Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2022
Dear children! The Most High has sent me to you to teach you prayer. Prayer opens hearts and gives hope, and faith is born and strengthened. Little children, with love I am calling you; return to God, because God is love and your hope. You do not have a future if you do not decide for God; and that is why I am with you to guide you to decide for conversion and life, and not for death. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
December 2022
In this Advent message from Our Lady, given in her 41st year of apparitions in Medjugorje, she reveals why her most frequent call over these four decades has been, “Pray! Pray! Pray!” It is simply because, as she says: “The Most High has sent me to you to teach you prayer.” Our Lady does not claim to be appearing in Medjugorje daily for all these years in order to teach us the Catholic Catechism, Church doctrine, moral theology, sacred scripture, social justice, private ethics, Christian philosophy, or political ideology. None of that is her mission; rather, she was sent to earth by God “to teach us PRAYER.” Why?
Because prayer alone gives us “first-hand” knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ—rather than the “second-hand” knowledge we get from all the many branches and disciplines of “religious teaching.” Through theological and catechetical training, retreats, workshops, podcasts, videos and spirituality books we can learn all “ABOUT” God and Jesus. But in PRAYER, we come to KNOW God and Jesus through a “first-hand” experiential encounter. Prayer provides us a direct knowing of the Lord rather than a mere knowing “about.” In sending Our Lady to Medjugorje with this mission of teaching us PRAYER, God is not seeking more people with academic education or intellectual knowledge “about” the Most High, but rather, a personal, intimate, “first-hand” relationship of Love with each one of us.
Our Lady says: “Prayer opens hearts and gives hope, and faith is born and strengthened.” Unlike other sorts of teaching, which challenge and enlarge the human intellect—our thinking brain, rational faculty, mental ability, and reasoning power—the teaching of PRAYER addresses a completely different, more subtle and profound level of our being and personhood: a dimension that is far deeper than thought or thinking, and which transcends reason. It is sometimes called the intuitive level of consciousness, or sixth sense, but more commonly known simply as “the heart.” While study touches the “head,” prayer opens the “heart.”
Conversion (or “metanoia” )—the crucial change of direction in which we are seeking happiness in life—hinges upon “opening the heart” to become vulnerable, transparent, and accessible to the Presence and action of God working internally and intimately within our inmost being. Our Lady says this “opening of the heart” —a new, radical receptivity to the “Most High” dwelling at our very center—“gives hope, and faith is born and strengthened.” All of this HEART-OPENING is made possible, she says, through PRAYER. This is because prayer is the actualizing of a RELATIONSHIP—beginning with our acknowledgement, first and foremost, that GOD EXISTS. We cannot be in a relationship with anyone or anything that we do not first see and recognize as REAL. Once we perceive and comprehend, however dimly or obliquely, that GOD IS, a path opens for us that will lead to a glorious and unending future of Life Everlasting.
Our Lady is here to teach us PRAYER, which opens our “heart” —that trans-rational, intuitive, spiritual level of consciousness beyond thoughts, words, ideas, and concepts—thus enabling “FAITH to be born, and [gradually] strengthened,” as we continue to “pray, pray, pray!” Throughout the Gospels, Jesus insists to all those people miraculously healed by him: “Your FAITH has saved you.” This means that their hearts had opened in RECEPTIVITY to His divine power, which they could not begin to fathom intellectually or understand rationally; yet intuitively they reached out to Jesus in a trusting hope and were saved, healed, made whole. PRAYER opened the path of faith for them in the moment they perceived that the Divine Presence was real and upon them, and they called out their affirmation of this recognition, thus establishing a RELATIONSHIP with God the Son.
To “pray” means to place ourselves in relationship with any aspect of the Holy Trinity, which also puts us in touch with Ultimate Reality, for, as even our modern science in quantum physics grasps, the essence of Reality = Relationship. Just as we have five physical senses, FAITH is the precious and necessary “sixth sense” —an intuitive heart-sensation of Divine Being—upon which our whole future and destiny depend. PRAYER serves to activate this vital sixth sense called “faith” that definitively closes the door on death and opens our path to eternal life.
Our Lady’s message continues: “Little children, with love I am calling you: return to God because God is love and your hope.” In alluding to “love,” Our Lady has now mentioned all three Theological Virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love. Affirming the scriptural teaching that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), she urges us to “return to God” who is our hope. But why use the word “RETURN”? Like the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, every human being trying to “Do Life My Way” —with one’s own power and control—at some point comes to the end of their human resources and self-sufficiency. Anyone who has ever struggled with an addiction, obsession, or compulsion (which includes most of us) knows that eventually we must admit our powerlessness and complete inability to free ourselves from the miserable bondage to our chosen idol—whatever it may be.
