Medjugorje Message: April 25, 2022
Dear children! I am looking at you and I see that you are lost. That is why I am calling all of you: return to God, return to prayer—and the Holy Spirit will fill you with His love which gives joy to the heart. Hope will grow in you, also for a better future, and you will become joyful witnesses of God’s mercy in you and around you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
May 2022
Our Lady, Queen of Peace, in Medjugorje gave this Easter message on the Monday following Divine Mercy Sunday, and her words clearly relate to that profound devotion given to the Church by Jesus through St. Faustina Kowalska in the 1930’s. In her Diary, the Polish nun (later canonized by Pope John Paul II) recorded these words of the Lord to her, in a time as troubled and yearning for peace as our world is today: “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy.”
Thus our journey through the fifty days of the Easter season begins with the Feast of Divine Mercy on the second Sunday of Easter—the very date which our Lord Jesus Christ requested for this important celebration. This is supremely fitting, for MERCY and FORGIVENESS should have primacy of place as our first and greatest lesson or “takeaway” from the Paschal Mysteries we have observed through Lent and Holy Week, culminating in the glorious Resurrection of Christ: the ultimate and eternal victory of LOVE over sin and death. On Good Friday, the winning “weapon of war” in Christ’s Divine Arsenal was not an instrument of destruction—a gun, tank, missile, bomb, nuke, chemical, or drone such as we now foolishly use to “win wars.” Rather, it was the MERCIFUL LOVE of the battered, bleeding, and crucified Man-God who cried, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
If we who are called “Christians” were paying attention to our own salvation history and the events that opened our graves and Heaven’s gate to us, we would have realized that MERCIFUL FORGIVENESS is the keynote of God’s saving program for humankind, seen clearly throughout sacred scripture and in the sacramental life of the Church. Without it, humanity in general and each one of us, individually, are LOST. Without merciful forgiveness, race relations in America are “lost.” Without merciful forgiveness, hopes of bipartisan political cooperation are “lost.” Without merciful forgiveness, the chances of reconciliation between quarreling married couples, parents and children, estranged friends, and nations are “lost.”
Which brings us to Our Lady’s opening statement in this month’s message: “Dear children! I am looking at you and I see that you are lost.” Let us try to unpack this first statement and take in, deeply, what Our Lady—“looking at us” —sees and means in saying we are “LOST.” Surely we can validate her words from our own lived experience:
Today we are “lost” in confusion over what to believe or whom to follow, as deliberate disinformation distorts many issues where the “Truth” matters, but we cannot discern which voices to trust. We are “lost” in chronic fatigue, depression, and grief over the pandemic deaths of loved ones and of our “normal way of life” at work, school, home, and social groups, wearing us down and disorienting us over the past 3 years. We are “lost” in an endless battle of extreme and divisive political ideologies that have hardened into deep fissures of conflict within our country, global and local communities, churches and families—leaving us angry, exhausted and intolerant. We are “lost” in anxiety and fear about the Ukraine-Russia war with its escalating destruction, danger and major financial damage affecting the entire globe.
We are “lost” in overwhelming dread and complacency about the health of our planet Earth’s environment and the crisis of climate change that we feel powerless to resolve. We are “lost” in a morass of technology that controls our behavior, enslaving us to the devices in our hands, to internet screens and a virtual world robbing us of flesh-and-blood human intimacy and healthy personal interaction. We are “lost” in a sea of materialistic consumerism, unable to unplug from commercially-manipulated “wants” driving us into frenzies of “getting and spending” far beyond our means and our needs. We are “lost” in massive distractedness where fleeting, superficial sound-bites amidst constant noise are the limit of our attention span and the extent of our “understanding.”
These are just a few examples of the clearly manifest “outward” ways that Our Lady, “looking at us,” can “see that we are lost.” Underlying all of these external causes of our “lostness” lies the deeper, interior, foundational “broken compass” of our fallen human condition, marked by the ego’s emotional programs for happiness that will never work: our insatiable, overblown False-self drives for Safety and Security, Affection and Esteem, Power and Control—all sought through the faulty symbols and engines of our secular, self-reliant culture, NOT through reliance on GOD as their Source. So very accurately, indeed, does Our Lady say, “I see that you are lost.“
In the Gospel we read that “Jesus went around to all the towns and villages….At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mt 9:36) They were “lost.” Two thousand years later, we are still “lost.” May our “lostness” stir the compassion of Christ again today as it did during his earthly life!
