Medjugorje Message: December 25, 2019
Dear children! I am carrying my Son Jesus to you, for Him to bless you and reveal to you His love, which comes from Heaven. Your heart yearns for peace, of which there is less and less on earth. That is why people are far from God and souls are sick and heading towards spiritual death. I am with you, little children, to lead you on this way of salvation to which God calls you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
Annual Message to Jacov Colo: December 25, 2019
Dear children, today, on this day of grace, in a special way I am calling you to open your hearts and to implore Jesus to strengthen your faith. Children, through prayer with the heart, faith and works, you will come to know what it means to live a sincere Christian life. Often times, children, darkness, pain and crosses overwhelm your hearts. Do not waver in faith and ask ‘why’ because you think that you are alone and abandoned. Instead, open your hearts, pray and believe firmly and then your heart will feel God’s nearness and that God never abandons you—that He is beside you at every moment. Through prayer and faith, God will answer your every ‘why’ and transform your every pain, darkness and cross into light. Thank you.
River of Light
January 2020
In these two Christmas Day messages from Our Lady Queen of Peace in Medjugorje—both her monthly message to the world given through Marija and her annual message to Jacov Colo—she appeared carrying “little Jesus” in her arms. This happens every December 25th: Our Lady’s apparition with the Christ-child, leading us to ponder and marvel at the boundless freedom from time that exists in the eternity of Heaven, where Mary can revisit the joyful, wonder-filled experience of carrying the Baby Jesus in her arms rather than being locked-in to the tragic horror of her last earthly moments with the Pieta‘s crucified corpse of her grown son on her lap being the “final word” of history.
She starts her Christmas message by clearly explaining WHY she appears with the Infant Jesus: “I am carrying my Son Jesus to you, for Him to bless you and reveal to you His love, which comes from Heaven.” Every year at Christmas, Our Lady shows us once again how blessed we are by a God whose immense LOVE for us compelled Him to this incredible act of humility: the taking on of flesh and blood humanity in the abject poverty and utter helplessness of a tiny baby laid in a feeding trough—all in order to lift us up to the divine status of immortality and the Eternal Love of heaven. The reason for Our Lady’s annual appearance with the Baby Jesus in her arms is to help renew within us a grateful recognition of this mind-blowing Mystery of the Incarnation—carried out for LOVE of us and the Divine Desire for intimacy with us.
Surprisingly, the rest of Our Lady’s message is somber and sad, unlike her usual Christmas tone of joy and celebration. She continues: “Your heart yearns for peace, of which there is less and less on earth. That is why people are far from God and souls are sick and heading towards spiritual death.” How distressing this must be for Our Lady Queen of Peace, who came to Medjugorje 38 years ago saying, “Peace, peace, peace! Only peace!” and giving us her motherly teaching on the path to personal and global peace: Prayer of the Heart/Rosary, Scripture Reading, Monthly Confession, Frequent Eucharist, and Conversion of Life. In other years she has appeared joyous at Christmas and happy with our efforts to live these messages. But this time she speaks of “less and less peace on earth” that is resulting in people being “far from God” with “souls sick and heading towards spiritual death.”
This grim description of our current state is one we can easily verify by simply opening our eyes and ears to the tragically degraded condition of our own country, suffering the horrible peacelessness of polarization and a crisis of leadership (aided by social and cable media) that, instead of healing rifts, daily exacerbates the gaping wounds of division, encouraging further drama, unrest and internal chaos in these “Dis-United States” of America. The “soul-sickness” and “spiritual death” that threatens our depraved “reality-show” of a country today is also wreaking havoc throughout the whole world, as many other governments and nations are suffering from the satanic ego of fallen humanity having its dark hour of victory at this moment in history.
For Our Lady, the saddest aspect of all this degenerated, broken-down “inner rot” we’re experiencing is that “souls are sick and heading towards spiritual death.” The hope of sharing heaven and eternity in LOVE with all of us was what drove God to the Bethlehem manger and the Christmas gift of the Incarnation in the first place. But like all gifts, it must be RECEIVED. If we refuse to receive the divine gift of eternal salvation for our souls, through hearts and minds that are closed and willfully “far from God,” then our souls, like our bodies, will shrivel up and die, with the grave being the end of a story that was meant to continue unfolding forever. How tragic!
But Our Lady ends her Christmas message on this hopeful note: “I am with you, little children, to lead you on this way of salvation to which God calls you.” Let us renew our desire and commitment to OPEN OUR HEARTS to receive and live the messages of Medjugorje every day, always inviting others to receive with us the freely-given gift of Divine Light, Life and Love!
In Our Lady’s annual message to Jacov Colo, also given on Christmas Day, she elaborates upon what lies behind the lack of peace, sickness of soul and impending spiritual death that plagues our stricken human condition: the absence of PRAYER and a WEAK FAITH overwhelmed by life’s difficulties. She begins: “On this day of grace, in a special way I am calling you to open your hearts and to implore Jesus to strengthen your faith. Children, through prayer with the heart, faith and works, you will come to know what it means to live a sincere Christian life.“
A SINCERE Christian life. Clearly that is not what is currently happening in our peaceless, soul-sick, spiritually-dying world led by many people who claim to be “Christians.” While many in power may feel they are living “a sincere Christian life,” as Our Lady says, we now have government-ordered separation of refugee children from their parents with destitute families living in cages on our border; pathological lying and corruption from the highest seats of largely “Christian“-funded political power; relentless assaults upon our fragile, already-mortally-wounded natural environment, etc.
