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Medjugorje
Message: March 25, 2014 Dear children! I am calling you anew: begin the battle against
sin as in the first days, go to confession and decide for holiness. The love
of God will begin to flow through you into the world, peace will begin to
rule in your hearts and God’s blessing will fill you. I am with you and
intercede for all of you before my Son Jesus. Thank you for having responded
to my call. Annual Message to Mirjana: March 18,
2014 Dear children! As a mother, I desire to be of help to you.
With my motherly love, I desire to help you to open your heart and to put my
Son in the first place in it. Through your love for my Son and through your
prayer, I desire for God’s light to illuminate you and God’s mercy to fill
you. In this way, I desire for the darkness, and the shadow of death which
wants to encompass and mislead you, to be driven away. I desire for you to
feel the joy of the blessing of God’s promise. You, children of man, you are
God’s children —you are my children. Therefore, my children,
set out on the ways on which my love leads you, teaches you humility and
wisdom, and finds the way to the Heavenly Father. Pray with me for those who
do not accept me and do not follow me—those who, because of hardness of their
hearts, cannot feel the joy of humility, devotion, peace and love—the joy of
my Son. Pray that your shepherds, with their blessed hands, may always give
you the joy of God’s blessing. Thank you. |
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Published
by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic Evangelization Ministry This month we have two messages from Our Lady to guide us through the
final days of Lent and into the joyous Easter season. In her monthly message
to the world, she says, “I am calling you anew.” Spring is the season of newness, renewal of life and
a fresh outbursting of nature in its manifold
forms. Our Lady wants us to approach our spiritual journey and relationship
with God in a fresh way, too, with new eyes made clean and innocent by the discipline of Lent. She makes a
threefold request of us, followed by a threefold promise for answering her
call. She asks us to: 1) begin the battle against sin as in
the first days; 2) go
to confession; 3) decide
for holiness. When we do these things, Our
Lady promises that: 1) The love of God will begin to flow through us into
the world; 2) peace will begin to rule in our hearts; 3) God’s
blessing will fill us. Let’s look at the first call: “Begin the battle
against sin as in the first days.” Our
Lady tries to jog our memory by having us reflect upon “the first days.”
When were they?—the early months and years of our conversion, the time when a
deepening intimacy with God and Our Lady filled our heart and mind, giving a
new focus, energy, balance and intensity to life. This period might have
begun with a pilgrimage, a weekend conference, a silent or preached retreat,
a liturgy or devotion at church; a death, divorce, illness, birth, or
wedding; a vivid encounter with nature, or in some other experience of life
that thrust us into a profound awareness of God’s Presence. In these “first
days,” the “battle against sin” was something
we engaged gladly, gratefully, and unhesitatingly, with courage and
confidence that God’s love and grace would give us everything we needed. With the spiritual fire of those “first days,” we were led to sincerely battle our own
disorderly attachments, selfish agendas, strongholds of pride and egoic pursuits that were obstacles to this growing
intimacy with God—happy to lay aside our own will to unite with the Divine
one. In the “honeymoon glow” of the “first days” of conversion, this “battle against sin” was fought with love and joy—not the sour, doom-and-gloom,
bored, or irritable countenance that has perhaps crept in with time and
familiarity. It was fought against our own “false self”—not projected outward in a judgmental critique of others’ sins; we
took our own inventory, not someone else’s, removing the plank from our
own eye, not the speck from our neighbor’s. Our Lady tells us that if we
return to this battle against sin “as in the first days,” then “the love of God will begin to flow
through us into the world.” Who ever heard of a “battle”
bringing more LOVE into the world? Yet the true battle against sin harms no
one; instead it liberates
a love for all—the love that lies deep within our hearts where God dwells. The “battle against sin” is always waged first and foremost against the obstacles
to love within me, which constitute my sin—not another’s! This correct focus of the
war turns a bloody battlefield
into a festival of Divine love. Our Lady’s second call is: “go to confession.” Having taken up the “battle against sin” anew, we have naturally begun to examine our conscience,
which in turn leads us to the Sacrament of Reconciliation where Christ awaits
us with His infinite mercy, ready to heal the inner, self-inflicted wounds of
our sinfulness. The Church asks us to go to confession minimally at least
once a year, in the Lenten season, prior to the celebration of Easter. In Medjugorje, Our Lady has asked us to go to confession on
a monthly basis. Such requests are not burdensome, once we understand
the joy and inner healing we receive in this great sacrament of personal encounter with
Jesus Christ, where the priest-confessor sits “in persona Christi,” ready to gently lead us through the whole experience in the power
of the Holy Spirit guiding his words of encouragement and counsel to us
in the presence of the Risen Christ. No matter how long we have been away from the Sacrament, we are
welcomed and tenderly cared for during the precious moments of our honest,
open-hearted revealing to Another the truth of our failings and weaknesses.