Aside from deadly addictions, our human condition is also one of immense distraction, confusion, and wrong turns as we navigate through the choppy seas of worldly enticements, always lured to build our lives on shifting sands of pursuing safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control, and sensory pleasure—none of which provides lasting happiness or meaning. Like the Prodigal Son, we all eventually “hit bottom” and “come to our senses” as the Gospel says, in the realization that to LIVE, we must “return to God who is love and our hope.” We came into existence from God, and our whole life on earth is the return journey back to God who made us. Because we have a “Prodigal Father” in God—one who is All-Merciful, All-Compassionate LOVE—we can always “return” in confidence of being received with open arms.
Our Lady’s message concludes: “You do not have a future if you do not decide for God; and that is why I am with you to guide you to decide for conversion and life, and not for death.” Here Our Lady is returning to the themes of last month’s message, when she said, “mankind has decided for death….without the God of love you do not have a future….Do not lose hope in a change of the human heart.” Again this month, Our Lady uses the powerful language of “DECIDING” —which is an active word that includes both MIND and HEART in a unified choice or discernment towards our volition and agency: an act of the WILL. “Deciding” is committing to a particular path or course of action that we will execute and act upon.
Through prayer, Our Lady wishes to guide us to “decide for conversion and life, and not for death.” Our life on earth is a rapidly fleeting eye blink, or, as scripture says, a vapor, a grass or flower that blooms and quickly fades. If we let the years of our short life zoom past without ever “deciding for God” by opening our heart in prayer—consenting to the Divine Indwelling Presence and action within us and entering into a Love Relationship with this Ultimate Reality, which IS Love and Relationship Itself—then we naturally FALL OUT OF PARTICIPATION, ALIGNMENT, and CONFORMITY with Relational Reality, thereby excluding ourselves from the fullness of Cosmic Truth, which is Eternal Loving Relationship. This non-participation in God/Reality means that we “do not have a future,” for by NOT “deciding for God,” we have “decided for death” by default.
But if we DO “decide for God” in this brief lifetime, then we DO have a future and a hope, for there is NO DEATH for those who have “decided for God.” To “decide for God” is to “decide for conversion and life, and not for death.” It means that we sign up for participation in the “full meal deal,” which is: Reality = Relationship = Love = God = Unending LIFE. It is a glorious, holistic “package deal”!
During this beautiful Advent season, we anticipate the great Feast of the Incarnation—Christmas—when LOVE came into our human flesh in a way that made it possible for us to no longer “decide for death” as our default human position, but join in Eternal Life through the Ultimate Reality of the Love Relationship we call “God.” Let us open our hearts wide in PRAYER of total receptivity to this amazing offer!
May our prayer take whatever form the Divine Indwelling Presence—the Holy Spirit within—asks of us: spoken prayer, silent prayer, memorized prayer, spontaneous prayer, liturgical prayer, meditative prayer, charismatic prayer, contemplative prayer, singing prayer, rosary prayer, Eucharistic adoration prayer, centering prayer, intercessory prayer, thankful prayer, penitential prayer, praising prayer, mantric prayer, chanting prayer, any and all prayer by which we have a “first-hand” experience of knowing God intimately, and participating in a mutual LOVE RELATIONSHIP with GOD who is Love.
Just as young lovers maintain a constant inner flame of adoration burning in their hearts and minds through continual loving awareness of their beloved, let us “PRAY ALWAYS” and in “ALL WAYS” with an overflowing heart of love for the LOVE who made us and sustains us each moment. Our Love is coming!
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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
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WE CANNOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS WITH THE SAME THINKING THAT WE USED WHEN WE CREATED THEM.
—Albert Einstein
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“ADVENT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END
OF ALL THINGS IN US THAT ARE NOT CHRIST.”
—Thomas Merton
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Advent is the season during which we are reminded of the longing of the entire human race for the potential of salvation after original sin. Advent is a reminder of those nine months of prayer in which surely Mary engaged…awaiting the Son’s advent, awaiting his birth. It is appropriate, then, that we try during Advent—with all the hustle and bustle, all the activities to prepare for Christmas—to enter into a season of recollection, a season in which we reflect on the coming of Christ.
—Cardinal John O’Connor
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Because Jesus is the Savior of the human race, tradition calls Mary the “Ark of Salvation.” In giving birth to Jesus, she gave him the precious blood—the blood of the “new and eternal covenant,” as we hear at every Eucharist—that washes away our sins.
—Fr. Sebastian White, O.P.
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FAITH is no refuge for the fainthearted, but something which enhances our lives. It makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love.
—Pope Francis (Lumen Fidei, 53)
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Advent is a season of burgeoning life, a season of tending life, and a season of becoming. This is perhaps the greatest theological thunderclap of Advent: that God, who only IS—the “is-ness” at the heart of being—now, in the Incarnation, is becoming. Now, choosing to become Incarnate, God, as man, can become. During the Advent season we commemorate his becoming in the womb of a woman….The Church becomes, even in her tenderness, very dramatic. “Wake up!” she says. And she will say this again and again in Advent: “Get up out of this torpor, this stupor. Wake up! Now is the time to rise from the spiritual sleepiness, the same old dreary infidelities, the same wastefulness, the same old idling paths, the same old petty self-indulgences. Wake up!”
