Medjugorje Message: June 25, 2020
Dear children! I am listening to your cries and prayers, and am interceding for you before my Son Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Return, little children, to prayer and open your hearts in this time of grace and set out on the way of conversion. Your life is passing and, without God, does not have meaning. This is why I am with you to lead you towards holiness of life, so that each of you may discover the joy of living. I love you all, little children and am blessing you with my motherly blessing. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
July 2020
Our Lady’s message was given on the 39th anniversary of her apparitions in Medjugorje. She begins by citing sacred scripture, quoting the Gospel of John 14:6 as she refers to her Son: “I am listening to your cries and prayers, and am interceding for you before my Son Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Our Lady starts by assuring us that she is “LISTENING” to our “cries and prayers” —thus acknowledging our distress and the difficulty of both our personal problems and our present global crisis as the Covid-19 pandemic continues, with the USA having the worst escalation of cases in the world, exacerbated by the vital wearing of face masks becoming a “political issue” for many Americans who refuse to do so.
Concurrently with the deadly virus, a global movement of rising consciousness and unrest around the SIN OF RACISM has been sparked by recent events of homicidal police brutality and the larger ongoing systemic pattern of racial inequality, especially in the United States. Sadly, this July 4th, what the world sees most when looking to the USA is the deep woundedness of our internal division, reminding us of the words of Christ (later echoed by Abraham Lincoln): “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” (Mk 3:25, Mt 12:25, Lk 11:17)
While Our Lady’s initial reference to hearing our “cries and prayers” is her only explicit allusion to these external tribulations we are suffering at this moment in history, her entire message provides guidance for our response. First of all, just as she did at the wedding in Cana, Our Lady directs us to the One who, alone, has the power to “fix” the problem: “my Son Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” She models for us the perfect “First Responder” impulse, to:
A) “listen” to the outcry of pain and suffering wherever it occurs (from the gasping Covid patient being intubated to the “I can’t breathe” of George Floyd, dying under a policeman’s knee); and
B) immediately TURN IT OVER to Jesus Christ “who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
It was Jesus who first used this title for himself at the Last Supper, after telling his distressed disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled….I am going to prepare a place for you….Where I am going you know the way.” Met with confusion and incomprehension, he spelled out his meaning clearly: “I AM the way and the truth and the life.” Our Lady reminds us of this supremely important, overarching fact—that interceding with Christ is the single most effective response we can offer for any kind of suffering we encounter. Without any specious discussion, we simply pray, “Jesus, YOU take over!“
But instead of prayerful intercession, how have we actually responded to our world’s suffering? To be honest, many of us have spent much more time scrolling through social media, surfing the internet, and watching cable news pundits “spin” the events of our day to the “Right” or “Left” extremes, with the “Truth that is in the middle” nowhere in sight. Rather than spending time each day with “the Way, the Truth and the Life,” we spend endless hours in the “bubbles” or “echo chambers” of our like-minded friends and “news” sources, filling our minds with ideological words and dialectical sound bites for bemoaning the world’s darkness and the tragic “way things are,” always pointing fingers and laying blame outside of ourselves, at the feet of the “other side.” We frequently ramp up our own fear, frustration and anger to a fever pitch of judgment and condemnation toward our perceived “enemies.” How does this response work out? The polarization of opposites deepens and “peacelessness reigns,” as Our Lady often says.
In stark contrast, Our Lady’s Cana example is to turn immediately to “the Way” in total trust and simplicity, and “Do whatever he tells you.” But how can we “DO” whatever he tells us if we are not listening to His Word in prayer and scripture? For example, in a letter of St. Paul, scripture tells us: “Stop disputing about words. This serves no useful purpose since it harms those who listen…Avoid profane, idle talk, for such people will become more and more godless….Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels. A slave of the Lord should not quarrel, but should be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness.” (I Tim 2:14-24) How “kind” and “gentle” do we find today’s exchanges? How effective in healing our division?
