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Medjugorje
Message: December 25, 2014 Dear children! Also today, in my arms I am carrying my Son
Jesus to you and I am asking from Him peace for you and peace among you. Pray
to and adore my Son for His peace and joy to enter into your hearts. I am
praying for you to be all the more open to prayer. Thank you for having
responded to my call. Annual Message to Jakov Colo: December 25 Dear children! Today, on this day of grace, I desire for each
of your hearts to become a little stable of Bethlehem in which the Savior of
the world was born. I am your mother who loves you immeasurably and is concerned
for each of you. Therefore, my children, abandon yourselves to the mother, so
that She may place each of your hearts and lives before little Jesus; because
only in this way, my children, your hearts will be witnesses of God’s daily
birth in you. Permit God to illuminate your lives with light and your hearts
with joy, so that you may daily illuminate the way and be an example of true
joy to others who live in darkness and are not open to God and His graces.
Thank you for having responded to my call. |
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Published
by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic Evangelization Ministry
January 2015 In this Christmas Day message, the Queen of Peace invokes the Prince of
Peace, her Son Jesus Christ, “asking
from Him peace for you and peace among you”—the “peace on earth” of which the angelic host sang above
Shepherds’ Field on the first Christmas Day. Our Lady begins with a reminder
of her own incarnate human nature: “Also today, in
my arms I am carrying my Son Jesus to you…” Referring to her own bodily arms reminds us that Mary’s human body conceived and gave
to the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—God Most High—a human body
of flesh and blood, bone and tissue, with faculties of thinking, feeling, and
moving. Her divine son was formed
entirely of her DNA in his physicality. The Body and Blood
communicated to us in the Holy Eucharist was in its
earthly substance knitted
together in Mary’s womb. Our Lady says, “I
am asking from Him peace for you and
peace among you”—that is, peace individually and collectively. Peace first within our internal hearts and lives, where all “external” peaceful relations must be rooted. And then, peace among all the
“outer” warring factions of humankind at this dark moment of the history of
civilization on our planet. Truly the bleak landscape of escalating violence
and destruction that we see in the world today mirrors the inner state
of “warring factions” each of us finds within our private self. Until these
interior divisions and rivalries are healed within the personal self, there
can be no peace between persons, groups, nations, or between earth’s species
and the wider natural environment. This is due to the fundamental
interrelatedness of reality—the fact that all aspects of
creation are inextricably connected with each other despite any
appearance to the contrary. As naturalist John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by
itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that
cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” Our modern science is proving this basic interrelatedness of all
creation across many disciplines—from quantum mechanics to biology, neurophysics to cosmology—with an emerging picture of a holistic
universe that functions as one body
with many parts. To Christian ears, this finding should sound very familiar! The basic unity and connectedness of reality has been realized or
intuited by all the great religious traditions, especially at their mystical
or contemplative core. Ancient Chinese wisdom states: “To put the world in order, we must
first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the
family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal
life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.” This statement sums up the holistic model of reality—that each part is a “microcosm” or smaller version of the larger whole (holon)
or “macrocosm” to which it belongs. Thus we sing: “Let there be peace on earth
and let it begin with me.” Our Lady continues: “Pray to and adore my
Son for His peace and joy to enter into your hearts.” As Christians we know that this interconnected, holistic reality
that science is discovering is the Body of Christ, and that through Him all things were made, both visible and
invisible. All reality was created through Him and for Him; He is the Alpha
and the Omega, the beginning and end of all that is…“that in all things he might be
preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him
to reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of his cross, whether
those on earth or those in heaven.” (Col 1) So to spend time each day praying to and adoring
Jesus Christ is to go to the Divine
Center of all creation—to the “Root,” the “Rod of the Stem,” the “Key,”
the “Dayspring,” the “Wisdom who orders all things” (as the Advent antiphons proclaim)—and soak in the existential “peace and joy” of the headwaters of REALITY: God/Love. To pray and adore Jesus Christ is to experience “the riches of the glory of this
mystery: it is Christ in you.” (Col 1:27) When we pray and adore Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, in
nature, in imageless silence, or in the midst of fellow humans created
(through Him) in the divine image, we are in the privileged position of
conscious contact with the Great Holon or organizing principle of all life—the
“original” or “blueprint” or “macrocosm” upon which every other level and
aspect of reality is modeled—the One who resides in us and we
in Him. Our Lady ends by saying: “I am praying for you
to be all the more open to prayer.” God in
His boundless mercy has given us a path out of the dense, impenetrable jungle
of our own dark egoic illusions of separateness,
division, fear, and hatred where we wander, lost and hurting, without peace,
in escalating violence and destruction, until the light of Reality
dawns: “The
people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt
in the land of gloom a light has shown.” (Isa 9:1)….“In
the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide
our feet into the way of peace.” (Lk
