Medjugorje Message: April 25, 2026
Dear children! I am praying for you and encourage you to a new life, a life in joy and prayer. May the Holy Spirit fill you, little children, with joy so that you may be like a spring of pure and drinkable water; that you, little children, may be in God and with God missionaries of love and peace. Your life is short here on earth and that is why I am with you to lead you towards Heaven. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
May 2026
Pentecost: “A New Life in Joy”
“I am praying for you and encourage you
to a new life in joy and prayer”
You call me, Blessed Mother, in this noonday heat of Spring
here at my own Samaritan well—the very same call of your Son
to a woman like me, holding an empty bucket of hot and thirsty desire.
Like her, we all grow weary of the daily return, the mundane duty and
tedious task of refilling our pail of endless needs that flow swiftly out
in unsatisfied craving for more—longing, spent, and weary for a new life.
“May the Holy Spirit fill you, little children, with joy so that you may be like a spring of pure and drinkable water”
Your Son said if only we knew Him, we’d ask for this new life-giving substance—
the Holy Spirit joy that becomes in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,”
the mere draft of which satisfies us forever, never to thirst again.
Then we would become “pure and drinkable water”
from which the thirsty can draw and be quenched, cleanly and abundantly.
But until we drink in this new life in joy,
our only recourse is the Samaritan well of “want” —this tainted, toxic, polluted liquid we daily imbibe, futilely trying to quell an insatiable thirst
for safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control, bodily pleasure—
the ever-recurring compulsions, addictions, and cravings that exhaust us.
But you say, Blessed Mother, that with the Holy Spirit’s filling,
“You may be in God and with God missionaries of love and peace” —
carrying to everyone this Inner Spring, bubbling and welling up
for all to drink from us the love and peace of Divine Presence.
With the Samaritan woman may we now cry out to Jesus,
“Give us this water always so we won’t get thirsty
and have to keep coming here to draw water!”
Pour out your Holy Spirit, Lord, in this noonday heat of our life!
For “the hour has now come when true worshipers will worship the Father
in Spirit and truth. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”
Our squabbles over religion will drop into the same dust heap as our
squabbles over politics, and be buried in forgetfulness—lost, useless, and dead.
You remind us again, dear Mother, of the stark fact of mortality:
“Your life is short here on earth
and that is why I am with you to lead you towards Heaven.”
May our Life in the Spirit—a new life in joy
welling up within us to Eternal Life—
flow out to all we meet!
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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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MAY PEARLS…
When he rose from the dead and appeared to his awe-struck disciples on Easter Sunday night, Jesus told them repeatedly, “Peace be with you.” He showed them his wounds, and repeated his greeting, “Peace be with you.” In that resurrection moment, he offered a peace that is not of this world. It is the peace that comes about through total surrender, nonviolence, non-retaliation, and unconditional, universal love. If, like the nonviolent Jesus, we choose not to respond to violence with further violence, if we dare respond with love, surrender ourselves to God, and practice creative nonviolence, then, come what may, we will know a new kind of peace.
Life is short. We have only so many years left. Even if we eat right, lose weight, exercise daily, and take care of ourselves, our time on earth is limited. What do we want to do with the time that is given us? How can we get beyond ourselves and help relieve suffering and disarm the world? If we surrender our hearts, wills and lives to the living God of Peace, we will be given the resurrection gift of peace, and become instruments of God’s peace and universal love.
Resurrection means having nothing to do with death, having not a trace of violence within us. When we live in the peaceful spirit of resurrection, we find ourselves practicing the boundless love and gentleness of the nonviolent Jesus, who came to reconcile humanity to God, which is the ultimate act of peacemaking. This resurrection peace is ours for the asking if we dare choose it and surrender.
If we dare surrender to the God of Universal Love and Peace, then we can go forth into the world of violence and war without fear, worry, anxiety, or anger, and be transforming agents of loving nonviolence like Gandhi and Dr. King, and know, with the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”
—Fr. John Dear, SJ
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Renewable Resources of the Spirit
In a world so full of need, how do we not run out? So often, we draw from what could be called “fossil fuel” emotional resources: things like hostility, striving, jealousy, or self-protection. They can produce energy for a moment. But they deplete us. And they leave the world more messy!
The Spirit offers something different. A renewable supply of exactly what the world needs most: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control. But these are not things we manufacture. They are received. Like a wind turbine turning toward the breeze, or a solar panel tilting toward the light, we learn to align our lives to receive what is already being given. And as we receive, we become conduits.
—Dr. John Garland
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Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Know that the truth always leads to love and the perpetuation of peace. Its products are never bitterness and strife. Clothe yourself in the work of love, in the revolutionary work of nonviolent resistance against evil. Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness.
Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time, don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice.
And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself.
—John Lewis
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Ignatian “5-R” Daily Examination of Conscience
- RELISH and give thanks for all the moments that went well, and for the gifts of today.
- REQUEST the Holy Spirit to gently lead you through a review of the day.