Our Lady’s message continues: “Return, little children, to prayer and open your hearts in this time of grace and set out on the way of conversion.” How strange it may seem to call our tragic, troubled moment of history “this time of grace“! But if we are alive, it is indeed a “time of grace” in which we have an opportunity, each moment, to be aware of God’s Presence and to allow God’s all-loving, all-merciful action to proceed through us, with us, and in us. Notice that Our Lady invites our “RETURN” to prayer—a return to our “home base,” our “true North,” our “natural state.”
To “return to prayer and open our HEARTS” is a very different experience from frantically supplicating God from our “heads” in anxious, self-absorbed cries of panic, terror, rage and despair. Rather, the “RETURN to prayer” is a soothing homecoming to the calm simplicity of the breath, in stillness—the return to simply BREATHING and BEING, in the divine SILENCE that undergirds everything that arises in reality from moment to moment. This “return to prayer” of which Our Lady speaks is “being present to Presence” in a calm, silent stillness beyond words.
With our “hearts open,” we can finally begin to LISTEN to the Word within, the voice of conscience and the Holy Spirit, informing our inmost being of where “the Way, the Truth and the Life” is leading us. From that interior revelation—accessible only in our “coming home” to silent prayer of the heart—we can “set out on the way of conversion” and begin to truly change our life in conformity to Christ’s life within us. We can finally start to “DO whatever he tells you.” The fact that Our Lady has called us to CONVERSION for 39 years in Medjugorje should tell us that “something” needs to change, for if we already held all the “correct” moral values, political ideologies, and religious spiritualities, why would Our Lady be here for so long, still inviting us to “conversion” ? Apparently, every single one of us holds views that are in need of correction by Jesus Christ, through conversion of heart.
Our Lady concludes by pulling back the camera for a wider-angle view of the “Big Picture”: “Your life is passing and, without God, does not have meaning. This is why I am with you to lead you towards holiness of life, so that each of you may discover the joy of living.” Certainly our life is passing, “like the grass of the field that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow.” (Mt 6:20) But if our attention and awareness are lifted up to God/Christ-consciousness, then our brief sojourn on this earth can “have meaning,” for we will then perceive the “holiness of life” —that is, the WHOLENESS of life that is so much more than the few transitory earthbound years we spend between the cradle and the grave. It is indeed possible to rise above our circumstances—including plagues, economic collapse, social unrest, environmental crises, and more.
In the “return to prayer” we will glimpse the vast interior spaciousness of Divine Love stretching out before us—a Love that includes but far transcends our earthly journey and worldly cares. We will perceive that “life is eternal and love is immortal and death is only a horizon” (William Penn)—that, indeed, death is just the beginning of a far larger, grander adventure of discovery. In finding this holiness/wholeness of life, Our Lady says, “each of [us] may discover the joy of living.” A JOY to be experienced in its fullness after death, but which may be tasted now, even in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic or any other earthly horror—the “joy of living” we can feel whenever we give ourselves open-heartedly to the “right here, right now” of God’s unfailing Presence and Action within, guiding us toward the Loving Action in the world that God wishes to manifest through us. Joy to the world!
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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“BE UNCONDITIONALLY PRO-LIFE. ERADICATE EVERY FORM OF RACISM AS PART OF YOUR COMMITMENT TO LIFE.”
—St. John Paul II
“WE CANNOT TOLERATE OR TURN A BLIND EYE TO RACISM AND EXCLUSION IN ANY FORM AND YET CLAIM TO DEFEND THE SACREDNESS OF EVERY HUMAN LIFE.”
—Pope Francis
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Racism has rightly been called America’s original sin. It remains a blot on our national life and continues to cause acts and attitudes of hatred, as recent events have made evident. The need to condemn, and combat, the demonic ideologies of white supremacy, neo-Nazism and racism has become especially urgent at this time. Our efforts must be constantly led and accompanied by prayer—but they must also include concrete action. People of faith call upon the Divine Physician, Christ the Lord, to heal the wounds of racism throughout our land.
