Medjugorje Message: January 25, 2023
Dear children! Pray with me for peace, because Satan wants war and hatred in hearts and peoples. Therefore, pray and sacrifice your days by fasting and penance, that God may give you peace. The future is at a crossroads, because modern man does not want God. That is why mankind is heading to perdition. You, little children, are my hope. Pray with me, that what I began in Fatima and here may be realized. Be prayer and witness peace in your surroundings, and be people of peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
February 2023
In this very sobering message, Our Lady seems to anticipate the season of Lent nearly a month before Ash Wednesday! It is a grim and serious message to which we must give our heed and our hearts in contemplative listening and total openness. In contrast to other alleged apparitions of Mary in the world, Our Lady Queen of Peace in Medjugorje has never focused upon fearful chastisements, divine wrath, or threats of punishment—and she still isn’t. Instead, she has continually emphasized our need to open our hearts in PRAYER, and thus live lives of peace, love and joy by using our human agency and free will to “decide for God.” To remain in this daily close relationship with the divine indwelling Presence is often called “Christ consciousness.”
This month’s message is quite similar to, and reminiscent of, Our Lady’s teaching at Fatima, Portugal, where she appeared in 1917, revealing to the three children-seers the coming end of WW I, but also the start of WW II and the need to pray for the conversion of Russia. While the Medjugorje messages have been far less specific in naming the events of our times, over the past 41 years, Our Lady has shared many of the same concerns as at Fatima, and indeed, Pope John Paul II declared that “Medjugorje is the fulfillment of Fatima.” What are the similarities?
As at Fatima, Our Lady has focused on PEACE and PRAYER at Medjugorje, introducing herself as the “Queen of Peace” and urging us to build world peace through praying. As at Fatima, Our Lady has given “secrets” to the visionaries at Medjugorje—three secrets at Fatima and ten secrets at Medjugorje—which contain the events which will (potentially) unfold in the coming years of the era in which we live. As at Fatima, pilgrims in Medjugorje have experienced the “Miracle of the Sun” and many other luminary and supernatural phenomena, as well as radical changes of heart, health and life. As at Fatima, Our Lady has tirelessly called humanity as a whole to “CONVERSION” in order to avert our self-destruction—both earthly and spiritual.
In general, the Fatima apparitions of Our Lady to the three shepherd children had a stronger emphasis on penance and penitential prayer than we have seen at Medjugorje, which has focused largely on our becoming living examples through peaceful behavior springing from a prayer-fueled conversion of heart. Having said this, we see in this month’s message a “Fatima-like” plea for PENITENTIAL PRACTICES in response to the dire situation of our present world, in which PEACE is so critically threatened and our very survival so greatly endangered.
Our Lady begins: “Pray with me for peace, because Satan wants war and hatred in hearts and peoples.” For years Mary has been saying this repeatedly in Medjugorje, letting us know that as we experience “war and hatred” —whether in the “outer” world of Ukraine, mass shootings, violent crime, international and domestic unrest, and broken families, OR in the inner recesses of our own hearts and minds filled with interpersonal dramas of rage, bitterness, resentment, and plots for revenge—they are always a DELIGHT and a VICTORY for “Satan.” War and hatred are always a “win” for demonic ego that is conquering our “better angels,” both as individuals and as communities, cultures and nations. As in the time of Fatima, in our current day it is again “Russia” that seems to be ramping up the threat of worldwide “war and hatred” on a level of unprecedented nuclear destruction.
Our Lady continues: “Therefore, pray and sacrifice your days by fasting and penance, that God may give you peace.” Here Our Lady immediately reveals the antidote for this deadly illness that is “war and hatred.” She tells us that if we “pray and sacrifice our days by fasting and penance,” we will experience the peace of God—a peace “not as the world gives” (Jn 14:27), a “peace that surpasses understanding.” (Phil 4:7) This peace is not a “reward” for our heroic behavior in praying and sacrificing food or other substances and activities that we love; rather, this divine PEACE is an inherent “side-effect” or “consequence” of the deepening intimacy with God that happens—naturally and organically—when we pray and sacrifice for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for love of us. Our prayer and sacrifice simply open a channel of love through which the grace of PEACE may flow freely into us. Just as sin carries its own self-punishment, prayer and sacrifice carry their own “reward” in the deepening love and sense of the Divine Presence within, which bestows upon us an unshakable inner “PEACE.”
