Medjugorje Message: June 25, 2017
Dear children! Today, I desire to thank you for your perseverance and call you to open yourselves to profound prayer. Prayer, little children, is the heart of faith and is hope in eternal life. Therefore, pray with the heart until your heart sings with thanksgiving to God the Creator who gave you life. I am with you, little children, and carry to you my motherly blessing of peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
July 2017
On this 36th anniversary of the ongoing apparitions of Our Lady, Queen of Peace in Medjugorje, she continues the theme of her decades-long teaching, saying: “I desire to thank you for your perseverance and to call you to open yourselves to profound prayer.” Indeed, it seems WE should be thanking Our Lady for HER perseverance in remaining with us for these many years—not giving up on us or “throwing in the towel” for our obtuseness, lethargy, apathy, and unwillingness to truly live her Medjugorje messages of prayer, peace, fasting, conversion and sacramental life. Instead, as a faithful and longsuffering mother, Our Lady perseveres for as long as Heaven allows her to minister to this troubled world through what are promised to be “the last Marian apparitions on earth.” Graciously, she thanks US—we who have continued to read, study, listen, make pilgrimage, and in any way attempt to follow and live Our Lady’s messages, however imperfectly.
Again she calls us to “open yourselves to profound prayer.” Here the word “profound” is an important qualifier, an adjective meaning “deep, intense, heartfelt, penetrating, earnest, sincere, fervent, ardent, extensive, thorough or radical.” Clearly, for Our Lady, “profound prayer” is something of much greater DEPTH than a superficial and distracted “lip service” of mouthing rote prayers while our mind wanders and our body fidgets impatiently. Sadly, such shallow, inattentive, mechanical “prayer” is all that many people have ever experienced! Medjugorje has been called Our Lady’s “School of Prayer” because for 36 years she has tried to teach us how to “pray with the heart.” The key to such “profound prayer,” according to Our Lady, is “OPENING“—especially opening the heart. That’s because “profound prayer” is not about our own “doing,” but is a gift from God that must be received. If we’re not “open” we cannot “receive.” So in prayer the primary “work” or “practice” on our part is the work of opening our hearts to God’s holy presence and action within us, in order to become a receptive vessel for the Divine Indwelling Spirit to do its healing work in the depths of our being.
The work of “openness” inevitably involves certain “letting go” disciplines or practices. To be “open” necessitates STILLNESS (letting go of activity) in order to perceive the subtlety of the Divine Presence in any given moment; it necessitates SILENCE (letting go of the “monkey mind” chatter) in order to hear the “still, small voice” of Spirit in the midst of a noisy world; it necessitates SIMPLICITY (letting go of selfish schemes and agendas) in order to cut through the many illusions of life’s chaotic, overcomplicated “static.” All of these “opening” practices facilitate inner ATTENTION, which is the gateway to “profound prayer” of the open heart.
In the next lines of Our Lady’s message, notice her repeated use of the word “heart”: “Prayer, little children, is the HEART of faith and is hope in eternal life. Therefore, pray with the HEART until your HEART sings with thanksgiving to God the Creator who gave you life.” Scripture tells us that faith, hope and love are the three crowning “theological virtues,” and Our Lady identifies PRAYER as the “heart of faith” and as “hope” in eternal life. To say that prayer is the “heart of faith” means that the center, the core, the axis, the essential ingredient in faith is PRAYER—not our intellectual assent or verbal recitation of creeds and dogmas, nor our scholarly study and academic theology that come from the “HEAD.” Wonderful as our rational mind is, it alone will leave us far from the reality of deep and authentic “faith.” The ego can easily franchise our intellectual brilliance for its own selfish ends.
Likewise, church attendance alone—simply “warming a pew seat” with our body every Sunday morning, head bowed and hands folded properly—is no guarantee of true faith, for the false self can find many egoic delights in church-going, such as superficial socializing and the “mythic membership” value of being part of an “in-group” that can judge and condemn “outsiders” who are not “just like us” in religious superiority. Hence the hate-filled rhetoric of exclusion we sometimes hear from those who claim to be “Christians” while trampling upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ on their way to and from church. To say that PRAYER (rather than our other religious and pseudo-religious behaviors) is the “heart of faith” means that relationship with God is the vital link that must be forged for a living faith, uniting creature with Creator in the depths of our human consciousness operating on ALL levels—not just the partial physical or mental aspects of our being.