Our Lady continues: “That is why I am calling all of you: return to God, return to prayer—and the Holy Spirit will fill you with His love which gives joy to the heart. Hope will grow in you, also for a better future, and you will become joyful witnesses of God’s mercy in you and around you.” Notice that Our Lady addresses her call to “ALL OF YOU,” for truly, there are none who are not “lost” in the ways mentioned above, or in other ways. As St. Paul said, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have gone astray; all alike are worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is on their lips. Their mouths are full of bitter cursing. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they know not.” (Rom 3:10-17) Thus we are “ALL” lost and needing to “RETURN”!
But Our Lady lifts us up to Easter joy by reminding us yet again of HOW we may access the salvific love, compassion, pity, Divine Mercy, and Easter peace of our Risen Lord: PRAYER. By our “return to God, return to prayer,” we are always offered a new and risen life through the indwelling Holy Spirit—even in this dark and troubled chapter of human history. Despite everything, Our Lady says, we CAN experience divine love, joy in the heart, hope for a better future, and God’s mercy in and around us.
It sounds incredible, but such is the Risen Life of Easter People who have chosen to “pass from death to life” (1 Jn 3:14) by the definitive “Exodus” of the spiritual journey—our flight from the enslaving egoic “fleshpots of Egypt” that are the hellish False Self programs for success, and by our tenacious, unyielding attachment to Jesus alone, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. As we “return to God, return to prayer,” we will naturally receive, practice, and give to ALL people the Divine Mercy of Christ that indwells our inmost being, thus radiating love, joy, hope, and peace to our lost and weary world. Twenty minutes, twice a day, in silent communion with the Indwelling Holy Spirit. . . . Easter Light and Love, alleluia, alleluia.
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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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WE CANNOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS WITH THE SAME THINKING THAT WE USED WHEN WE CREATED THEM.
—Albert Einstein
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It is interesting how the believers at that first Easter experienced the resurrected Christ in their lives. The Gospels tell us that they were huddled in fear and paranoia behind locked doors, wanting only to protect themselves, when Christ came through their locked doors, the doors of their fear and self-protection, and breathed peace into them. He breathed peace into them despite their resistance, their fear, and their locked doors. Things haven’t changed much in two thousand years. We are still mostly huddling in fear, anxious about ourselves, distrustful, not at peace, our doors locked, even as our hearts desire peace and trust.
This image, the “locked doors of our fear,” reveal a most consoling truth; it reveals this about God’s grace: When we cannot help ourselves, we can still be helped and when we are powerless to reach out, grace can still come through the walls of our resistance and breathe peace into us. We need to cling to this whenever we experience brokenness in our lives, when we feel helpless inside our wounds and fears, and when we grieve loved ones lost to addictions and suicide. The resurrected Christ can come through locked doors, no matter how hopeless the task is for us.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Where is the risen Christ? Everywhere and all around us—in you, your neighbor, the dogwood tree outside, the budding grape vine, the ants popping up through the cracks. The whole world is filled with God, who is shining through even the darkest places in our lives. To “go to church” is to awaken to this divine presence in our midst and respond in love with a yes: Your life, O God, is my life and life of the planet. With St. Francis, we too can sing with the air we breathe, the sun that shines upon us, the rain that pours down to water the earth. And we can cry with those who mourning, with the forgotten, with those who are suffering from illness, with the weak, with the imprisoned.
We can mourn in the solidarity of compassion but we must live in the hope of new life. For we are Easter people, and we are called to celebrate the whole earth as the body of Christ. Every act done in love gives glory to God: a pause of thanksgiving, a laugh, a gaze at the sun, or just raising a toast to your friends at a gathering. The good news? “He is not here!” Christ is everywhere, and love will make us whole.
—Ilia Delio, OSF
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Jesus did not begin to save the world by transfiguring first the visible symptoms. Because the evil of injustice, war and greed still carves new marks in the face of the earth, we fear that Easter really is about the next life only. We wonder whether the world is “absolutely saved,” as they say. But, as with sick and shallow institutions and churches, the resistant surface is usually the last to collapse. Easter faith is about believing in the Light while it is still dark.