—U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
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Statement of Lament: Black Lives Matter
We are stunned, shocked, and rendered speechless by recent social commentary revealing the depth of racial divide, disparity, and unrest still existing in our society. But we cannot ignore the reality, nor remain silent. We join our voices with the thousands of others who cry out against senseless killings and devaluing of human life. We commit ourselves to act for a different vision of our world….We stand in solidarity with African American communities and all who are threatened due to race or ethnicity. We especially grieve the events of the past months that added to the long list of African American lives tragically slain.
The Catholic intellectual tradition strives to establish a justice based on the gospel message of faith, hope, and love, while decidedly leaning in favor of the poor and the marginalized. We stand together with all those who continue to peacefully seek change, to promote justice based on this gospel message, and we stand against all who seek to commandeer such actions for personal gain through acts of violence and destruction.
The current pandemic and the response to the recent killings expose the deep wounds and divisions that plague our society, our Church, our institutions, and our nation along economic and racial lines that leave none of us unaffected. The [Christian] charism demands that we examine our own actions and inactions to intensify our response to proclaim the Good News to the poor and to a divided and fragmented world. The poverty, fragmentation, and divisions of our time have uncovered vulnerabilities within our communities that lead to violence, hatred, rivalry, dissensions, and further factions—far from the unity of God’s vision for our world.
We speak out strongly against any use of religion or religious symbols to soften or denigrate scripture’s nonnegotiable affirmation that God stands with justice and the poor. Any action in the name of religion that does not radiate love, peace, kindness, and fundamental respect, but divides people, is antithetical to Jesus and is NOT from the Holy Spirit.
—Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio
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A New America: Getting Beyond Racism by Remaking Religion
The Black Lives Matter movement may be about race but race discloses something deeper in the American psyche…something genetically inscribed in culture. Cultural genes inscribe patterns of thinking and behavior within gene pools from one generation to the next. The symbol of race is based on an outmoded notion of biological essentialism, an obsolete tenet of Aristotle’s philosophy that shaped Christian thinking. Early European settlers in America believed that God created Adam as a white male and placed him in the Garden of Eden to till the earth, be fruitful and multiply. Whiteness was part of God’s original creation and thus a higher level of being than blackness.
Christian religious principles shaped the foundation of America; the discovery of a new land was a divine inspiration to build a new Garden of Eden. For the first 200 years, America became a land of prosperity largely on the backs of slaves, sanctioned by the myth of the white Adam. The principles that drove white Europeans to conquer the land and own slaves also led them to study nature and develop technology….Indeed, the relationship between science and religion became deeply conflicted in the 20th century when Darwin’s evolution led scientists to realize there is no such thing as biological essentialism. Einstein’s theory of relativity caused a similar revolution in physics….These new scientific insights were radical and…demanded a shift in thinking about the human person in relation to the larger whole. While science was bringing about a new worldview, institutional religion remained unaffected and unchanged, holding on to principles rooted in a static, fixed cosmos. Racism stems from outdated philosophical principles embedded in institutional religion…and in the American psyche.
In the western hemisphere religion has become an outmoded social design that no longer has a function…yet religion has not gone away. There is a longing for deep connectivity, community and participation…a longing for ultimate concern, for the truly ultimate. Unlike this true faith, idolatrous faith elevates finite realities to a status of ultimacy that leads to existential disappointment. Racism is a problem of Greek philosophical ideas mixed with a literal reading of the Bible and inserted into minds of believers. Racism is deeply rooted; eliminating it will not come about through education or public policies that espouse equality. It is a problem of deconstructing the static, abstract framework of religion and renewing religion within a scientific world, so that the principles of religion are consonant with the principles of nature. Racism will not be eradicated by rearranging the furniture; rather it is a matter of burning down the house and building a new one. Einstein’s insight holds true: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
What was written of the ecological crisis can be equally said of the race crisis: the roots of the problem are deeply religious and the remedy must be religious as well. Without a new religious worldview aligned with modern science, socialization and order will be thwarted. To revise Christianity along the lines of evolution and quantum physics…shifts it to a God-world relationship in which God is integral to the process of evolution. This new religious paradigm could potentially change our social, political and economic orders and eliminate racism.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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Is Our Culture Hostile to Christianity?