- REVIEW any choices or actions that did not go well.
- REPENT of any mistakes or failures that may have occurred.
- RESOLVE to live tomorrow well, inviting God’s help and blessing on its actions.
—Andy Otto
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Evening Prayer with Mary
Mother of quiet grace and hidden strength, as the day fades into stillness and the world withdraws into rest, wrap me in your silence, that I may be freed from the noise of my own thoughts and the restless echo of the day now past. Teach me to listen with the heart to the gentle whisper of your Son. In the stillness, guard my mind from anxiety, my memory from regret, and my soul from all that disturbs its peace. Let your quiet presence be a refuge, a soft and watchful shelter through the night. As you kept all things and pondered them in your heart, help me to entrust all things to God—unspoken, surrendered, and at rest. Remain with me, O Mother, in the sacred silence of this night, until the dawn rises and my soul awakens again in Him. Amen.
—Our Lady of Silence Abbey
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What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement when we need to unfold? How would this shape the choices you make about how to spend today?
—Oriah Mountain Dreamer
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We are invited to respond to Jesus on the cross:
Jesus crucified, I am beginning to see that I, in my own body, am an image of what is happening everywhere, and I want it to stop today. I want to stop the violence toward myself, toward the world, toward you. I don’t need to ever again create any victim, even in my mind. We humans mistrust, murder, and attack. We hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you. I must stop crucifying your blessed flesh on this earth and in my brothers and sisters. Now I see that you live in me and I live in you. You invite me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence. In your perfect love, you have chosen to enter into union with me, and I am slowly learning to trust that this can be true.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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What does it mean to be truly human? Mary, a symbol of the cosmos itself, was the first “yes” to accepting divinity into the chaos of humanity. Divine love must be received, and receptivity requires space within. Nature does this without complaint, bending its roots toward the life of God. But humans are conflicted, tortured by an ongoing conflict between ego and freedom. To be human does not come naturally; it is a choice for love beyond measure and such love requires absolute freedom.
Jesus lived into this by showing us that the spirit of love is the highest law to follow, even when the direction goes against cultural demands. Ultimately it was love that got Jesus into trouble. The God who is human can only be realized in love. Jesus shows us that suffering through love unto a higher love is the path toward the fullness of life. Our culture militates against the truly human. But being human is what Jesus was about, and it is what we are called to embrace.
If Mary and Jesus were the first and second incarnations of divine love, then we are called to be the third. When we walk the path Jesus walked—choosing love over power, vulnerability over control, forgiveness over vengeance—we become Christ. The divine love received by Mary and embodied by Jesus seeks a third dwelling place: the human person who says yes to the fullness of life, even if that yes leads through suffering. Evolution is a via dolorosa, suffering through the tragedies of existence into something higher and more wondrous…the cosmic unfolding of the third incarnation of love that won’t stop until it fills all things.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
—Etty Hillesum
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Belief in the resurrection is an act of rebellion against the evil, corruption and oppression that can easily swamp us. Believing in the resurrection can be a refusal to accept the world as it is, that it can never change. Believing in resurrection allows us to see the world with a long view that looks backward to the empty tomb and forward to the end times, recognizing traces of resurrection and end times in what is happening now. Believing in resurrection should transform not only how we view the world, but how we live in it. We should become people in whom others can see new life, and people who introduce that new life wherever the world is stultifying and life-denying.
—Paula Gooder
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How do you remain faithful when the surrounding culture is losing its moral center? The desert elders and early monastic communities understood that without intentional spiritual formation and maturity, power, fear, and spectacle will train the soul faster than truth will. So the desert was a training ground for perception: for learning to to see your own reactions clearly—anger, fear, ego, shame. Silence exposed all of that in order to free people.
Right now many people feel spiritually flooded, saturated with alarm, analysis, reaction, and dread. The nervous system never powers down and the imagination never quiets enough to hear wisdom instead of impulse. The desert elders would tell you to build inner ground, to create small deserts of clarity inside daily life, where truth can speak, so that when you act, it is from depth instead of reactivity. Stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility, and shaped by love more than by fear. The goal is never escape, but freedom to remain fully human when systems forget how.
—Rev. Cameron Trimble
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We can begin to heal the rift between our love and actions, our values and our daily lives, by turning our attention to whatever patch of ground we have been given to tend, even if it is a potted planter on a balcony in the city. To plant a garden, to create a wetland—these seem like small acts in the face of our world of concrete, our obsession with never-ending economic growth. What difference can it make?
But hospitality as “making room” is a sacramental practice where we learn to recognize the holy in the wild lives around us. We relate to the world in its sacredness, keeping ourselves from seeing it as a mere landscape or interchangeable abstraction for our desires….What if each yard could host the future of the planet by holding onto the life needed to reseed the world when we finally wake from the delusions of our commodifying, extractive ways of life?
—Fr. Ragan Sutterfield
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Wisdom from Pope Leo XIV
Don’t be paralyzed by mistrust and fear.
Be catalyzed by Christ to build 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
