Medjugorje Message: June 25, 2018
Dear children! This is the day that the Lord gave me to give Him thanks for each of you, for those who have converted and have accepted my messages and have set out on the way of conversion and holiness. Rejoice, little children, because God is merciful and loves you all with His immeasurable love and leads you to the way of salvation through my coming here. I love you all and give you my Son that He may give you peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
July 2018
In this message given on the 37th anniversary of Our Lady’s apparitions in Medjugorje, she acknowledges June 25th as a day uniquely chosen for her to be present in our world in an unprecedented and never-to-be repeated way, as she has stated from the start that these will be the last Marian apparitions on earth: “This is the day that the Lord gave me to give Him thanks for each of you, for those who have converted and have accepted my messages and have set out on the way of conversion and holiness.” What a beautiful perspective on the meaning of this (or any) anniversary: that it is “the day that the Lord gave me to give Him thanks.” Indeed, an attitude of gratitude, focused on thanksgiving to God, is the most appropriate way to celebrate any memorial of a life event—whether a birthday, wedding anniversary, milestone of recovery or sobriety, death date of a loved one, national holiday, religious holy day, or patron saint’s day. On these “red letter days,” our first priority should be thanking God for the original grace-filled event in our history and for whatever blessings have flowed from it since that day.
When we think of June 25, 1981, and the 37 years that have passed since then, we are grateful to God for sending Our Lady once more into our world. Just as God sent Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, Our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette, and Our Lady of Fatima to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, in our time He has sent Our Lady Queen of Peace to communicate with the world anew through the six visionaries, Ivan, Vicka, Marija, Mirjana, Ivanka and Jacov. We thank God for these seers’ faithful, unflagging witness to Our Lady’s words and the willingness to share their experience with the world; for the open-hearted hospitality of the tiny village of Medjugorje that has welcomed over 40 million pilgrims into its humble homes; for the Franciscan friars and parish community of St. James Church that have provided tireless spiritual assistance to visitors in need of healing, sacraments, instruction, youth ministry, and compassionate companioning; for the countless tour operators that have shepherded pilgrims safely in and out of the remote mountain village; and for the many Marian centers worldwide that have worked to spread Our Lady’s messages and make them accessible to the millions of people who will never physically go there. For these things we give God thanks!
From Our Lady’s perspective, her gratitude is for “each of [us]…who have converted and have accepted [her] messages and have set out on the way of conversion and holiness.” To convert means to “CHANGE.” Medjugorje is an international “School of Prayer” through which Our Lady Queen of Peace has called the world to change. Those who have accepted her messages have “set out on the WAY of conversion,” for this Gospel call to change is not about a one-time event, but a DAILY WALK, an ongoing, never-ending Spiritual Journey; there is no “graduation” from Our Lady’s “School of Conversion.” Every day we are called to CHANGE and to BE CHANGED by our encounter with God in prayer.
To be “on the way” of change is to be “on the way” of “holiness,” Our Lady says. “Holiness” is not a static condition in which we think, say, and do the same things we thought, said, and did 50 years ago, or 10 years ago, or two months ago. Holiness is to be “on the way of conversion“—the daily walk of CHANGE in which our hearts are open to the newness of each moment’s encounter with God through the people, places and things He brings into our life. Holiness is a RADICAL RECEPTIVITY to the freshness of God’s inspiration and guidance of our ideas, attitudes and actions TODAY, always in the direction of peace, faith, hope, and love, in ever-greater conformity to the Gospel ideals taught by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Holiness is a following of Mary’s Son ever more closely, which requires ongoing change or “conversion” from our typical self-centered, materialistic, superficial, fear-based, egoistic, vengeful, narcissistic, competitive, hard-hearted, exclusionary, greedy, careless, pleasure-seeking, apathetic, power-hungry, and controlling modes of thinking and behaving. These selfish characteristics form our natural “fallen” human condition, from which we are called to CONVERT or CHANGE. Yet how can we possibly be expected to change our basic human nature?
At the Annunciation, Our Lady was told by Gabriel, “Nothing is impossible with God.” Later, Jesus said to his disciples: “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Created in the image of God, our faith assures us that, with the grace of God, it IS possible for us to change, to be “divinized” or “deified” by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit—transformed not only into the “image” but also the “likeness” of God! What does this change look like? In June 1981, in some of her earliest words at Medjugorje, Our Lady said, “Peace, peace, peace! Be reconciled. Only peace!” Our conversion of heart will be marked, above all, by an unmistakable CHANGE from unrest and conflict to PEACE.
