Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2022
Dear children! I am with you and we pray together. Help me with prayer, little children, that Satan may not prevail. His power of death, hatred, and fear has visited the earth. Therefore, little children, return to God and to prayer, to fasting and to renunciation, for all those who are downtrodden, poor, and have no voice in this world without God. Little children, if you do not return to God and His Commandments, you do not have a future. That is why He sent me to you to guide you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2022
In this month’s Lenten message from Our Lady, given just five days before Ash Wednesday, her words about prayer, fasting, and renunciation—always a staple of her teaching at this season—carry a special urgency and dark gravity as the eyes of the world are turned toward Ukraine and the escalating violence of a Russian invasion that has now begun in a shocking “land grab” by Vladimir Putin. Nothing like this has been seen in eastern Europe since WW II, and many have felt that such a “Hitler-esque” unprovoked invasion of an innocent sovereign nation was unthinkable in the 21st century. But it is actually happening in our time, showing that our world is still far from “safe for democracy.” Factors like energy supply lines, nuclear threats, cyberattacks, and economic sanctions will potentially cause this war to affect not only the immediate region, but the whole world, which is now an interconnected “global village.”
Our Lady’s opening lines of this message seem clearly relevant to the present world crisis: “I am with you and we pray together. Help me with prayer, little children, that Satan may not prevail. His power of death, hatred, and fear has visited the earth.” The current tragic situation in Ukraine enables us to hear these words with greater openness, seriousness, and responsiveness, but Our Lady has been saying these things for a long time, pleading for our prayers to “help her” overcome Satanic influence in our world, that this evil “may not prevail.” Just last month, she said, “Do not forget that Satan is strong and that he wants to attract all the more souls to himself.”
When Our Lady says that the Satanic “power of death, hatred, and fear has visited the earth,” do we suppose that she refers only to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Surely not—for YEARS Our Lady has been warning of and decrying our escalating division and polarization born of Satanic ego. What we see happening today has been sown and seeded for years, as increasing divisiveness, incivility, ideological extremism, political corruption, brutality, unbridled greed, blatant lying and propaganda have become “mainstreamed” not only in the expected places of autocratic/authoritarian government, but also in western democracies and worldwide—largely through social media and the internet. This toxic demonic influence has infected the whole planet, just as the coronavirus pandemic did.
The ongoing Satanic assault on our UNITY as a human species whose forces of greed are “fouling our nest” to the point of making the planetary climate unlivable is not being deterred even by this imminent ecological catastrophe; much less is the Satanic assault on our UNITY as fellow Americans, fellow Catholics, or fellow Christians slowed down as we have become bitterly divided into opposing “enemy camps” through the politicizing of basic, core values of health, equality, justice, civil rights, and human dignity that were once shared spiritual values transcending “partisan” differences.
Through this Satanic assault on our UNITY via political division, the “Great Divider” has succeeded and “prevailed” in hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from Covid-19 through a propaganda/disinformation campaign of misplaced blame and false accusation, led by “the Accuser of our brothers” (Rev 12:10)—the devil who always separates and divides. As Our Lady says, “His power of death, hatred, and fear has visited the earth.” Seeds of FEAR are sown first, in vulnerable minds that are easily led by lying manipulation; next, fear is overlaid by ANGER as we try to defend our egoic positions with argument; then anger hardens into HATRED for the “other side” who are now shunned as the “enemy” ; next, hatred bears the fruit of VIOLENCE that becomes increasingly “justified” in our suicidally egoic delusion; and finally violence leads to DEATH, as Satan, the “Divider-in-Chief,” often does “prevail” in the voluntary end of lives that should be longer, if only the politicizing poison of demonic division had not entered into them.
The invasion of Ukraine has just begun, but for years now there has been a Satanic invasion of the sovereign territory of our basic human dignity, created as we are, in the image and likeness of God to be LOVE and only LOVE. We have all sustained the injuries of battle in the brutal siege of the past decade of polarization brought by political division and ideological extremism. It has killed many of us, left others emotionally and spiritually wounded, and countless relationships damaged or destroyed. Indeed this “power” of Satanic ego “has visited the earth.”
