Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2020
Dear children! In this time of grace, I desire to see your faces transformed in prayer. You are so flooded by earthly concerns, you do not even feel that spring is at the threshold. You are called, little children, to penance and prayer. As nature fights in silence for new life, also you are called to open yourselves in prayer to God, in Whom you will find peace and warmth of the spring sun in your hearts. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2020
Our Lady begins her Lenten message by saying, “In this time of grace, I desire to see your faces transformed in prayer.” On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Church’s special “time of grace” in preparation for Easter, our faces are indeed transformed—by a cross in black ashes smeared upon our foreheads. We walk through our day—at work, school, out shopping, doing errands, or at home—with our “faces transformed” by the sooty ashes that are, themselves, a result of transformation: the burning of last year’s Palm Sunday branches.
We give public witness through our ash-blackened faces that we are “penitents” —people who have been humbled to the dust in awareness, confession, and repentance for our SINS. It is a beautiful and meaningful public display of faith in God and recognition of our human condition, heading ever-closer to the grave each day—an open admission of both humanity and divinity: that we are dying in the flesh, but that in voluntarily dying to “self” we are also moving spiritually toward eternal life in the Oneness of Love.
But for all of the deep, symbolic, metaphorical and archetypal significance of our Ash Wednesday facial transformation, how much of it penetrates to our heart and mind and to our actual lived experience in the form of new behaviors? This can happen only through PRAYER, which is why Our Lady asks not for “your faces transformed in ashes” —but for “your faces transformed in prayer.” Indeed, this transforming prayer has been her call for the past 39 years in Medjugorje.
The very word “Lent” means “spring,” and so Our Lady turns our attention to this reality of Great Nature: “You are so flooded by earthly concerns, you do not even feel that spring is at the threshold.” How sad and true! We are tragically distanced, disconnected, and out of touch with nature in our absorption by electronic screens, mass media, social media, smart phones, and the over-stimulation they provide as a 24/7 bombardment of our senses, focusing our attention on worldly things and numbing our awareness of budding trees and awakening seeds that are visible all around us as the miracle of New Life for which Lent is meant to prepare us. But this human “disconnection” is an old problem; poet William Wordsworth famously captured it in a sonnet over 200 years ago:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
While the various kinds of distracting external stimuli have changed over time, the basic phenomenon of this human “attention deficit” regarding nature is nothing new.
Our Lady continues: “You are called, little children, to penance and prayer. As nature fights in silence for new life, also you are called to open yourselves in prayer to God, in Whom you will find peace and warmth of the spring sun in your hearts.” After stating the obvious—our traditional Catholic teaching on Lent as a call to “penance and prayer” —Our Lady gives us a beautiful and instructive illustration from NATURE as the perfect example of what needs to happen in our spiritual life during these forty days. In her teaching, penance and prayer come together as an integral whole.
Penance is difficult for all human beings, for—as Jesus warned his sleepy disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane—“the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” (Mt 26:41) Penance is a voluntary outward expression of our inner “turning around,” repentance, thinking-again, metanoia, conversion, transformation of consciousness, and “changing the direction in which we look for happiness.” As such, it “goes against the grain” and “kicks against the goad” of what is most comfortable, easy and typical for us. Doing penance thus involves a “fight” —a movement outside of our comfort zone into what feels less “natural and normal” to our habitual way of life.
It might entail a difficult change in our eating and drinking through fasting/abstinence; a difficult change in our financial spending through almsgiving/donating to charity; or a difficult change in our time and energy outlay through volunteer labor/works of mercy. All of these are worthy forms of penance that involve the hard discipline of overriding our resistance to exerting unusual effort, rather than taking the “path of least resistance” demanded by our human condition’s love of “ease and comfort.”
But rather than focusing on these worthy facets of penance, Our Lady dwells instead upon the penitential aspect of PRAYER itself—especially SILENT prayer or meditation. She says, “As nature fights IN SILENCE for new life, also YOU are called to open yourselves in prayer to God.” Anyone who has spent time in Christian meditation—having the simple intention of opening the mind and heart to God’s presence and action within—has experienced a “FIGHT IN SILENCE FOR NEW LIFE.”
When we enter into a 20-minute period of externally silent meditation, we soon realize that our internal world is anything but silent! Whether using a concentrative “mantra” method like the Rosary or Jesus Prayer, or a receptive model like Centering Prayer, we quickly find the egoic “monkey mind” at work, trying to hijack our intention by controlling and directing our attention through endless distractions. Herein lies the serious interior battle between “spirit and flesh,” the “True Self and False Self,” the “better angels and demonic ego” that lie within each one of us.
