December 2015

Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2015

Dear children! Today I am calling all of you: pray for my intentions. Peace is in danger; therefore, little children, pray and be carriers of peace and hope in this restless world where Satan is attacking and tempting in every way. Little children, be firm in prayer and courageous in faith. I am with you and intercede before my Son Jesus for all of you. Thank you for having responded to my call.

River of Light

December 2015

Our Lady’s message has the urgency and seriousness of an “S.O.S.” call. Gone are the pleasantries of her usual Advent or Thanksgiving messages. Instead, she cuts directly to the chase: “Today I am calling all of you: pray for my intentions. Peace is in danger; therefore, little children, pray and be carriers of peace and hope in this restless world where Satan is attacking and tempting in every way.” She seems to be sounding the alarm for us to wake up and “do” something to help her. Our planetary house is on fire, and she is ringing the bell, hoping its deafening noise will stir us from our lethargic sleep. At the same moment of her message in Medjugorje, our own State Department was issuing a “worldwide travel alert,” advising everyone to be aware and attentive to our surroundings, avoid crowds, and stay abreast of breaking news bulletins regarding terrorist activities across the planet, in any place we might be traveling. The attacks of ISIS and other extremist organizations have reached a critical threshold and unprecedented success, finally capturing the attention of all the nations of the world. Countries that formerly were at odds and wary of each other are now beginning to join forces to fight a common enemy.

This might actually be one “amazing grace” that emerges from a horrible situation of extreme danger and rampant violence—the uniting of nations beyond their ideological and political differences to affirm a common commitment to basic goodness over evil. This recalls what happened during WW II in the face of the evil of Nazi totalitarianism—the formation of “Allied Forces,” most of whom were not Jews, rallying to the defense of their Jewish brothers and sisters suffering the genocide of the Holocaust. The vitally important role our Muslim brothers and sisters must take now in resisting the terrible distortion of Islam has come to the forefront of our consciousness as we seek to aid and assist those Muslim believers who must lead the fight against terrorist Islamic extremism. The terrorists say they want a “Jihad” (holy war) of Islam vs. other religions, but the world is coming to see that this is not what the conflict is about; rather we need to support Islam—in its pure practice and devout belief in one God—to resist the hijacking of the faith that has taken place through the terrorist perpetrators. In Medjugorje, Our Lady has said that the division of peoples into Muslims, Jews and Christians is a manmade division; in the eyes of God all human beings are equally beloved children. To devout Muslims, the outer Jihad of an exterior “holy war” is by far the “lesser” Jihad. The “greater” Jihad is the individual, interior war against the “nafs”—the inner evil impulses of our lower nature, the egoic False Self. This is the “Jihad” to which Our Lady has constantly called us in Medjugorje: an inner Jihad conducted through prayer of the heart.

And so today we must take very seriously Our Lady’s urgent call to “pray for my intentions.” She does not spell out for us what those intentions are, but we know that as Queen of Peace she is surely centered upon the peace of our planet. Throughout this Advent season—a time meant to be intensely reflective, quiet, prayerful and penitential—let us join forces as “Allies” of Our Blessed Lady in this holy war against the Satanic evil of the egoic false self, and offer thousands of “Hail Mary’s, Our Father’s, and Glory Be’s for “her intentions”—whatever they may be. Let us offer our daily or weekly Eucharists, our liturgical prayer during Mass, our rosaries, our litanies and chaplets of mercy, our small impromptu pleas, our Centering and meditative prayer, our Lectio Divina upon scripture, and any other forms of prayer we make at random moments throughout the day for Our Lady’s intentions. In some hidden and mysterious way that we cannot comprehend, heaven can make use of our prayers, however poor and weak they are in our eyes. Our Lady has often expressed that she NEEDS our participation through prayer in order to achieve the goals for which she was allowed by the Divine Will to come to Medjugorje. This need has now reached a critical “tipping” point.

Along with prayer, Our Lady calls us to “be carriers of peace and hope in this restless world.” How? Fr.Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. prophetically stated more than 60 years ago: “The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.” Today we see the dire need to move past ideological differences between the world’s countries and cultures, to discover and focus upon the common provenance of basic human values shared by all—our inherent dignity, hopes, dreams, rights and responsibilities as members of the same species. All of our recent popes have warned of the dangers of ideologies that become obsessive and idolatrous, spawning only division, hatred and war. This human propensity toward ideology rears its head most hatefully in the realm of politics, whether domestic or international, as “we impersonalize and demonize each other through labels.”