Looking at our life today, as we approach another milestone anniversary—Independence Day on July 4th, commemorating 242 years of the American “experiment” in democratic freedom—do we find “PEACE” in our country? No. Both inward and outward peace elude us in this dark hour of our nation’s political unrest, deep division, and the dominating influence of polarized extremes—an inferno of rage stoked daily by a frenzied media that reports “alternative facts” and “fake news” on all sides through the partial lens of biased editorializing and ideological propaganda.
No more “Walter Cronkite Evening News” where everyone hears the same objective account of the day’s events and decides on their own what to make of them. Now everyone lives locked in the separate “silos” of partisan “echo chambers” filled with conservative right-wing “spin” or liberal left-wing “spin”—all blindly drinking the “red” or “blue” Kool-Aid of mythic membership in their chosen “cult.”
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that “veritas in medio est“—“The truth is in the middle.” But “truth” has vanished from our cultural discourse, for the extreme fringes that now dominate the political stage cannot tolerate the “Golden Mean” or “Middle Way” of truth that can emerge only through respectful dialogue, listening, collaboration, compromise and collegiality. The dishonesty and manipulation of extremism has infected the entire body politic; independent thinking and prayerful spiritual discernment of issues have eroded and died in America, even among self-professed “Christian” and “religious” people, as all stripes are led by the nose, “like sheep to the slaughter,” rendered incapable of free thinking by the 24/7 brainwashing bombardment of entrenched, unyielding partisan opinion that we ingest constantly, through a media and technology that is never turned off or unplugged.
From the earliest days in Medjugorje, Our Lady suggested that we “turn off the television” because too much of it renders us “unable to pray.” If this was a problem in the 1980’s—long before the advent of 24/7 cable news, hundreds of channels, the internet, smart phones, tablets, and social media—just imagine how much worse the situation is today! Our Lady’s most frequently repeated Medjugorje message has been: “Pray, pray, pray!”—for PRAYER is the key to conversion; it unlocks the CHANGE from war to peace within both our hearts and our world. But prayer itself is DISABLED by our over-exposure to the angry, hateful, vitriolic, violent influence of the media and technology-driven polarized partisan “echo chambers” in which we now live. This toxic soup in which we swim—whether it’s “red” or “blue“—is destroying our country, poisoning our prayer life, and killing our chances for conversion and peace!
But into this sad state of affairs Our Lady injects this hopeful and uplifting reminder: “Rejoice, little children, because God is merciful and LOVES YOU ALL with His immeasurable love and leads you to the way of salvation through my coming here. I LOVE YOU ALL and give you my Son that He may give you PEACE.” In these two final sentences of her anniversary message, Our Lady points us in the direction we MUST go—as her children, as God’s children, and as disciples of Jesus Christ. The key word she repeats is “ALL“: “God is merciful and loves you ALL with His immeasurable love….I love you ALL.” And we know from the Gospels that Jesus, who loves us ALL to the point of death on a cross, gave us only one new commandment: that WE love ALL people in that same non-discriminating, universally inclusive way. He said we must love even our enemies and persecutors, for this kind of LOVE is what constitutes our “perfection” as the heavenly Father is perfect—to let our rain fall and our sun shine on BOTH the bad and the good, the just and the unjust.
Surely this is the challenging “CHANGE PATH,” the conversion-of-heart “WAY” upon which we must walk, day by day. Our inescapable human condition makes a “one-time-only” or “one-and-done” conversion impossible, for “the human animal” is not “hard-wired” to be loving to those with whom we disagree, much less to those who treat us in unjust, disrespectful, or hateful ways. On the contrary, such CHRISTLIKE LOVE requires a daily discipline of self-renunciation, sacrificial suffering, and humility that can only be nourished by the “daily bread” of PRAYERFUL INTERCOURSE with our “immeasurably” loving God. In these trying times in which we live, when basic civility and simple human respect have been lost in our society (from the top down), quiet time given to PRAYER each day is for us a vital lifeline to sanity and health of mind, body and spirit. Daily Eucharist and frequent sacramental confession, whenever possible, will help us survive these “dog days of summer” when our dignity as children of God in America is suffering a parching drought and thirst. As a countersign to our culture, let us BE LOVE.
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The Kingdom of God is a place where all is not only included but connected, whether we know it or not. It is a whole and it is orderly, but our understanding cannot comprehend it.
