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Medjugorje
Message: February 25, 2015 Dear children! In this time of grace I call all of you: pray
more and speak less. In prayer seek the will of God and live it according to
the commandments to which God calls you. I am with you and am praying with
you. Thank you for having responded to my call. |
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Published
by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic Evangelization Ministry Our Lady’s Lenten direction is pointed and succinct: “pray
more and speak less.” If we do nothing else this
Lent but take these four words as our mantra and live them—“PRAY MORE, SPEAK LESS”—by Easter our life will be transformed. In every moment and
situation of our daily life we have the opportunity to practice this one
simple discipline that confronts our habitual “yama-yama-yama” of endlessly streaming words either spoken out loud or sounding inside our head. We might begin
with the external, extraneous words we use. Can we curtail the impulse
to “chime in” on every topic being discussed? (Much of which is gossip.) Can
we withhold the “putting-in of our two cents” on every issue, whether trivial
or “important”? Even harder: can we hold our tongue when someone provokes an
emotional response of anger or irritation inside us? Can we suppress the
sarcastic or snarky reply that itches to be hurled from our mouth in that moment?
Not without
help from above! In these situations, perhaps
we can try to remember to internally turn our gaze toward heaven,
whispering “Help
me, Jesus!” or “Help me, Blessed Mother!” or “Help
me, God!” while NOT
uttering a word from our mouth. And then
a silent “Thank
you!” when the moment of temptation passes…. Sacred scripture teaches that just as a bit in the horse’s mouth
bridles his whole body, and a small rudder steers a large ship through
storms, “in
the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretensions.
Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of
malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on
fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna. For every
kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has
been tamed by the human species, but no
human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly
poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse human
beings who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing
and cursing. This need not be so.” (James 3:5-10) Our Lady ends her brief message by advising us on prayer: “In
prayer seek the will of God and live it according to the commandments to
which God calls you.” Just as an airplane reaches
its destination by a continual “correcting” of its course, adjusting from
moment to moment in order to stay aligned with the compass readings that
point the way, we should each be in continual interior
prayer to God in order to read our own
moment-by-moment “course corrections” as we travel through our day. For,
like an airplane, our human tendency is to constantly “drift off-course”
and we need continual contact with the “air-traffic-control tower” who is our God
of Love in order to correct our
earthly path toward the destination of heaven. “The
commandments to which God calls you” are
these “course-corrections” we need to make from moment to moment, discovered
through ongoing prayer. Our Lady is calling us to the interior, “New Covenant” commandments we receive through the
indwelling Holy Spirit speaking God’s will for us in our hearts—not to
the external, “Old Covenant” commandments written on tablets of stone. For
through the prophet Jeremiah, God says of this new covenant, “It will not be like the covenant I
made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth
from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant….But this is the covenant
which I will make with Israel… I
will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will
be their God and they shall be my people.” (Jer 31:31-33)
These commandments will not need to be
taught by teachers, for “all, from least to greatest, shall know
me, says the Lord.” This is the interior
voice of conscience which God has implanted in each of us, accessible by prayer. What is the ramification of “speaking less” and “praying more” in
terms of our actual prayer practice? Through the prophet Isaiah God says, “This people draws near with words only and honors me with their lips, though their hearts are far from me.” (Is 29:13) In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “When you pray, do not
babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of
their many words. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”(Mt 6:7-8) St. Francis famously said, “Preach the gospel at all times; use words
if necessary.” Again and again, through
scripture and the lives of the saints we learn that “God’s first language is silence” and that in the spiritual life, words are often overrated, unnecessary, and even detrimental. For example, if you realize that your manner of vocally praying grace before meals or reciting
morning or evening prayers has become rote, routine, and
habitual but without genuine attention or sincerity, try replacing these
moments of rote vocal prayers with a moment or two of SILENCE. The prayer of silence—meditative and contemplative—has a depth
and intimacy with God that every Christian should
seek and cultivate. Ideally we will spend 15-20 minutes, twice a day, in
prayer of total
silence. In this form of prayer we
gradually learn to let go of not only the spoken words, but also the constant barrage of inner words flooding our mind. Bringing this hyperactive interior monologue to silence
within is a pathway to unimaginable peace, for an opening is finally created in which God can take up residence as the
Indwelling Divine Master of our house, and set this house in order. To this peace the Queen of Peace invites us. March Musings . . . Living Lent . . . Risky Prayer. .
