Medjugorje Message: December 25, 2017
Dear children! Today I am bringing to you my Son Jesus for Him to give you His peace and blessing. I am calling all of you, little children, to live and witness the graces and the gifts which you have received. Do not be afraid. Pray for the Holy Spirit to give you the strength to be joyful witnesses and people of peace and hope. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
January 2018
Every Christmas we are struck by Our Lady appearing in Medjugorje with the Baby Jesus in her arms, and the magical mystery of her bringing Him to us anew, as a newborn child, here and now, in our “present tense,” thousands of years after his earthly birth, life, death and resurrection. How can this be?! Like Mary, let us “ponder in our heart” this mystery and its meaning.
Our Lady’s Christmas message begins with the word “Today“: “Today I am bringing to you my Son Jesus for Him to give you His peace and blessing.” Our Lady lives in an eternal “NOW” and she invites us to join her there. At the mystical core of all the world’s religious traditions is this vital invitation to dwell in the present moment, to “be here now“: “today.”
But in our human condition we are continually lured away from the present moment by obsessive thoughts of “yesterday” and “tomorrow“—the past and the future—caught up in imagining the future with its goals, challenges, needs and possibilities, or in remembering the past with its injuries, tragedies, injustices, or its idyllic simplicity and benevolence as a bygone era. On the one hand we fixate on anxieties and worry about the future, while on the other hand we rehash the grievances, resentments or nostalgia of the past. Whether caught in the mental web of imagination or memory, we are definitely not PRESENT to the Presence of this “Now” moment of our life, which is the only reality. Everything else is illusion, existing only in our egoic mind that craves the semblance of control that cannot be had in the present moment. God is present in the eternal now and that is where we can find Him—not in the distracted digressions of our mind’s mental gymnastics flipping forward in fantasy to tomorrow or backward in memory to yesterday: the two places our ego tries to “manage” by controlling the narrative or storyline of “the past” and “the future.”
If Christmas is confined to an event in history that sparks only memories and nostalgic music, decorations, feasting, consumeristic indulgence, and commercial profit every year, we are in pitiful shape. Yet many “religious” people who piously proclaim that “Jesus is the reason for the season,” or who militantly promote the phrase “Merry Christmas!” in order to “keep Christ in Christmas” are in fact only marginally or shallowly grasping the Christmas message themselves. Like everyone else, they keep Jesus securely locked in the past as a figure of history whom we dust off to cuddle at Christmas or for whom we dye eggs, bunnies and chicks at Easter. Our Lady says, “TODAY I am bringing you my Son Jesus for Him to give you His peace and blessing.” Each of us is called to make of our own heart another manger—simple, humble, poor, empty and receptive—where Christ can be born anew by the power of the Holy Spirit, just as He was born of Mary. Each of us, in the “now” of every present moment, must provide a channel of Incarnation for Divine Presence to break through and be experienced by all.
Rather than “stall out” at future imaginings of success or past memories of failure and lack, Our Lady says, “I am calling all of you, little children, to live and witness the graces and gifts which you have received.” Again we’re invited to “be here now,” to “live and witness” what we already have, what we already are as beloved children of God. This means being awake, aware, alert and attuned to the changing needs of each present moment—not caught in the static responses that were appropriate “yesterday” or years ago. Life is what’s happening NOW! And God has already provided all that we need to meet the requirements of love for this moment.
Our Lady concludes by saying: “Do not be afraid. Pray for the Holy Spirit to give you the strength to be joyful witnesses and people of peace and hope.” When we live in our heads, captive to our ego’s unending “spin machine” that compulsively cranks out stories of past and future scenarios (most of it “fake news”), we are prone and prey to the emotion of FEAR, which is perhaps the most destructive and damaging of all human emotions, leading to hatred, violence and war. It is said that the Bible repeats the command “Be not afraid” 365 times—one for each “today” of the year—and Jesus himself taught that “Fear is useless; what is needed is trust.” The key to banishing fear is to be rooted in the PRESENT MOMENT, in the NOW, rather than caught in the ego-snare of past and future rumination. To be wholly present is to “become like a little child,” as Jesus instructed—a state that is naturally joyful, peaceful and hopeful, devoid of worry, anxiety or fear, without thought of past or future—fully and completely “being here now.” Indeed, Christ promised that no one could enter the Kingdom without “becoming like a little child“: that is, having this guileless “present-moment-awareness.”
