love must always precede knowledge. The mind alone cannot get us there, which is the great arrogance of most Western religion. Prayer becomes letting myself be nakedly known, exactly as I am, in all my ordinariness and shadow, face to face, without any masks or religious makeup. Such a nakedness is falling into the unified field underneath reality, what Thomas Merton called “a hidden wholeness,” where we know in a different way and from a different source.
This is the contemplative’s unique access point: knowing by union with a thing, where we can enjoy an intuitive grasp of wholeness, a truth beyond words, beyond any need to prove anything right or wrong. This is the contemplative mind which Christianity should have taught, but which it largely lost with tragic results for history and religion.
When Western civilization set out on its many paths of winning and conquest, the contemplative mind seemed counterproductive to our egoic purposes. We lost almost any notion of paradox, mystery, or the wisdom of unsayability—which are the qualities that make biblical faith so dynamic, creative, and nonviolent. Instead, we insisted on certain “knowing” all the time. This is no longer the enlightenment path of Abraham, Moses, Mary, or Jesus, but a late and inadequate form of religion.
Christianity in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information- or knowledge-centered. The primacy of LOVE allows our knowing to be much humbler and more patient, recognizing that other people and traditions have much to teach us. This honest self-knowledge and deeper interiority, with the head (Scripture), the heart (Experience), and the body (Tradition) operating as one is helping many to be more integrated and truthful about their actual experience of God.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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According to Isaac the Syrian, a famous 7th century bishop and theologian, a person who’s genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up, so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm that person. A humble person, he said, has recovered the smell of paradise and in the presence of such a person one does not feel judged and has nothing to fear, and this holds true even for animals. They feel safe around a humble person and are drawn to him or her. No wonder people like Francis of Assisi could talk to birds and befriend wolves.
Humility does have a smell, the smell of the earth, of the soil, and of paradise. How can a spiritual quality give off a physical scent? We’re psychosomatic—creatures of both body and soul. Thus, in us the physical and the spiritual are so much part of one and the same substance that it’s impossible to separate them out from each other. We’re one substance, inseparable, body and soul, and so we’re always both physical and spiritual.
The word “humility” takes its root in the Latin word, humus, meaning soil, ground, and earth. The most humble person you know is the most-earthy and most-grounded person you know. To be humble is to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground, to be in touch with the earth, to carry the smell of the earth, and to take one’s rightful place as a piece of the earth and not as something separate from it.
The renowned mystic and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, expressed this in his prayers. As a priest, in his Mass for the World, he didn’t speak for the earth; he spoke as the earth, giving it voice, in words like this:
Lord God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice:
See in my openness, the world’s openness, in my infidelity, the world’s infidelity; in my sincerity, the world’s sincerity; in my hypocrisy, the world’s hypocrisy; in my generosity, the world’s generosity; in my attentiveness, the world’s attentiveness; in my distraction, the world’s distraction; in my desire to praise you, the world’s desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world’s forgetfulness of you. For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens and closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Today, we are no longer the only ones that produce culture, no longer the first nor the most listened to. The faith in the West is no longer an obvious presumption but is often denied, derided, marginalized and ridiculed. Here we have to beware of the temptation of assuming a rigid outlook. Rigidity that is born from fear of change and that ends up disseminating obstacles in the ground of the common good, turning it into a minefield of misunderstanding and hatred. Rigidity and imbalance fuel one another in a vicious circle. And these days, the temptation to rigidity has become so apparent. Tradition is not static, it is dynamic.
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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
