Medjugorje Message: August 25, 2018
Dear children! This is a time of grace. Little children, pray more, speak less and permit God to lead you on the way of conversion. I am with you and love you with my motherly love. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
September 2018
Our Lady’s message to the world this month is brief and poignant. In some ways it is jarring in its simple and succinct message which begins, “This is a time of grace.” Really? It seems counterintuitive, perhaps, to call this troubled time in which we live “a time of grace,” as we witness the endlessly-escalating divisions among our American population, fueled by the constant negative verbiage pouring over us 24/7—ranging from the polarizing “tweets of Pennsylvania Avenue,” to the talking heads of cable TV, to the nonstop “meme-mill” of social media hate speech, relentlessly fomenting public outrage over one scandal after another, with each day’s revelation of corruption, dishonesty, and assaults on basic human dignity more shocking and grievous than the days before. The political debacle through which we’re living is unprecedented in American history, as congressional tolerance for high-level corruption has reached unimaginable levels.
Added to this bleak and exhausting political scene in which the very foundations of our democracy seem to be shaking is a terrible new wave of the clerical sex abuse scandal rocking the U.S. Catholic Church. Again, wagons appear to be circling—similarly to our national political situation—around factions labeled “liberal” and “conservative,” as some try to exploit the horrific events that have come to light in order to “axe-grind” old grudges and rivalries with our Holy Father, Pope Francis, whose pastoral style and prophetic, openly-stated anti-clericalism are deemed threatening by some in the Church. Again, an escalating, exhausting and oppressive fomenting of outrage is the steady diet of WORDS pouring over us each day when we boot up our technology devices.
But lest we become myopically self-focused, we must remember that Our Lady’s monthly message from Medjugorje is not just for Americans, but for the whole world. Indeed, these two tragic divisions we are experiencing—both a political and a religious polarization of our country along “liberal” and “conservative” lines—is actually a phenomenon that’s occurring throughout the world. Populist extremism in politics has impacted many other countries besides ours, as has the shameful and reprehensible clergy sex abuse scandal in which Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals have been complicit in destroying the innocence and lives of so many young people, with reactions of the Catholic faithful falling into opposing camps of “right” and “left”-wing finger-pointing and blame-laying.
Yet Our Lady says, “This is a time of grace“—a sentence that is perhaps more comprehensible in light of her next statement: “Little children, pray more, speak less and permit God to lead you on the way of conversion.” Heaven knows the totality of our present situation—every circumstance, crisis and event that happens on Planet Earth from moment to moment. And heaven knows each moment’s content in its full depth of reality—not just its outward appearance. As humans, we “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12); we can know things in part—only partially, at best—for the field of our vision is narrowly constrained by the million limitations of bias and conditioning that form each person’s peculiar “lens” upon the world. Our words, our speech, our disgruntled complaints and passionate rhetoric about the state of our sin-filled world, all issue from the best thinking of our very limited intellects, validly crying out for CHANGE.
But Our Lady’s call to “pray more, speak less and permit God to lead you on the way of conversion” (i.e. CHANGE) is above all an invitation to SILENCE as a pathway to healing our mortal wounds of injustice and division. “The most excellent speech finally falls into Silence,” Thoreau said. With words we seek to communicate our thoughts and feelings. But prayer goes deeper. St. Teresa of Avila wrote: “Prayer is an act of love; words are not needed.” And Thomas Merton wrote, “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, it is beyond speech and beyond concept.”
Prayer is this communing with God in the silence of our minds and hearts that “permits“—that gives God “permission“—to be present and active in us and “lead the dance” toward the needed change in our world. God can “lead us on the way of conversion” only when we shut up and get out of His way with all of our own words, ideas, criticisms, speeches, tweets, memes, posts, and verbal rants and raves. The pervasive angry diatribes and sharp jabs flooding both the airwaves and private conversations have poisoned our whole environment and made us a sick society.
Yes, there is surely a time to speak. The recent #MeToo Movement is an example of “speaking truth to power” in order to overcome the darkness of concealed evil by shining a bright revealing light. Likewise, the opening of closed records and secrecy around clergy sex abuse is a necessary speech for healing to begin in the Church. And the exercise of First Amendment rights and SUFFRAGE—the right/privilege/responsibility to VOTE in elections of our government leaders—is the most effective use of our “voice” for bringing political change and healing to our country. In these ways, “speaking up” is vitally important and beneficial.
