Medjugorje Message: May 25, 2017
Dear children! The Most High has permitted me to call you anew to conversion. Little children, open your hearts to the grace to which you are all called. Be witnesses of peace and love in this peaceless world. Your life here on earth is passing. Pray that through prayer you may yearn for Heaven and the things of Heaven and your hearts will see everything differently. You are not alone; I am with you and intercede before my Son Jesus for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
June 2017
Our Lady’s message was given on the Feast of the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, forty days after the Resurrection, and it fittingly reminds us of our own calling toward “Heaven and the things of Heaven.” She calls us yet again (and “anew”) to “conversion“—which means, essentially, to “change the direction in which we are looking for happiness.” How do we accomplish this? Our Lady says: “Open your hearts to the GRACE to which you are all called.” Opening up to grace, meaning divine aid—God’s help, assistance, power and strength—comes first, because conversion (radical, root-level change) is not something we can do on our own! Note that Our Lady says “ALL” of us are offered divine grace—not just “some” specially-chosen people.
Next, Our Lady says: “Be witnesses of peace and love in this peaceless world.” If the world is “peaceless” but WE are to “witness peace and love,” then clearly we are being asked to live as a “counter-sign” to the world, to live in a “counter-cultural” or “un-worldly” way! This indeed requires “conversion” fueled by divine grace, for up until now we have been looking for our happiness in the direction of “the world”—in the typical ways that all ego-centered, false-self bound people look for happiness within our universal human condition: seeking safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control as the basic “programs” for our happiness. These agendas will NEVER WORK! Why?
Primarily because worldly “happiness” based upon our instinctual/primitive childhood needs can be only temporary at best! It is transitory, fleeting, ephemeral—even within our own lifetime—but more importantly, it cannot follow us beyond the grave: it is a “this-life-only,” earthbound brand of happiness with a rapidly expiring “shelf-life”! Our Lady spells out the grim truth: “YOUR LIFE HERE ON EARTH IS PASSING.” Ouch! Several times in recent years, Our Lady has reminded us of this sober reality: “Your life is passing.” We each must reckon with our own mortality. Every religion and spiritual tradition on earth teaches the value of keeping DEATH before our eyes, in our wakeful awareness as much as possible. To have life in focus, we must have death in focus.
The Baby Boomers are now aging and becoming “senior citizens”; many of us have died and it seems more are “dropping” every day, often at “young” ages—in our 50’s, 60’s or 70’s. As health problems arise, the inevitable diminishment of our youthful vigor and the gradual (or rapid) slide toward the “final curtain” loom ever larger in our consciousness. Perhaps we begin to hear in a new way the manifold references to death we have been making in our prayers all these years: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…” (Hail Mary); “At the hour of my death call me and bid me come to you…” (Anima Christi)—or the references to our life on earth as only a temporary waystation on the road to another, fuller life: “To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears….after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus” (Salve Regina). Indeed, these prayers we’ve known since childhood take on a sobering new significance now!
To accomplish the “conversion” that Our Lady asks of us, she says: “PRAY that through PRAYER you may yearn for Heaven and the things of Heaven and your hearts will see everything differently.” Up until now, in our unconverted state, we, like everyone else, have been yearning for the things of Earth, the goods of this world as they are valued by human accounting—the cultural symbols of safety/security, affection/esteem, and power/control. By midlife or old age, we have perhaps gained some of these coveted worldly goods: safe homes, money in the bank, a stable income, material possessions, family and friends, a title or position of respect, and relative autonomy and independence to run our lives as we wish. Yet in our dawning realization of life’s decline and death’s coming closeness, a chilling fear enters our hearts which none of the world’s goods can calm or silence!
But PRAYER can address this existential fear, as Our Lady has taught tirelessly at Medjugorje. Prayer is the way to get our own mortality and death into focus, and then to transcend it—to go beyond it, to the resurrection, to a new and eternal life that arises from our union with God. This new life that we call “Heaven” is a death to all our fears—beginning with the worldly fear of our own mortality. In prayer we go beyond our own life and its limitations into the mystery of God called “Heaven,” which is a mystery of Infinite Love that casts out all fear. In prayer we realize that our SOUL is immortal and will outlast our mortal frame—our aging and diminishing earthly body—and go on for all eternity with and in God: our Divine, Indwelling, inmost Center.
Some people complain that a theological emphasis upon Heaven (“pie in the sky when we die“) robs us of our legitimate and necessary concern for this world and for Kingdom-building in the “here and now” of this suffering earth—that it weakens our motivation and resolve to help the poor and work for the good of the created natural environment, making us complacent as we simply “bide our time” in this “vale of tears” and wait apathetically for death to come as our welcome exit to the Pearly Gates.
