Medjugorje Message: October 25, 2024
Dear children! At this time, when you are celebrating the day of All Saints, seek their intercession and prayers so that in union with them, you may find peace. May the Saints be your intercessors and example, that you imitate them and live holily. I am with you and intercede before God for each of you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
November 2024
In this month of All Saints and All Souls—the closing chapter of the year when Nature’s rhythm urges us to reflect upon the “Last Things” of Time yielding to Eternity—Our Lady’s message calls us into a living, conscious, and active relationship with the Communion of Saints. DEATH is the doorway through which each of us will enter fully into this “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), but HERE and NOW, the Church beckons us to celebrate the beneficial connection we can have with them in the living of our lives. November 1st is the Feast of All Saints and November 2nd the Feast of All Souls (“Dia de Los Muertos“). In these sister-solemnities, we honor all those who have preceded us through Death’s gate into the fullness of Life, Light, and Love, whether in heaven now, or on the “last leg” of their pilgrim journey home, in the final purification of purgatory.
Our Lady begins: “At this time, when you are celebrating the day of All Saints, seek their intercession and prayers so that in union with them, you may find peace.” The Catholic Church, “our true mother on earth,” teaches the fullness of truth about DEATH: the ancient (yet newly recognized) cosmology of Relational Wholeness that Quantum Physics is discovering in our time. That is, the interconnected network of all Reality, including the ongoing relatedness between earth and heaven, the living and the dead (or, more precisely, the living and the much-more-fully-alive). The so-called “New Cosmology” is finding that a vast, unseen “entangled universe” of interrelatedness lies just beyond the limits of our sight and sensory perception, so that we perceive only the “tip of the iceberg” of Ultimate Reality. The “Communion of Saints” is part of this “iceberg” that lies mostly outside of our physical vision and conscious awareness, yet is EVER-PRESENT in our midst: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us.” (Heb 12:1)
Our Lady is calling us to AWAKEN to the presence of this wonderful community of “older brothers and sisters” in faith who are ready, willing, and able to intercede and pray for us. We ask the saints to help us through prayer, just as we ask our earthly friends and relatives to pray for us. Many people have cultivated close friendships with heartfelt affection and practical dependency upon particular “favorite saints” like St. Anthony, St. Therese, St. Joseph, St. Jude, Our Lady of Guadalupe, etc. There are millions of loving saints awaiting our conscious acknowledgement! Our Lady says that by developing this conscious and intentional relationship with the saints through remembering their presence and calling upon their aid, we will experience “union with them” and “find peace.” As the Queen of Peace, Our Lady always focuses on the things that bring PEACE to our mind, heart, and world. She knows that whenever we “plug in” to the unseen “relational wholeness” of the vast interconnected network of Life and Love that is Ultimate Reality—the underlying ONENESS beneath the illusion of our separate, divided, isolated “self”—we experience the grace of “UNION,” the Unity of God-Who-Is-Love, and therefore, “PEACE.”
Next, Our Lady says: “May the Saints be your intercessors and example, that you imitate them and live holily.” Here she moves from calling us out of our sleeping forgetfulness of the Saints’ presence, and beyond our initial awareness and acknowledgement of their place in our interwoven web of Reality, moving deeper—to a more active and purposeful engagement with them. We do this by learning WHO they are in their earthly incarnations: the exemplary, singular virtues and habits that made them “tick,” so that we can now approach them as mentors whose way of life we can “imitate” in order to “live holily” —in a more holistic and whole way, as “holons of the Whole” of Ultimate Reality.
First, let us educate ourselves on the hagiography—the biographies of the canonized saints—and come to appreciate what made them “saints” in the Church’s view. What were their struggles, weaknesses, and sins? (They all had them!) What were their heroic virtues through which they confronted and conquered their “false self“? What were the special graces, gifts, and charisms of their “True Self” given by God, the divine attributes to which they opened themselves, to eventually shine brightly through their human “feet of clay” and “earthen vessels”? As we read and learn the stories of the saints, we will naturally be drawn and attracted to some more than others, just as in our everyday relationships with people we meet. Some of the saints will “resonate” with us, sharing facets that match our own life story—and these will inspire us in the ways that they handled challenges that we also face.
