Medjugorje Message: December 25, 2022
Dear children! Today I am carrying my Son Jesus to you, that you may be His peace and a reflection of clarity and joy of Heaven. Pray, little children, to be open to receive peace because many hearts are closed to the call of the light which changes hearts. I am with you and am praying for you to open yourselves to receive the King of peace, Who fills your hearts with warmth and blessing. Thank you for having responded to my call.
Annual Message to Visionary Jacov Colo: December 25, 2022
Dear children! Today, when the light of Jesus’ birth is illuminating the entire world, in a special way, with Jesus in my arms, I am praying that every heart becomes a stable of Bethlehem, in which my Son will be born, so that your lives become a light of His birth. Little children, you live in peacelessness and fear. That is why, little children, today, on this day of grace, implore Jesus to strengthen your faith and to become the ruler of your lives; because, my children, only with Jesus in your lives will you not be looking at peacelessness but praying for peace and will live in peace; and you will not be looking at fear but at Jesus Who frees us of all fears. I am your Mother who ceaselessly keeps vigil over you and I am blessing you with my Motherly blessing.
River of Light
January 2023
This month, both of Our Lady’s Christmas messages focus on the LIGHT of Christ’s birth as a heart-changing illumination that calls for each of us to RECEIVE and REFLECT it, thus incarnating our Lord’s gospel teaching: “You are the light of the world.” (Mt 5:14) The monthly Medjugorje message begins: “Today I am carrying my Son Jesus to you, that you may be His peace and a reflection of clarity and joy of Heaven.” Every Christmas Day in Medjugorje, Our Lady appears carrying the Baby Jesus in her arms. This time, she does not say, “so that He may be your peace” —but rather, she says: “so that YOU may be His peace.” The emphasis of Our Lady’s whole message this month is upon US and how WE are to assimilate the LIGHT of Christ and reflect it to others through our lives.
She lays out our earthly goal in her very first sentence: “that you may be His peace and a reflection of clarity and joy of Heaven.” In this season of celebrating the incarnation of the Prince of Peace in our world, Our Lady is stressing how WE are His new incarnation, meant to “BE His peace” on planet Earth. Just as Christ Jesus was during his 33 years of life in our world, WE are now to be “a reflection of clarity and joy of Heaven.” Here Our Lady uses an uncommon word to describe Heaven: “clarity.” Clarity is the quality of being clear, lucid and intelligible, coherent and understandable, visible and direct, transparent and pure. In Heaven, all misunderstandings are cleared up and replaced by the precisely accurate, simple, unclouded, and loving perception of Reality. During Jesus’ life and ministry, He embodied and expressed, in all that He said and did, this heavenly CLARITY, as well as the “joy of Heaven.” That is why His presence was so compelling! Our Lady says that this is now OUR JOB: to “be reflections” of Christ in our own little corner of the world.
But we live mostly in an age and state of confusion, fear, anger, and sorrow—far from exuding the “clarity and joy of Heaven.” How can we access these sublime qualities in our present impoverished state of mind and heart, much less project them outward as a LIGHT to the world? Our Lady says: “PRAY, little children, to be open to receive peace because many hearts are closed to the call of the light which changes hearts. I am with you and am praying for you to open yourselves to receive the King of peace, Who fills your hearts with warmth and blessing.” Let us meditate upon “the call of the light which changes hearts.” This is the LIGHT of CHRIST which bestows upon us peace, warmth, blessing, joy, and clarity—but this Light must be “received.” Thus Our Lady continually begs for an OPENING of our hearts so that we may RECEIVE this heavenly illumination from her Son, “the King of peace.”
She acknowledges that, sadly, “many hearts are closed to the call of the light which changes hearts.” Just as a lamp’s light, if concealed beneath a thick, heavy “bushel basket,” is darkly shrouded and enclosed—so our hearts are mostly buried beneath the preoccupations of our thinking minds which dominate and control our character and behavior. Our MINDS are often scattered, confused, chaotic, and unfocused through the distractions of our screens and devices, our daily work and domestic dramas—or else they are fixated and obsessed by overpowering cares, anxieties, fears, aversions, or compulsive desires and attachments. Thus, our minds are usually either totally unfocused or addictively over-focused on the wrong things! (Such as our futile “emotional programs for happiness” based on cultural symbols of safety/security, affection/esteem, and power/control.)
Our Lady instructs us to “PRAY to be open to receive…the call of the light which changes hearts,” and she also assures us of HER prayer, “praying for you to open yourselves to receive the King of peace.” Thus we must BOTH “open ourselves” in receptivity through our free will choices regarding where we place our attention and thoughts, AND we must pray for God’s divine grace to open us where our own “opening” ability fails.