Our culture is hostile only to the INAUTHENTIC living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect. What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?
Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.
—Fr. Gregory Boyle, S.J.
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Whenever there is a lack of clarity or ambiguous circumstances, it is time to wait. Active waiting is essential to the spiritual life. But the paradox of waiting is that it requires full attention to the present moment, with the expectation of what is to come and the patience to learn from the act of waiting. But patience does not mean passivity. It is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the fullest in order to find there the signs of the one we are waiting for. The word “patience” comes from the Latin verb meaning “to suffer.” Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the fullest in belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Patience—an active dwelling in the present moment—is the mother of expectation …standing vulnerable in the presence of our loving God. This is the core of all prayer.
—Fr. Henri Nouwen
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The central element in communion with God is the act of self-surrender. The symbol of my prayer today is the open heart. It is most natural for me to think of prayer in terms of the open hand. My needs are so great and so desperate that there seems to be nothing besides my own urgency. I must open my heart to God. This will include my own deep urgencies and all of my desiring….Somehow I must make God central to me and in me, over and above the use to which I wish to put His energy and power. I surrender myself to God without any conditions or reservations. I shall not bargain with God. I shall not make my surrender piecemeal but lay bare the very center of me, that all of my being shall be charged with the creative energy of God. Little by little, my life must be transmuted in the life of God. As this happens, I come into the meaning of true freedom.
—Howard Thurman (spiritual teacher of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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The unanswered question demands a surrender to God and a greater offering. The surrender can only be made with a conviction that God has heard the request for some light. If no clarity is forthcoming, the soul can still remain at peace, certain that God will extend grace. Logical labors of thought that seem to provide clear answers are usually false solutions in the realm of sacred mystery. Only in waiting and in darkness do quiet spiritual insights come upon us, and when they do, they are like the light emerging at dawn. And often they have to do with our need to offer ourselves more fully in love.
—Fr. Donald Haggerty
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Prayer is personal, not just individualistic. That means it is more than revolving around the egocentric concerns of our lives. It is about breaking out of that orbit and making the true and universal center of reality the conscious hub of our personal universe. Prayer then takes on an increasingly universalist significance as our own worries and troubles are reconfigured in a network of relationships held together by compassion and wisdom—the very forces of the soul that lift us out of the basement of the ego to the roof of the soul where we can see the stars.
—Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
The Lord asks us, in the midst of our tempest, to reawaken and put into practice that solidarity and hope capable of giving strength and meaning to these hours when everything seems to be floundering. The Lord awakens so as to reawaken and revive our Easter faith. We have an anchor: by his cross we have been saved. We have a rudder: by his cross we have been redeemed. We have a hope: by his cross we have been healed and embraced so that nothing and no one can separate us from his redeeming love. In the midst of isolation when we are suffering and experience the loss of so many things, let us once again listen to the proclamation that saves us: he is risen and is living by our side. Let us allow hope to be rekindled.
Embracing his cross means finding the courage to embrace all the hardships of the present time, abandoning our eagerness for power and possessions in order to make room for the creativity that only the Spirit is capable of inspiring…to allow new forms of hospitality, fraternity and solidarity. Embrace the Lord in order to embrace hope: that is the strength of faith. I entrust all of you to the Lord, through the intercession of Mary, Health of the Sick and Star of the Stormy Sea… may God’s blessing come down upon you as a consoling embrace. Lord, may you bless the world, give health to our bodies and comfort our hearts.
—from the “Urbi et Orbi” Message given by Pope Francis on March 27, 2020, along with an extraordinary Blessing and Plenary Indulgence for Everyone in the World who prays for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic
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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
