Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2026
Dear children! In this time of grace, anew, I am calling you to offer your lives to God that He may lead you towards the resurrection through your personal conversion. Little children, God is near to you and heeds your prayers, but you are lulled to sleep, and that is why He sent me to you to awaken you, and that you may shine holiness like a spring flower. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2026
“Awaken You, and…Shine“
“In this time of grace”
(some with long years—others, just days)…
all a time of grace, we have, for personal conversion:
A changing of the psyche, transforming of the heart,
a parting of the Red Sea within (those roiling waves
of bloodlust), and Exodus from the chains
binding our minding of this time of grace we have—
for shattering our captivity to earth’s enchanting idols
so at last in a Lenten Sinai we may offer our lives to God:
the Summit of the Joy and Truth
we’ve chased blindly since youth, down dark alleys
unknowing, in a cloud of confusion,
thinking to offer our selves to littler, lesser, shiny objects—
those golden calves of people, places and things—
evaporating beauties falling silent to their graves.
But God saves the “awakened ones” (Buddhas) who allow and permit
that “He lead us towards the resurrection
through our personal conversion.”
What prevents us crossing Jordan
to enter Canaan’s promised rest?
What detains us in the pains of desert hellscapes of fear?
Mother Mary, Seat of Wisdom, whispers in my ear:
“God is near to you and heeds your prayers.”
How the Holy One awaits with baited breath
the smallest stirring of love from us—
faintest sign of awareness, tiniest nod toward Divine
Indwelling Presence: all are heeded with Infinite
Mercy’s listening heart—God’s love for us so deep!
“But you are lulled to sleep” —comatose we lie
in that sleep of worldly life which provides the way we die:
Sleep of mechanical man on automatic pilot,
moving through his days, hungry-sated-violent;
Sleep of passing passions ever-unexplored,
and hair-trigger reactions to abhor or adore;
Sleep of insomnia’s doom-scrolling agitation,
and the morning snoring of bloated constipation;
Sleep of rabid consuming the symbols of success:
money, fame, power, sex, all the toys!—and nothing less
(zzz’s barreling toward retirement)
“And that is why He sent me to you to awaken you,” She reveals.
Cold water wash and ice cube dump, a slap across the face—
“Wake up, O slumbering consciousness, and become a human race!”
God is Here! God is Now! Within and all around!
Eyes closed in this walk of sleep, we miss Easter’s
deep and endless joy-path to resurrection,
lose our Way in this red-sweat Gethsemane of a wounded world.
Still, Christ beckons us, stay watchful and alert!
Upon barren deadwood sticks, you’ll see nubs of green buds
miraculously rise with Life welcoming them to the Whole.
Let’s keep vigil with Him in this Garden one hour
“that we [too] may shine holiness like a spring flower.”
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PERENNIAL PEARLS…
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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Every being exists in intimate relation with other beings and in constant exchange of gifts with each other.
—Fr. Thomas Berry, CP
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Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
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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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MARCH PEARLS…
Sit now very quietly
in some lovely wild place,
and listen to the silence.
And I say that this, too,
is a poem.
—Mary Oliver
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The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.
—Hannah Arendt
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Our planet and social systems are in a deep state of flux, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. As we offer our consent in Centering Prayer, as we offer our devotion and joy in embodied chanting and sacred movement, as we turn in any given moment and embrace and welcome what is happening within us, there is an alchemical effect: the world is changed.
Our own moves toward integration help to integrate our world, and every little bit we do in the direction of wholeness makes a difference. There is an echo of support from the communion of saints, and from the entire cosmos with which we are connected. This is so deeply needed in our world right now.
—Joy Andrews Hayter
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God is on Earth, inside every living being. What we call “the Divine” is none other than the energy of awakening, of peace, of understanding, and of love, which is to be found not only in every human being, but in every species on Earth.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
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God never blesses violence.
Our heart is the most important battlefield. It is there that we must learn the bloodless but necessary victory over the impulses of death and the tendencies toward domination: only peaceful hearts can build a world of peace.
Stability and peace cannot be built through mutual threats or weapons, which sow destruction, pain and death—but only through reasonable, authentic and responsible dialogue.
Faced with the possibility [in Iran] of a tragedy of enormous proportions, I make a heartfelt appeal to the parties involved to assume their moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss! May diplomacy regain its role and promote the good of peoples who yearn for peaceful coexistence based on justice.
Let us pray together that harmony may prevail in all conflicts throughout the world. Only peace, God’s gift, can heal the wounds between peoples.
—Pope Leo XIV
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The doctrine of Christ’s “descent into hell” is the most consoling of all doctrines, in any religion. As an ancient homily on Holy Saturday puts it, the love that Christ reveals in the cross is so strong that it can descend into any hell we can create, thaw out our frozen souls, and lead us into the light and peace of paradise, despite our fears and weaknesses. The cross of Christ does not stand helpless before a locked door.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features.
The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist—an outer world and the inner world—but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet…as if the human is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.
—Kabir Edmund Helminski
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Give over your own willing. Give over your own running. Give over your own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the seed which God chose in your heart, and let that grow in you, and be in you, and breathe in you, and act in you, and you shall find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life.