1:78) Until this
light dawns, each of us stumbles in the darkness of the False Self
wrought with anxieties, addictions, resentments, bitterness, rivalries, grief
and sicknesses of all kinds. When Reality dawns by God’s mercy and we meet Jesus Christ, we see by His Light
that our fears, needs, and insecurities are based on the satanic illusion of separation from God and other
creatures, when in REALITY, there is no
separation, for all of creation is fundamentally and inextricably
interconnected and interrelated in Jesus Christ through whom all things were
made. (“May
they all be one, Father, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they
may be brought to perfection as one.”--Jn 17:22) To wake
up to this reality and to maintain this realization that we
are One Body in Christ (in a world that is
unconsciously spellbound by the demonic illusion of separation) requires a daily practice of PRAYER. This is
what Our Lady Queen of Peace has been calling, inviting, and begging us to see
for the past 33 years in Medjugorje. World peace
will come only when my individual heart is at peace, and that will happen only through daily prayer that puts me in touch with the cosmic REALITY beyond my egoic illusions. January
Musings . . . What Christmas Means for our Humanity . . . Thinking & Doing vs. Contemplation & Being . . . All kinds of mysteries
come spilling out of the Gospel on Christmas, tumbling and cascading down to
every level of our consciousness. Let us join the shepherds and try to enter
into their experience. Events and images in scripture symbolize inner
experiences. Christmas is, therefore, an important occasion in our personal
history. Through it God awakens us to the divine life in us. We are
not only human beings; we are divinely human beings….Now God has
become one of us and is breathing our air. In Jesus, his heart is beating;
his eyes are seeing; his hands are touching; his ears are hearing. Through
his humanity, the whole material universe has become divine. By becoming a
human being, he is in the heart of all creation and in every part of it. On the Feast of
Epiphany the liturgy celebrates this insight and sings of the waters of the
Jordan sanctified by the touch of the body of Jesus. Every drop of water on
earth, as a result of that contact, has become matter for the sacrament of
baptism….Similarly, by eating and drinking Jesus has made food and drink,
especially bread and wine, the means of divine transformation. The overload
from some strong sense experience that speaks of God not only points to him,
but in some mysterious way contains him. Now Jesus can say
that whatever is done to the least of his little ones is done to him. Every
human person, by virtue of the Incarnation, is Christ. Everything
in creation has been transformed by contact with his humanity. By
his breathing, the atmosphere is sacred. By his eating, food is sacred. Now
every sense experience conveys the mystery of Christ. He gives himself to us
in everything that happens. “The
Word was made flesh”—made a part of creation, made matter—“and dwells among us.” Jesus is trying
to give himself to us in every experience. Let us try to be there with the
shepherds. – Fr. Thomas
Keating, OCSO + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + Antidote for the Deadly “Separate-Self Sense”: PRAYER Along with the separate-self
sense arises the false self and the
gradual emergence of the ego. All three manifest the
consequences of original sin: illusion (not knowing where to look for
happiness), concupiscence (seeking it in limited and impossible
places), and weakness of will (the inability to pursue effectively the
true sources of happiness even when we know where to look). The
root of all sin is the separate-self sense. The deliberate
dismantling of the false self and the death of the ego is the narrow gate
“that leads to life” (Mt
7:14): the straight, direct, and shortest way to divine union,
human wholeness and boundless happiness. The separate-self sense, beginning even
in the womb, seems to be an inevitable accompaniment of human development and
growth. To what do we attribute the separate-self sense? The book of Genesis
proposes that it is the result of the fall from grace of our first parents
and that it affects their entire human progeny, depriving it of the divine
intimacy symbolized by the Garden of Eden. Contemporary science
proposes that the separate-self sense is part of the evolutionary
process from mammalian to human consciousness. The Perennial Philosophy,
represented in the world religions, affirms that there are further states
of consciousness beyond the rational. The vast majority of the human species,
however, has not yet evolved into them. We become in some real sense incarnations
of Christ in the sacrament of baptism when we are incorporated into
his mystical body. But the full development of all the possibilities of baptism
normally takes a lifetime. According to the four Gospels, God sent his
only begotten Son to heal the human family. Just what does this healing
consist of? The account of the fall in Genesis tends to communicate a
profound sense of guilt and personal accountability for the fall even though
there is no personal sin on our part. Because we are members of one species, all
of whom are interconnected and interdependent, our every thought, word, and
deed affect everyone else in the human family instantaneously, regardless of
space and time. The present moment is
always changing, always new. To respond, one must establish a certain
spiritual poise like a cruising speed on a freeway. To think
is to apply the brakes. It slows you down. What maintains
normal speed on the spiritual journey are not ideas but intuition. Such
are the inspirations of the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. In
prayer, not thinking but being is the primary goal. “Thinking
about ourselves” is not it. “One
Christ loving himself” is St. Augustine’s description of the mystical
body of Christ. There are no basic inequalities. All are one; we just
have different functions in the body of Christ, as St. Paul explains. – Fr. Thomas
Keating, OCSO + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + A Tip when Making New Year’s Resolutions . . . It is useless to try
to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done.