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI (President of our Oblate School of Theology) writes: “It is a terrible scourge, a moral failure, this labeling. A label renders another faceless, an amorphous category and usually, a hated one as well. Through labels we set up faceless demons through which we can give full vent to paranoia.…Thus we could justify building nuclear bombs and could hate in the name of God. Why? Because we were not hating actual persons, with faces, feelings, dreams, pains, families and children. We were hating a faceless monster without eyes….All wars, ultimately, come about because we no longer look at persons, but rather at ideology and then create the appropriate labels by which to demonize people. Many soldiers, for instance, find it almost impossible to kill someone if they are close enough to see that person’s face. Killing is more easily done from a distance—with mortar shells, bombings and long-range weapons that strike a faceless ‘enemy’ who is not actually seen….

But this isn’t just true for war; it is just as true within our churches and civic circles: Here we disrespect, justify paranoia, and rationalize lack of elementary charity because we are, in the end, not dealing with real persons, but with faceless ‘liberals, conservatives, feminists, male chauvinists, reactionaries, old fogies, New Agers, good-for-nothings on welfare, valueless yuppies, out-of-date patriarchal bullies, fanatical pro-lifers, family-value-destroying radicals, and uptight fundamentalists’….We need not give these persons the love and understanding the Gospel asks for because, thanks to the labels we have given them, they are not persons at all but demons to be exorcised. We live in a time of paranoia and hysteria, both of the right and of the left, within society at large. Simply put, there is a lot of hatred, disrespect, slander of others and distortion of the truth all around. Moreover, on all sides, it is rationalized on the highest moral grounds….Through labels we demonize each other, strip the faces off of each other, and…kill each other. It is time to say, enough!” Let us keep in mind this common way that “Satan is attacking and tempting us” every day. Our refusal to label and demonize fellow human beings according to ideological stereotyping is one profound, important way that we can answer Our Lady’s call to “be carriers of peace and hope in this restless world.” Blessed Advent to all!

December Musings . . . Advent: Season of Silent Reflection & Prayer of Preparation for Celebrating the Incarnation of God-with-Us

The first Sunday of Advent addresses the theme of divine light. We know that light is a form of energy. This energy is invisible to the naked eye….Faith is the receptive apparatus that perceives the divine energy. Advent is a refining of our receptive apparatus. One of the best ways of doing this is to watch and pray.

The Spirit of Advent is the realization that we cannot be happy without a relationship with this immense Mysterythat vastly transcends all categories and yet deals with us in an incredibly personal way. The grace of Advent, through the Spirit’s gift of Knowledge, penetrates the inadequacy of all distorted values and programs for happiness. We know that we cannot save ourselves. Hence, out of our inmost being comes the cry for help. The realization comes that there is nothing we can do to change the existential situation except to wait and to offer this longing, too deep for words, to God’s infinite compassion.

Advent is not just waiting for a feast. It is waiting for God, waiting to be reborn, waiting to be transformed. – Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO

The joy of Advent is a joy born of eager expectation and waiting: waiting for something good—in fact, something wonderful. It is waiting for something sure. And what is sure? That God, the God who once came in Jesus, will come to us again. The joy of Advent springs from expecting him who came before “to build his tent in our midst” as one of us, and who will come again and again. It is a joy that springs from hope.
– Jaime L. Cardinal Sin of Manila

God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid. – Annie Dillard

For the good of all humankind Jesus Christ became human in a Bethlehem stable. Rejoice, O Christendom. All who at the manger finally lay down all power and honor, all prestige, all vanity, all arrogance and self-will; all who take their place among the lowly and let God alone be high; all who see the glory of God in the lowliness of the child in the manger: these are the ones who will truly celebrate Christmas.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Where will God go to touch the world? Look deep inside Mary for an answer. Better still—look deep within yourself. “Christ in you, the hope of glory!” the scripture says. (Col 1:27) Christ grew in Mary until He had to come out. Christ will grow in you until the same occurs. He will come out in your speech, in your actions, in your decisions. Every place you live will be a Bethlehem. And every day you live will be a Christmas. Deliver Christ into the world…your world.  – Max Lucado