—Fr. Daniel O’Leary
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When we go into the full death of anything, we can come out the other side transformed, more alive, more open, more forgiving of ourselves and others. We’re being held by a larger force, a larger source that is not our own. God has found the most ingenious way to transform the human soul. God uses the very thing that would normally destroy us—the tragic, the sorrowful, the painful, the unjust deaths that lead us all to the bottom of our lives—to transform us. Are we prepared to trust that?
Jesus’ death and resurrection is a statement of how reality works all the time and everywhere. He teaches us that there’s a different way to live with our pain, our sadness, and our suffering. We can say, “God is even in this.” That’s what Jesus did on Good Friday. None of us crosses over this gap from death to new life by our own effort, our own merit, our own purity, or our own perfection. Worthiness is never the ticket, only deep desire. With that desire the tomb is always, finally empty, as Mary Magdalene discovered on Easter morning. Death cannot win. God’s one job description is to turn death into life. That’s what God does with every new springtime, every new life, every new season.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Resurrection has begun. We are part of something rare, precious, utterly revolutionary. It feels like an uprising. An uprising of hope, not hate. An uprising armed with love, not weapons. An uprising that shouts a joyful promise of life and peace, not angry threats of hostility and death. It’s an uprising of outstretched hands, not clenched fists. This is what it means to be truly alive, to be en route, walking the road to a new and better day. Tell the others: the Lord is risen!
—Brian McLaren
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He is Risen! And has invited us now, to hit the trail. The bushwhacking is done. The path has been cleared. Time to get underway. For these forty days that we celebrate as Ascensiontide, he appears among us shining forth from his resurrection body, and through it he lives and moves among his beloveds, “in the world but not of it.” He eats, shares final teachings, socializes, bilocates, walks through walls, gives each one what they need to move into the world in unconflicted unity of inner seeing and outer doing. And it is their own spiritual bodies that receive this gift and are fed and empowered. Christianity was literally founded in this second body, by second bodies on fire with the light of truth and truth of lightness that they received from their Risen Lord during those forty days. The Kingdom of Heaven, altering the world’s causality “from within” by the very force of its higher potency.
Each of you also has a second, subtle body. We are intended to be well acclimated to it by the time we’re rounding the second half of life, and it is through this body that the real causal energies—faith, hope, love, gentleness, joy, peace, courage, conscience, compassion, integrity, forgiveness—enter and change our world. Let us acknowledge, explore, and live out of our second body these forty days…obedient to its causality, open to its grace. That is the “path between the worlds” that Jesus bushwhacked for us during the three days in the heart of the earth. Open and assisted, like a moving walkway.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
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MAY: Mary’s Month
O Mary Immaculate, your unique perfection, a grace of God, reveals the holiness to which every child of God is called. Save me from all worldly deception.
O Mary, Full of Grace, by your “Fiat” at the Annunciation, earth was made heaven and all that my heart longs for became Flesh in your womb. Conform me to your obedience.
O Blessed Virgin of the Visitation, you never fail to come into my life bearing Jesus your Son. Make my life an unending welcome to the divine Presence.
O Mother of God, from the Christmas miracle until now, you are the Theotokos interceding for my spiritual birth and growth. Make me fully human with the humanity of your Son.
O Mother of Jesus, at the Cana wedding feast you show your concern for our smallest needs. Lead me to your Son and make me open to do whatever He tells me.
O Most Sorrowful Mother, at the cross you were given to all humanity as our mother. Sustain me in your confident faith when sacrificial suffering is asked of me.
O Mary, Queen of Heaven, you bring joy to all who have crossed over. Uplift my heart to keep my thoughts on heaven, awaiting with trusting peace and joy my moment of arrival there.
—Fr. Peter Cameron, O.P.
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
The icy winds of war, which bring only death, destruction and hatred in their wake, have swept down powerfully upon the lives of many people and affected us all. Now in the night of war that has fallen upon humanity, let us not allow the dream of peace to fade!…How can we save ourselves from this shipwreck which risks sinking the ship of our civilization? By conducting ourselves with kindness and humanity. By regarding people not merely as statistics.
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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
