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Medjugorje
Message: March 25, 2013 Dear children! In this time of grace I call you to take the
cross of my beloved Son Jesus in your hands and to meditate on His passion
and death. May your suffering be united in His suffering and love will win,
because He who is love gave Himself out of love to save each of you. Pray,
pray, pray until love and peace begin to reign in your hearts. Thank you for
having responded to my call. Annual Message to Mirjana: March 18, 2013 Dear children! I call you to, with complete trust and joy, bless the name of the Lord and, day by day, to give
Him thanks from the heart for His great love. My Son, through that love which
He showed by the Cross, gave you the possibility to be forgiven for
everything; so that you do not have to be ashamed or to hide, and out of fear
not to open the door of your heart to my Son. To the contrary, my children, reconcile with the Heavenly Father so that you
may be able to come to love yourselves as my Son loves you. When you come to
love yourselves, you will also love others; in them you will see my Son and
recognize the greatness of His love. Live in faith! Through me, my Son is
preparing you for the works which He desires to do through you—works through
which He desires to be glorified. Give Him thanks. Especially thank Him for
the shepherds—for your intercessors in the reconciliation with the Heavenly
Father. I am thanking you, my children. Thank you. |
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Published
by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic Evangelization Ministry Our Lady’s monthly message was given on Monday of Holy Week, which
was also March 25th, traditionally celebrated as the Feast of the
Annunciation, exactly nine months before Christmas. Yet as Our Lady mentions
“this time of
grace,” she does not refer to her
own Marian feast day that begins the story of the Incarnation, but rather, is
totally focused—as is the Church—upon the events of Holy
Week and the memorial of Our Lord’s
Passion, death, and resurrection: the Paschal Mystery at the heart of
our faith. Our Lady says, “I call you to take the cross of my
beloved Son Jesus in your hands and to meditate on his passion and death.” Have we done this? It is a most beneficial spiritual exercise: to
hold a crucifix and gaze upon it, to touch its wood or metal and trace the
Lord’s figure with our fingers, silently allowing every
part of our being to receive its impression—our
senses, our emotions, and our intellect. With openness and receptivity, to realize
anew the impact of the Cross—what happened there and what it means for
me, personally. This is an experience beyond words, beyond explanation. The
suffering of Jesus inevitably calls into question our own suffering. How am I related to the Man on the cross? What did his Passion have
to do with me? And now, how is my own passion and suffering related to His?
What is my cross? How can I carry it? What gets nailed to it, to agonize and
to die? Our Lady says, “May your suffering be united in His
suffering and love will win, because He who is love gave Himself out of love
to save each of you.” If we unite our own
suffering with the suffering of Jesus on the Cross, Mary tells us, “love will win.” Love will win! That is the essence of the
“Good News”—the Gospel—Love
wins! In spite of all appearances to the contrary
in our troubled world—riddled with ignorance, division, injustice, violence,
crime, sin, oppression, disease, exploitation, catastrophe, and hatred—we
know that because of the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and
resurrection, LOVE will win! In the end, as Julian of Norwich wrote, “all will be well, and all will be
well, and every manner of thing shall be well.” This was done by Christ “to save each of you.” Each
and every person on earth, without exception!
Incredible! It confounds all our thinking and logical reasoning, so far is it
beyond the mind of human beings—the extraordinary Love of “He
who is love.” Our Lady’s message ends with the words, “Pray,
pray, pray until love and peace begin to reign
in your hearts.” Is this some sort of magic?