.Sounding Silence. . .True Self/No Self During Lent the Church addresses her
instruction to different levels of Christian consciousness. If we want to
organize our Lenten observance this year, we might do so under three headings
which St. Aelred calls the “three sabbaths.”
These are love of self, love of neighbor, and love of God. The Gospel teaching “Beware
of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them…” is
concerned with the first sabbath—the
love of self. If we have not yet achieved this Sabbath, we might
prepare for Easter by seeking to obtain the joy of this kind of rest. The
Lord Jesus warns us not to give in to one of the great temptations of Lent,
which is to get all wound up with the observance of almsgiving, fasting,
vigils, and extra prayers. Jesus’ advice is: “Whatever you do, let nobody
notice it.” That is a hard saying for beginners in the spiritual
life. The moment any success in practicing some penitential exercise begins
to appear, we find ourselves attacked by the compulsion of competition, or by
wanting our observance to be observed. Jesus warns, “Let nobody see you. Otherwise, the Father,
who sees in secret, cannot reward you.” The first sabbath
is the recognition of the truth about ourselves. We tend to want to become a
saintly, enlightened, or realized person. Such desires can hide the truth
about ourselves. When our energy is directed
toward becoming the special person that we want to be, it becomes harder to
accept the person we actually are. Prayer in secret leads to
self-knowledge. And little by little self-knowledge leads to the acceptance
of ourselves; that is, of our gifts, of our limitations, and of our sinful
human condition.
Acceptance of the truth about ourselves is the
beginning of the first sabbath. But that is not
enough. What matters most is how comfortable we feel in admitting the truth
about ourselves. The more comfortable we feel in our predicament—like
a little child who has fallen into a mud puddle, but who knows he is still
loved by his mother—the more we too can trustfully raise our tiny hands
toward God, as we wallow contentedly in the mud and sigh, “Ah, what peace! What repose!” This is what Aelred
meant by the first sabbath. The true love of self and of
our lowly condition enables us to acknowledge the whole truth about ourselves
with all its consequences. That is a project worth our Lenten
efforts. As this comfortable acceptance of ourselves
continues to increase, something else begins to happen. We are able to accept
others as they are, with the whole of the truth about them. If
we are at peace with ourselves and who we are, the chances are good that we
will be at peace with others and who they are. That is St. Aelred’s second sabbath—the sabbath of love of neighbor.
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ It’s a risky thing to pray, and the
danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is
not to pray, but to go directly to God. If saying your prayers is an
obstacle to prayer, cut it out. The best way to pray is: stop. Let
prayer pray within you, whether you know it or not. This means a deep
awareness of our true inner identity. It implies a life of faith,
but also of doubt. You can’t have faith without doubt. Give up the
business of suppressing doubt. Doubt and faith are two sides of the same
thing. Faith will grow out of doubt, the real doubt. We don’t pray right
because we evade doubt. And we evade it by regularity and by activism.
It is in these two ways that we create a false identity, and by
which we justify the self-perpetuation of our institutions. – Thomas Merton, OCSO + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + To know ourselves, to understand
ourselves and to get ourselves and our problems in perspective, we simply
must make contact with our spirit. All self-understanding arises from
understanding ourselves as spiritual beings, and it is only contact with the
universal Holy Spirit that can give us the depth and breadth to understand.
The way to this is not difficult. But it does require serious commitment. The way of meditation is simple. All
each of us has to do is to be as still as possible in body and in
spirit. Learning to meditate is learning to let go of your thoughts, ideas
and imagination and to rest in the depths of your own being. Always
remember that. Don’t think, don’t use any words other than your own word, don’t imagine anything. Just sound the word in the depths
of your spirit and listen to it…with all your attention. Why is this so powerful?
Basically, because it gives us the space that our spirit needs to breathe. It
gives each of us the space to be ourselves. When you are meditating you
don’t need to apologize for yourself and you don’t need to justify yourself.
