Medjugorje Message: August 25, 2020
Dear children! This is a time of grace. I am with you and anew am calling you, little children: return to God and to prayer until prayer will be a joy for you. Little children, you do not have a future or peace until your life begins with a personal conversion and a change to the good. Evil will cease and peace will begin to reign in your hearts and in the world. Therefore, little children, pray, pray, pray. I am with you and intercede before my Son Jesus for each of you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
September 2020
Our Lady’s message is filled with statements she has made many times before in her 39 years at Medjugorje. However, it is significant that she speaks them now, in the midst of our current situation: a world health crisis that is killing thousands daily, an economic and unemployment crisis that will potentially rival the Great Depression, and a contentious election season unfolding within a radically polarized political environment that has many people anxious and fearful for the survival of our democracy, when—for the first time in U.S. history—the “peaceful transfer of power” through lawful voting which defines us as a democracy seems to be in jeopardy. Anxiety, stress and unrest, along with the pandemic’s physical sickness and emotional fatigue of isolation have taken a huge toll on everyone.
Yet Our Lady begins her message by saying: “This is a time of grace.” Wow! Really? Her opening words challenge our feelings of pessimism, hopelessness, and despair through a totally different approach and perspective from our present negative attitude toward life in today’s difficult circumstances. Our Lady is calling us to a higher, broader, and truer vision of what is happening: “I am with you and anew am calling you, little children: return to God and to prayer until prayer will be a joy for you.“
Our Lady has frequently repeated this instruction to “pray until prayer becomes a joy,” so it is essential that we try to understand it. Notice that she does not say, “Pray until you feel happy.” While “happiness” is a cheerful emotion of pleasurable enjoyment within some positive activity or circumstance of life, “JOY” is a deeply-rooted, enduring, divinely-inspired state of inner BEING that is lasting, ongoing, and even eternal—regardless of our outward circumstances! Joy is thus an interior quality that we can “tap into” even when external conditions around us are terrible or falling to pieces. It is like being in the calm eye of a storm while chaos swirls and churns all about, or like being a lotus blossom that, deeply rooted in mud, remains dry and undisturbed even in torrential monsoons.
Our Lady urges us to find this deeply rooted joy in PRAYER. With prayer as our “ground zero,” home base, core and foundation, we are able to retain an abiding sense of inner JOY even in the midst of a deadly pandemic, a destroyed economy, natural disasters, civil unrest, and a tragically divided country that was once the “United States.” The problem is, so few of us ever truly “pray until prayer becomes a joy” for us; instead, we talk about prayer, or we engage in prayer minimally, often out of a sense of “obligation” rather than genuine, enthusiastic desire.
And when we do pray, we pray as if God were absent, somewhere far away, to whom we are sending a “long-distance smoke signal” from earth to heaven. With such an ingrained idea of separation between ourselves and God, it’s no wonder that our prayer is brief and infrequent, never becoming a “joy” for us. Often words in prayer serve only to reinforce this sense of distance and separation that robs the experience of any joy of real connection. St. Teresa of Avila taught that all of our problems with prayer stem from this one mistaken notion of SEPARATION: “praying as if God were absent.”
But the Silent Listening Prayer of Meditation and Contemplation brings us into the “HERE and NOW” of the Divine Indwelling Presence at the innermost center of our being—closer and more intimate to us than our next breath or heartbeat, and closer to us than we are to ourselves. This profound sense of God’s PRESENCE can be felt in the depths of our being when we are alone in the silence of our “inner room” or with God in Nature, immersed in the beauty of Creation’s symphony of life, teeming with only the sound of breezes, sunlit leaves, birdsong, flowing water, and the drone of insects.
In these times of simply being “present to Presence” in the Here and Now of silent awareness, simply watching and listening (seat in the chair, feet on the ground), PRAYER does indeed become a JOY for us. The peacelessness of our anxious worry about the world’s “evil” seems to evaporate when we “return to God and to prayer” in this way, as Our Lady asks.
Next, Our Lady puts into the proper hopeful perspective all of our anxious fears and hand-wringing over the future of our sadly polarized nation and sick world filled with “peacelessness” and evil: “Little children, you do not have a future or peace until your life begins with a personal conversion and a change to the good. Evil will cease and peace will begin to reign in your hearts and in the world.” Here, once again, Our Lady reveals the necessary, essential, unavoidable interconnectedness of Reality that modern science has also discovered: Each small part of the universe is a “holon” or microcosm/mirror image of the “Whole.”
So there can be no “world peace” on a large-scale “macro” level if there is no “individual peace” within the small “holon” of ME, PERSONALLY. Conversely, if I cultivate within my own “grassroots” individual life “a personal conversion and a change to the good,” there will inevitably be a “ripple effect” in which expanding circles of peace and love in place of evil will radiate out from me to life all around. My own heart, whether filled with love or hate, is always a “microcosm” of the (“macrocosm”) whole world, identically filled with love or hate.