If we pray “3 times,” will we who are often hateful, angry, selfish jerks
magically (superstitiously) be morphed into loving, peaceful people with
hearts of gold? Our Lady has used the formula “pray,
pray, pray” so often in Medjugorje that we might not “hear” its deep meaning for
our life. In the context of this month’s message about the Passion of Christ,
Our Lady is reiterating, yet again, that it is only through PRAYER that we can establish in our present moment a point of contact with the saving power of the Paschal
Mystery, a channel through which the fine and subtle energy of its transforming Love can reach us in the very depths of our being in such a way that our ordinary
daily life—weighed down by failures, weaknesses, challenges, heartaches,
frustrations, and reversals—can be lived with extraordinary love and
utmost compassion. Only through prayer can the future “Love
wins” of heaven be experienced NOW, as “love and peace begin to reign” in these hearts that are presently littered with the obstacles of self-will,
arrogance, pride, vanity, illusion, and our thousand egoic
agendas for false “happiness.” After 32 years in Our Lady’s “School of
Prayer” at Medjugorje, we’re still trying to
understand this threefold, trinitarian key to our
existence and the Reality of Being: what it means to “pray,
pray, pray.” *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * * The annual message from Our Lady given to Mirjana
on March 18th (her birthday) contains familiar themes, plus a profound
teaching on self-forgiveness and genuine self-love. Again, Our Lady impresses
upon us the magnitude of Christ’s love shown to us on the Cross, and she repeatedly invites us to an “attitude of gratitude” and sincere thankfulness to her Son. She says: “I call you to, with
complete trust and joy, bless the name of the Lord and, day by day, to give
Him thanks from the heart for His great love.” Does our daily prayer begin with joyous, grateful acknowledgement
of our countless blessings? Is our first attentiveness to all that we have
been given, or do we immediately skip over
praise to a list of what we allegedly “lack”? Next, Our Lady beckons us to abandon any sense of fear or shame
as we open our hearts to the Lord in total trust and faith,
remembering the incredible Gift we were given by virtue of His death on
Calvary: “My Son, through that love which He
showed by the Cross, gave you the possibility to be forgiven for
everything; so that you do not have to be ashamed or to hide, and out of
fear not to open the door of your heart to my Son.” The image of “hiding” recalls the Garden of Eden, where out of
shame, Adam and Eve fearfully hid from God after their disobedience. As they
say, “the rest
is history”—the sad and sorry history of
the human condition after the “First Fall” from grace into sin. But thanks to
God, there was a “Second
Fall”—the voluntary “Fall of God” into the human condition through the
Incarnation: Jesus Christ, born in the abject poverty of a stable’s feeding
trough. The Garden of Eden was to be rectified by the Garden of Gethsemane. In that “Second
Fall,” God deigned to do for us what we could
never do for ourselves by works of the law or the operations of karma: reconciled us to Himself
beyond any sin that we could commit, no matter how heinous. (For
what could be more heinous than crucifying our very God?) In entering fully and completely into our human condition, and
literally “becoming
sin,” God experienced the total reality of
being human, from the inside-out. In this experience there was a
mysterious “exchange” of energy by which “God
became man so that man might become God.” (St. Athanasius) Just as God drank of our
essential humanity, we too, were given to drink of God’s divinity and the
possibility of being “divinized” or “deified” ourselves, as the Church
Fathers taught. So now, as Our Lady says, we “do
not have to be ashamed or to hide, and out of fear not to open the door of
our heart” to Jesus. God has made
Himself one with our human condition and therefore truly “gets” us. And yet, how many of us live this glorious reality of our Christian
faith? Instead, most of us are locked in shackles of guilt. We’re stuck in painful memories of our past misdeeds and our
stories of how they were justified by the wrongs done to us by others.
We’re imprisoned in the snares of bitter resentment toward those who
have sinned against us, and unrelenting shame and anguish over our own
sins. The two-edged sword of guilt haunts us: the guilt of others whom we judge and condemn mercilessly in our thoughts, and our
own guilt which we carry, consciously or
unconsciously, as a torturous thorn in our side, tainting all of our
relationships. To assuage or medicate the sting of guilt, we fall into all
sorts of addictions and compulsions: over-eating, -drinking, -drugging, -sexing, -shopping, -working,
-churching, -tweeting—anything
to provide some passing relief from the
pain of our inner demons of guilt and resentment. Hateful and unforgiving
toward ourselves and others, how can we not feel fear and shame at the
thought of nakedly, transparently approaching the holiness of God? But Our Lady says, “To the contrary, my children, reconcile with the Heavenly Father so that you
may be able to come to love yourselves as my Son loves you. When you
come to love yourselves, you will also love others; in them you will
see my Son and recognize the greatness of His love….Especially thank Him for
the shepherds—for your intercessors in the reconciliation with the Heavenly
Father.” Clearly Our Lady is
promoting the Sacrament of Reconciliation—the rite of holy Confession.