Moving now from subtle to more obvious visibility, it is manifesting blatantly in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Hopefully our sensitivity as human beings has not been so severely impaired that we cannot see what is True and Real in this tragic situation. Hopefully we can still join with Our Lady and “help her with prayer, that Satan may not prevail.” Here is Our Lady’s heavenly antidote to our collective human sickness:
“Therefore, little children, return to God and to prayer, to fasting and to renunciation, for all those who are downtrodden, poor, and have no voice in this world without God.” This is the perennial Lenten program of PENITENCE—our 40-day season of preparation for Easter through repentance: bringing into our awareness the sins by which we separate ourselves from God-consciousness; a cleansing and opening of our hearts and minds for liberation, “the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21) that we will know when our idols have been released. Thus we prepare for the new life of Easter resurrection by the necessary death: voluntarily dying to the old, false self of doom and destruction.
Our Lady’s call to “return to God and to prayer” invites us into the INTIMACY with God that we may have lost (or never experienced) through a superficial, “lip-service” practice of our faith. But through a dedicated time for “prayer of the heart” in silent solitude and stillness, we can give God an opening to touch our inmost being. Only in our opening to the Divine Indwelling Presence in PRAYER can our souls be healed and our characters transformed into the LOVE we were created to be as image and likeness of God. Upon this personal transformation into LOVE hinges the fate of our entire planet Earth today.
Our Lady’s call to “fasting and renunciation” —the voluntary surrender of some portion of our normal food intake and of other substances or behaviors that are a pleasurable or habitual part of our life—is deeply tied to the whole Body of Christ, the worldwide community with which we are inextricably linked in a great network of mutuality and interbeing. Without this sense of the “whole” of which we are a part—the larger macrocosmic circles of our family, neighborhood, city, country, world, and biosphere/planet—we will not be able to survive as a species for much longer, as human greed (driven by Satanic ego) compels each of us to constantly TAKE MORE than we need and CONSUME MORE than our fair share of the earth’s goods.
Thus Our Lady pointedly calls us to fasting and renunciation “for all those who are downtrodden, poor, and have no voice in this world without God.” Implicit in this call is our Catholic social justice teaching and what the Church calls a “preferential option for the poor.” This view is solidly grounded in sacred scripture, found in the biblical commands of God, the prophets, and Jesus who taught that “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me,” (Mt 25:40) and that our present treatment of the “poor Lazarus” at our door will determine our fate after death. (Lk 16:19-31) Furthermore, our care for the “downtrodden, poor, and voiceless in this world” is not to be confined to the 40 days of Lent and our “Rice Bowl” collection; it is a call upon our whole life, 24/7/365, determining our policies and actions for the marginalized in both private and public spheres of our influence.
Our Lady concludes her message with these chilling yet hopeful words: “Little children, if you do not return to God and His Commandments, you do not have a future. That is why He sent me to you to guide you.” Just two months ago, Our Lady said, “Little children, without peace you do not have a future,” imploring us to pray and work for peace in this “peaceless world.” Now, when our world peace has been newly shattered in a profound way, Our Lady is repeating her warning—but this time spelling out clearly the ROOT of peace, its basic, rudimentary conditions: “a return to God and His Commandments.” Without these, she says, “YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUTURE.” Strong words! A zero-sum “endgame” has arrived for Planet Earth. Already the “saber-rattling” of war has escalated to “nuclear arms-rattling,” and a nuclear holocaust will end not only the “western democracy experiment,” but the whole “Human Experiment.”
For 40 years, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Queen of Peace, has called us to “return to God” through one simple path: “PRAY! PRAY! PRAY!” Through PRAYER everything else falls into place, for a return to “God’s Commandments” —LOVE of God and LOVE of neighbor—flows naturally and inevitably from PRAYER. We were made by, in, and for LOVE by the God who IS LOVE, and only by returning to our true and essential nature as the “Imago Dei” (image of God) can we possibly survive, thrive, and “have a future” —whether on earth or in heaven.
In PRAYER we are touched by the Indwelling Divine Presence of LOVE and immersed in the Source/Light/Energy of Life: the unconditional, all-embracing, non-judging Acceptance that is Infinite LOVE. Nowhere else but in the silence of PRAYER can we contact and “re-fuel” ourselves with this Power for life. It’s a free and inexhaustible resource always present and available to us, but we must CHOOSE conscious awareness of this LOVING Presence through praying, each and every day. May this Lenten season kick-start for all of us a long life on a new earth in the “civilization of Love.”
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Empty yourself. Sit quietly, content with the grace of God.