According to an ancient poem, if you’re walking down the roads of life these days and looking for God, you should be looking down. If God is going to be found these days, it’s going to be in small things, it’s going to beclose to the ground, it may even be below the ground, or, perhaps more likely, in the face of a baby sleeping in a crib. May Christmas draw us to the crib! – Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI

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It is not over, this birthing. There are always newer skies into which God can throw stars. When we begin to think that we can predict the Advent of God, that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem, that’s just the time that God will be born in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe. Those who wait for God watch with their hearts and not their eyes, listening, always listening for angel words. – Ann Weems

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Humanly speaking, the time of Advent must have been the happiest time in Our Lady’s life. The world about her must have been informed with more than its habitual loveliness, for she was gathering it all to the making of her son. But sometimes a pang of grief must have shot through her; for example, when the young wheat grew and she saw it pierce the earth with little swords. Perhaps the first sword to pierce her heart was a blade of green wheat. For was not her precious burden a grain of wheat sown in a field? Was He not bread? The world’s bread that must be broken? Everything must have spoken to her of Him…creation itself is simply God’s meditation on Christ.

The seed in the earth is the unborn child. The snow on the field is the Virgin Mother’s purity. The bloom on the black thorn, flowering through the land, His birth. The falling of the red rose leaves foretells His passion, the wheat is bound in sheaves because He was bound, it is threshed because He was scourged. The fruit is red on the bough because He was crucified; because He rose from the dead, spring returns to us again.

If such is the beauty of the world to ordinary children, what must it have been to the Mother of God, when her whole being was folded upon the unborn Christ within her? He was completely her own, utterly dependent upon her; she was His food and warmth and rest. His shelter from the world, His shade in the sun. She was the shrine of the Sacrament, the four walls and the roof of His home. Yet she must have longed to hold Him between her hands and to look into His human face and to see in it, in the face of God, a family likeness to herself! Think of that! It must have been a season of joy, and she must have longed for His birth, but at the same time she knew that every step that she took, took her little son nearer to the grave. Each work of her hands prepared His hands a little more for the nails; each breath that she drew counted one more to His last.

In giving life to Him she was giving Him death….In fact, unless Mary would give Him death, He could not die. Unless she would give Him the capacity for suffering, He could not suffer. He could only feel cold and hunger and thirst if she gave Him her vulnerability to cold and hunger and thirst. He could not know the indifference of friends or treachery or the bitterness of being betrayed unless she gave Him a human mind and a human heart. That is what it meant to Mary to give human nature to God.

He was invulnerable; He asked her for a body to be wounded. He was joy itself; He asked her to give Him tears. He was God; He asked her to make Him man. He asked for hands and feet to be nailed. He asked for blood to be shed. He asked for a heart to be broken. The stable at Bethlehem was the first Calvary. The wooden manger was the first Cross. The swaddling bands were the first burial bands. The Passion had begun. Christ was man. – Caryll Houselander

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The helpless and piercing cry of a baby. Majesty in the midst of the mundane. Holiness in the filth of sheep manure and sweat. Divinity entering the world on the floor of a stable, through the womb of a teenager and in the presence of a carpenter. – Max Lucado

God became man so that man might become God.
– St. Athanasius

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December 8: The Immaculate Conception of Mary

Immaculate Conception, Mary my Mother, live in me, act in me, speak in and through me, think your thoughts in my mind, love through my heart, give me your dispositions and feelings. Teach, lead and guide me to Jesus! Correct, enlighten, and expand my thoughts and behavior, possess my soul, take over my entire personality and life, replace it with yourself! Incline me to constant adoration, pray in me and through me; let me live in you and keep me in this union always. – Mother Immaculata, OCD

Wisdom of Pope Francis

This Christmas, there will be lights, parties, bright trees, and even Nativity scenes while the world continues to wage war. And what will remain after this war? Ruins, thousands of children without education, countless innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers. God weeps for a world that has not understood the way of peace.

Mark Your Calendar!