Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2025
Dear children! May this springtime be an encouragement for personal conversion for you, that with your lives you may pray and love God above all, for all those who are in need. Little children, be my hands of peace and prayer; be love for all those who do not love, do not pray and do not want peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2025
Our Lady’s Lenten message conveys a world of meaning in just two sentences. Given to us a week before the start of Lent, her words begin with a reference to “springtime” as well as the three great disciplines of the Lenten season: “May this springtime be an encouragement for personal conversion for you, that with your lives you may pray and love God above all, for all those who are in need.”
The word “Lent” means “springtime,” and indeed the rebirth of the natural world in budding trees, flowers, birdsong and warmer temps is a powerful “encouragement for personal conversion.” On the physical level, it’s the time when we shed our winter sweat pants and sedentary habits to begin outdoor exercise and activities with new energy and enthusiasm. Materially, “springtime” inspires us to shed our excess accumulation in the deep “Spring cleaning” of our houses, and do needed repairs and home improvements.
In addition to these, Our Lady is especially concerned with our SPIRITUAL “springtime” —the forty days of LENT—and the “personal conversion” to which she has been calling us for nearly 44 years in Medjugorje. The Church’s three traditional disciplines of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This first sentence of Our Lady’s message includes all three.
First, Our Lady beckons us, “that WITH YOUR LIVES you may PRAY”—not only with our lips, not only in church or at specific set-apart times, not only when we are in trouble or great need, and not only when someone asks us. Rather, as St. Paul said, we are to “pray without ceasing,” and as Our Lady says, “with our lives.” That is, ALL of our life—every minute, every circumstance. PRAYER, as our conscious connection to and awareness of God—both outside of us in all Creation and within us as the Divine Indwelling Presence—must become a sort of “4th or 5th dimension” of consciousness.
We humans live in a three-dimensional world of SPACE, with height, breadth, and depth perception. Einstein called TIME a “fourth dimension.” But beyond these space-time dimensions, we can also identify PRAYER—the ongoing awareness of an immanent God—as a “fifth dimension,” a higher level of consciousness marked by a sense of unity, love, compassion, and connection to all things. In understanding PRAYER as “5D” consciousness, we see that we could indeed pray “with our lives” —not just with our lips or with various transient, circumscribed methodologies.
Prayer as “5D consciousness” is holistic—i.e. permeating our whole day/life/being with the realization that our thoughts and actions affect the world around us because of the universe’s entangled web of One Interconnected Reality. Thus we would operate from unconditional love and the higher purpose of harmonizing with the world through our conscious aligning with the Divine Indwelling. This will mean “living our best life” through the larger, True Self rather than the small, egoic False Self. “Praying with our lives” would open us to continual guidance from the Holy Spirit, enabling us to constantly discern and act upon the promptings from higher dimensions. So the first discipline of Lent—PRAYER—means to Our Lady to “pray with your lives” by living in “5D consciousness.”
The second discipline of Lent is “fasting” or renunciation. Our Lady translates this simply as meaning that “with your lives you may…LOVE GOD ABOVE ALL.” How do we show or express visibly that we “love God above all“? During Lent the primary demonstration of this is fasting from (or renouncing) substances, behaviors, and actions to which we are overly attached, for anything in our life that becomes an addiction or obsession is essentially becoming for us an “IDOL” usurping the place of God and stealing our freedom. To reaffirm and recommit to our love for God “above all,” we deliberately deprive ourselves of whatever is leading us into idolatry through an over-attachment or enslaving dependency upon it.
For some, this involves excessive or unhealthy food and drink; for others, alcohol, tobacco, drugs; for some, television, internet, video-gaming, social media; for others, unhealthy relationships, gossiping, or overspending on “retail therapy” consumerism. Whatever our idolatrous attachments may be, during Lent’s “spiritual springtime,” we find “encouragement for personal conversion” in which we can prove “with our lives” (i.e. our daily behaviors) that we “love God above all.” It is important that our fasting be rooted in LOVE, and not in our own performative, ego-driven, self-aggrandizing power, pride, or control!
The third traditional discipline of Lent is “almsgiving” or works of mercy, which focus our attention beyond our own selfish desires and agendas, upon the suffering world and all those who are less fortunate. Our Lady’s message calls us to pray and love God “with our lives” —yet always in the service of one, great overarching motivation: “FOR ALL THOSE WHO ARE IN NEED.” Like Our Lord Jesus Christ who gave us the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we are each to be a “person for others” without discrimination of any kind as to the “worthiness” of the other. Our “neighbors” are not limited geographically, politically, sexually, ethnically, religiously, racially, or otherwise; they are simply “all those who are in need.”
