Medjugorje Message: April 25, 2018
Dear children! Today I am calling you to live your new life with Jesus. May the Risen One give you strength to always be strong in the trials of life and to be faithful and persevering in prayer; because Jesus saved you by His wounds and by His Resurrection gave you new life. Pray, little children, and do not lose hope. May joy and peace be in your hearts and witness the joy that you are mine. I am with you and love you all with my motherly love. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
May 2018
May is “Mary’s Month,” according to ancient Church tradition, and in this Medjugorje message for May, Our Lady clearly illustrates her proper role and the reason why she so rightfully deserves the love, honor, respect and devotion (but never “worship”!) that she is given by the Church.
Our Lady’s entire May message is focused upon JESUS—encouraging us to understand, appreciate and LIVE the Good News of our salvation and our “new life” in Him. While many of our non-Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ misunderstand devotion to Mary as misplaced “worship” or a detraction from the love of Jesus, we know that from the earliest days of Christianity when the Council of Ephesus declared her “Theotokos” —“Mother of God” (over 1,000 years before the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church was split up by the Protestant reformers)—all Christians venerated Our Lady with the sound, sensible understanding that she exists only to continually give the world Jesus in ever deepening, more profound and intimate ways as our human capacity and receptivity grow and allow.
As we often say about our own local M.C.S.A. ministry, the “Marian Center” is JESUS CHRIST! Always and everywhere, authentic “Marian” devotion or activity is “centered” on Jesus the Christ, Son of God and son of Mary. Mary’s own “center” —both on earth, in heaven, and throughout all of her authentic apparitions and messages given to the world in the past 2,000 years—is ever and always Jesus Christ. The ultimate human icon of humility, Our Lady points only to Jesus, never to herself, and she seeks only, through her maternal care and guidance of the human race entrusted to her at Calvary, to draw her children closer to Jesus in an intimate communion with Him that will continue from this life into eternity. Her motherly concern for our immortal souls always revolves around her Son Jesus and how to better lead, draw, and unite our hearts more intimately with His heart in a bond that will overcome and outlast death.
While non-Catholic Christians often view Marian devotion as a distracting “detour” from a more direct “fast-track” to Jesus and our heavenly Father, the saints and mystics throughout history clearly show that a close, loving relationship with Mary-Theotokos, the Mother of God, is indeed the surest route to a profound personal encounter and deep, abiding intimacy with Christ. One example is St. Francis of Assisi, universally seen as “another Christ” who gave to the world the popular Jesus-centered devotions of the Christmas creche/Nativity Scene and the Stations of the Cross in honor of the Lord’s Passion. One of the few saints to receive the stigmata (wounds of Jesus) on his body, Francis was clearly one of the most Christ-centered people who ever lived—yet he consecrated his entire religious order and all aspects of his ministry and movement to the Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom he wrote numerous poetic prayers and devotions. Many other great saints, mystics and theologians of the Church did likewise, receiving profound Christological insight and Gospel illumination through their closeness to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
Just as the world received the “original Christmas gift” of the Incarnate Word, God made flesh, in Bethlehem through Mary, this pattern—“to Jesus through Mary“—remains to this day the most effective channel of grace and path for our human and spiritual growth in Christ. For this reason, Sacred Scripture affirms in Luke 1:48—Mary’s “Magnificat” —“Behold, all generations shall call me blessed.” Here she refers, as always, not to herself, but to “the Almighty who has done great things for me.” Thus the Holy Bible itself attests to the ageless wonder and veneration that are due to Mary, the Mother of God and our mother.
This month’s message, given in the glorious Easter season, fittingly focuses on how we are to live as “Easter people.” Our Lady says, “Today I am calling you to live your new life with Jesus.” But are we even aware that we have a “NEW LIFE”? St. Paul says, “Are you unaware that you who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too should walk in newness of life.” (Rom 6:3-4) The Easter Event not only gave the resurrected Lord Jesus a new life, but gave all of us who are His followers this same risen “new life” to be lived with Him. This “new life” is not only ours after death when we enter eternity; it is to be lived RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, as a witness to the world.
Again, St. Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away; behold, new things have come!” (2 Cor 5:17) So Our Lady says, “I am calling you to live your NEW LIFE with Jesus.” She’s calling because so many of us who proclaim ourselves to be Christians—baptized believers in the Lord—are manifestly NOT “living our new life“! How we cling to our old life and its misery, to our “fleshpots of Egypt” and our many enslavements. We clutch our old resentments, grievances, hurts, and self-pity tightly to our chests, wearing them as badges of honor, as claims to perpetual victimhood and false martyrdom, as entitlements and justifications for our current faithless or sinful behaviors—for our bitterness, cynicism, laziness, addictions and sensuality. Sour, critical and pessimistic, we fail to show the characteristics of hope, strength, faith, joy and peace that would identify us as a “new creation” living a “new life.” Yet such virtuous traits are essential to the Gospel we proclaim: the “Good News” of the Resurrection and Risen Life we share with Jesus Christ, and which we should be showing the world.
