Medjugorje Message: August 25, 2017
Dear children! Today I am calling you to be people of prayer. Pray until prayer becomes joy for you and a meeting with the Most High. He will transform your hearts and you will become people of love and peace. Do not forget, little children, that Satan is strong and wants to draw you away from prayer. You, do not forget that prayer is the secret key of meeting with God. That is why I am with you to lead you. Do not give up on prayer. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
September 2017
In our contentious, strife-filled world violently divided into warring groups, political parties, races, religions, and ideologies, Our Lady’s message beckons us to a higher level of “belonging,” a more profound “membership” and “affiliation” than any of these factions: “Today I am calling you to be people of prayer.” She does not address us as people of patriotism, people of nationalistic pride, people of a particular religion or race, people of conservative or liberal values, people of populist or libertarian politics, or people of moral outrage toward our ideological opponents. God knows many of us are passionate adherents of such “mythic-membership” groups in our current boiling and churning cultural pressure cooker. In many cases, this preoccupation with our chosen “in-group” or obsession with our enemy “out-group” monopolizes far too much of our time and energy.
All of this is satanic ego, as Our Lady indicates: “Do not forget, little children, that Satan is strong and wants to draw you away from prayer.” Not difficult to do, thanks to social media, the 24-hour cable news cycle, and our ubiquitous digital devices that are rarely unplugged! As an alternative to this satanic distraction, what does Our Lady offer us as “people of prayer”?
First she reminds us of her oft-repeated description of what true PRAYER is: “Pray until prayer becomes a joy for you and a meeting with the Most High.” If we have not yet experienced this “joyful” quality of prayer, we are unlikely to become the “people of prayer” Our Lady has in mind. If we have not experienced in prayer “a meeting with the Most High” —or, as Teresa of Avila said, a “being many times alone with Him whom we know loves us” —we are unlikely to yearn for becoming “people of prayer.”
Instead, we will be content to read about prayer, to talk about prayer, to listen to lectures and attend classes on prayer, and then throw ourselves headlong into our real “joy”—a hyperactive display of allegiance to whatever political or mythic-membership group most appeals to our religious temperament and our mental/emotional “take” on Catholic Christianity. Clearly there are both “right-wing” and “left-wing” versions where equally devout churchgoers find their “tribe.” Sadly, many of these fervent Catholic ideologues with powerful in-group memberships are not “people of prayer.” In fact, over-involvement in “group-think” leads to a narrow and primitive “tribal ” level of regressive consciousness that is antithetical to the expansive mind of Christ and God of Love. Whether on the “right” or the “left,” ideologues inevitably spew critical, judgmental, ridiculing, excluding, condemning, and hateful rhetoric at their opponents—forgetting the power of both satanic ego and prayer while throwing gasoline on the fires of discord. Hence our present state of partisan gridlock and stalemate.
In sharp contrast to all this, Our Lady says that for “people of prayer” (i.e. those who find JOY in meeting God there), “He will transform your hearts and you will become people of love and peace.” Transformation of heart is the “gold standard” and “acid test” of whether we are, in fact, “people of prayer.” If we pray, our heart is increasingly open to being transformed by the Divine Indwelling presence and action of God at our inmost center. So this is the crucial question: Are our hearts being transformed so that we who were full of fear, anger and contentiousness are becoming “people of love and peace”? This single criterion tells the tale and constitutes the “proof in the pudding” of whatever claims we make to being “prayerful Christians.”
To be sure, “people of love and peace” are not required to be victims or doormats. Nor should they be shrinking violets too timid or afraid to speak and stand for their beliefs rooted in conscience. But neither will they spew hate-filled intolerance and derision upon those with whom they disagree. The great frustration of our human condition is that the egoic False Self, driven by the lower emotions of the reptilian brain like fear and the “fight or flight” impulse, is constantly fighting for the steering wheel of our life, wanting to “run the show,” while the True Self in the upper register of our being, open to the influence of Spirit, plays host to our “better angels” and welcomes the “transformation of heart” that makes us “people of love and peace.” This fundamental conflict that exists within each individual person is mirrored in the paradox of religion itself, which is BOTH the chief vehicle for humanity’s evolution in God-consciousness and universal love, AND—at the same time—the purveyor of some of the worst crimes of hatred, intolerance, barbaric devolution, and spiritual sleep in human history. The True Self and False Self in action upon the canvas of religion!
In Medjugorje Our Lady has never dwelt upon “religion” per se. In fact, she stated early on that religions are man-made constructs; that God is the father and she is the mother of all humanity, irrespective of the religious labels we give ourselves, and that all are loved equally from Heaven’s perspective. Her purpose there, instead, has been a universally-directed teaching on PRAYER. Again this month she reminds us, twice warning us not to “forget”: “Do not forget, little children, that Satan wants to draw you away from prayer. You, do not forget that prayer is the secret key of meeting with God….Do not give up on prayer.”