Next, Our Lady says something very difficult to hear: “The future is at a crossroads, because modern man does not want God. That is why mankind is heading to perdition.” Ouch. Such strong language from Our Lady cuts to the quick and stings our eyes with tears—almost like a sudden slap meant to shock us into wakeful awareness. But isn’t this what every good mother does sometimes? Such rough, jarring, plain-spoken declarations are necessary when a mother sees her children barreling heedlessly, unconsciously, obliviously toward a deadly cliff that will bring them to harm, ruin, and utter destruction.
We are now on the precipice of such a cliff, Our Lady says, with our “future” —as a planet, a species, a democratic nation, a family, an individual, a soul—“at a crossroads,” with one path leading to more life, and the other path “heading to perdition.” We’ve recently heard that the so-called “Doomsday Clock” that was started by atomic scientists in 1947 when the world was near the brink of disaster, has now reached “90 seconds until midnight” —the closest our world has ever come to human-made global catastrophe and self-destruction. These calculations are based on such factors as geopolitical wars (e.g. Ukraine), environmental/climate crises, unchecked technological advances (e.g. artificial intelligence), nuclear energy threats, bioterrorism, excessive weaponry, and destabilizing political and diplomatic breakdowns in the world.
Our Lady bluntly states that because “modern man does not want God” —our free will always remaining intact and respected!—“mankind is heading to perdition.” Our Lady makes it clear that human beings are free to choose God (or NOT), to “decide for God” (or NOT). The pervasiveness of “war and hatred” in our world reveals that “modern man does not want God,” for if we were pursuing the relationship of LOVE that heaven offers by OPENING OUR HEARTS in PRAYER, God would “give us peace” and our world would be a very different place. But “modern man” —glutted with the electronic and material surfeit of outer influences and with technology’s bombardment of impressions—has lost sight of the “Big Picture” of Spiritual Reality beyond the passing-yet-preoccupying “things of this world.” GOD or Ultimate Reality is nowhere on the “radar screen” of modern man, as in ages past. Our marvelously impressive technology has become a 21st century “Tower of Babel” through which we forget God…thus assuring our own self-destruction.
Beginning in the 14th century, the frightening word “perdition” was often related to “hell” or “eternal damnation” in Christian theology. But the word actually comes from the ancient Latin root “perditio,” which means “loss” or “utter destruction.” In John 17:12, Jesus prays to God for his disciples, saying “none was LOST except the son of perdition”—meaning Judas Iscariot, who, by his own choice, betrayed Jesus and thus “did not want God” but rather prioritized his own political agenda for the Messiah. We, too, are “heading to perdition” when, through our sleepwalking lack of the awareness that comes from a spiritual practice of prayer, fasting and penance, we lose sight of Ultimate Reality and see only the “things of this world” —unconscious and unable, through our spiritual apathy, to “WANT GOD.” In that awful condition, Satanic EGO takes the reins and runs the show of our life, fixing our eyes only upon the futile “emotional programs for happiness” that will never work: safety/security, affection/esteem, power/control, and sensory pleasure. The tragic results of this “godless” existence are “war and hatred in hearts and peoples.”
Into this gloomy picture of our state of “lostness,” Our Lady finally shines a light, saying: “You, little children, are my hope. Pray with me, that what I began in Fatima and here may be realized.” Here, Our Lady is confirming the words of Pope St. John Paul II when he said, “Medjugorje is the fulfillment of Fatima.” Clearly Our Lady is drawing these two 20th century apparitions together as parts of one unified purpose: the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart over the forces of evil on earth that would lead humankind over the cliff to “perdition”—an ultimate, final “lostness” and “utter destruction” of our species and of our souls. Our Lady’s plea to us is: “PRAY WITH ME.” Indeed, from the earliest days of Medjugorje, her constant cry has been: “Pray! Pray! Pray!”
