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Medjugorje
Message: December 25, 2012 On Christmas Day, in an unprecedented occur-rence,
visionary Maria Pavlovic-Lunetti reported that “Our
Lady came with little Jesus in her arms and she did not speak or give a
message, but little Jesus began to speak and said: “I am your peace, live my
commandments.” With a Sign of the Cross, Our Lady and little Jesus blessed us
together.” Annual Message to Jacov
Colo: December 25, 2012 Dear children, give the gift of your life to me and completely
surrender to me so that I may help you to comprehend my motherly love and the
love of my Son for you. My children, I love you immeasurably and today, in a
special way, on the day of the birth of my Son, I desire to receive each of
you into my heart and to give a gift of your lives to my Son. My children,
Jesus loves you and gives you the grace to live in His mercy, but sin has
overtaken many of your hearts and you live in darkness. Therefore, my
children, do not wait, say ‘no’ to sin and surrender your hearts to my Son,
because only in this way will you be able to live God’s mercy and, with Jesus
in your hearts, set out on the way of salvation. |
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Published by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic
Evangelization Ministry We are in new territory as 2013 dawns with the unprecedented
Christmas apparition of Our Lady to Maria Pavlovic-Lunetti,
the Medjugorje visionary who receives the monthly
message from the Queen of Peace to the world. This December 25th,
Our Lady came holding the Christ-Child as she always does on Christmas Day,
but for the first time ever, she gave no message! Instead, Jesus spoke
these words: “I
am your peace, live my commandments.” In a powerful and profound way, these seven short words summarize
the entire 31 years of apparitions at Medjugorje.
It is unclear whether “little Jesus” (as Maria called him) appeared as a (pre-verbal)
infant or a (talking-age) toddler. This is basically irrelevant here in the
realm of the miraculous, anyway. What really matters is the content of
His message. Jesus says, “I am your peace.” We talk a lot about peace—in intellectual, academic, personal,
emotional, moral, and philosophical terms. But do we ever realize the essence
of peace as a
person—Jesus
Christ indwelling our inmost being? As Pope Benedict has said, “Being Christian is not the result of an
ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a
person.” The person of Jesus
Christ who has spoken to us directly
in this latest apparition from Medjugorje….the same
Jesus who has spoken to us through the scriptures. There, He has told us, “Peace
I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it
to you.” (Jn 14:27) No, indeed, for the world gives us a fleeting, superficial,
contingent, and transitory “peace” based on external circumstances and
passing conditions. Jesus gives us Himself, taking up residence within our center, the core of our Being, and if
we experience peace in the midst of life’s storms when all the outward
conditions and circumstances are chaotic, tragic, and contrary to peace, we
can be sure that our peace is not the “world’s” peace, but that—as Jesus says—“I
am your peace.” It is the peace of “I AM”—the Indwelling God. At the Last Supper, Jesus promised that He
would live within us (and thus be our peace!) if only we would follow
his commandments. In Medjugorje, the Christ-Child says, “Live
my commandments.” What are His commandments?
The Christian gospel is the Gospel of Love. Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the Law of Moses
(including the Ten Commandments) but to fulfill it. The fulfillment
which He brought was an underlying intention of LOVE to our legal obedience.
In Matthew 5-6, Jesus goes through the Mosaic teachings on anger, adultery,
divorce, oaths, retaliation, almsgiving, prayer, fasting, money, and judging
others; in each teaching he furthers the demand of the law by
requiring an inward disposition of heart that is
rooted in love rather than servile fear or
self-seeking. He teaches the radical demand of love’s perfection—“Love
your enemies”—and upholds the universally-taught
Golden Rule: “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is
the Law and the Prophets.” (Mt 7:12) When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus replies with the
traditional answer—the “Shema” of Mosaic Law—but then extends it with the Second Great
Commandment: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the
greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You
shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Mt 22:38-40) Commenting on this central teaching of Jesus, St. Paul wrote: “The
one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not
commit adultery, you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet’;
and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying,
‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no evil to the
neighbor; hence love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Rom
13:8-10) “Live my commandments.” Just to be sure we understand what the commandment of Jesus is, John’s Gospel makes it clear. At the Last Supper, Our
Lord says, “I give you a new commandment: love
one another. As I have loved you, so you
also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13:34) In John 14-15, Jesus says, “If
you love me, you will keep my commandments….As the Father loves me, so I also
love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in
my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love….This
is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you….This
I command you: love one another.” This is self-sacrificial love. We have been richly blessed this month by the annual message of Our
Lady to Jacov, which is illuminated below by the
writing of Caryll Houselander
on the surrender that is asked of every follower of Christ. And the seven
short words of our Newborn Savior’s message are enough to study,
contemplate, pray over, and—above all—LIVE
for the rest of our lives. January
Musings: A New Year’s Letter . . . Following Mary into the Incarnate
Life . . . Living Christ-in-us: our human & divine natures . . .