As “three-brained beings” made up of a moving center (body), thinking center (mind), and feeling center (emotions), we are tasked with opening all three aspects of our being to the higher influences of God whose grace is always ready to be given. But so often this Divine Grace is blocked from entering by the obstacles of our False Self that reigns over the “downstairs” of all three centers, where satanic ego finds it easy to “draw us away from prayer.” The upper tier of these three centers—our “three brains”—is the domain of the True Self where our heart opens to the higher influences of Spirit: the divine transformation of our being toward “love and peace.” At Medjugorje, Holy Mary reminds us, again and again, that PRAYER ALONE is the “secret key” by which we fall under the influence of the higher energies of Divine Grace that enable our transformation into love and peace. This is the meeting place with our Creator, the “secret key of meeting with God.” How could this “meeting with the Most High” not be pure JOY?! Indeed, we do not give up on prayer!
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September 14: Exaltation of the Cross
Everything hinges on the cross. The cross is about how to fight and not become a casualty yourself. The cross is about being the victory instead of just winning a victory. The cross moves us from the myth of redemptive violence to a new scenario of transformative suffering. On the cross of life, we accept our own complicity with evil, instead of imagining ourselves on some pedestal of moral superiority. The mystery of the cross teaches us how to stand against hate without becoming hate, how to oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves. You will feel crucified. You hang in between, without resolution, your very life a paradox held by God. Human existence is neither consistent, nor total chaos, but it has a “cruciform” shape of cross purposes, always needing to be reconciled in us.
Reality is not meaningless and absurd, but neither is it perfectly consistent. Reality is filled with contradictions, the “coincidence of opposites.” Some kind of suffering is the only way to reconcile differences. Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world that was both human and divine, broken and utterly whole. He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole yet utterly disfigured—all the opposites.
Jesus “recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth.” (Eph 1:10) Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of suffering and not demand perfection of creation. We are indeed saved by the cross. The people who hold the contradictions—and resolve them in themselves—are the saviors of the world. They are agents of transformation, reconciliation and newness. These are the people who “transcend and include.” Jesus was a realist; he was patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, and to love the way that God loves. To hold the contradictions with God, is to participate in the redemption of the world. We all must forgive reality for being what it is. We can do this only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and with crucified humanity. Christ then carries us across! The risen, victorious Jesus destroys death and sin not by canceling it out, but by making a trophy of it. — Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Heart-Transforming Prayer
In the “prayer of the heart” we seek first of all the deepest ground of our identity in God. We do not reason about dogmas of faith, or “the mysteries.” We seek rather to gain a direct existential grasp, a personal experience of the deepest truths of life and faith, finding ourselves in God’s truth….We learn recollection, which consists in listening for God’s will, in direct and simple attention to reality. Recollection is awareness of the unconditional. Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for capacity to hear and obey him. It is thus something much more than uttering petitions for good things external to our own deepest concerns.
First of all our meditation should begin with the realization of our nothingness and helplessness in the presence of God. This need not be a mournful experience. On the contrary, it can be deeply tranquil and joyful since it brings us in direct contact with the source of all joy and all life. But one reason why our meditation never gets started is perhaps that we never make this real, serious return to the center of our own nothingness before God. Hence we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with him. We meditate merely “in the mind,” in the imagination, or at best in the desires, considering religious truths from a detached objective viewpoint. We do not begin by seeking to “find our heart.” Finding our heart and recovering this awareness of our inmost identity in God implies the recognition that our external, everyday self is to a great extent a mask and a fabrication. It is not our true self. And indeed our true self is not easy to find. It is hidden in obscurity and “nothingness,” at the center where we are in direct dependence on God.
— Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O.
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Poem: “First They Came” *
First they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out because I was not a Muslim.
Then they came for the farmworkers, but I did not speak out because I was not a farmworker.
Then they came for the African-Americans, but I did not speak out because I was not an African-American.
Then they came for people with disabilities, but I did not speak out because I was not a person with a disability.
Then they came for scientists, but I did not speak out because I was not a scientist.
Then they came for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and I did not speak out because I was not an LGBT person.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Alex Mikulich
* based on a famous 1946 poem by Martin Niemoller, German anti-Nazi pastor
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Dialogue is the best means of promoting the common good, on the basis of a culture of encounter, respect and acknowledgment of the legitimate differences and opinions of others. Do not be afraid to set out on that “exodus” which is necessary for all authentic dialogue. Otherwise, we fail to understand the thinking of others, or to realize that the person we wish to reach with the power of love, counts more than their positions, distant as they may be from what we hold as true. Harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a leader, it has no place in his heart; although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing.
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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