Along with our praying from the “5D” consciousness of our interconnectedness with all life forms in the universal flow of love, and fasting from the lesser loves that distance us from others’ need in a myopic narcissism of our own selfishness, Our Lady devotes the remainder of her message to this third discipline of Lent which animates and undergirds the first two: “almsgiving.” This is grounded in the self-emptying nature of God displayed throughout the universe, the continual outpouring of Divine Life in humble self-donation, which we are to emulate and incarnate, just as all of Nature reflects and exemplifies it. The word “almsgiving” could be shortened to simply “GIVING.” We show ourselves to be the “image and likeness of God” —sons and daughters of the Kingdom—when we LIVE TO GIVE.
Our Lady instructs us: “Little children, be my hands of peace and prayer; be love for all those who do not love, do not pray, and do not want peace.” Oh, what a tall order this is! For we are all now immersed in a cultural darkness of historic proportions—a sea of churning unrest and division, a political power orgy of greed, revenge, retaliation, brutality and hatred, an abysmal black void of prayerlessness. What is unfolding today lacks any hint of the “5D consciousness” marked by love, compassion, unity, solidarity, and awareness of the interconnectedness of all life that would respect and conform to the Reality of our entangled, God-soaked universe. Into this deep “dark night” that is our present country and world, Our Lady calls us to bring LIGHT. She asks us to BE her “hands of peace and prayer.” How can we do this?
Our Lady’s simple answer: “BE LOVE.” Sacred Scripture tells us, “God is love.” (1 Jn 4:8,16) So Our Lady is telling us in our everyday life to BE (God), BE (Divine), LIVE from the “5D”/”I AM” consciousness of the Indwelling Presence of Christ at our core, where the Divine Spark was placed in us as the “image of God” before the world began—and was meant to grow into God’s “likeness,” as well. Every human person without exception contains the divine spark of God’s image, but there are many who—due to their arrested spiritual development and low-to-no conscious awareness of WHO THEY ARE in God—“do not love, do not pray, and do not want peace.” That is, they are not evolving or growing into the divine “likeness.”
Our Lady says that for them, WE are to “BE LOVE”—which means we are to “fill up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ.” (Col 1:24) WE are to supply the sacrificial love that is clearly missing from the hearts, minds, words, and behavior of those we see today, even at the highest echelons, “who do not love, do not pray, and do not want peace.” Rather than reacting to them in kind—with angry negativity toward the evil, dishonesty, and divisiveness of our world’s “architects of darkness”—Our Lady calls us to bring LIGHT to the world in what may be the ultimate acts of protest, resistance and subversion: overcome evil with Good, falsehood with Truth, and hatred with Love. Shine a Light in the darkness: this is our program for Lent—and beyond!
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Empty yourself. Sit quietly, content with the grace of God.
—St. Romuald
The purpose of silence is to break through the crust of the false self.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
If God is the center of your life, no words are necessary. Your mere presence will touch hearts.
—St. Vincent de Paul
It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than to have words without a heart.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi
Contemplation is a wordless resting in the presence of God beyond all thoughts and images.
—James Finley
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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
Division begins in the MIND and can be ended by the HEART.
—Robb Smith
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Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.
—St. John Paul II
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“Incarnatio continua!”: The Incarnation continues IN you, AS you.
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Find inner peace and thousands around you will find salvation.
The purpose of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.
—St. Seraphim of Sarov
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LOVE is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. LOVE is the primal and universal psychic energy. LOVE is a sacred reserve of energy; it is the blood of spiritual evolution.
—Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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Our Amma/Abba, Divine Source-Who-Is-Love,
Whole and Holy is Your Name.
May Your reign of Love come, Your will of Love be done
Here on earth, just as it is with You.
You give us each day all that we need
and You hold no accounts against us,
just as we wish to hold no accounts against each other or ourselves.
Leave us not in temptation of believing the lie of separation,
But deliver us from its consequences of acting out in fear
and the evil delusions of ego.
For Yours is the power and the glory of endless Life, Light, and Love
now and forever, amen.
—Aramaic translation of the Lord’s Prayer
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Amidst the challenging developments in Washington, D.C. and so many other places in the world, we are invited to pause and reflect again and again on the space of deep peace that dwells within all of us. To remember that each of us is a peacemaker, capable of waging peace from the inside out, regardless of what is happening around us. And that whenever we find ourselves listening to strident voices, watching violent images and getting caught up in the emotional tug-of-war—whether with outer circumstances or our own shadow—we have the choice to either keep tugging harder or choosing to wage peace, one moment, one breath, one loving feeling at a time.
It may seem futile sometimes, but history has shown us again and again that tyrants and terrors come and go; emperors and empires rise and fall—but only LOVE endures.
—Celebration Circle
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March 5: ASH WEDNESDAY
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
…Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
—T.S. Eliot, from the poem “Ash Wednesday”
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In prayer, the path of contemplation is designed to heal the wounds of a lifetime. These wounds are brought about when we over-identify with our infantile emotional programs for happiness. St. Paul calls this condition “the old man.” It is the result of coming into the world with the feeling of being separate from God, and seeking fulfillment in the passing pleasures of gratifying our instinctual desires, which we mistake for “happiness.”