To experience genuine remorse of conscience and contrition for our sins against self and others melts the heart of God and opens the
floodgates of Divine Mercy to pour into us. As Our Lady says, after going to
confession, “peace will begin to rule in our
hearts.” Where before there was guilt, sadness, unrest, or projected anger and
resentment resulting from our burden of sin, now there is freedom, lightness,
joy, and the deep peace of being ONE with God, our true inner self, and other people. This is the experience of “reconciliation” for which the Sacrament is named. Finally, Our Lady calls us to “decide for holiness.” To “decide” means to set an intention and affirm a positive direction
for one’s action. Our Lady has urged us to “decide for holiness” countless times in her messages during the past 33 years in Medjugorje. We often overlook or ignore the importance of
these three simple words, unaware of how important a decision is—the setting
of an intention—for our ongoing conversion and
continuing spiritual growth. It is our human condition to be continually
distracted and overtaken by the shifting cares and concerns of the
moment, blown about like reeds in the wind, unable to sustain our focus and
concentration on one goal for long. Because of this innate instability of our attention and lack
of rootedness and centered presence, it is
vitally important that each morning we make a conscious decision about our
intention for the day. What will it mean to “decide
for holiness”? It is closely related to the “battle against sin,” which involves dismantling our selfishness and the egoic agendas that are obstacles to love. To decide
for “holiness” is to decide for “wholeness”—being whole-hearted in our attention and desire for God alone,
undistracted by the thousand false voices of our selfish ego, clamoring to
lure us away from the single-minded, whole/holy focus on God’s will in
each present moment. One way to “decide for holiness” is to set our intention by making a “Morning Offering” of our day to God. We can use
whatever words we choose. One example, taken from the “Third Step Prayer” of Alcoholics Anonymous, is: “God, I offer myself to
Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou will. Relieve me of the
bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my
difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help,
of Thy power, Thy love, and Thy way of life. May I do Thy will always.” Another simple Morning Offering
uses the words of Our Blessed Mother: “Let it be done to
me according to Thy word, this day, O Lord.” Or the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ: “Not
my will, but thine be done, today, dear God.” By making a short prayer of Morning Offering to God each day, we
are setting our intention to “decide for holiness,” as Our Lady asks, promising that in return, “God’s blessing
will fill us.” April
Musings: LENT into EASTER Rising to New Life through Him, with Him, and In
Him There was something I had missed about Christianity, and now
all of a sudden I could see what it was. It was the Resurrection! How could I have been a church historian
and person of prayer who loved God and still not known that the most
fundamental Christian reality is not the suffering of the cross but the life
it brings? The foundation of the universe for which God made us, to which
God draws us, and in which God keeps us is not death but JOY. – Roberta Bondi + +
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+ St. Benedict told his monks, “Always keep death before your eyes.” We don’t talk much
about death in the modern world. But what the whole Christian tradition tells
us is that if we would become wise we must learn the lesson that we have
here “no abiding city.” To have life in focus we must have death in focus.
Talking about death is hard for the worldly to understand….Indeed much
worldliness operates not from the wisdom of our own mortality but the pure
fantasy that we are immortal, beyond physical weakness. But the wisdom of the Christian tradition is that awareness
of our physical weakness enables us to see our own spiritual fragility, too.
There is a profound awareness in all of us that we must make contact with
the fullness of life and the source of life. We must make contact with
the power of God and somehow open our own fragile “earthen vessels” to the
eternal love of God. Meditation is a way of power because it is a way to
understand our own mortality. It is the way to get our own death into focus.
It can do so because it is the way beyond our own mortality, beyond our own
death to the resurrection—to a new and eternal life, the life that arises
from our union with God. The essence of the Christian gospel is that we are invited to
this experience now, today.
All of us are invited to die to our own self-importance, our own
selfishness, our own limitations. We are invited
to die to our own exclusiveness. We are invited to all this because Jesus has
died before us and has risen from the dead. Our invitation is also one to
rise to new life, to community, to communion, to a full life without fear.
In meditation we lose our fear because we realize death is death to fear and resurrection is rising to new life.
Every time we sit down to meditation we enter this axis of death and
resurrection. We go beyond our own life into the mystery of God. We each
discover from our own experience that the mystery of God is the mystery of
love—infinite love that casts out all fear. – Fr. John Main, OSB + + +
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+ If we are to embrace the eternity of the fullness of being
(the “I AM” of God), we must first face the stark reality of impermanence
and emptiness. The temptation is always to reduce the intensity, to sink
to a lesser degree of consciousness, even to fall asleep. “Be alert, be wakeful. You do not
know when the moment comes…What I say to you, I say to everyone: Stay
awake.” (Mk 13:33) In the letter to the Ephesians Paul says that this state of
wakefulness leads to the “spiritual powers of wisdom and vision” and on to
spiritual knowledge. But even with the strongest faith…the wall of the ego
can feel like an insuperable obstacle, a dead end leaving us nowhere to run.