Our Lady spells it out clearly: “May the Risen One give you strength to always be strong in the trials of life and to be faithful and persevering in prayer; because Jesus saved you by His wounds and by His Resurrection gave you new life. Pray, little children, and do not lose hope. May joy and peace be in your hearts and witness the joy that you are mine.” Thus we are to identify completely with the Risen Christ, filled with confident trust and awareness that we have been saved and given a NEW LIFE through the Paschal Mystery of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection. As we live this “new life with Jesus,” our “old man” or false self—enslaved to sin, self-pity, egoism, the blame-game of victimhood, and the abdication of mature responsibility for free-will choices made in life—DIES, and is reborn as the “New Man” or True Self living the resurrected and risen “new life” in Christ: full of joy, peace, and the Gospel witness of transformation in love. As the Acts of the Apostles repeatedly tell us, after the Resurrection, even under the worst possible worldly treatment and trials, “the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.” Like them, may we begin to live and show the world our “new life“!
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather sometimes die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die. —W.H. Auden
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May 13: Mother’s Day
When we say Our Lady is Mother we mean that she is supremely life-giving. Wherever she is, whatever she touches, is awakened to life. Life flows out from her fingertips. She is like a whirling ball of fire throwing off life-giving sparks…and the life she radiates is always the life of Jesus. She is Mother, she is Virgin. These terms are not contradictory. Spiritually speaking you cannot have one without the other. You cannot be a true mother unless you are utterly virginal, and you cannot be truly virginal without being a mother. What is spiritual virginity? It means being totally for God, loving God with the whole of oneself—with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength. It means recognizing that God alone is one’s fulfillment and looking only to him for that fulfillment. Let us, like Mary, find happiness in our nothingness, take pride in our state of empty longing, waiting in silent trust…utterly certain, not that one day he will come but that, here and now, he comes. Here and now he is filling my emptiness, causing my desert to blossom like the lily.
—Sr. Ruth Burrows, OCD
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May 20: Pentecost Sunday—Feast of the Holy Spirit
The Spirit is the agelessness, the boundless emptiness of God. It therefore fills everything with its emptiness and contains “all the truth.” Only emptiness can contain everything. Returning to us in the Spirit of truth, Jesus can therefore be both divine and human, historical and cosmic, personal and universal. He is wave and particle, fully individuated yet able to be indivisible from everything. This makes his (and all) death meaningful and necessary. In St. John’s gospel, the Resurrection and the sending of the Spirit are seen as a single event. On the evening of Easter Day, Jesus…breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Then he gave them the power to forgive sins. This power to forgive is a charism of the Spirit because forgiveness removes the greatest of all obstacles to communication. It heals wounds, confesses the truth that sets us free, consoles pain, calms anger, dissolves resentment, reconciles enemies. Whoever knows the truth has the power to forgive.
—Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
Your core, your deepest DNA, is divine; it is the Spirit of Love implanted within you by your Creator at the first moment of your creation. Once you recognize the Christ as the universal truth of matter and spirit working together as one, then everything is holy.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
Jesus tells us of the Spirit who dwells in our heart as the Spirit of love. This interior contact with the Life Source is vital for us, because without it we can hardly begin to suspect the potential that our life has: that we should grow, mature, come to fullness of life, love and wisdom. Each of us is invited to understand the sacredness of our being and life. We should allow our spirit the space within which to expand. This space for expansion of spirit is to be found in silence, and meditation is a way of silence which grows in every part of our lives, and becomes the eternal silence of God. In this silence we begin to find the humility, compassion and understanding that we need for our expansion of spirit. The only thing necessary is that we enter into it by beginning the practice, by putting time aside to make ourselves available for making contact with the Source of all life and the expansion of spirit.
—Fr. John Main, OSB
“MATTER IS SPIRIT MOVING SLOWLY ENOUGH FOR US TO SEE IT.” —Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
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May 27: Feast of the Most Holy Trinity
The classic naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an affirmation that there is an intrinsic plurality to goodness; there are at least three shapes to the foundational goodness, truth and beauty of things. The Trinity reveals a pattern of perfect freedom whereby each of the Three Persons allows the other Two to be fully themselves and remains in full givenness toward each of them, while still allowing, protecting, and honoring itself as itself, and forever emptying itself of itself to make room for the other Two. This is also a definition of the shape of Divine and human Love.
The divine dance of the Trinity is a flow of universal reality through life. People filled with the flow will move away from any need to protect their own power. Trinity says that God’s power is not domination, threat or coercion. All divine power is shared power. God’s mystery rests in mutuality: three persons perfectly handing over, emptying themselves out, and then receiving what was handed over. As members of the mystical body, Christians partake in the divine nature of the Trinity. —Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
The Trinity encapsulates a paradigm of change and transformation based on an ancient principle known as the Law of Three—or ternary metaphysics. Comprehensive and original, the Law of Three is Christianity’s authentic temperament, the key in which all its teachings hang together. The Trinity or Law of Three is a template of God’s ongoing creativity in an evolving universe, the central evolutionary principle. In all situations there are three energies or forces at play: affirming, denying and reconciling. Human beings are locked in binary, either-or thinking that makes us “third-force blind.” The trinitarian Law of Three teaches us to see the new kingdom coming—the manifestation of love that is already present in every situation—to bring resolution to what seem to be two irreducible dualistic binaries. The movement of love within the Trinity sustains third force, drawing things from conflict into reconciliation. A presence that can hold the tension of opposites gives the best access for “third force” to arise; thus a daily contemplative practice of prayer is the greatest help to our becoming alert and receptive to “third force” by relaxing our dualistic/binary thinking.
—Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In every age, the Risen Shepherd tirelessly seeks us, his brothers and sisters, wandering in the deserts of this world. With the marks of his passion—the wounds of his merciful love—he draws us to follow him on his way, the way of life. God our shepherd has come in search of us.
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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