But authentic and healthy Christianity is never such an uncaring “escape” from the needs of earth! Our Lady points to this when she says: “Yearn for Heaven and the things of Heaven and YOUR HEARTS WILL SEE EVERYTHING DIFFERENTLY.” This “heart-seeing” (rather than mere “head-seeing”) is the “conversion” to which we are called! The Gospel calls us to experience the Paschal Mystery of Life-Death-Resurrection not only in the Easter story of Jesus or in our own eventual bodily demise, but in the present moment of TODAY, now and throughout our Christian walk on this earth.
In prayer, we are to live the Paschal Mystery in union with Christ continually. That means we’re invited to DIE DAILY to our own selfishness and egoic behavior, our own narcissism, exclusiveness, bigotry, possessiveness, greed, small-mindedness and stinginess. In this continual dying to self, we develop a new way of seeing, for through our daily deaths we also rise to new life—to a sense of compassion, community and communion in love with all people and all creation, to a full life without fear, beyond our former focus on lack, scarcity and limitation, into an experiential knowledge of God’s infinite abundance and unconditional love. Through prayer we LOSE OUR FEAR, and when the scales of fear fall from our eyes, we indeed “see everything differently,” as Our Lady says. We “yearn for Heaven and the things of Heaven,” not only as “pie in the sky when we die,” but HERE and NOW, as we pray in the words of Jesus: “Thy kingdom COME, thy will be done ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.”
WITHOUT FEAR, we are living in the grace of conversion where we “see everything differently.” We look upon our relationships, our country, our world with new eyes and new vision, casting everything in the light of Heaven and through the Gospel lens of conforming earth to heaven: “As above, so below.” For example: In Heaven, do we envision guns for killing? Nuclear bombs? Starving children? Mistreated minorities? Untreated sickness? Vindictive retribution for mistakes? Wealthy/moneyed “buying” of special privilege or personal gain? Desecrated nature? All of these things are part of “this peaceless world,” but Our Lady teaches that those who, through prayer, daily enter into the axis of death and resurrection will experience the grace-fueled “conversion” necessary to become “witnesses of peace and love in this peaceless world.”
They will “yearn for Heaven” and “see everything differently” here on earth. They will be a counter-sign to our current worldly culture of hatred, violence, bigotry, greed and corruption, having an authentic desire for God’s will—LOVE—to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Focusing on “Heaven and the things of Heaven” through prayer (as Our Lady asks) will cast out all the FEAR that drives our present “peaceless world” and its leaders to behave as they do. Instead of merely mirroring worldly culture, those of us who are converted to “seeing everything differently” will seek to transform worldly culture as its “salt,” “light,” “leaven” and “mustard seed.” Our efforts for transformation of the world will be done with an unshakable inner peace and with heartfelt love for all, rooted in our prayer experience that “in GOD we trust.” To this life of ongoing conversion we are called by our baptism, our confirmation, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the messages of Our Lady.
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Moving from Hateful to Grateful
June 11: Feast of the Most Holy Trinity
Today we contemplate the Most Holy Trinity as Jesus introduced us to it. He revealed to us that God is love “not in the oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance.” He is the Creator and merciful Father; he is the Only-Begotten Son, eternal Wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves all things, cosmos and history, toward their final, full recapitulation. Three Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles.
The “name” of the Blessed Trinity is imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love, and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom. “In him we live and move and have our being,” St. Paul said at the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17:28). The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. We could say that imprinted upon his “genome,” the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love. — Pope Benedict XVI
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In our own day, we see various signs of our being orphans: in the interior loneliness which we feel even when we are surrounded by people, a loneliness which can become an existential sadness; in the attempt to be free of God, even if accompanied by a desire for his presence; in the all-too-common spiritual illiteracy which renders us incapable of prayer; in the difficulty in grasping the truth and reality of eternal life as that fullness of communion which begins on earth and reaches full flower after death; in the effort to see others as “brothers” and “sisters,” since we are children of the same Father; and other such signs.
Being children of God runs contrary to all this and is our primordial vocation. We were made to be God’s children, it is in our DNA….I will not leave you orphans.…On the feast of Pentecost, Jesus’ words remind us also of the maternal presence of Mary in the Upper Room. The Mother of Jesus is with the community of disciples gathered in prayer: she is the living remembrance of the Son and the living invocation of the Holy Spirit. She is the Mother of the Church. We entrust to her intercession, in a particular way, all Christians, all families, and communities that at this moment are most in need of the Spirit, the Paraclete, the Defender and Comforter, the Spirit of truth, freedom, and peace….
By means of our universal Brother–Jesus–we can relate to one another in a new way: no longer as orphans, but rather as children of the same good and merciful Father. And this changes everything! We can see each other as brothers and sisters whose differences can only increase our joy and wonder at sharing in this unique fatherhood and brotherhood.
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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