In her Christmas apparition to Jacov Colo (the youngest of the Medjugorje visionaries), Our Lady continues this same theme of OUR ROLE as carriers or reflections of the Light of Christ in the world. Her beautiful message begins: “Today, when the light of Jesus’ birth is illuminating the entire world…I am praying that every heart becomes a stable of Bethlehem, in which my Son will be born, so that your lives become a light of His birth.” Quantum physics has shown us the truth of the ancient metaphysical law, “As above, so below,” which Our Lady is also conveying in these words: just as the birth of Christ was a “macro-cosmic” or “holistic” illumination of the “entire world” in which, as the Gospel says, “the true light that enlightens every person was coming into the world” (Jn 1:9)—so on the smaller, “micro-cosmic” or “holon” level, Our Lady prays that “every heart becomes a stable of Bethlehem in which my Son will be born,” with each small, individual human life, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, becoming “a light of His birth.” Just as the quantum “whole” is contained in each small quantum “part,” so “we are many parts, but all one Body,” St. Paul wrote. (1 Cor 12:20)
Next, in addressing the difficulty we have in becoming a Light of Christ that can radiate the warm glow of Divine Presence, Our Lady turns to the crux of our dilemma: our lack of consciousness, attention and awareness. She says bluntly: “You live in peacelessness and fear. That is why, little children, today, on this day of grace, implore Jesus to strengthen your faith and to become the ruler of your lives; because…only with Jesus in your lives will you not be looking at peacelessness but praying for peace and will live in peace; and you will not be looking at fear but at Jesus Who frees us of all fears.”
Our Lady is telling us to become mindful of our state of consciousness and quality of attention, to WHERE WE ARE LOOKING—and to “fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2), rather than upon the things of this world that lead us to a state of “peacelessness and fear.“ If Jesus were “the ruler of our lives,” we would NOT be focused upon and “LOOKING AT” peacelessness, but rather “praying for peace and living in peace“—totally immersed in the Peace of Christ, the “peace that passes understanding,” the “peace that the world cannot give.” Our ATTENTION would be on “Christ Our Peace“—not upon the million unpeaceful and anti-peaceful events and actions taking place in the world, from wars to domestic violence to petty, rude, hurtful, addictive, and self-destructive behaviors. When confronted with any form of peacelessness, great or small, our ATTENTION would go only to Christ our Peace, with a prayer for His peace to heal the situation and the hearts involved.
Likewise, Our Lady says of the million things we FEAR: if Jesus rules our life, we DO NOT FOCUS our attention on, and “WILL NOT BE LOOKING AT FEAR, but at JESUS who frees us of all fears.” Afraid of illness? Focus on JESUS, our Healer and the Great Physician. Afraid of being attacked? Focus on JESUS, our Good Shepherd and our Justice. Afraid of poverty? Focus on JESUS, our Daily Bread. Afraid of being alone? Focus on JESUS, “with you always,” Ever-Present at our very center. Afraid of dying? Focus on JESUS, the Resurrection and the Life. By keeping our ATTENTION always fixed upon the Lord as ruler of our life—and not upon ourselves or our fears and peaceless insecurities—Our Lady says our life will become an illuminating “stable of Bethlehem” for others, a “light of His birth” in our world. To accomplish this, she urges us: “Implore Jesus to strengthen your faith and become the ruler of your lives.” Let us pray for this New Attention every day!
Our Lady concludes Jacov’s message by saying: “I am your Mother who ceaselessly keeps vigil over you and I am blessing you with my Motherly blessing.” What powerful and intimate maternal care she expresses! The practice of “ceaselessly keeping vigil” is what Our Lady’s whole message has been about—the “vigilance” of keeping CHRIST ever in the forefront of our consciousness, guarding our minds and hearts through conscious attention and intentional awareness: an attentiveness to Christ Jesus as the ruler of our life. This “keeping vigil” means to “NOT BE LOOKING” at “peacelessness” in any form or at “fear” of any kind, but “ceaselessly” looking only “AT” Jesus as model…and “TO” Jesus as remedy and help for everything we need.
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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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God knew our Lady’s trust in him was absolutely without limit. She was to give him her body and soul unconditionally, and—she was to give him her daily life…her ordinary life shared with Joseph. God wanted to give the world the impression that it is ordinary for him to be born of a human creature. God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it is his will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life, and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the human love that people give to one another.
—Caryll Houselander
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WHO IS IN THE MANGER?
Christmas is a beautiful time of the year when we are reminded that the heavens could not contain God, but a simple manger could contain the mystery of divine love. We are reminded that love is stronger than death and that hope is the constancy of light shining through darkness. We are amazed by this earthy God who shows up after five massive terrestrial extinctions, in which millions of species were wiped off the face of the earth. We are confronted by the reality that death does not have the last word, that life endures beyond death, and that the power of love enkindling life cannot be snuffed out.
It is spellbinding that after millions of years of biological evolution human consciousness reaches a point where divinity appears; that Jesus is the human person who shows us the power of the human soul to manifest divine life. In Jesus, we see that the heavens could not contain God, but the human person can do so, and we see that this is no typical cultic God, not a God who is distant, remote and in control but a God who is humble, selfless and in need of a human heart…a God who appears only through human consent.