The Incarnate Word came to deliver us from the old slavery to sin. We all know how our faults enslave us…our impatience, our self-will, our unwillingness to bear with one another’s idiosyncrasies and failings. We never have any lasting satisfaction from these things. This is what Christ came to deliver us from; he came to fill in the valleys in us and to lower the mountains in us.
—Mother Mary Francis of Our Lady, P.C.C.
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Advent is truly the season of expectant waiting. By embracing the reflective solitude of the season, we come to see that what we long for—the in-breaking of the divine into our ordinary life—has already happened; it happened more than two thousand years ago. We can wait in peace. But by traveling the Advent journey we find in ourselves a new certainty: what we long for has already happened, but it’s still happening today. When we quiet down, and embrace our neediness, we can see Christ present here and now.
—Kimberly Shankman
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We are meant to learn from the experience of waiting; the deeper meaning of life is to keep watch. Above and beyond all your wishes and ideas, the Lord has created you for an intimacy with God that no human eye has seen, no human ear has heard. (1 Cor 2:9) We are designed for this. This should be our first Advent light: to understand all that happens to us and threatens us from the perspective of life’s character of waiting. The character of life is to keep going, to keep a lookout, and to endure until the vigilant heart of man and the heart of God come together: presently in the interior meeting in the sacraments, and later in the final homecoming.
God enters his own rooms, where someone is keeping watch for him. Are we living out of the center of our being, or from memory or impulses, but not because we are settled in the center of reality with our stability nourished there? This is the deeper sense of Advent: that we scrutinize this center and set up lights of recognition in our lives, and from the center master life’s gloominess. There is not absolute darkness. Those who wait on the Lord God will not be disappointed.
—Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ
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St. Francis of Assisi knew that he would never reform the church by any frontal, verbal, or theoretical attack. He came, instead, from beneath, from the side—and from the positive. He simply lived in a different and more attractive way. He didn’t use oppositional energy. He went just outside the walls, rebuilt little tiny churches, and did it in a way that was beautiful, loving, and positive. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Contemplative prophets are nurturing, gentle, and invitational. Their work spreads by attraction more than promotion. It meets people where they are. When we recognize the deep shortcomings and limitations in our mainstream Christian institutions, we continue to face a choice on how to respond. Some of us zealous types have an instinct to think we should engage those institutions directly and try to force them into change. It is easy for us to think, “They should know better!”
But when you attack something, you make it defensive, and when something becomes defensive, it often becomes more aggressive and even more dangerous. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. There is a time to name wrongs, but, when possible, we can try to find ways to do it without adding to the shame and fear that is present in the people involved.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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HEALING A VIOLENT WORLD with PRAYER
A regular practice of Centering Prayer enables us to actually welcome those acts of violence that come to us in our daily life and then redirect these energies as a force for good in this world. This practice begins with recognizing the many acts of violence we do against ourselves that keep us from truly welcoming the faults, limitations, and yes, even outrageous behavior of others. The practice of Centering Prayer serves as a filter for the very real toxins of violence and hate that are so present in our world. Each breath we take during our daily prayer sessions is an opportunity to breathe in the pain and violence of our world and breathe out the utmost charity that is gifted to us in the silence of contemplative prayer. Utmost charity is to forgive completely and from the heart everything and everyone, including ourselves. This is the path to unity.
—Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
We have to empty ourselves of the many small or great idols that we have and in which we take refuge, on which we often seek to base our security. They are idols that we sometimes keep well-hidden; they can be ambition, careerism, a taste for success, placing ourselves at the center, the tendency to dominate others, the claim to be the sole masters of our lives, some sins to which we are bound, and many others. We have to rid ourselves of these idols in order to enter into right relationship with God and others. Our salvation and our true happiness depend on it.
On the 6oth Anniversary of Vatican II:
How often, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, did Christians prefer to choose sides in the church, not realizing that they were breaking their mother’s heart! How many times did they prefer to cheer on their own party rather than being servants of all? To be progressive or conservative rather than being brothers and sisters? To be on the “right” or “left,” rather than with Jesus? To present themselves as “guardians of the truth” or “pioneers of innovation” rather than seeing themselves as humble and grateful children of holy mother church? This is not how the Lord wants us to be. We are his sheep, his flock, and we can only be so together and as one. Let us be careful: Both the “progressivism” that lines up behind the world and the “traditionalism” that longs for a bygone world are not evidence of love, but of infidelity. They are forms of a selfishness that puts our own tastes and plans above the love that pleases God—the simple, humble and faithful love that Jesus asked of Peter.
The Church is meant to be, as Pope John put it,”the church of all, and particularly the church of the poor.” The Council calls for a church that is madly in love with its Lord and with all the men and women whom he loves, that is rich in Jesus and poor in assets, a church that is free and freeing. A church in love with Jesus has no time for quarrels, gossip and disputes. May God free us from being critical and intolerant, harsh and angry! You who desire that we be a united flock, save us from the forms of polarization that are the devil’s handiwork.
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