Our Lady also says that “Prayer is hope in eternal life.” Truly, “eternal life” is our ULTIMATE HOPE as human beings. While we nurture “hope” for many lesser things in life—physical health, happy marriages and children, fulfilling careers, material security, recreational pleasures, etc.—our most important long-term hope is that we will live forever; that our soul will never die but have eternal life. Those who have no hope for heaven or an afterlife once their body dies also have little reason or motivation to PRAY, for prayer addresses the divine dimension beyond our earthbound time; it is intimate contact with ETERNITY and a living, conscious relationship of creatures with our Creator God—one that we hope will continue long after we’re dead and gone from here!
Our Lady says, “Pray with the heart until your heart sings with thanksgiving to God the Creator who gave you life.” To “pray with the heart” is to complete our spiritual practice by rescuing it from the truncated, partial exercise of only the mind and body—completing the circle needed for authentic relationship by a HOLISTIC ATTENTIVENESS to all three of our centers: physical, intellectual and emotional/feeling. Too often the third, “heart” center is left out of our prayer and our human interactions. To “pray with the heart” is not “irrational” but TRANS-RATIONAL—including but transcending the discursive intellect; it is not anti-physical but TRANS-PHYSICAL—including but transcending bodily movements of speech and posture. It may be seen in the ecstasy of charismatic prayer experiences like “speaking in tongues” (glossolalia) or “resting in the Spirit,” as well as in the contemplative silence of mystical union given by God after an opening of heart in Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, Rosary, Taize chant or Christian meditation. When all three of our centers are functioning together as one in Prayer of the Heart, we experience the “holiness” of “wholeness” in a joy-filled realization of the great gift of our life and being created by God. This realization in prayer gives rise to praise and “singing with thanksgiving” that we are so “fearfully and wonderfully made” in our multiple centers of being that glorify God as we grow in love.
At Medjugorje, Our Lady’s persistent call to “pray with the heart” has been a plea for our “profound prayer” of the WHOLE PERSON, bringing to God an openness to relationship with ALL of our being: moving center, thinking center AND feeling center—leaving no aspect of our personhood out, just as Our Lord himself called upon us to love God with all our heart (feeling), all our mind (thought), and all our strength (body). Throughout history our human condition has tended toward difficulty with holistic worship, an unbalanced emphasis upon the “head” or the external “body” expressions of prayer, with a neglect of the “heart” of sincere FEELING wedded to the thoughts, words and gestures we project. This imbalance of leaving out the heart has led to tragic hypocrisy, distortions and a bad example of “Christianity” being shown to the world. Our Lady is trying to repair this glaring defect through each one of US.
She concludes her anniversary message by saying, “I am with you, little children, and carry to you my motherly blessing of peace.” This hearkens back to the first day of her coming to Medjugorje in June 1981, when she said, “Peace, peace, peace—only peace!” [“Mir” in Croatian], and identified herself as the Queen of Peace. Countless times in the past 36 years, she has taught us that PRAYER is our ticket to peace—whether personal and private peace, or public and political peace. Peace! Pace! Paz! Pax! Shalom! Salam! Mir!
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Astonishing and Impossible, but True!
Do You Have the Courage and Recklessness of Faith?
The commitment of faith is not merely intellectual or dialectical. It is not that we decide to “believe” in the ideas of the Christian tradition. It is much rather that we have the courage and the recklessness to open ourselves to the unknown, the unfathomable and truly mysterious….We allow ourselves, in the full biblical sense, to “know” the mystery or, even better, to be known by it. To allow ourselves to do this is to follow the fundamental gospel precept of becoming simple, of becoming childlike, of becoming awake. Despite the fact that it is so easily forgotten by those in the mainstream, these are the fundamental tenets of the gospel: faith is not a matter of exertion but of openness.
We need to see faith as openness, and to see it as a positive, creative, sensitive way of being—miles apart from mere passivity or quietism. The effectiveness of all “doing” depends on the quality of “being” we enjoy. And to be open implies certain other qualities: such as being still, because we cannot be open to what is here if we are always running after what we think is there; such as being silent, because we cannot listen or receive unless we give our whole attention; such as being simple, because what we are being open to is the wholeness, the integrity of God. This condition of openness as the the blend of stillness, silence and simplicity is the condition of prayer: our nature and being in wholesome harmony with the being and nature of God. Meditation is our way to this condition of being fully human, fully alive—the condition we are all called to. — Fr. John Main, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
“The world tells us to seek success, power and money; God tells us to seek humility, service and love.”
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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
