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Medjugorje Message:
October 25, 2011 Dear children! I am looking at you and in
your hearts I do not see joy. Today I desire to give you the joy of the Risen
One, that He may lead you and embrace you with His love and tenderness. I
love you and I am praying for your conversion without ceasing before my Son
Jesus. Thank you for having responded to my call. |
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Published
by the Marian Center of San Antonio / A Catholic Evangelization Ministry In this month when
we celebrate the Communion of Saints and reflect upon the passing of all
things—of the year, the seasons, our own lives and those of our loved ones
who are steadily marching toward death or have already “crossed over” the
thin veil separating this earthly life from the “other side”—Our Lady makes a
pointed observation about the quality of our present existence: “I am looking at you and in your
hearts I do not see joy.” The first thing this
tells us is that Our Blessed Mother sees not only our exterior facade, but into our hearts.
Like all good mothers, she “reads” us on a deep level, knows us through and
through, penetrating beneath whatever superficial outward pretenses of
contentment or neutrality we present, and sees the true state of our
innermost being. We might be able to “snow” other people, but we cannot
fool Our Lady; she knows if our heart is joyless—riddled, perhaps, by fears,
anxieties, grievances, guilt or sorrows that we hide from others. This fact
should give us comfort—knowing that we are deeply seen, known, and
understood by Our Lady. So we are in this
situation of our hearts lacking “joy”
— for momentary, transient periods of happiness or amusement,
when we feel that life is “going our way” in terms of material or sensory
results, do not constitute
“joy,” but only a passing, ephemeral, temporary “lift” that
will soon end, when our next need for security, safety, pleasure, affection,
esteem, power, or control is thwarted—and it will be, without fail! Into this
situation, Our Lady comes to us and says, “Today I desire to give you the joy of the Risen One,
that He may lead you and embrace you with His love and tenderness.”
Here we are, in the month of November, the end of the year when the Church
invites us to consider “all Souls”—particularly our own —and to be
mindful of our mortality. We expect to hear Our Lady speak of the
“Risen One” at Easter, not in autumn. But really, what better time than now? It is significant
that Our Lady says, “TODAY.”
She does not express a desire to “give us the joy of the Risen One” tomorrow,
or next month at Christmas, or on the day we die, but “today.” We are
offered the joy,
the blessedness,
the bliss
of the Risen life of eternity in God—right here, right now! The Risen
One —Jesus Christ—shares the beatific joy of heaven with us, not only after
death when we are joined with Him, but potentially, even now in our earthly life,
to the extent that we are willing and able to open ourselves to Him, “that
He may lead us and embrace us with His love and tenderness.” When the Risen One
“leads” us and we are living within His strong “embrace” of divine Love, all
the things that once had the power to “make or break” our mood, our peace of
mind, our happiness—the worldly, sensory “prizes” of comfort, ease, pleasure,
material wealth, control, affection, esteem, security, etc.—no longer drive
us or determine our emotional state. We pass over from an erratic
life of fleeting, transitory moments of relative satisfaction into the
eternal realm of ”JOY”:
heavenly bliss and blessed awareness. We discover what St. Catherine of
Siena knew when she said, “All
the way to heaven is heaven.” This has been the great
discovery of those whom the Church has
canonized as saints—an abiding awareness of Christ’s faithful, loving,
indwelling Presence
which relativizes all the lesser pursuits and conditions which once
determined happiness (including physical survival itself!). How do we receive
this “joy of the
Risen One” that Our Lady desires to give us? She
says, “I love you and I am praying for your conversion without ceasing before
my Son Jesus.” Only conversion of heart will bring this joy that frees
us from the prison-house of self in which we struggle, day after day,
to achieve some measure of “happiness” based on what Fr. Thomas Keating calls
our “emotional programs for happiness that will never work.” The key
to such conversion is a daily
practice of meditative PRAYER. Nov. 1991 - Nov. 2011: Our
Twenty-Year Anniversary! With gratitude to
God, this month we celebrate 20
years of the River
of Light newsletter, the publication through which we
share the monthly message of Our Lady, Queen of Peace in Medjugorje.
It was a private pilgrimage
to Medjugorje in August 1988 that
gave birth to the Marian Center of San Antonio and its ministries of monthly Peace
Masses, Peace Walks, Peace Rosaries, Rosary-making, Pilgrimages, a 24-hour
Prayer/Message Line (225-MARY),
ten National Marian Conferences, and the monthly River of Light newsletter. How abundantly
blessed we have been by Jesus and Mary through that 1988 conversion
experience and the resulting commitment to spreading Our Lady’s messages.
What began as a small mailing list grew, over the years, to thousands of
readers from every state in the USA. (The name “River of Light” is one translation of the
ancient Nahuatl word, “Guadalupe.” Our Lady of
Guadalupe, in her Missionary Image, provided the first “project” of the
Marian Center of San Antonio in 1991, and so the newsletter was named for
her.) A Big
Change on the Horizon! At this
providential “moment” in MCSA history, we are embarking upon a change,
inspired by the Holy Spirit who has so faithfully guided us these twenty
years. Beginning in January
2012, the River
of Light is going “electronic”
and “paperless.”