—Wendell Berry
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The process of conversion begins with a genuine openness to change; openness to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so too the spiritual life evolves. Grace is the presence and action of Christ in our lives inviting us to let go of where we are now and to be open to the new values that are born every time we penetrate to a new understanding of the Gospel. Each time we consent to…the new perspective that has been given to us…it is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in….If you are willing to let God change you, the Kingdom of God is close….The Kingdom of God belongs to those who have let go of their possessive attitude toward everything, including God.
We may think that the spiritual journey is a magic carpet ride to bliss. It is rather the humiliation of the false self. This is the formation that Jesus gave to His first disciples.
There is no place to go to find God, and there is no place not to go. God is. He is always happening, and that happening is the content of the present moment, whatever that is. On our part, it means a willingness to live in the present moment without being attached to its content and without giving way to an aversion for it. This is learning the divine way to be human, which the Fathers of the Church called deification.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Our life is a unity because it is centered in the mystery of God. But to know that unity we have to see beyond ourselves and with a perspective greater than we generally see with, when self-interest is our dominant concern. Only when we have begun to turn from self-interest and self-consciousness does this larger perspective begin to open. Our vision expands…we come to see beyond mere appearances, into the depth and interconnected meanings of things, not just in relation to ourselves but to the whole of which we are a part. This is the way of true self-knowledge, which is identical with true humility. Meditation opens up for us this precious form of knowledge, which becomes wisdom, when we know no longer by mere analysis and definition, but by direct participation in the heart and spirit of Christ.
Meditation is cutting a pathway through to reality. We begin to see everything in a new light because we have become who we really are. And becoming who we are, we can now see everything as it is and everyone else as they are. We learn how to be rooted in our essential being, which is to be rooted in God, the author of all reality….We do not have to be anyone’s image of ourselves, but simply the real person we are….If we want to find our lives we have to be prepared to lose them. In meditating, that is exactly what we do. We find ourselves because we are prepared to let go of ourselves, to launch out into the depths of God.
—Fr. John Main, OSB
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We begin in ego, imagining that the union with God we seek is far off. After all, ego consciousness is the perception of being a separate self that has to find God, who is perceived as being other than one’s self. God is already here, all about us and within us….God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery, not just in prayer, but in every moment of our lives. This is how Jesus lived. Whether he observed his own disciples or his executioners—Jesus saw God. We meditate that we might learn, with God’s grace, to see God in all that we see. Our oneness with Christ deepens in a lifelong process of conversion in which Christ’s mind and our mind become one mind, one way of seeing and being in the world. The Spirit within us yearns that we might awaken to eternal oneness with God…that our experience of ourselves as other than Christ dissolves into realized oneness with Christ.
—James Finley
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July 4th: Independence Day Reflection
A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands. I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see. That is what the Jewish prophets told Israel both before and during their painful and long Exile (596-538 BC). Yet Exile was the very time when the Jewish people went deep and discovered their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice. Their experience laid the foundation for Jesus’ teaching and solidarity with the poor and outcast.
We must not imagine that political or programmatic changes—of themselves—will ever bring about the goodness, charity, or transformation that the Gospel offers the world. Do not be afraid to allow conventional wisdom to fail and disappoint you, which is often the only path to wisdom. Imperial thinking focuses on judging who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is in and who is out. We who know about universal belonging and identity in God have a different form of power: LOVE (even of enemies) is our habitat, not the kingdoms of this world.
Our message is pre-political and post-political, with huge socio-political implications. Grounding social action in contemplative consciousness is not a luxury for the few, but surely a cultural necessity. Both the Christian religion and American psyche now need deep cleansing and healing. Only a contemplative mind can hold our fear, confusion, vulnerability, and anger and guide us toward love.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Being poor in spirit is rooted in humility and openness to others. The poor in spirit are those who do not rely on themselves, on material riches, who don’t insist on their own opinions, but listen with respect and willingly defer to others’ decisions. If there were more people poor in spirit, there would be less divisions, conflicts and polemics! Like charity, humility is an essential virtue for living in community. The person who truly lives the ‘poor in spirit’ Beatitude has assumed the feelings and attitudes of the poor who in their condition don’t rebel, but know how to be humble, docile, available to God’s grace.
The haze of ravenous consumption takes the attitude of ‘the more I have, the more I want’—this is ravenous consumption, and this kills the spirit. One is not blessed if they are not converted. Always have the heart and hands open, not closed!
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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