All you need to do is be yourself, to accept from the hands of
God the gift of your own being. And in that acceptance of yourself and your
creation, you come into harmony with the Creator, the Spirit of God. – Fr. John Main, OSB + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + + One reason why silence is so disturbing to
us: As soon as we begin to become silent, we experience the
relativity of our ordinary everyday mind. With this mind we measure our
space and time coordinates, we calculate probabilities and count up our
mistakes and successes. It is a very important and useful level of
consciousness. It is so useful and familiar a state of mind that we
easily think it is all there is to us: our whole mind, our real selves, our
full meaning. Life, love, and death frequently
teach us otherwise. We bump into silence at many unexpected turnings on the
road of life, in unpredictable ways, in unlikely people. Its greeting has an effect that is
both thrilling, full of wonder, and yet often terrifying. Our thoughts,
fears, fantasies, hopes, angers and attractions are all rising and falling
moment by moment. We automatically identify ourselves with these fleeting or
compulsively recurring states without thinking what we are thinking. When
silence teaches us how unreliably transient these states
really are, we confront the terrible questions of who we are. In silence
we must wrestle with the terrible possibility of our own non-reality. Buddhist thought makes this
experience—what it calls “no self”—one of the central
wisdom-pillars of its path to liberation from suffering and one of its
essential means to enlightenment. The Buddhist practitioner is encouraged to seek
out this sense of inner transience and, rather than fleeing from it, to dive
headlong into it, as Meister Eckhart and the great Christian mystics
did. “No self” is the
Buddhist idea that others have most trouble with. How absurd, terrible,
sacrilegious to say that I don’t exist. In fact most Christian antagonism
to “no self” is founded on misinterpretation. It does not mean
that we do not exist but that we do not exist in autonomous independence,
which is the kind of existence the ego likes to imagine it has; the kind of fantasy
of being God with which the serpent tempted Eve. It
is the hubris to which religious people often fall victim. I do not
exist by myself because God is the ground of my being. In the light of
this insight we read the words of Jesus in the New Testament with deeper perception:
“If
anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind…whoever
loses his life for my sake will save it.” If through silence
we can embrace this truth of “no self,” we make important
discoveries about the nature of consciousness. We discover that
consciousness, the soul, is more than the amazing computing and calculating
and judging system of the brain. We are more than what we think. Meditation is not what we think. – Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB + + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + “What We Have to Be is What We Are” Thomas Merton’s insistence that there
is no real spiritual development until we plumb the depths of the self to
determine who we are—without the masks, without the labels—is a call to
honesty
and to self-criticism. The difficulty lies in the fact that both
qualities are long lost in the Madison Avenue approach to life. In this
world, life becomes a matter of creating images of who I aspire to be
rather than setting out to understand who I really am. What really drives
me, what I really think and want and care about are the raw materials of me.
It is out of these things that the self emerges, shapes and forms itself, and
finally, finally, finally comes to fullness. What Merton calls us to do as part
of this slow but fulfilling process depends on the raw and ruthless debunking
of the self to the self that is the ground of humility. He
challenges us all to cling to the reality that is ourselves rather than
enshroud ourselves in the cosmetic world around us, mere specters of who
we are each meant to become. He calls us to the most daring truth of all, the
truth of who we really are. In the center of the self. In the heart
of us. Behind the veils. But is it not a simple process. To
discover the real self implies the peeling away of the layers of persona
we have so carefully cultivated for the sake of fitting into a
plastic world full of other plastic images. It requires, as they say in publishing, the
courage to refuse to believe our own press. Until that happens we risk the
danger of falling down the rabbit hole of the self. We begin to see
ourselves as above, beyond, different from, superior to the other mere
mortals around us. In political language we call it “exceptionalism.” In spiritual dialects we call it
“holiness.” We find ourselves beyond the pale of basic spiritual
disciplines, above the appetites that score the rest of the human race…. It is the task of a lifetime to work
with the basic instincts and urgings, soul shifts and values, desires and
hopes within us to become the fullness of the raw material of the self. But unless we do, we doom
ourselves to buy into the empty images every new world creates to define
itself: successful man, tough urban cowboy, wealthy woman, clerical dandy,
wonder woman, obedient disciple, leader, stereotype of whatever becomes
the fashion of the time. – Sr.