This means that next month, December 2011,
you will receive your final “hard copy, snail-mail” River of
Light. As of January 1, 2012
—the Solemnity of the Mother of God—you may access the River of Light
newsletter at the following web address: There, you can
follow the link provided to a free
monthly subscription delivered to your email-box. It
will contain Our Lady’s monthly message to the world from Medjugorje,
along with the usual commentary, calendar of events, and other inspirational
reading. After 20 years of producing a monthly print publication, we have
been led to this significant change through the following considerations: +
Prohibitive
Rising Production Costs of Printing, Postage, etc. without sufficiently rising income from
subscription donations; + Frequently-changing, Costly
& Labor-intensive Postal Requirements without
improving postal delivery service/distribution of mail; + “Green”
Benefits
of eliminating paper to make a smaller carbon footprint & environmental impact; + Evangelization
Potential
of reaching many more readers through the Worldwide Web than is possible in print media. To those who have
sent subscription donations, we thank you sincerely for these much-needed
tax-deductible contributions that will help fund the updated computer
technology and technical support for the online edition of River of Light
(now under construction). In this “eucharistic” month of Thanksgiving in
which the River of Light
began 20 years ago, we again renew our thanks to you, the readers who
have journeyed with us on this grace-filled spiritual path of Our Lady’s School of Prayer &
Peace. We continue the journey together. May you have a
Blessed & Happy Holy-Day Season! Autumn: Death of the Year & Our Death
In November, nature reminds us of
the life cycle winding down to death,
burying the seeds of birth and renewal; so, too, do our high holy days of All Saints and All Souls. It
is a very sacred and fertile time of year, spiritually. We are forced to
confront our own mortality and resurrection, and to see them in the “now” of
our daily life. The spiritual journey teaches us the non-negotiable necessity of
dying, surrendering, and letting go of all our own ideas, plans, and
self-will in order to experience transformation and resurrection.
In our prayer practice, too, we find that “we foolishly imagine that
meditation will empower us to be an enlightened ego, a holy ego, an ego one
with God. As the poverty and emptiness of meditation continue to erode away
these egocentric misconceptions, it is normal to experience sadness and
anxiety. For, after all, we have become accustomed to the prison house of
our delusional notions of being nothing more than who we imagine, think and
feel ourselves to be. We have become attached to the confining illu-sions in which we continue to suffer. Imagine a
caterpillar who is about to undergo a metamorphosis. This caterpillar has
been eagerly looking forward to this great event. It has studied and
researched metamorphosis...so as to publish what it thinks will be a
best-seller: “My
Metamorphosis.” But when it actually begins to occur, something
the caterpillar never anticipated happens. Its brain begins to
change first. The state of caterpillar consciousness from which it
assumed it was going to observe its metamor-phosis
is the first thing that begins to change! For a butterfly is not a
caterpillar with wings. If it were, it could never fly. Resurrection
is not resuscitation of a corpse. We desire our transformation into God;
our meditation practice embodies this desire. But insofar as we are still
subject to identifying ourselves with an egocentric understanding of this
transformation, its actual occurrence occasions a dark night in which, with
fear and trembling, we
learn to let go of and die to who we imagined ourselves to be.
Fear and anxiety arise from this process in which we must let go and die
to identifying with anything less than a divine understanding of our
transformation.” (James
Finley, SJ) Fueled by our silent prayer
practice, in ordinary life, this transformative “autumnal dying”
is mostly seen in a humble, faith-filled, and peaceful acceptance of
Reality as “what is”—especially during hard times: “Use whatever
challenge comes into your life as a kind of fuel for the flame of
consciousness. That is done through surrender
to what is. Some people may need more of that than
others. If you choose presence in your daily life, you may not need the
drastic challenges.” (Eckhart
Tolle) “Forget
about what should be. Discover what is.” (Ivan Granger) In doing
this, we even leave behind our own ideas of holiness and “become a channel
of divine grace
rather than a paragon of merely human virtue.” (Fr. Thomas Keating)
Penetrating the facade of the false self or ego, “the more clearly you understand
yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
(Spinoza) This
“letting be” and surrender of egoic expectations
affects our relationships, too: “The
beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to
twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love
only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” (Thomas Merton) With loving attention to Reality or “What Is,” we
begin to glimpse the Mystery of the Big Picture: “God leads us step by
step, from event to event. Only afterwards, as we look back over the way we
have come and reconsider certain important moments in our lives in the light
of all that has followed them, or when we survey the whole progress of our
lives, do we experience the feeling of having been led without knowing it,
the feeling that God has mysteriously guided us.” (Paul Tournier)
Here is a powerful everyday prayer for ego-surrender, dying to self, and
consent to “what is”: THE
WELCOMING PRAYER
(Contemplative
Outreach, Ltd.) Mark Your Calendar
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
--- Mary Oliver |
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