In addition to the canonized saints of the Church, we all know many holy people we’ve been privileged to meet in our own life—deceased family members, friends, and acquaintances who have touched us in our own spiritual journey by their example of faith, hope and love lived “out loud” and visibly. These, too, may be our “intercessors and example” on whom we call for guidance and support. While Our Lady asks us to “seek” the Saints’ intercession and “imitate” their example, she never expects us to “be someone we’re not” or “pretend” to be anyone but ourselves, for God created each of us uniquely, with a one-of-a-kind mind, heart, body, personality, and soul, as unrepeatable as a snowflake or fingerprint—each of us providing for God a totally new channel of opportunity for LOVE to experience and express Life as a human person. To try to be someone other than oneself is to deny God this unique experience which we were created to provide. Thus, to “live holily” is to be no one but oneself—AND, simultaneously, connected in consciousness and conscience to the WHOLE unified field of the Communion of Saints in a ONENESS of Love.
Our Lady concludes her message: “I am with you and intercede before God for each of you.” Let us remember that Our Lady is herself “SAINT Mary”—the “Queen of All Saints.” In Medjugorje for the past 43 years she has repeatedly said, “I AM WITH YOU” to remind us of this unseen “iceberg” PRESENCE that is always “with us” although we constantly perceive just the “tip” that’s visible to our eyes and physical senses. We don’t have to “do” anything to bring Our Lady—she is always already “WITH US.” She closes by acknowledging our unique and personal CONNECTION to the Whole of Ultimate Reality—the assurance that she intercedes (“goes between“) with God on behalf of “EACH” and every one of us, individually. Mary is the Matrix of an unfathomable Mystery of “the ONE and the MANY,” the “micro- and the macro,” the “UNITY and the MULTIPLICITY” of our God-Who-Is-Love!
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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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Some think of the saints as fanatics and religious freaks, with no relevance whatsoever to modern problems in the real world. Quite the contrary, anyone who reads the lives of the saints carefully will discover that these people are heroes of love, persons who really did love God with their whole hearts. Therefore, they were able to respond with love to people in their own times whom everyone despised: slaves, lepers, criminals, terminal cancer patients, street urchins, and so on.
Among the striking elements in the lives of the saints are the intensity of their love of Christ, the degree of sacrifice in their lives, their deep exalted mystical joy, and their consequent untiring love of neighbor. If we were to meet a couple whose love retained the intensity of the honeymoon for their whole lives, we would be amazed and delighted. We would not consider them to be fanatics. A saint is like one who has fallen in love and can think of nothing else but his beloved. Unlike most of us who move from this high state to a gradually lesser degree of fervor, the love of a saint moves upward in a constant crescendo.
This is what Christ desired when he said, “I have come to light a fire on the earth. How I wish the blaze were ignited!” He wanted his love to come into us like a burning flame so that we could radiate light and warmth to a world grown dark and cold. Catholic veneration of the saints is rooted in this loving reverence for those who have allowed themselves to be transformed by Christ’s love. The saints show the possibility of holiness, becoming models to imitate in our own lives, and inspirations to light up the darkness that surrounds us. We take courage in the knowledge that other human beings succeeded in loving even though they faced outer and inner difficulties similar to our own.
—Ronda Chervin
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As we move with, oh, such surprising speed, through the decades of our life, we become ever more acquainted with the dead. How quickly, when we aren’t looking, did they go: the beloved grandparents, parents, cousins; grade school, high school, and college friends; the neighbors, colleagues, mentors, on through the veil—a mere whisper of threads, that separates time from eternity. Among these souls there are surely unproclaimed saints.