Awakening in Christ’s body and our body From
a New Year’s Letter by Brother David Steindl-Rast,
OSB: How are you aging? Central to Christmas
is the image of the child. And doesn’t this image speak to every human
heart?...Aging can be a process of “saging” (growing wise)…or else it can lead to fear and
anxiety. Only a child’s trust can re-direct our
fear-ridden society. Paralyzing fear or childlike trust—the
choice is ours. From fear springs violence—yes,
not the other way around. Even a tiny mouse will attack when it gets
frightened enough and can’t flee. Fear invented wars, weapons, and all the
violence weapons can cause—all the way to the recent carnage in
Connecticut that makes the mind reel with outrage and sorrow. From fear springs arrogance—from
the frightened toad that inflates itself to impress an aggressor to a display
of conspicuous consumption that thinly veils the fear of being outdone by a
neighbor. From fear springs greed—beginning
with a sense of scarcity (“Will there be enough for
my wants?”) and ending with exploitation and economic collapse. No wonder, then, that
violence, arrogance, and greed disfigure our fearful society. No wonder we
long for the world of the fearless child, the world of non-violence, mutual
respect, and joyful sharing. To let the child-in-you guide you…toward
building this new world, this is what I wish you most of all in 2013. It will
take courage, strength, and wisdom, but—“fear
not!”—together we can do it. Let us run with grateful joy toward the
opportunities a new year holds out to us. What
God Asked of Mary—and Asks of Us—in the Incarnation The one thing that He
did ask of her was the gift of her humanity. She was
to give Him her body and soul unconditionally, and—what would have seemed
absurdly trivial to anyone but the Child Bride of Wisdom—she was to give
Him her daily life. And
outwardly it would not differ from the life she would have led if she had not
been chosen to be the Bride of the Spirit and the Mother of God at all! She was not even asked
to live it alone with this God who was her own Being and whose Being was to
be hers. No, he asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was
not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man,
because God was her unborn child. On the contrary, the hands and feet, the
heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form
Him in service to Joseph. Yes, it certainly seemed that God wanted to give
the world the impression that it is ordinary for Him to be born of a human
creature. Well that is a fact.
God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it was His will that Christ
shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through
extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the
human love that people give to one another. Our Lady said yes. She
said yes for us all….and in that little house a Child was born and
the Child was God. Our Lady said yes for the human race.
Each
one of us must echo that yes for our own lives. We are all asked
if we will surrender what we are, our humanity, our
flesh and blood, to the Holy Spirit and allow Christ to fill the emptiness
formed by the particular shape of our life. The surrender that is asked
of us includes complete and absolute trust; it must be like Our Lady’s
surrender, without condition and without reservation. We shall not be asked
to do more than the Mother of God; we shall not be asked to become extraordinary
or set apart to make a hard and fast rule of life or to compile a manual of
mortifications or heroic resolutions; we shall not be asked to cultivate
our souls like rare hothouse flowers; we shall not, most of us, even be allowed to do that. What we shall be asked
to give is our flesh and blood, our daily life—our thoughts, our
service to one another, our affections and loves, our words, our intellect,
our waking, working, and sleeping, our ordinary human joys and sorrows—to
God. To surrender all that we are, as we are, to the Spirit of Love
in order that our lives may bear Christ into the world—that is what we shall
be asked. Our Lady has made this
possible. Her fiat was for
herself and for us, but if we want God’s will to be completed in us as it is
in her, we must echo her fiat.
This is not such an easy thing to do. Most people, unless the invitation
comes to them in early childhood, have already thrust down fierce roots into
the heavy clay of the world. Their hands are already gripping hard onto self-interest.
They are already partly paralyzed by fear. To put aside suddenly
every motive except this single one, the forming of Christ in our life,
is not so easy for ordinary people who are to remain ordinary. The surrender we shall
make will ask two hard things of us straightaway. The first of these hard
things is that through being wed to the Spirit, we shall receive the
gift of understanding. In the world in which we live today, the
great understanding given by the Spirit of Wisdom must involve us in a lot
of suffering. We shall be obliged to see the wound that sin has inflicted on
the people of the world. We shall have x-ray minds; we shall see
through the bandages people have laid over the wounds that sin has dealt
them; we shall see the Christ in others, and that vision will impose an
obligation on us for as long as we live—the obligation of love.