In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached
from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to
some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the
good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We
must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without
expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction,
and to exist without any special recognition. It is only when we are
detached from ourselves that we can be at peace with ourselves. We cannot
find happiness in our work if we are always extending ourselves beyond
ourselves and beyond the sphere of our work in order to find ourselves
greater than we are. Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great
one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being
great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory. – Thomas
Merton + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + “Thinking” vs. Contemplating In the West, religion
has fallen on hard times. I maintain that it has done so precisely
because it attempted to do with the eye of the mind that which can be done only
with the eye of contemplation. Because the mind could not actually
deliver the metaphysical goods, and yet kept loudly claiming that it could,
somebody was bound to blow the whistle and demand real evidence. Kant made
the demand, and metaphysics collapsed. Neither sensory empiricism, nor pure
reason, nor practical reason, nor any combination thereof can see into the
realm of Spirit. But religion can regain its proper warrant, which is not
sensory or mythic or mental but finally contemplative. The great and
secret message of the experimental mystics the world over is that, with
the eye of contemplation, Spirit can be seen. With the eye of contemplation,
God can be seen. With the eye of contemplation, the great Within radiantly
unfolds. – Ken Wilber + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + Evangelizing in a Catholic/Universal Way Perhaps one of the
perplexing dilemmas for traditional Christianity today is the meaning of communicating
the gospel in a non-competitive way in the context of relationships with
other faiths. For the exclusivist Christian, this is nonsensical. And yet
it is what is happening all around, all the time today. And perhaps the
Spirit is trying to teach us something. Perhaps Christianity is learning that
if it is truly universal it must find and recognize itself in all forms of
human spiritual experience and in every kind of spiritual event. We
are today arriving in a new era of religious dialogue, of tolerance, mutual
reverence and of learning from each other which those before us could never
have imagined. Yet its rightness for Christians is attested by the fact that it
is so compatible with the personality and example of Jesus. He rejected no
one, tolerated all and saw the mystery of God in all people and in nature. He
ate with those he should have despised; he spoke with those he should have
avoided. He was as open to others as he was to God. In Jesus, time and
eternity intersect. – Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + The Ba’al Shem Tov* said, “Humility, separation and sweetening unity.”
The idea of making boundaries is to create integrity; clarification is vital,
and if you do that based on humility, then there will be a unity
with whatever you are separating from. Whether it is milk and meat, women
and men, Catholics and Jews, the result of the separation will be a unification. I would call it the clarifying separation. If it is done with arrogance, on the other
hand, the result of the separation will be blame and shame and more
conflict. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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Mark Your
Calendar!
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January 1 |
Solemnity
of Mary, the Mother of God (Holy Day); New Year’s Day |
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4 |
Epiphany of the Lord
(Sunday) |
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5
- 16 |
2-week Class: A Way in the World—The Spiritual Path of
Family & Friendship with Dr. Wendy Wright, M-F 6-9:30 pm; Oblate
School of Theology, 285 Oblate Dr, call (210)
341-1366 x 226 |
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11 |
Baptism of the Lord |
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17 |
Portraits
of World Mysticism: French Mystics
with Dr. Wendy Wright; 9 am-12 pm; OST Whitley Theological Center, 285 Oblate
Dr., $40, call (210) 341-1366 x 212 |
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18 |
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day |
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20 |
Class: Spirituality and Mission with Fr. Frank Santucci,
OMI; Tuesdays thru May 8, 7-9:30 pm; Oblate School of Theology, 285 Oblate
Dr., call (210) 341-1366 x 212 Class: Overview of the History of Christian Spirituality with Dr. Steven
Chase; Thursdays thru May 8, 7-9:30 pm; Oblate School of Theology, 285 Oblate
Dr., call (210) 341-1366 x 212 |
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25 |
Rosary-making:
2-5:30 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s (free parking &
materials) |
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26 |
St. Timothy & St. Titus |
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28 |
St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the
Church |
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31 |
PEACE
MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; Rosary at 11:30 am |
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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 |
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Copyright, Marian Center of San Antonio. All
rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced without
permission. |