But, as the Resurrection reminds us, what
seems like the end is not. By facing our entrenched egoism and
recognizing its slow dying, meditation helps us to verify our own
resurrection in our own experience. The law of lower nature (of karma), and the domination of the
limiting ego reign until a hole in the wall appears. First one brick is removed, as if by an unseen hand, and we
glimpse a perspective beyond anything we had previously thought or were
capable of knowing….We are no longer the merely
individual person we thought we were. Life has changed irreversibly. We live
and yet, like St. Paul, we live no longer. I am because I am not. – Fr. Lawrence Freeman, OSB + +
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+ The Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His
creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think
is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in
His mysterious, cosmic dance. For the world and time are
the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the
music of a wedding feast. Indeed we are in the midst of it, and it is in the
midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active,
and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is
spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for
life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact
that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and
infinitely abundant Source. – Thomas Merton + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + As we come to know ourselves in God and God in ourselves, we
come to a deeper understanding of Jesus as the way of life. What takes
place in Jesus is to take place in our lives as well, if we are to attain
the fullness of life in God. Spirituality is key to
knowing Christ and the meaning of Christ crucified as the theological center,
because all that can be known of God is revealed in the crucified Christ.
Such knowledge is less of the mind than of the heart, for only the heart
centered in God can know the truth of God and contemplate God, as God reveals
Godself in fragile creation….Prayer and grace
must accompany intellectual strivings. Knowing alone therefore is
insufficient for the rebirth of Christ today. Rather, this new birth must
take place through crucified love,
for love is borne in the surrender of the gift of self—that is, in relationship. The deepening of our lives in Christ not only awakens us to
who we are but leads to a new source of energy—a free, liberating energy
that flows from the heart. Awakening to transcendence initiates a
personal revolution by relativizing everything that one had previously
experienced or known, opening a new depth of consciousness and a new relationship
with this reality beyond the self. One awakens to the realization that the
meaning of Jesus the Christ is somehow the center of reality; one finds that
one’s life must be reordered to correspond to that realization. We begin to
see the mystery of Christ as the mystery of our lives. We are created to
bear Christ within us and to express the life of Christ in the world. To live
the Christ mystery we must participate
in the mystery. For Christians, such participation takes place in the
sacramental life of the church and the sacramental life of the world, where
the body of Christ truly exists. The meaning of Christ must move from the
altar of the church to the altar of the world. Participation in the world is
participation in Christ, insofar as belief in Christ empowers a new
vision for the world which can unfold only in and through us. – Sr.
Ilia Delio, OSF + +
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+ + +
+ + +
+ + + The devout Christian must be vigilant in observing the
following practices: submission of his own
will through faith and obedience; avoidance of sin, and the
proximate occasions of sin; prudent control of the emotions; restrictions
of involvement in worldly affairs; and daily examination of conscience. Once the Christian is sufficiently mortified, that is, once
he subjects his lower powers and faculties to reason and reason is guided by
faith, the Holy Spirit can rule in him to such an extent that he is always
disposed to approach God in love….Any difficulty in the practice of the
love of God is not caused by the exercise of love itself…but in ridding
ourselves of the impediments to love. We encounter great resistance to
the fire of love because our souls are so cold and damp….We should not
measure our progress in holiness by the sweetness or consolation that we
sometimes experience….It is always safer and more accurate to measure our
progress in terms of victory over the obstacles to holiness, our practice
of self-denial, and strict control over self-centered love and the passions
that flow from it. – Ven. Fr. Louis of Granada + +
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The more the soul revives itself in the Resurrection of
Christ, the more it feels the need of God and of heavenly truths; it detaches
itself more and more from earthly things to turn toward those of heaven….The
soul which feels no hunger for God, no need to seek him and to find him, does
not bear within itself the signs of the Resurrection. It is a dead soul, or
at least weakened and rendered insensible by lukewarmness.
The Paschal alleluia is a cry of triumph at Christ’s Resurrection, but at
the same time it is an urgent invitation for us to rise also. Like the sound
of reveille, it calls us to the battles of the spirit, and invites us to
rouse and renew ourselves, to participate ever more profoundly in Christ’s
Resurrection. Who can say, however advanced he may be in the ways of the spirit, that he has wholly attained to his
resurrection? -- Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, OCD + + +
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+ + + April
29: St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of
the Church I want you to love God’s goodness within yourself, and
his immeasurable charity, which you will find in the cell of self-knowledge. In this cell you will find
God…. How true it is, that within the cell of your soul you will find the
whole of God. And he bestows such sweetness, refreshment, and consolation
that no matter what may happen we cannot be shaken, because we have been
made big enough to hold God’s own will. How? By getting rid of all
selfish love, by getting rid of everything that is not God’s will. I long to see you making your home in the cell of
self-knowledge, so that you may attain perfect love, for I know that we cannot please our Creator unless we love
him, because he is love and wants nothing but love.