Clearly as adults we need to plan for the future and learn from the past, so some healthy balance in our thinking must be achieved. But how do we avoid the universal human tendency to get “sucked in” to a mental vortex of compulsive thinking about past and future that takes us out of the healthy, organically joyful and peaceful full participation in the present moment? Our Lady says, “Pray for the Holy Spirit to give you the strength to be joyful witnesses and people of peace and hope.” PRAYER is the first and foremost way that we can begin to be liberated from the egoic trap of our mental enslavement to “past” and “future.” Through a committed daily practice of silent, non-conceptual prayer, opening ourselves to the gift of contemplation, we give our consent to God, the “Divine Therapist,” to begin dismantling the prison walls of our psyche that confine us to the ego’s “broken record” of spinning repeated stories about past and future in our head.
In time, through prayer, we can step into the freedom and sunlight of the simple, beautiful, and always-perfect, joy-filled “NOW” of the present moment of grace. Only in this way can we become, like Mary, a vessel and channel for the the Incarnation of Christ in our own communities. Even in this troubled world that has been greatly traumatized in the past year of 2017 by an escalating abasement of human dignity, assaulted on so many fronts, we can live the New Year of grace, 2018, as “joyful witnesses and people of peace and hope.” Blessings of conversion to all!
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What is our true, essential being—that which remains the same through all the shifting sands of personal identity? Our true, essential being is utterly simple, present moment consciousness of just being, or simple existence, before we experience ourselves as anything specific or particular—a woman, a man, old, young, black, white or brown, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, atheist….Actually living from this silent sense of simple presence in this eternal here and now, beyond any self-concept, is what some would call “spiritual enlightenment” or “awakening to the true Self.” Jesus and many mystics would probably have called it living in the presence of God. —Francis Dale Bennett
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The thinking mind dominates awareness with clenching fists that constantly search for something to grasp. Contemplation, by contrast, requires open palms of simple, direct engagement. This grasping tendency of the mind is the subject of the healing that will help it remain still and receptive. Whipping up inner commentaries on past hurts that angered or frightened us happens when the mind uses one of its millions of hands to grab onto something (real or imagined). This grabbing, lightning quick, produces the story we tell ourselves about our anger or resentment. It is crucial to be able to spot these stories, for there will be no liberation until we learn to drop these elaborate commentaries, and we cannot drop them until we see ourselves doing it. —Fr. Martin Laird
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Of course the ego resists surrender and emptiness. So we need a little practice. In contemplative prayer we consciously open ourselves to being prayed through. Again and again we are humbled, observing our incessant and scattered stream of consciousness. Simply watching our thoughts helps us detach from them rather than be identified with them. Again and again we have the opportunity to let go, to sink into the deeper stream of Presence. It takes a lifetime of practice to remain in this flow more and more. —Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are. —Adyashanti
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The essence of meditation is to leave the ego behind. We are not trying to see with the ego what is happening. Ego-vision is limited by its own self-centeredness. The eye with which we see without limit is the eye that cannot see itself. The paradox of meditation is that once we give up trying to see and to possess, then we see all and all things are ours. —Fr. John Main, OSB
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We usually evade the present, either by living in the past, or by creating a world of fantasy. But meditating closes off those two options or escape routes. There is nowhere to go except to BE HERE. The prayer points in one direction, towards the center. It is a narrow path, but it is the path of truth. As we follow the way of silence, it leads us along a way in which everything in us dies that would hold us back from the fullness of life. We die each day in faith and that is the supreme preparation for our death. It also inevitably brings us to confront two very powerful forces: anger, and the fear that it springs from. This is everything that meditation is not.
There is a great danger, especially today in our self-conscious and narcissistic society, of mistaking introversion, self-fixation, self-analysis, for true interiority. To be truly interior is the complete opposite of being introverted. In the awareness of the indwelling Presence, our consciousness is turned around, converted, so that we are no longer looking at ourselves, anticipating or remembering feelings, reactions, desires, ideas or daydreams. We are turning towards something else. In faith, attention is controlled by a new Spirit, which is by its nature dispossessive. The passport into the kingdom requires the stamp of poverty. But there is nothing more difficult than to learn to take the attention off ourselves. We are all too prone to let our attention wander, to drift back into self-consciousness, self-infatuation, and distraction. But when the attention is in God, with the vision of faith, everything reveals God to us. When our attention is on ourselves, in the image-blindness of the ego, everything is a distraction from God. To place our attention always in that vision of faith, though a demanding challenge, is precisely what we have been created for. —Fr. Laurence Freeman
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
To be attracted by power, by grandeur, by appearances, is tragically human. It is a great temptation that tries to insinuate itself everywhere. But to give oneself to others, eliminating distances, dwelling in littleness and living the reality of one’s everyday life: this is exquisitely divine.
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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