—Isaac Penington, Quaker mystic
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The fast of Lent has no advantage to us unless it brings about our spiritual renewal. It is necessary while fasting to change our whole life and practice virtue. Turning away from all wickedness means keeping our tongue in check, restraining our anger, avoiding all gossip, lying and swearing. To abstain from these things—herein lies the true value of the fast.
—St. John Chrysostom
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If you yearn inordinately for the good things of this life, you will lose those which are heavenly and eternal. Use temporal things properly, but always desire what is eternal. Temporal things can never fully satisfy you, for you were not created to enjoy them alone, for your blessedness and happiness lie only in God, who has made all things from nothing.
—Thomas á Kempis
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We can use Sabbath to opt out of the mammon machine one day per week. If all U.S. Christians did this, we’d harness the enormous economic power of the most successful boycotts. But nothing will change if we remain in our silos, allowing the allure of prosperity and the power of empire to obstruct the meaning of the gospel.
Sabbath is practiced in community. God gave this commandment not to a person but to a people, knowing that only those who rested together would be equipped to resist together. Real Sabbath is done in community each week and every seven years, Leviticus 25-style. Everyone and everything is affected. It’s the kind of wild community cooperation we can expect from a triune God.
Sabbath as resistance is nearly impossible to practice in isolation. Like Mohandas Gandhi’s “satyagraha” (truth force) movement, our positive duty is to create spaces that foster truth, love, nonviolence, fearlessness, tolerance, and the dissolution of any “caste” system. May we, like the Israelites, turn to God each week, to remember and keep holy the fulcrum commandment that connects us to the divine and to one another.
—J. Dana Trent
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Any situation in life can be transformed into a moment of union with God. But it requires a daily practice of contemplative prayer in order to immerse yourself in the reality of the mercy of God’s Presence within, which we call the Divine Indwelling. The Divine Indwelling has always been one of the great truths of faith, but it needs to be emphasized more in our day. It is the radical source of the spiritual life. God’s personal presence is sheer gift. Here we begin the spiritual journey not with what we are going to do for God, but with what God is doing for us. We consent to God’s presence, letting God decide what God wants us to do.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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The Desert Spirituality of Lent
The ancient path of the desert mystics invites us to disrupt the patterns of ego and empire through the courageous pursuit of inner liberation. Throughout Christian history, spiritual seekers have led radical movements of departure, leaving behind the ways of the world for the desert in search of union with God. The contemplative practices of desert spirituality interrupt patterns of the heart and mind like the tantalizing forces of greed and power.
Desert contemplation helps us to see things as they are, unclouded by what Thomas Merton called “unreality.” This enables aspects of the true self to be discovered, for our awareness of the divine within us to grow, for love to expand, and for the ancient truths of the desert to dwell and deepen in our souls.
—Stephen Copeland
Abba Joseph came to Abba Lot and said: “Father, according to my strength, I keep a moderate rule of prayer and fasting, quiet and meditation, and as far as I can I control my imagination; what more must I do?” And the old man rose and held his hands toward the sky so that his fingers became like flames of fire and he said, “If you will, you shall become all flame.”
—Sayings of the Desert Fathers
The desert journey of Exodus that ancient Israel walked is an image of the journey made by every person who sets out to seek the Divine Presence. In the Bible, Israel is humanity personified, and so what happens to Israel is what happens to everyone who sets out on a journey of faith. In Exodus, Egypt is the place of slavery, and the Promised Land is the place of freedom. The journey from Egypt to the Promised Land is a saga which symbolizes our own struggle towards ever greater inner freedom, empowered by grace.
We have to be willing to experience the Exodus in our own lives and enter into our own desert wanderings. We have to let God liberate us from captivity to freedom, from Egypt to Canaan, not fully knowing how to cross the desert between the two. Like Moses, people of faith act on the promises of God. Can we trust, like the Israelites, that the way to the Promised Land is through the desert?
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
All freedom journeys require an open mind, not conditioned by past knowledge and experience, but open to possibility. Unless one is capable of imagining another possible reality, one cannot free oneself from bondage. The comfort and security of routine and resistance to change is apparent in the Exodus. In being led to freedom, the Israelites often yearned to return to Egypt—its predictability, where everything was known.
Freedom is ultimately uncertain and unpredictable. To be free we must learn how to bear uncertainty and trust in the unknown. The daily supply of manna—just enough for one day at a time–provided the necessary preparation for the Israelites to become a free people. The “manna” of our daily lives is an opportunity for us to practice this same beginner’s mind. It teaches us to continually live in the questions, remaining awake and curious and not going into sleep mode.
Each day we are challenged to see the same familiar people and landscapes with new eyes, as everything is alive and changing, ourselves included, if we are spiritually awake and paying attention. In this way we come out of Egypt, our personal places of bondage.
—Estelle Frankel
The truth is that we’re all on a wilderness journey out of some form of slavery. We know what it is to be enslaved to fear, alcohol, food, rage, worry, lust, shame, inferiority, or control. Economically, millions at the bottom of the pyramid work like slaves and never get ahead, and those at the top are driven by their own inner slave drivers: greed, debt, competition, and a desperate, addictive craving for more.
The wilderness journey is always difficult and seems to last forever, but there is wisdom, strength, skill, and moral muscle we will need in the promised land of freedom that we can gain only in the desert and in the struggles of this wilderness road.
—Brian McLaren
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Wisdom from Pope Leo XIV
I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgment, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves.
Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.
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