Of course, anyone can pray directly to God “with humble and contrite heart” as the liturgy says, and be inwardly reconciled and forgiven
through sincere repentance, remorse of conscience, and firm intention of
reform. But there is something vitally healing to our psyche in the confession of sins to another human being,
whether in the Twelve-Step work of sharing one’s personal inventory, or, most
beneficial of all—the Sacrament our Lord gave to us through the Church:
confession to a priest who sits “in persona Christi” with these life-giving prayer-words of absolution to pronounce in
the sign of the Cross upon our heads: “God, the Father of
mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son has reconciled the
world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of
sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace,
and I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.” + As Our Lady says, through this encounter with Christ, we are
gradually “able to come to love ourselves as He
loves us.” Faced with the shocking
reality of His unconditional love for me, I see myself in a new light, as a
new creation, as radically lovable in my essence—something I’ve never seen or felt in myself before!
What a revelation! Those terrible things I’ve done, said, and thought are no
obstacle at all to the love of Jesus for me. I sincerely repent and
regret them, and poof! They are gone and forgotten in His eyes! He sees me only through the
lens of His love alone, taking delight in how I reflect the image and likeness of His
Father, my Creator. (This means that Jesus looks upon my True Self,
not the egoic False Self that I have mistaken for
“me” and despised for so long, showing it sinfully to the world while my True Self was buried.) As I begin to internalize
this awe-full love Christ has for me with literally everything forgiven, I begin to see other
people in a new light, too. I begin to see them through the eyes
of love with which I myself have been
seen, the eyes of Christ that have looked upon me so mercifully. Incredibly, I start to see Him in others—glimpsing their True Self in God’s image and likeness,
despite their egoic, False Self flaws and failings,
so much like mine. I “recognize the greatness of His love” in them, and—at last —I begin to “love
my Neighbor as my Self”—the Second Great Commandment.
Our Lady concludes her message to Mirjana:
“Live in faith! Through me, my
Son is preparing you for the works which He desires to do through you—works
through which He desires to be glorified. Give Him thanks….I am thanking you,
my children.” Medjugorje
is a Prep School; it is preparatory training “for the works which Christ
desires to do through us” and by which He will “be glorified.” Let us live
in faith and thankfulness for our great vocation as human
beings whose very nature has been raised to union with the Godhead through the divine plan fulfilled in Christ. The Lord is truly risen,
alleluia, alleluia! April
Musings: Dying and Rising with Christ in
Easter Glory, Alleluia, Alleluia Out of death comes
life that dies no more. There is no true and undying life in us except the life
that comes forth from death. If water is to become hot, then cold must
die out of it. If wood is to be made fire, then the nature of wood must die. The
life we seek cannot be in us…unless we gain it by first ceasing to be what we
are; we acquire this life through death. However many deaths there
may seem to be, they all are but one, namely, the death a man dies to his own
will, to his sense of proprietorship, to division and multiplicity and
activity—in so far as this is possible to a creature. And there is
one life, and only one, namely, the one ineffable, incomprehensible,
uncreated, essential, divine life. Toward this life all other life hurries
on…being irresistibly drawn to possess it. The nearer our life comes to
this essential life, and the more it is likened to it, the more truly do we
live, for in this life is all life. Whoever will have this divine life living
within him, made essentially and truly his own, must essentially and truly
die to himself. Whoever fails to die will fail to live.
And whoever totally dies to self, such a one is wholly made alive in God and
without any separation. And this death has many degrees, just as life has. A
man may die a thousand deaths in a single day, and each is instantly followed
by a joyous life in God—death is no longer death. This happens
because God cannot refuse the offering of death nor resist its plea for life.