When we sit in awe at the deathbed of a loved one, watching our dear pilgrim slip through to the other side, when we go with our loved one as far as the door and then sense the soul moving beyond us through the veil, we realize how mysteriously close we are to our invisible ones. The twin feasts of All Saints and All Souls, coming with the falling leaves, are a consoling confirmation that our loved ones are with us. The world will forget us, but our beloved beyond the veil never will. One day they will greet us; they have been with us all along.
—Anne Burleigh
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The community to which we Christians belong extends across time as well as space, embracing the departed alongside the living. No one is saved alone. We are saved in and through others. And since for us Christians death is not an impassable barrier or wall of separation, we look for help and companionship not only to the living but to those who have already completed their earthly course. In the unity of the Church, we are all organically linked together. In heaven, I will not serve in the same way as I serve here but I will serve in another way….We will be at the beck and call of everyone on earth who calls on us.
—Catherine de Hueck Doherty
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Our friends among the dead now live where time and space are transfigured. They behold us now in ways they never could have when they lived beside us on earth. Because they live near the source of destiny, their blessings for us are accurate and penetrating, offering a divine illumination not according to the calculations of the visible world. Perhaps one of the surprises of death will be a retrospective view of the lives we lived here and to see how our friends among the dead clothed us in weave after weave of blessing.
—John O’Donohue
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We are born with an inner fire. This fire is the God within. It is an unquenchable, divine fire. It warms us, encourages us, and occasionally asks us to dance. We’ve become very somber Christians in a very somber age. It’s not that we don’t have things to be concerned about. There are wars, natural disasters, deficits, broken relationships and viruses. But in the midst of this, we’re called to joy by a joyful God and a joyful Savior. No matter the circumstances, we’re called to joy.
—Dr. Barbara Holmes
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“In the simplicity of God everything is resolved.” (Thomas Keating) Practically, in the simplicity of silence and stillness, all is resolved, reconciled, harmonized. This understanding invites us to become as a child—powerless, without status, receptive, simple, observant, dependent on Presence in the present, only about the divine business of growing and awakening to Source. In this state of consciousness and way of living, the kingdom of God is here and now.
In the pivotal moment of the passion drama, Jesus was just sitting there—not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise, and holding that to the light. A quiet harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness in a way that didn’t cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole.
Contemplation means not just “resting in God,” but luminous seeing…a quiet intimacy grounded in the human heart. The energetically collected heart participates in a more universal and objective knowingness. The heart is an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, where meaning and clarity come together in a whole different way.
—Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault
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Contemplatives experience the Holy One living within us, inviting us deeper into the heart of God and out into the marketplace as servants. In opening ourselves to this loving Indwelling Presence, we are asked to let go of our possessions—thoughts, feelings, opinions, roles, achievements, resentments, failures, sorrows—all identifications. Even the holiest idea about God is still not God and therefore can block an open channel with Divine Love. And spiritual practices can likewise become ego-decorations, obscuring the simple but infinitely loving mutual gaze. The gaze of the heart can be turned inward as the witness to discern our own ego obstacles.
The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. Instead of drinking your friends under the table as a sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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For the Christian person, the choices we make are always about love and which choice enables us to keep following God into love. The deepest question for us is, “What does love call for in this situation? What would love do?”
Why do we so rarely ask this question relative to the choices we face? What distracts us from love when we’re trying to discern God’s will? For one thing, love is a major inconvenience at times. It is rarely efficient. Furthermore, love challenges my self-centeredness and requires me to give more of myself than I want to give. Sometimes love hurts or makes me vulnerable. All the time love is risky and without guarantees.
And yet love is the deepest calling of the Christian life, the standard by which everything in our life is measured. Any decision-making process that fails to ask the love question misses the point of Christian discernment, which is intended to take us deeper and deeper into the the heart of God’s will, following God passionately into Love.