Yet how can leaders living “a sincere Christian life” permit such things? How can those of us with a Catholic “formation of conscience” support the daily injustices that have become our nation’s “standard operating procedure”? If these things violate the “prayer with the heart, faith, and works” of a Gospel-based life, then—as St. John wrote—while claiming fellowship with Christ, “we continue to walk in darkness; we lie and do not act in truth.” (1 Jn 1:5) Thus many “Christian” leaders and their supporters are presenting to the world the reeking stench of hypocrisy—not a “sincere” (authentic/genuine/real) Christian witness.
Our Lady continues: “Often times, children, darkness, pain and crosses overwhelm your hearts. Do not waver in faith and ask ‘why’ because you think that you are alone and abandoned. Instead, open your hearts, pray and believe firmly and then your heart will feel God’s nearness and that God never abandons you—that He is beside you at every moment.” Once again Our Lady is leading us back to her keystone—the central, foundational message of Medjugorje: “Pray, pray, pray!” Through prayer of the Open Heart we will experience the Divine Indwelling Presence of God that assures us that we are NOT “alone and abandoned” and that “God never abandons us” but is indeed “Emmanuel”—“God with us”—“at every moment” of our life.
It is so important to have a PRAYER PRACTICE that truly opens our heart and mind to this Divine Presence at our inmost center. For even prayer itself can sometimes present a misunderstanding of God that leads to a faulty/insincere/hypocritical “Christian” witness in the world. St. Teresa of Avila taught that every problem with prayer is rooted in “praying as if God were absent.” That is, praying dualistically to a “God up there” from “us down here,” with a huge gulf separating us—rather than opening up mind and heart in silent receptivity to the experience of God’s indwelling Divine Presence at the core of our being. This Prayer of the Heart reveals to us that we are living “through Him, with Him, and in Him” —right HERE, right NOW.
As we experience the grace of genuine Prayer of the Heart, we will be able to verify from our own living practice these final words of Our Lady to Jacov: “Through prayer and faith, God will answer your every ‘why’ and transform your every pain, darkness and cross into light.” What a beautiful promise Our Lady makes here to all of us who, in these very dark and difficult days for our nation, our planet, and our personal lives, may feel sorely confounded and baffled by events, asking “WHY?” in great frustration and distress. (Why are good people supporting evil and injustice?! Why do so many seem blind to the destruction that is happening?! Why does nothing seem powerful enough to awaken consciences and bring about conversion of hearts and minds?!)
The answer to our every ‘why’ lies in PRAYER and FAITH, through which God will transform our painful darkness into light. In the coming days of this beautiful Christmas season of Light emerging from the winter’s darkness, may we close our mouths and open our ears to hear God speak in the silence of our listening hearts. May we hush the dualistic, discriminating mind dividing things up into what is good and bad for me, accept the present moment with everyone and everything in it just as they are, and try to act as lovingly as possible in every situation. In this way, we ourselves will become small beacons of LIGHT shining in the darkness of a troubled world—just as our Lord intended, saying “YOU are the light of the world.” (Mt 5:14)
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?
—St. Oscar Romero
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INCARNATION: The Christmas Mystery We Celebrate
Once you recognize the Christ as the universal truth of matter and spirit working together as one, then everything is holy and nothing is excluded. Once you surrender to this Christ mystery, this divine incarnation in your ordinary self and body, you begin to see it every other ordinary place, too. Christ is “the one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
You don’t have to go to sacred places to pray or wait for holy days for good things to happen. You can pray always, and everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be. Once we can accept that God is in all situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and for God. Our task is to find the good, the true, and the beautiful in everything, most especially the problematic. The bad is never strong enough to counteract the good.
You can most easily learn this through some form of contemplative practice. In contemplation you learn to trust your Vital Center over all the passing snags of emotions and obsessive thinking. Once you are anchored in such a strong and loving soul, which is also the Indwelling Spirit, you are no longer pulled to and fro with every passing feeling. You have achieved a PEACE that nothing else can give, and that no one can take from you.
Divine incarnation took the form of an Indwelling Presence in every human soul and surely all creatures in some way. It is only our human freedom that gives us the ability to resist and deny our core identities by refusing to participate in the flow of life through negativity, exclusion, or unlove. Exclusion might be described as the core sin. In the Gospels, the only people Jesus seems to “exclude” are the excluders themselves. We are all living en Christo, so EVERYTHING belongs. The only difference is the degree to which we surrender to this gift of gratuitous inclusion. The image and likeness of God, when allowed and received, are our human holiness.
We who are rooted in an Incarnational spirituality have some insight into the Ground or Spirit present in every being and calling for an appropriate form of absolute respect. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human. It is the key to healing a suffering world.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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God made all things to this end: to enjoy the same union of humanity and divinity that was united in Christ.
—St. Maximus the Confessor
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The transformation of our human nature—its deification and transfiguration—were accomplished in Christ from the start, from the moment in which He assumed our nature.
—St. Gregory Palamas
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God became the bearer of flesh for a time, in order that humanity might become the bearer of Spirit forever.
—St. Athanasius
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
There is darkness in human hearts, yet the light of Christ is greater still. There is darkness in personal, family and social relationships, but the light of Christ is greater. There is darkness in economic, geopolitical and ecological conflicts, yet greater still is the light of Christ. The unconditional love of God changes lives, renews history, liberates from evil, fills hearts with peace and joy. It is divine love. Christmas reminds us that God continues to love us all, even the worst of us. His love is unconditional; it does not depend on you. Let us receive the gift that is Jesus…once we stop trying to change others but try to change ourselves and to make of our life a gift. The grace of God has appeared, to shine forth in your life. Accept it and the light of Christmas will shine forth in you.
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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