If we do know ourselves we find this love. Why? Because we see our own nothingness, that our very
existence is ours by grace and not because we have a right to it, and every
grace is given to us with boundless love. How great is our wretched blindness! We see that we were
created in God’s image and likeness….Yet we are so blind as to abandon God’s
affection and love which made us so great, and give ourselves over to loving
things apart from God!...It is not that prestige and worldly pleasure and
other people are evil in themselves; what is evil is our attachment to them
when by such attachment we disregard the sweet commandment of God. When,
on the other hand, our affection and love are turned away from ourselves and centered
entirely in Christ crucified, we achieve the greatest dignity possible to us,
because we become one with our Creator….Such a soul has been stripped of her
old self and has been clothed in a new self, in Christ gentle Jesus…. So don’t be careless. Be conscientious on this lovely
straight way, Christ Jesus. Don’t let selfish love or inattentiveness
take control of you, because this is what keeps us from running, so that
we stall along the way….I urge you then, for love of Christ crucified…let
us dally no longer. Let’s keep in mind how short our time is. Let’s
redeem with holy sorrow and grief the time we have spent carelessly or lost,
and in this way we shall regain the past.
– St. Catherine of
Siena + + +
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Mark Your Calendar!
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April 1 |
Lenten Lecture: Building a Civilization of Love in a
Divided World; 7 pm, Church
of the Holy Spirit, 8134 Blanco Rd.; (210) 734-1655 |
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2 |
11th Annual Catholic
Intellectual Tradition Lecture Series: Bridging
Divine & Human Life—God’s Life-giving Migrations and Our Human &
Global Life-seeking Migrations, with Dr. Miguel Diaz; 7 pm, St. Mary’s
University Center, Conference Rm. A; One Camino Santa Maria; free |
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5 |
Portraits of World
Mysticism Class: Equanimity: the
Balance born of Wisdom with Sharon Salzburg; 9 am-12 pm; Oblate School of
Theology Whitley Theological Center, 285 Oblate; $40; call (210) 341-1366 x
212 |
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5 |
Catholic Seniors’
Conference: Hallmarks of Aging &
Wisdom with Archbishop Gustavo (Mass+ Q&A) and Guest Speakers; 8:30
am-2:30 pm; St. Paul’s Community Center, 1201 Donaldson; $15 incl. lunch,
snacks, presentations; call Pilgrim Center of Hope: (210) 521-3377 |
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5 |
Lenten Retreat: You are Unique with Fr. Phil Henning
& Sr. Mary Fagan, SHSp; 8:30 am-3:30 pm; St.
Dominic Catholic Church, 5919 Ingram Rd.; free admission (love offering) |
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6-8 |
Lenten Parish Mission with Fr. Tom
Donaldson, CSsR; 7 pm; St. Gerard Church, 1523 Iowa
St. |
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9 |
8-week Study Course: Living A Compassionate Life with
Rosalyn Collier & Karen Ball; 11 am-1 pm; Oblate School of Theology Rock
House; 285 Oblate; $55 or $10/week; call (210) 341-1366 x212 |
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13 |
Palm
Sunday of the Lord’s Passion |
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18 |
Good
Friday of the Passion of the Lord |
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19 |
Holy
Saturday: Easter Vigil |
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20 |
Easter
Sunday: Resurrection of the Lord |
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25-27 |
Divine Mercy Weekend Conference with
Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ; St. Benedict Church, 4535 Lord Rd., call
(210) 535-4428 |
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26 |
PEACE
MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; Rosary at 11:30 am |
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27 |
Divine Mercy Sunday (2nd
Sunday of Easter) Rosary-making: 2:00-5:30 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; free
parking & materials |
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29 |
St. Catherine of Siena,
Doctor of the Church
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Be reverent before the
dawning day. Do not think of what will be
in a year, or in ten years. Think of today. Leave your theories . . . .
Do not abuse life. Live in today. Be reverent
towards each day. Love it, respect it, do not
sully it, do not hinder it from coming to flower. Love it even when it is gray
and sad. Do not be anxious. See. It is winter now.
Everything is asleep. The good earth will awake
again. Be good and patient like the
earth. Be reverent. Wait. -- Romain Roland |
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Copyright, Marian Center of San Antonio. All
rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced without
permission. |