When we fail in it, we shall not be able to escape in excuses and
distractions as we have done in the past; the failure will afflict us bitterly
and always. We shall have, by virtue of this same gift of
understanding, far truer values; and we shall be haunted by a nostalgia for divine things, by a homesickness for God…. And in proportion to
our understanding we are likely to be misunderstood; the
world does not accept Christ’s values. The Beatitudes are madness to the
world. “Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the reviled, the persecuted,
the calumniated; blessed are those who hunger and thirst after Justice.”
People who will not compromise with Christ’s values are uncomfortable
neighbors for mediocrity; they are likely to be misunderstood and often
hated.
-- Caryll Houselander Since as Christians we
now enjoy fullness of life in keeping with both the human nature
which is ours by birth and the divine nature in which we participate by
adoption in Christ, we are free to begin engaging our entire self as
human beings, but in such a way that everything we
are and have (not just intellect and will, but body and passions as well)
serves the Lord, as St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “The body is meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. You are
not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
All desires and loves can be regenerated and transformed and made
beautiful and fruitful by the power of the divine love we have received by
grace. This is the art of the Christian life: to learn gradually
how to allow God’s energy to make everything in us serve the Lord
who is Love, to imitate our Mother Mary in praying her Magnificat unceasingly with full-souled joy…. Mary’s sinlessness means that no aspect of her being remains
inactive in her obedient service, praise, and exultation. And this
is our vocation as well.
– Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis Whoever really and
truly has God, has God everywhere, in the
street and in company with everyone, just as much as in
church or in solitary places. Who has God essentially present grasps God
divinely; and to him God shines in all things, for everything
tastes of God. A person cannot learn this by running away, by shunning things
and shutting himself up in an external solitude. But he must practice a solitude of spirit, wherever or with whomever he is. He
must learn to break through things and to grasp God in them. – Meister
Eckhart We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor
hand is Christ. He enters my foot
and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in his Godhood). I move my foot, and at once He appears in a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous?—Then open your heart to Him. And let yourself receive the one who is
opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up
inside Christ’s body. Where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized
in joy as Him. And he makes us utterly real. And everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in him transformed and recognized as whole, lovely, radiant in his light. We awaken as the Beloved in every
last part of our body. -- Symeon the New Theologian (a favorite of Pope Benedict XVI)
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Mark Your Calendar!
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January 1 |
Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God; Holy
Day |
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6
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Epiphany of the Lord |
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7-17 |
“Love is God’s Meaning”: The Spiritual Path
of the English Mystics
with Prof. Philip Sheldrake; 6:30-9:30 pm; Oblate School of Theology, 285
Oblate, call 341-1366 x 226 |
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10 |
Bridges
to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton: Seeing that Paradise Begins Now; 9 Thursdays Jan-Mar.; 1-3 pm;
Oblate School of Theology (Rock House); 285 Oblate Dr.; $75; call 341-1366 x
212 |
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11-13 |
Revisiting
the Spiritual Journey
with Fr. Carl Arico; contemplative prayer retreat
hosted by Benedictine Sisters; Omega Retreat Center, 216 W. Highland, Boerne,
TX; $155; call 830-816-8471 |
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12 |
Portraits
of World Mysticism: Julian of Norwich/Cloud of Unknowing with Prof. Philip Sheldrake; 9 am-
noon; Whitley Theological Center, Oblate School of Theology, 285 Oblate; $40;
call 341-1366 x 212 |
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13 |
The Baptism of the Lord |
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15 |
The
Soul at Work: Living Our Faith in the Workplace with Rev. Kelly Allen; 3 Tuesdays
(15,22,29); 7-9 pm, SoL Center, 300 Bushnell; $35,
call 732-9927 |
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22 |
Introduction
to Christian Spirituality with Fr. Frank Santucci,
OMI; 7-9 pm, Tuesdays thru May 7; Oblate School of Theology, 285 Oblate, call
341-1366 |
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24 |
Introduction
to Ignatian Spirituality with Dr. Renata
Furst; 7-9:30 pm, Thursdays thru May 9; Oblate
School of Theology, 285 Oblate, call 341-1366 |
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25 |
The
Conversion of St. Paul, Apostle |
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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 |
Rosary-making: 2 – 5:30 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St.
Mary’s |
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“The
fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.”
-- Julian of Norwich |
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Copyright, Marian Center of San Antonio. All
rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced without
permission. |