—St. Romuald
The purpose of silence is to break through the crust of the false self.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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The illusion of what Thomas Merton called the “false” self…is the separate or small self that believes it is autonomous and separate from God….the little being that we get attached to and take too seriously. The True Self is life itself—the Big Life, Universal Being, the “One in whom we live an move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) Your True Self is Life and Being and Love. Love is what you were made for and Love is who you are. When you live outside of Love, you are not living from your true Being or with full consciousness. Your True Self is a tiny flame of the Universal Reality that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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The God whom Jesus proclaimed embraces indiscriminately, the bad and the good, the deserving and the undeserving…with mercy like the light of the sun, going out to everyone. It’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, and has a reach beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even sin itself.
We must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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God is the doer and the giver. Christian prayer is nothing other than being present to God so that God can give to us. All that matters is that we believe this and stay there, present, regardless of how we feel or don’t feel. The most profound expression we can give to faith is to set aside an inviolable time each day, no matter how short, when we each deliberately affirm God’s absolute love for us now, here—and stay there in blind, trusting faith, receiving it. This will mean learning the precious lesson that, in fact, we have no inner resources, learning to live happily without any assurances from within ourselves but casting our whole weight onto infinite love. This glorifies God’s true nature which is LOVE.
—Sr. Ruth Burrows, OCD
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A Lenten Fast from TV Commercials? (Press “Mute” to Silence!)
There are three degrees of silence: silence of the mouth, silence of the mind, and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will. Physical noise, mental noise, and the noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. All the resources of our technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.
The television is a conduit through which a prefabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with babel of distractions. Broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, and the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of fantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—the workings of that force which saints have always taught is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine ground.
—Aldous Huxley
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It may be hard to convince yourself of the value of interior silence. In this prayer God is speaking not to your ears, to your emotions, to your head, or even to your heart, but to your spirit, to your inmost being. There is no human apparatus to understand that language or to hear it. A kind of anointing takes place. The fruits of that anointing will appear later…in your gentleness, peace, and willingness to surrender to God in everything that happens. That is why interior silence is greater than any insight. The deeper your interior silence, the more profoundly God will work in you without your knowing it. Pure faith consents and surrenders to the Ultimate Mystery just as God is—not as you think God is or as someone has told you God is, but as God is in God’s self.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Solitude is not a practice just for ourselves but a practice to cultivate within each of us a greater capacity for living in communion with the world. In solitude we are able to listen more intimately for the whispers of the Divine alive in each moment.
—Christine Valters Paintner
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Entering into a simple contemplative practice and remaining with its simplicity awakens you to God’s simplicity. When you simplify your mind’s actions in silent prayer, you reduce them from many to one. In contemplation, your many thoughts and strategies of finding truth, of seeking God, of discovering what your own life is about, are simplified into truth itself, into God, into life itself. In the clear, immediate, unadorned moment of life, God IS.
—David Frenette
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We can help heal this world and unify it in LOVE, or we can destroy its inner unity by our resistance to evolve in love.
How can I increase my capacity for LOVE? Throughout this Lenten season, notice all the ways and places where a little more love can bring some healing and unity into your life, the life of others, and the life of our planet. This is a deliberate decision which, moment by moment, can transform the world.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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I long to see us united with and transformed into the gentle pure eternal truth, the truth that rids us of all falsehood and lies. I shudder at the thought of the devil’s deceptiveness. My only trust is in God’s goodness. I cannot trust in myself because of my own weakness and the devil’s cleverness. But then I turn to the tree of the most holy cross of Christ crucified; there I lean and want to nail myself fast…nailed fast with him in love and deep humility, the devils will have no power over me…because of the power of Christ crucified. Keep living in God’s holy and tender love. Jesus love! You are a fire ever burning, but not consuming. I say also that it burns and consumes; it dissolves and destroys all sin, ignorance, indifference in the soul, for charity is not inactive; it does great things!
—St. Catherine of Siena
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In recent days we have been shaken by something tragic: war. Time and again we have prayed that this road would not be taken. And let us not stop talking; indeed, let us pray to God more intensely. For this reason, I renew to all the invitation to make Ash Wednesday a day of prayer and fasting for peace in Ukraine. A day to be close to the suffering of the Ukrainian people, to feel that we are all brothers and sisters, and to implore of God the end of the war.
Those who wage war forget humanity. They do not look at the real life of people, but place partisan interests and power before all else. They trust in the diabolical and perverse logic of weapons, which is the furthest from the logic of God. And they distance themselves from the ordinary people who want peace and who are the real victims in every conflict, who pay for the follies of war with their own skin….the elderly, those who seek refuge, mothers fleeing with their children.
With a heart broken by what is happening in Ukraine—and let us not forget the wars in other parts of the world—I repeat: Put down your weapons!
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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