She concludes this month’s message by saying: “BE prayer and witness peace in your surroundings, and BE people of peace.” Again, as she has done for many years at Medjugorje, Our Lady uses the language of “BEING” and the verb “TO BE,” calling us not to “say” or “recite” prayers, but to “BE” prayer, and not to think about, talk about, write about, march about nonviolence, but to “BE people of peace” in all aspects of our life. We are to “witness peace” in our “surroundings” —becoming the salt, light, and leaven in our own small environments, the “mustard seed” growing to a huge shrub, the INFLUENCE that will spread, by the mysterious quantum interconnectedness of God’s creation, throughout our whole planet Earth. How little we grasp, realize, or understand the POWER OF PRAYER and of PERSONAL EXAMPLE that we have at our fingertips each day—if only we would practice the spiritual disciplines the Church (and all great religious paths) give us for cooperating with Our Lady to defeat Satanic ego and realize divine PEACE ON EARTH. May it be so.
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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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The deep, important things that most affect us are usually tiny, even imperceptible. How little of the human body we see from the outside. Inside are countless hidden, silent processes, all going on at once. Inside all this, there is an even more complex web of hidden connections between these various processes. Everything is interconnected, no part does anything that doesn’t affect everything else. This is true too of any social body. Just as with the human body, most of the deep things in a community are under the surface, invisible, silent, available only to the intuitive gaze of the mystic, poet or artist.
All of this is even more true of the Body of Christ, the baptized. The Body of Christ is more than meets the physical eye, a billion times more. Inside the Body of Christ, as in all bodies, there are deadly viruses, an immune system, cancer cells, and healthy enzymes. What’s deepest inside of life is not visible to the naked eye. Therese of Lisieux, with her highly-tuned mystical sense, understood her hidden life in a monastery as a part of the immune system inside the Body of Christ. Without ever leaving the small town of Lisieux, she touched the lives of millions of people.
This can help give us a sense of the mystical union we have inside the “communion of saints.” There exists among all the baptized, at a level too deep for words, a union that is as real, intimate and physical as a sexual union. This lies at the root of the Christian understanding of the Eucharist. The early Christians surrounded the Eucharist with the kind of reverence and discretion that lovers employ, not allowing anyone who wasn’t fully initiated to be present at the Eucharist. The union among ourselves in the “communion of saints” is also a presence to each other beyond distance.
Everything we do, good or bad, affects all the others. There is no such thing as a private act—of sin, virtue, or anything else. Nothing is private inside a body, everything affects everything. Moreover, our union with each other links us, even beyond death. We carry each other in love and union, across all distance, even death. Everything we do, be it ever so private, is either a bad virus or a healthy enzyme affecting the overall health of the Body of Christ and the family of humanity.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Pope Benedict XVI has been labeled a “traditionalist,” in contrast to Pope Francis, who is identified as a “progressive.” These terms, however, can be misleading, as if a progressive thinker does not value tradition. A traditionalist is, in the broadest sense, one who upholds tradition. Anyone who celebrates Christmas and Hanukkah is a traditionalist, insofar as one practices the rituals and traditions of these feasts. Traditionalism can become problematic when tradition is used to resist change, as if new ideas might eliminate precious elements of the tradition. The “-ism” can lead to a schism. Hence, there is a healthy traditionalism and an unhealthy traditionalism, and both are present in religious institutions today.
A healthy traditionalism means engaging the tradition as a vital way of life, in which a tradition can enrich culture, and, in turn, be challenged by culture to evaluate its core values. An unhealthy traditionalism can create opposition by refusing to engage culture in a mutually beneficial manner. Then tradition can become like a giant rock, unable to budge, blocking the view of new life.