And the stronger death is and the more complete, so is the life that
responds to it all the stronger and more integral. Just as death is, so shall
life be. And as life succeeds to death, so does life prepare a man to die a more
perfect death to himself. – Fr. John Tauler, OP + +
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+ + On Good Friday he
lays hold of the cross with the hands of a lover, takes to his heart
all that dire misery, ugliness, brutality, that is the result of sin; even
that he transforms. Suddenly, the age-long sorrow, death, becomes potent with
life. The seed has fallen into the earth, the great
emptiness of the world’s heart is filled with the potency of immortal love. Easter
is Christ risen in us; our life is the risen Christ.
Christ will flower in us, will bear fruit in us, will come to harvest in us.
Had he not risen in the flesh, but remained in the tomb, he would have been
the prerogative of the devout few. In every age the Magdalenes
and the Johns of the world would have come with their precious ointment of
love, but the Christian world would have been a world of weeping. Because
Christ is risen, it is a world of joy, an
unassailable kingdom of heaven in the midst of surrounding sorrow. It is
for the ordinary man, the creature of flesh and blood, that Christ has
risen—for those who cannot look upon folded hands and still feet and listen
to the silence of a heart no longer beating.
-- Caryll
Houselander VIVA EL PAPA! by Michele Maxwell The day before the
papal enclave began, I paid a visit to St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York City. The entire church was covered with scaffolding,
inside and out, and most of the entrances were blocked, with only limited
access along narrow pathways. Once inside, the sound of workers on the
scaffolding filled the air with reverberating thuds and echoing clangs as the
church’s acoustics magnified their labor. The hanging light fixtures had been
removed and laid on the floor, replaced by a few high-intensity work lamps,
leaving the pathways dim. In the midst of this
dark cacophony, I made my way toward the rear of the Cathedral, to the Lady Chapel where the Blessed
Sacrament is kept exposed. Along the narrow corridor leading back there, I
saw numerous and varied people planted in the pews: some homeless with their
bags and bed rolls filling the seats around them, some kneeling with faces
covered, blotting out the sounds of construction, some sleeping, some staring
into space, some telling their rosary beads, some weeping. The church in
disarray, her people there to pray. When I got to the Lady Chapel, I saw a larger gathering
of folks, drawn like moths to the flame of that small patch of bright light,
clean polished marble, sparkling gold candlesticks and fireglow
surrounding the monstrance: Christ humbly, silently disguised
as a white wafer of bread. Again a motley crowd squeezed in to the double row
of pews: tourists, locals, business people, wealthy and poor, men and women,
black and white. There, shoulder to shoulder with this cross-section of
humanity, I closed my eyes and listened to the strange noises filling the
air, envisioning deep space and the sounds of creation after the primordial
Big Bang. Suddenly the words
that Francis heard from the San Damiano crucifix
came to mind: “Rebuild my Church, for as you can see, it is falling into ruin.” And
I felt a great hope well up within me…that even now in this present darkness,
the work of rebuilding goes on. To the wounded, angry and cynical this must
seem madness, a “rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic”…and yet these
burning hearts and bowed heads—eyes leaking tears of grief and contrition,
turning again and again to the Sacred Host hidden in the back chapel while
the deafening roar of renovation proceeds—embodied a prodigious hope, to me. Before exiting the
building, I saw that workmen in hard hats and mountaineering gear, tied to
pulleys and harnesses for scaling the Gothic heights, still far from
approaching the “real” project, were painstakingly assembling a high wooden
platform from which it might be safe to even begin. Yes, we need a footing
and a place to start this massive work of rebuilding the Church. Large
posters on easels were placed near the entrance to remind all of us, great
and small, to pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance at this pivotal moment in
history, when there is an opportunity for change. May there be openness: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not
your hearts.” A few days later,
white smoke billowed from the Sistine Chapel with the jubilant cry: “Habemus papum!” Our
Holy Father Francesco—taking the
name of “Pope Francis” after St. Francis of Assisi—is the first Latin
American and first Jesuit pope: Cardinal
Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Known to be a man of deep humility, simplicity, poverty of spirit
and lifestyle, and dedicated pastoral care, he has begun his pontificate with
a distinctly Franciscan tone of spirituality, in his first homily emphasizing
the centrality of the cross: “When
we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross, and when we
confess Christ without the cross, then we are not disciples of the Lord. We
might be bishops, priests, cardinals and popes, but we are not disciples of
the Lord. I would like all of us, after these days of grace, to have the
courage to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the cross of the Lord, to
edify the church in the blood of the Lord poured out on the cross, and to
confess the only glory, that of Christ crucified. And in this way, the church
will move forward.” Let us pray for Our Holy Father Francis in his great
task of rebuilding the Church in our time, just as St. Francis of
Assisi was challenged by the Crucified Lord to do the same in the Middle
Ages. “Lord,
make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is
despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness,
joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to
console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is
in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is
in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
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Mark Your Calendar!