The birth of Jesus is really the mystery of the human person, not simply what we are but what we are called to be—God-bearers capable of receiving God within us. We humans have the capacity for God-life, but we sell ourselves short and constantly waver between beasts and angels—which is exactly the spot where the manger is placed.
Let us wake up this Christmas to the truth of our lives, not by sitting in front of a plastic baby Jesus in the manger, as we unwrap our consumer gifts, but by placing a mirror in the manger and bending low to see our face within it. The divine love made flesh two thousand years ago is now our flesh. Who is born in the manger this Christmas? Let us be born anew, for the power of love within us is the power that can change the world.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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God manifested himself to humanity in the Incarnation of the Word to teach people a new way of living and loving.
—Pope Benedict XVI
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If, as Herod, we fill our lives with things,
if we consider ourselves so important that we must fill every moment of our lives with action,
when will we have time to make the long, slow journey across the desert as did the Magi?
Or sit and watch the stars as did the shepherds?
Or brood over the coming of the Child, as did Mary?
For each one of us, there is a desert to travel, a star to discover, and a Being in ourselves to bring to life.
—Lectio Divina reflection from a centering prayer group
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Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine. Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image.
—Madeleine L’Engle
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Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied status as persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
—Thomas Merton
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Jesus was born outside of a city, outside of what is comfortable, outside of glamour and fame, outside of being recognized by the rich and the powerful, and beyond notice by the everyday world. Jesus was born in anonymity, poor, outside of all notice, except for family and God. Jesus’ earthly life will end as it began. He will be a stranger, an outsider, crucified outside the city just as he was born outside the city. It is not those who sit at the center of things, the powerful, the rich, the famous, the government leaders, the entertainment celebrities, the corporate heads, the scholars and academics, who ultimately sit at the center of life. What is deepest and most meaningful inside of life lies in anonymity, unnoticed by the powerful, tenderly swaddled in faith, outside the city.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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We don’t want to distance the secular but always bring it closer. It’s only then that ordinary things and moments become epiphanies of God’s presence. We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The point of the Incarnation is that Jesus is one of us in the ordinary. Jesus is God’s declaration that the Infinite is present in it all. Our mystical “diving in” is at the heart of the Incarnation. Jesus ONLY referred to himself as the Son of Man, which means the Human One. It must be important. It shows up 87 times in the Bible. Never say it’s not God, if it’s human, in the flesh, and ever-present.
—Fr. Greg Boyle
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It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccuping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered with blood. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap.
God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say, “This is my body, given for you….”
To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’ story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation: the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and ear infections, in our refugee crises and endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.
—Rachel Held Evans
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Christmas brings us all back to the crib of life to start over: aware of what has gone before, conscious that nothing can last, but full of hope that this time, finally, we can learn what it takes to live well, grow to full stature of soul and spirit, get it right. There is a child in each of us, waiting to be born again. It is to those looking for life that the Christ child beckons. Christmas can be full of new possibility always, for those who are agitated with newness, whatever their age. Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of the constancy of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.
Let the soldiers stomp through life. Let the cold winds blow. Let the days seem mundane and fruitless. The manger in Bethlehem—cold, dark, small—justifies them all. Jesus has been here before us. Bring on the days of our lives. We have a God who has found them holy-making.
—Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In order to rediscover the meaning of Christmas, we need to look to the manger. What does the Lord tell us? Through the manger, three things: closeness, poverty and concreteness. The manger…a feeding trough to enable food to be consumed more quickly…can symbolize one aspect of our humanity: our greed for consumption. The principal victims of this human greed are the weak and the vulnerable. This Christmas, too, a world ravenous for money, for power, and for pleasure does not make room for the little ones. In the Child of Bethlehem, every child is present. We are invited to view life, politics and history through the eyes of children.
The indifference produced by the greedy rush to possess and consume…Christ is born and comes there, to a feeding trough, in order to become our food. He draws near to us in humility, laid in a manger. God was born in a manger so that you could be reborn in the very place where you thought you had hit rock bottom. There is no evil, no sin, from which Jesus does not want to save you. And he can.
The poverty of the manger shows us where the true riches in life are to be found: not in money and power, but in relationships and persons. It is not truly Christmas without the poor. At Christmas God is poor: let charity be reborn! God truly became flesh. As a result, all our theories, fine thought and pious sentiments are no longer enough. Jesus was born poor, lived poor, and died poor. He did not love us only in words; he loved us with utter seriousness!
He who lay naked in the manger and hung naked on the cross, asks us for truth, asks us to go to the bare reality of things, and to lay at the foot of the manger all our excuses, justifications and hypocrisies. Tenderly wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary, he wants us to be clothed in love. God does not want appearances but concreteness.
Jesus, help us to give flesh and life to our faith. Amen.
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