—Ruth Haley Barton
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I can see no other way for discernment than a life in the Spirit, a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation, a life of deep communion with the Spirit of God. Such a life will slowly develop in us an inner sensitivity, enabling us to distinguish between the law of flesh (ego) and the law of the Spirit (soul). We certainly will make constant errors and seldom have the purity of heart required to make the right decisions all the time. But when we try to live in the Spirit, we are willing to confess our weakness and limitations in all humility, trusting in the One who is greater than our hearts.
—Fr. Henri Nouwen
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If you’ve been a happy bride or bridegroom at some time in your life, you can sympathize with this disposition—what God feels about each one of us right now. The sacraments of the Church are about the interpenetration of spirits; they are about the symbols and beauty of sexual love raised to the level of total gift of self. To be a contemplative is to be willing to be loved concretely in every detail of life and on every level of human life—body, soul, and spirit.
If you are merely thinking of the Eucharist as a ritual, go home. It may start with that, but the Eucharist is primarily about the interpenetration of spirits—all that we are into all that God is, and all that God is into all that we are, including every detail of our life: every concern, joy, and suffering. We’ve got a life companion of infinite capabilities.
Why be afraid of anything? We’ve got the greatest gift of the cosmos, the friendship of God, and God wants to celebrate again, even if we may be a bit tired this morning.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Jesus, Muhammed, Buddha, and others—their stories inspire and guide us. We have to know that we’re not alone. Despite a concerted effort to convince us that we are radical individuals, a deeply communal spirit arises when we least expect it and need it most. We are a community of witnesses with responsibilities to the next generation. So visionaries, prophets, and Jesus have all warned us that this journey we’re on will be beset by troubles. In this life, you will have trouble. How we handle that trouble is our witness to future generations. An old order is passing away. A new order is on its way, and we do not have the power to stop or slow the transitions that we encounter.
The wisdom that matters now comes from the discernment of Divine Spirit in our midst. Hearing and heeding the voice of the Divine is critical during difficult times. But sometimes, with all of our media distractions and our own boredom, it’s hard to hear the voice of the Creator. If you hope to hear beyond this realm to the next, the key is newness. The Creator does not come as we expect. The Spirit does not move under our command. When we expect divine intervention in one way, it usually comes in another. We expect the warrior king to set things right, and God sends a baby in a manger. We expect wrongs to be punished, and God extends grace and mercy to all.
—Dr. Barbara Holmes
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
For three years we have been listening to the People of God in order better to understand how to be a “synodal Church”—it is by listening to the Holy Spirit….The key word is harmony. That is what the Spirit does. God’s grace, through his Spirit, whispers words of love into the heart of each person. It is up to us to amplify the voice of this whisper, without hindering it; by opening doors instead of erecting walls. It is harmful when women and men of the Church erect walls. Everyone is invited in!
There is a poem by Madeleine Delbrel, a mystic who exhorted, “Above all, do not be rigid!” Rigidity is a sin that sometimes creeps into our lives. I will read some lines that she wrote:
Let us live our life, not as a game of chess where everything is calculated,
not as a game where everything is difficult,
not as a theorem that breaks our minds,
but like an endless party where your meeting is renewed,
like a ball, like a dance, in the arms of your grace,
in the music that fills the universe with love.
In our time marked by wars, we must be witnesses of peace, by learning how to live out our differences in conviviality….On this path we need pauses, silences and prayer. It is a style that we are still learning together, little by little. The Holy Spirit supports us in this learning, which we need to understand as a process of conversion. It is possible to walk together in diversity, without condemning each other. Peace will be realized through the processes of listening, dialogue and reconciliation. All this is the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is harmony. Remember, in Madeleine Delbrel’s words: “there are places in which the Spirit breathes, but there is only one Spirit who breathes in all places.”
—October 26, 2024, upon closing of the 3-year Synod on Synodality
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