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April 2 |
“Jesus, Healer of Body and Soul” with healing Priest, Fr. Martin
Scott: 7 pm—Mass with reflective talk; 8 pm—Family Healing Service; Holy Trinity
Church, 20523 Huebner Rd; call (210) 274-5290 (April 4th in
Spanish) |
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3 |
“Art, Love and Conversion” with Glenn Hughes, Ph.D.: 10th
Annual Catholic Intellectual Tradition Lecture Series; 7 pm, St. Mary’s
University, University Center Room A; refreshments & conversation follow;
free/open to public |
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5
- 7 |
Divine Mercy Weekend
Celebration with Fr. Pablo Straub, CSsR, including
Fri. pm Mass; Sat. Walk for Mercy, Mass & Talks; Sun. Mass, talks, confessions,
Chaplet of Mercy; St. Benedict Catholic Church, 4535 Lord Rd.; call (210)
535-4428 |
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5 - 7 |
Weekend Retreat: “Just Call Me Lopez—A Story of Imperfection
and Grace” with Margaret Silf, scholar of Ignatian spirituality & the life of St. Ignatius
Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits); Oblate School of Theology
Whitley Theological Center, 285 Oblate; $135 ($40 for Sat. morning only);
call Brenda at (210) 341-1356 x 212 |
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6 |
Portraits of World
Mysticism Class: “Ordinary Experience-Extraordinary
Grace” with Margaret Silf, Scottish scholar of Ignatian spirituality; 9 am-12 pm; Oblate School of
Theology Whitley Theological Center; 285 Oblate Dr;
$40; call 341-1366 x 212 |
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7 |
Divine Mercy Sunday: Holy Hour with Divine
Mercy Chaplet, then Holy Mass with prayer for healing and Sacrament of
Reconciliation: 3 pm, Oblate Lourdes Grotto, Immaculate Conception Chapel,
5712 Blanco Rd.; also, 2:30 – 5:30 pm at St. Gregory the Great Church, 700
Dewhurst (Exposition of Blessed Sacrament, Rosary, Confessions, Chaplet of
Mercy); 414-3143 |
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8 |
The Annunciation of the
Lord (celebrated) |
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25 |
St. Mark, Evangelist |
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27 |
PEACE
MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; Rosary at 11:30 am |
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28 |
Rosary-making: 2–5:30 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St.
Mary’s |
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29 |
St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of
the Church |
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Prayer for Our Shepherds Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and High Priest, through the loving
hands of your holy Mother Mary, please guide and protect all priests,
bishops, cardinals and Pope Francis, your Vicar on earth. Help them to live
out the dignity of their priestly vocation with all its challenges,
difficulties, temptations, and personal sacrifices, always united to You with
eyes fixed on the cross of
self-emptying love which alone can sustain them. Help them to repair, rebuild and renew Your Church with
courage and humility, united to your Sacred Heart of all-inclusive love, with
a penitential soul and docility to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit for
any changes ordained by Your Divine Will. Give them strength and joy to labor
in Your vineyard for the salvation of souls. In Jesus’ name, amen. |
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Copyright, Marian Center of San Antonio. All
rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced without
permission. |