Our emotional programs for safety/security, affection/esteem, and power/control all arise from the illusion that we are separate from God. Thus the false self, building on this separate-self sense, takes over our developing consciousness. Only a contemplative prayer path can begin the dismantling of the false self system by revealing our oneness with God (or unitive consciousness), which will heal the wounds of a lifetime.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
What Martin Luther King wants me to do today is go out in the world and in every way that I can, small and large, build a beloved community.
—bell hooks
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We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised across our path to show us that, not our way, but God’s way must be done.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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In this time of the Great Turning,
When despair and possibility dance in the same holy darkness—
May we offer ourselves as cells in [Earth’s] metamorphosis…
May we be scattered like spores,
Each carrying a fraction of the future…
May our courage rise to match the magnitude of these times.
—Lynne MacNeil
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In a Time of Authoritarian Empire, to Whom Do We Pledge Allegiance?
“The image owes no allegiance to anything except that of which it is an image.”
—Meister Eckhart
And so it is with us, that we are the image of God. Without God, we are nothing, absolutely nothing. In being the image of God, we owe no allegiances to anything but the Infinite Love in whose image we are made. And the idolatry of diversions of the heart where we wander off into cul-de-sacs with the imagined authority of anything less or other than Infinite Love to name who we are—THIS IS THE PROBLEM.
—James Finley
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Gateway to STILLNESS: “5 4 3 2 1”
Sit comfortably in a quiet place, indoors or outdoors. Focus on your breath.
Become aware of 5 things you can SEE, and focus on each one.
Become aware of 4 things you can TOUCH, and focus on each one.
Become aware of 3 things you can HEAR, and focus on each one.
Become aware of 2 things you can SMELL, and focus on each one.
Become aware of 1 thing you can TASTE, and focus on it.
—Grounding practice for anxiety/stress/meditation
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Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear; with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice and no one can make it for you. If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this-worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space—these are existential realities playing out in your own mind. Heaven and hell are both inside you. It is your choice that determines where you will reside.
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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A Blessing from the Black Rock Prayer Book
The world now is too dangerous and too beautiful
for anything but love.
May your eyes be so blessed, you see God in everyone.
Your ears, so you hear the cry of the poor.
May your hands be so blessed that
everything you touch is a sacrament.
Your lips, so you speak nothing but the truth with love.
May your feet be so blessed you run to those who need you.
And may your heart be so opened, so set on fire
that your love, your love changes everything.
—Religious AF
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The mind is a plotter, a conspiracy theorist filled with schemes. Yet it needs to become a secret agent on behalf of Love, and not selfishness. It needs to craft conspiracies to bring more love to the world, to support other people…to craft conspiracies to be good to the other person in front of me.
If we can agree together to engage in this insurrection against the world, this revolution that begins with the act of lovingkindness, then things will improve a bit. We are tiny creatures, and we can only improve things a little bit. Yet Love and the Joy that supports it are powerful weapons in the battle to change what is happening now for the good.
—Lee van Laer
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As we move through this beautiful and troubled world, may we vow to be a beacon of peace, a fearless carrier of respect and lovingkindness for all life, a teller of truth, a voice for justice, a protector of those who are vulnerable or targeted. May the power of wisdom, integrity and compassion be our guide.
—Jack Kornfield
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In a time of hate
Love is an act of resistance
In a time of fear
Faith is an act of resistance
In a time of misinformation
Education is an act of resistance
In a time of poor leadership
Community is an act of resistance
In a time like this
Joy is an act of resistance
Resist. Resist. Resist.
—Loryn Brantz
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The Trinitarian “Law of Three” can help us move past our entrapment in the deadlocked dualism of a divided world. We need the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. This is “Third Force” —also called “Holy-Reconciling.” It can make whole the fractured extremes of “left” and “right” —the “Holy-Affirming” and “Holy-Denying” —into which we are divided, ripping apart our country and our world. We must pray for the “Law of Three”—with Third Force, the Holy Spirit—to operate first of all within our own divided hearts and minds:
“Holy-Affirming, Holy-Denying, Holy-Reconciling,
Transubstantiate in me for my Being.”
—G.I. Gurdjieff
This third force is an independent force, coequal with the other two, not a product of the two. Just as it takes three independent strands of hair to make a braid, so it takes three individual lines of force to make a new arising. This third force serves to bring the two other forces (which would otherwise remain disconnected and deadlocked) into relationship, from which forward momentum can emerge.
—Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America
The journey from slavery to freedom that the People of Israel traveled…invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration, as a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person….
The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration….
“The family of Nazareth in exile, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, emigrants in Egypt and refugees there to escape the wrath of an ungodly king, are the model, the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country, of all refugees of every condition who, beset by persecution or necessity, are forced to leave their homeland”….(Pope Pius XII)
Jesus Christ, loving everyone with a universal love, educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception ….The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women and entire families, and places them in a state of vulnerability and defenselessness.
This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized…. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly….
Worrying about personal, community or national identity easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth….God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!
I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.
2/10/2025
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