But unless we are the victims (or victim-advocates) of a crime that needs to be reported for the sake of justice, or unless it is Election Day and we need to have our voice counted for the sake of our democracy, Our Lady’s message is calling us to “SPEAK LESS” and “PRAY MORE” in the silence of open-hearted receptivity that “permits GOD to lead us” out of the deadly desert of our current lost wandering in the wasteland of hurtful words. Scripture tells us, “The tongue is a fire, a world of malice. No one can tame the tongue, a restless evil full of deadly poison.” (James 3:8) And, “we will be held accountable for every idle word that we speak.” (Mt 12:36) At this perilous moment of our history, the warnings of scripture about the destructive power of our negative, condemning speech have never been more timely; our whole culture and way of life are on the “chopping block” of our chosen use of the tongue (and keyboard). To “speak less” is the hard discipline and ascesis that Our Lady is asking of us at this critical crossroads.
Nevertheless, she affirms, “This is a time of grace.” Only a person of prayer and spiritual connectedness can see and say this in the midst of all that is “wrong” in our world. For a person of prayer and deep spirituality is at home with PARADOX—with the “both/and” of Reality—not stuck in the dualistic polarities of “either/or” thinking that divides up and labels everything along rigid lines of partiality, as “FOR” or “AGAINST”/”US” vs. “THEM.”
The capacity to embrace paradox means accepting the totality—even our brokenness—as part of life. Paradoxical thinking is the key to a holistic, integral awareness that sees beneath the messy, contentious surface of our fractured political and ecclesial systems to the underlying hidden wholeness that only a spiritual eye can discern: “There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all.” (Thomas Merton)
Mary, Seat of Wisdom, sees paradoxically, and thus can say, “This is a time of grace.” Sacred Scripture, likewise, confirms that Reality is comprised of both evil and arrogant leaders (e.g. King Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, Pontius Pilate) AND the indwelling Holy Spirit of God witnessing the Gospel life in Christ for which countless Christians have gone singing to their martyrdom, embracing the wholeness of paradox best seen in the Cross—an instrument of BOTH death and eternal life. The mystics of the Church and all people of deep prayer know, as Mary, Seat of Wisdom, Queen of Peace, says: “This is a time of grace“—for ALL time is grace-full for those in intimate communion with our paradoxical Lord and His contradictory Creation.
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“Speak words of hope. Be human in this most inhuman of ages. Guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”
—Thomas Merton, OCSO
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The Cross is the sign of contradiction—destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies….But the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the cross contradict mercy! This is the ultimate temptation of Christianity! To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved—while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly…worthy of being taken seriously.
—Thomas Merton, OCSO
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Evolution of consciousness can unite the fractured relationships of the human family by revealing their rootedness, oneness, and common destiny in an intelligence that is higher than rational consciousness and penetrated by the love of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is trying to manifest in a species that is virtually the opposite of God from almost every perspective. This reminds us of the adventurousness of God. He is interested in transforming the most unlikely characters. “The Son of Man has come to seek that which was lost.” (Lk 19:10)—that is, those who are totally ruined, wiped out, and utterly abandoned.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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There is something in all of us that incites us to control the other. The crime of idolatry is creating our own god, in our own image and likeness. Rather than encounter God in his awesome difference from ourselves, we construct a toy model in our own psychic and emotional image. In doing so, we do not harm God…but we do debase and scatter ourselves, surrendering the potential and glory of our humanity for the false glitter of the golden calf. The truth is so much more exciting and wonderful. Our way to experience it is in the silence of our meditation. The power that silence has is to allow truth to emerge, to become visible. We know that it is greater than we are….we let the truth be.
Just as we can cut God down to our own size and impose our own identity, so we can do this with other people. In silent meditation, we develop our capacity to turn our whole being towards the Other. We learn to let our neighbor be, just as we learn to let God be. We learn not to manipulate our neighbor but rather to reverence him, the wonder of his being. We learn to love him. Because of this, prayer is the great school of community.
—Fr. John Main, OSB
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The divisions, dichotomies, and dualisms of the world can only be overcome by a unitive consciousness at every level: personal, relational, social, political, cultural, inter-religious, and spiritual. This is the unique and central job of healthy religion. Many teachers have made the point that unity is not the same as uniformity. Unity, in fact, is the reconciliation of differences, and those differences must be maintained—and yet overcome! You must actually distinguish things and separate them before you can spiritually unite them, but usually at cost to yourself. If only Christianity and other religions had made that simple clarification, so many problems (and overemphasized, separate identities) could have moved to a much higher level of love and service.
Paul made this principle very clear. “There is a variety of gifts, but it is always the same Spirit. There are all sorts of service, but always to the same Lord, working in different ways in different people. It is the same God working in all of them.” (1 Cor. 12:4-6) Even our central template of Trinity maintains the clear distinction of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” while at the same time insisting they are One. Divine unity absolutely maintains and yet radically overcomes seeming distinctions. How different history could have been if we had only believed that.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons. We showed no care for the little ones. We abandoned them….Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient. Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated….These wounds never disappear and they require us to forcefully condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death….To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism.
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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