Today many of us are fretful and overwhelmed, anxious and depressed about the violently divided state of our country and the many systemic/communal evils, sins, and injustices of our world. Unfortunately, we may be participating in the downward spiral via harshly polarized social media debates (“Facebook and Twitter wars”) or binge-watching cable channels and websites full of hateful populist/extremist political propaganda (either left- or right-wing). All of this emotional manipulation is drastically escalating in our current “double trouble” period of a Covid-era election season. We may be wracking our brains about how to help heal the brokenness of our world, wondering how we can ever put the broken pieces of our damaged relationships back together.
Our Lady’s message addresses this dilemma of our troubled times, overflowing with evil and strife. Her answer may be boiled down to one simple phrase coined by the elderly British mystic, John Butler: “To Make Whole, Be Whole.” That is, to make “the world” whole again, I must be whole myself. For there to be “peace on earth” (or in my nation), the reign of peace must “begin with me,” as the song says. We cannot possibly “make” of the world outside ourselves anything better than we can first “BE” within ourselves. This is a divine law, clearly articulated by Our Lady and even by modern physics.
Our Lady says we have no “future or peace UNTIL our life begins with a personal conversion and a change to the good.” The word “until” gives us hope—hope that this “conversion” and “change” is indeed possible. It can potentially happen that “evil will cease and peace will begin to reign in our hearts and in the world.” But this is clearly “a package deal”: the condition of our individual hearts and the condition of the world are inextricably tied together, as “holons of the whole,” just as quantum physics describes it. The condition of one determines the condition of the other: “To make whole, be whole.” Or, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, “BE the change you want to see in the world.” The outer world is always but a reflection of our individual inner worlds.
So how do we “begin our life with a personal conversion and a change to the good”? Our Lady says, “Therefore, little children, pray, pray, pray.” The same thrice-repeated call she has issued since the very start of the Medjugorje messages in 1981, “Pray, pray, pray,” repeated hundreds of times in the past 39 years, is Our Lady’s revelation of a great secret—the very key to peace on earth!
To “pray” means turning off the television, internet, cell phone, computer, radio—those influences that keep us bound and tied in a binary, dualistic prison of thought and argument, ever battling through a low-level “us vs. them” consciousness, unable to hold the paradoxical duality of life in creative tension at the “Middle Way” point of truth that always lies between two extremes. Thus “personal conversion and change to the good” means turning an “about face” into a totally new direction, no longer focused on our electronically-fueled hateful dialectic of binary argument, but rather on the whole-making joy of PRAYER.
Prayer means entering into the “Abba experience” of Jesus: the experience of God as the Divine Indwelling Presence at the center of all creation, including myself. When we are in a state of Present-Moment-Awareness, Here and Now (not focused on any past or future time or any other place)—with feet on the ground, seat in the chair, in the Sacred Moment where all opposites are reconciled and there is nothing to dispute, refute, rebuke, or argue—we are rooting ourselves in the JOY of Oneness with the loving Whole that is God while experiencing our own/same wholeness. As we spend time each day doing THIS, indeed, “evil will cease and peace will begin to reign” —both “in our hearts and in the world.” Amen.
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Choose to perceive in every event today the Presence of transforming grace.
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September 8: Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Mary, Mother of God,
you are the model of faith for all of us—
men and women.
You are the representative of all humanity,
because you welcomed the most sublime of all graces:
the presence of God on earth.
God’s presence transforms all things,
even if no exterior change is apparent.
The most marvelous mystery in the history of humanity
was accomplished through your offering and collaboration:
God became man.
For having believed, you are blessed and worthy of praise.
Your existence is the fountain of joy and blessing
for all women and men who believed as you believed.
—Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan
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Ten Commandments for a Pandemic Moment in American History
Our country is “socially distanced” and politically split. Two pandemics have struck at once: one physical, one political, but we have managed to braid the two. We have made the physical one political—to mask or not to mask—and the political one physical—to social distance or not from those with whom we disagree?…Somewhere along the line, the “one people, one government” of America Past has begun to disappear. The biggest internal war the country has ever waged, other than the Civil War, is being fought in Congress now—a tug of war designed to break one political party by the power of the other, rather than to form one universal position out of both insights that together has meaning to us all. So we now have a Congress without a conscience that casts votes, not for what’s best for the country, but for what’s good for the power base of the party. Maybe we need a new standard that gives the process civility and balance: the 10 Commandments of American Politics:
1. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no gods besides me.
Remember: A president is not God. This commandment excludes idolatry of any person. We cannot make golden calves or worship statues of Caesar. We adhere to the Constitution, not a personality cult.
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Remember: Civil discourse and human respect are the underpinnings of democracy. When we destroy free speech, civil rights, the union of our 50 states, by mocking, deriding or setting out to divide the people from each other, we lay a curse upon the country that will destroy it.
3. Keep holy the Sabbath day.
Remember to keep the office of the President dignified and presidential as a symbol of genuine leadership of the republic—not a sideshow filled with crude gossip and scandal.
4. Honor thy father and mother.
Remember to honor both sides of the aisle—Republican and Democrat—as fellow patriots who all love our country but with different concerns and focus, needing to work together for the greatest good of the whole.