Joan Chittister, OSB + + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + +
+ + Lent is an ancient word for springtime;
it designates a season of burgeoning inner and outer life. Too often
Lent has been misunderstood as a time of grim repentance, but it is meant to
be a time of joy, the joy of a fresh start that greening meadows and
blossoming trees proclaim each spring. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of
this special time for sharpening our spiritual focus. Its name
comes from an ancient rite in which those who start their Lenten practice are
signed with ashes on their forehead. These ashes come from the burnt palm
branches of last year’s Palm Sunday celebration....The Palm Sunday procession
in which we carry palm branches, as the people did who welcomed Jesus into
Jerusalem, is a counter-demonstration
to the entry of Pontius Pilate into the city from the other side. Pilate came
on horseback surrounded by soldiers; Jesus came riding a donkey as Prince of
Peace. This and his other non-violent demonstrations cost Jesus his life. So,
when
we are signed with these ashes we are reminded of the “cost of discipleship.” While the priest signs the faithful
with ashes, he says, “Remember that
from dust you came and to dust you will return”….All forms come and go. The
implication of this impermanence is: NOW is the time, and the time is short….Sin
stands for everything that cuts us off from our authentic self, from one
another, and from the divine ground of our being….The world order in
accord with God’s design is only waiting for us to make it a reality here and
now. And how do we make God’s design for the world a tangible reality? By overcoming
sin in its three dimensions: we become authentic by pulling ourselves
together; we celebrate our belonging to the universe by
sharing with one another; we ground ourselves in God by letting
ourselves down into God’s silence to drink from the fountain of life,
the source of our being.
The traditional terminology for pulling
ourselves together is “Fasting” (meaning more than
discipline in eating and drinking). Sharing with others is called “Almsgiving”
(meaning more than doling out alms). And for grounding ourselves in Being,
the term is “Prayer” (meaning more than saying prayers). Fasting,
almsgiving and prayer are the three ways of aligning ourselves and our world
with God’s design—three intersecting pathways into the joy of
Lent….These intertwined dimensions help each one of us find our own customized observance of Lent. – Br. David Steindl-Rast,
OSB
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Mark Your
Calendar!
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March 1 |
Second Sunday of Lent |
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1-5 |
Contemplative Retreat &
Lecture Series: People of
Pilgrimage—The Liberated Heart: Becoming Who We Truly Are with Sr. Joyce Rupp,
OSM; 4:30 pm Sunday-noon Thursday; Oblate School of Theology, 285 Oblate Dr.;
full retreat $350 or lecture series only $45; call (210) 341-1366 x 212 |
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7 |
Portraits
of World Mysticism: Mysticism in the Orthodox Tradition with Fr. Frank Reardon; 9 am-12 pm;
OST Whitley Theological Center, 285 Oblate Dr., $40, call (210) 341-1366 x
212 |
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7 |
Guadalupanas Lenten Retreat: Mary—Our Mother, Companion, and Friend
with Fr. Antonio Gonzalez; 7:45 am-12 pm; Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 13715
Riggs Rd., Helotes TX; bilingual, no charge; (210) 545-5238 |
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8 |
Third Sunday of Lent |
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10,
17, 24 |
Lecture Series (3
Tuesdays): Moses in Pharaoh’s House: A
Liberation Spirituality for North America with Fr. John Markey, OP; 7-9
pm, Oblate School of Theology Whitley Theological Center, 285 Oblate Dr.;
$40; call (210) 341-1366 x 212 |
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14 |
Catholic Seniors’
Conference sponsored by Pilgrim Center of Hope, 8 am- 2:30 pm, St. Matthew
Catholic Church, McDonald Family Center, 10703 Wurzbach
Rd.; $25; call (210) 521-3377 |
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15 |
Fourth Sunday of Lent |
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17 |
St. Patrick
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18 |
Class (4 Wednesdays): Scriptural Reasoning: Reading the Sacred
Texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam with Narjis
Pierre; 7-9 pm, SoL Center, 300 Bushnell; $25; call
(210) 732-9927 |
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19 |
St. Joseph |
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22 |
Fifth Sunday of Lent |
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25 |
The Annunciation of the Lord (1st Joyful Mystery of the
Rosary) |
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28 |
PEACE
MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; Rosary at 11:30 am |
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29 |
PALM
SUNDAY |
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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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