It is a “fight to the death” in terms of the iconic Christian imagery of the cross—for “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single seed, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (Jn 12:24) The allegory of the buried seed in the dark earth—waiting in silence and receptivity for God’s springtime grace to resurrect it to a new life in the sun as a blooming, flowering plant—is one of Our Lady’s favorite analogies for silent, contemplative PRAYER “in secret,” and its transformative manifestation in our life.
She sees in the natural cycle of germination a reflection of our human need to “die before we die,” as the great saints and mystics of all religions have taught. Like a seed that seemingly dies “as seed” and lies dormant in the dark earth (sometimes for up to fifty years!), human beings, while biologically still “alive,” must experience a dying to the false self /ego, so that when physical death comes, the awakened/ resurrected/ germinated True Self or soul remains fully alive forever. Only what is essentially “unreal” ever really dies. As Jesus put it, “Whoever wishes to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 16:25) Our Lady finds in nature the perfect mirror of God’s way of working in the human soul/soil.
This Lent, for twenty minutes (twice a day), let us take up the transformative “penance” of silent Prayer of the Heart: “closing the door to our inner room” and praying “in secret,” as Jesus instructed (Mt 6:6)—opening ourselves in receptivity, waiting in the dark earth like a grain of wheat, dying to the False Self with its million chattering distractions and ego-manic cries of “Me, me, me!” and “I, I, I!” Let us engage in the spiritual battle and “fight” by continually letting go of those thoughts and returning our attention and intention to the Divine Indwelling Presence of God/Love “in Whom we will find peace and warmth of the spring sun in our hearts.”
Moreover, during these forty days of Lent, let us carry out ALL of our Lenten penance—fasting, almsgiving, and works of mercy—in the quiet secrecy and humility of a prayerful spirit “FIGHTING IN SILENCE,” just like the buried seeds. May Our Lady see our faces—and our lives—“transformed in prayer” by the time we reach the Easter feast of the Resurrection!
+ + + + + + + +
Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
+ + + + + + + +
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
—The Jesus Prayer/Prayer of the Heart, based on Luke 18:13
(Repeat these words silently from the heart throughout the day,
until the prayer “prays itself within you” automatically)
+ + + + + + + +
Remember that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
+ + + + + + + +
Standing in the Heart of the Cross
Here the cruciform-shaped cathedral converges
and we stand in the heart of the cross.
Here we commune within our own hearts,
with the heart of God.
It is here that our extremes and contradictions meet:
where South meets North,
East meets West,
and vertical and horizontal overlap.
Nailed to the extremes of this world
and all its contradictions,
Jesus embraces life and holds out hope.
—Inscription found in an old Irish church
+ + + + + + + +
“Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” We hand our imperfect self over to the One who responds by handing us back our true self through his gift of self on the cross. The Lord sets before us life and death, and asks us to “choose life” by taking up Christ’s cross.
—Pope Benedict XVI
+ + + + + + + +
Catholic Voting
Abortion and climate change are examples of existential threats competing as “single issues” for Catholic votes. But the faith-filled voter who seeks to be guided by Catholic social teaching is confronted by compelling moral claims that cut across the partisan and cultural divides of our nation. For this reason, the drive to label a single issue “preeminent” distorts the call to authentic discipleship in voting. Amid the swirl of social and political forces, American Catholics are required to choose a candidate for public office, not a stance, nor a specific teaching of the church.
It is a choice that takes being informed, and prudence in assessing a candidate’s opportunity, competence and character—deciding which one has the best chance to actually advance the common good. Catholics will need to think seriously about serious subjects, and not be driven merely by partisan passions or take the easy path of a one-issue vote. Believing that God is active in the lives of people, well-formed Catholic consciences deserve respect. For the disciple of Jesus Christ, voting is a sacred action. It touches the crossroads where Christian life and conscience come into contact with the real world.
—Bishop Robert McElroy
+ + + + + + + +
Wisdom from Pope Francis
“Be perfect.” These words challenge all of us, as the Lord’s disciples. Imitating the perfection of God might seem an unattainable goal. Yet we must never forget that without the Holy Spirit our efforts are in vain! Christian holiness is not first and foremost our own work, but the fruit of docility—willed and cultivated—to the Spirit of God.
In the Gospel, Jesus speaks to us of holiness, and explains to us his new law. He does this by contrasting the imperfect justice of the scribes and Pharisees with the higher justice of the Kingdom of God. The first contrast refers to revenge….We are required not only to avoid repaying others the evil they have done to us, but also to seek generously to do good to them. The second contrast refers to our enemies….Jesus asks us to love those who do not deserve it, without expecting anything in return, to fill the emptiness in human hearts, relationships, families, communities and in the entire world.
Jesus did not come to teach us good manners, how to behave well at the table! To do that, he would not have had to die on the cross. Christ came to save us, to show us the way, the only way out of the quicksand of sin, and this way of holiness is mercy—that mercy which he has shown, and daily continues to show, to us.
+ + + + + + + +
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