5. Thou shalt not kill.
Remember: Thou shalt not kill the American spirit of differences with partisanship. Congress was created to bring order through compromise rather than bloody battles where one side wins at the expense of the other.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Remember: Sexism, racism, xenophobia or cultural discrimination cannot be used to determine inclusion in our country. What counts is the Americanism of the heart, not other, lesser markers that are used to exclude.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
Remember: Real democracy demands just distribution of the basics of life—education, health care, food, and decent housing for all. Do not steal from the poor to give to the rich, either nationally or globally.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Remember: To divide the Congress is to divide the country, and to lie in tweets, public speeches or advertisements is the highest treason done for the sake of a short triumph.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s partner.
Remember: To undermine another public servant’s reputation or popularity through insults, misleading innuendo and intrigue actually loosens the bonds between all of us.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.
Remember: A public servant cannot use their position to take for themselves what belongs to others. Embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, vandalism and cheating people out of fair wages or work owed to them are all violations of this commandment.
—Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
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For me, faith and hope are rooted in the conviction that, regardless of how bad things may be, a new story is waiting to take hold—something we have not yet seen or felt or experienced. God is calling us—as individuals and communities—to work with God and others to champion that new story. We become partners with God when we act in unfamiliar, untested ways. Those new actions will be guided by a future that embraces:
+ Resilience in place of growth
+ Collaboration in place of consumption
+ Wisdom in place of progress
+ Balance in place of addiction
+ Moderation in place of excess
+ Vision in place of convenience
+ Accountability in place of disregard
+ Self-giving love in place of self-centered fear
As broken-hearted as God must be over what we have done to the gift of creation, God still has a dream….that humans seek spiritual rather than material progress…a just world at peace because gratitude has dissolved anxiety and generosity has eclipsed greed…a time when human and mutual respect bind humanity together, and the beauty of creation is treasured. Let us embrace God’s dream as our own. We will rediscover who we truly are.
—Jim Antal
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Co-creating a New America:
The Friendship of Religion, Science & Nature
The stuff that made America “great” will not make America great again because there is no returning to an illusory past. America is in evolution; it is an unfinished project in improvement. The religious spirit that drove Europeans to establish new life in America would prove to be both destructive and liberating, disclosing a God who is paradoxical….
Like Galileo, early American Protestant scientists were driven by religious aims: to know how nature works was, in a sense, to discover how God works. Charles Darwin was an Episcopalian. Science was both an intellectual endeavor and a religious one. To discover and know the things of creation was to regain Divine likeness. The “mastery of nature” was deeply tied to the colonization of Native American peoples and the importing of African slaves to work the land, and the fusion of progress, technology and religion into a “white mythology” was embedded in the history of the United States.
But nature is relational and dynamic. The new science of evolution and quantum physics brought science and religion into a unified field of knowledge. The God-world relationship is one of creative evolution. Jesuit priest-paleontologist, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, saw the need to reconcile Christianity and evolution: if we are to progress or evolve, we must release ourselves from religious individualism and confront the general religious experience, which is cosmic and evolutionary. He placed the Christian religion at the heart of evolution as the rise of complexity-consciousness, and opened up a place for religion in nature.
Teilhard wrote, “Religion and evolution should neither be confused nor divorced. They are destined to form one single continuous organism. It is for us to effect this synthesis. Religion is the energetic counterpart of physical evolution.” Christianity is normative of evolution—a religion of hybridity and synthesis. Jesus is the exemplary “cyborg,” revealing the capacity of the human person to become a new type of person through the power of divine love—the wild boundary crosser, who shows “the arbitrariness and constructed nature of what is considered the norm.” Jesus, the “new Adam,” symbolizes divinity entangled with a chaotic world in evolution.
Love is the reason and purpose for all cosmic life because God is love and love is relational, unitive and transcendent. “The physical structure of the universe is love,” Teilhard wrote.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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“Big Picture” Seeing: from Three Levels at Once
Only the whole self is ready for the whole God, which always involves moving beyond the dualistic mind toward a more spacious, contemplative knowing. If we are going to rebuild society, we first need to rebuild ourselves. A healthy psyche lives within at least three levels of meaning—“My Story,” “Our Story,” and “The Story.”
The first level, “My Story,” is the small, false self that Jesus teaches we must let go of—my private feelings, opinions and issues that make me special; the “me” that is the reference point for everything.
The second level of meaning, “Our Story,” is all about “us”—our group, community, country, church, nationality, ethnic group. These various memberships are a training ground for attaching, belonging, trusting and loving. But group egocentricity (tribalism) such as nationalism or racial supremacy drives wars, genocide, and most of our bloody human history.
The third level of meaning, “The Story,” is the realm of universal patterns true in every culture, holding all opposites together in sacred meaning, transcending the parts yet integrating them in a holistic inclusiveness. Those who live most of life grounded in “The Story” are mystics, prophets, saints, whole and holy ones who view the world through the lens of the Big Picture of Love, seeing Reality at all three levels simultaneously.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
We are living in an information-driven society which bombards us indiscriminately with data—all treated as being of equal importance—and which leads to remarkable superficiality in the area of moral discernment. In response, we need to provide an education which teaches critical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.
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Mark Your Calendar
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