The core values of religious traditions, like cultural traditions, are becoming irrelevant in our algorithmic, internet world. With a sea of information at our fingertips, many people disregard tradition for a smorgasbord of practices or beliefs, ideas gleaned from the internet, like cherries, and throw them into a basket of “likes” and “dislikes.” Religious syncretism seems to be growing with the internet, as one jet skis across websites for individual soul-building. The flattening out of religious traditions, turning deep-rooted values into sentimental ornaments or mere family gatherings, goes hand in hand with the flattening out of the human person. We are becoming like pancake people, spread wide and flat, and mentally thin.
When the computer takes charge of the human brain, we lose our ability to think and reflect, and thus our capacity to imagine and create. We lose what is distinctly human. Without an organic rootedness in the past, an historical transcendence, we cannot adequately grow into the future.
We need traditions today, as never before, because they provide road signs and symbols on how to direct the energies of our lives. Not every invention or scientific development is good. One must discern the insights of science and technology which can enhance human activity and evolution toward Omega. Christianity is normative of evolution, a roadmap to an expanding universe. Valuing tradition is important today, to shape our development toward what makes us fully human and alive.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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While the poor of the world continue knocking on the doors of the rich, the world of affluence runs the risk of no longer hearing those knocks, on account of a conscience that can no longer distinguish what is human.
The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore, the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction.
The deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shapes human coexistence.
—Pope Benedict XVI
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There are two great strains of spiritual teachers in all religions. There’s the priestly strain that holds the system together by repeating the tradition. There is also the prophetic strain. Prophets are critical of the very system that the priests maintain. If we have both, we have a certain kind of wholeness or integrity. If we have the priest AND the prophet, we have a system constantly refining itself and correcting itself from within. Those two strains rarely come together. We see it in Moses, who both gathers Israel, and yet is critical of his own people. We see it again in Jesus, who loves his people and his Jewish religion, but is lethally critical of hypocrisy, illusion and deceit.
We’re living in a most amazing time because we have it in Pope Francis right now. We very seldom have a pope who is also a prophet: one who holds the tradition together, respects and conserves the tradition, but at the same time is often quite critical of the bishops and the priests (as well he should be). Jesus’ first action as a prophet involved driving out evil from a religious establishment, the temple. Prophets aren’t nearly as popular as priests. Prophets put together the best of the conservative with the best of the liberal, to use contemporary language. They honor the tradition AND they also say what’s phony in the tradition. That’s what fully spiritually mature people can do.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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February 14: Valentine’s Day
The call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all humankind. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first letter of St. John: “Let us love one another, for love is of God. And everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. He that loves not knows not God, for God is love….If we love one another, God dwells in us and God’s love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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God of the Great Gaze,
We humans prefer satisfying un-truth to
The Truth that is usually unsatisfying.
Truth is always too big for us,
And we are small and afraid.
So You send us prophets and Truth speakers
To open our eyes and ears to Your Big Picture.
Show us how to hear them, how to support them,
And how to interpret their wisdom.
Help us to trust that Your prophetic voice
May also be communicated through our words and actions.
May we practice a spirit of discernment
And a stance of humility,
So that Your Truth be spoken, not our own.
We ask this in the name of Jesus the Prophet
Whom we also killed and will always kill
In the name of our little truths.
Help us, for we desire to share in Your Great Gaze. Amen.
—Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
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Is anything too hard for GOD? The welcome answer is NO, nothing is too hard for the Lord. Don’t measure the height of the mountain. Ponder the power of the One who made it. Don’t tell God how big your storm is. Tell the storm how big your God is. Your problem is not that your problem is too big, but that your view of God is too small. Our tendency is to magnify our fears. We place a magnifying glass on the diagnosis, the disease, or the debt. Stop that! Meditate less on the mess and more on the Master. Less on the problems and more on God’s POWER.
—Max Lucado
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Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it’s essential.
—Katherine May
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can—you must—try to seek God in every person’s life.
Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you, but knowing that each one of you is a child of God.
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
