Medjugorje Message: July 25, 2023
Dear children! In this time of grace, in which the Most High sends me to you to love you and guide you on the way of conversion, offer your prayers and sacrifices for all those who are far away and have not come to know God’s love. You, little children, be witnesses of love and peace for all peaceless hearts. Thank you for having responded to my call.”
River of Light
August 2023
Our Lady’s message clearly defines for us both her purpose in Medjugorje and our role in response to her historic, unprecedented daily apparitions there. The Queen of Peace begins her message: “In this time of grace…” —a phrase she has used often over the past 42 years. It reminds us that, in spite of all the dark, negative, tragic, and evil conditions that exist in our world (of which we are painfully aware), “THIS TIME” is still a “TIME OF GRACE” because of Our Lady’s special presence in Medjugorje, which she said would be her “last apparitions on earth.” We are privileged to be alive in “this time of grace” and must rightfully offer sincere thanks in a daily “attitude of gratitude,” regardless of whatever horrors are happening in our troubled world.
And how is this a “time of grace“? Our Lady says this is the time “in which the Most High sends me to you to love you and guide you on the way of conversion.” Here, our Blessed Mother affirms that she has been SENT by God, who is reaching out to us, taking the initiative towards humanity, just as happened at the Annunciation when Mary herself was visited by the angel Gabriel and offered the mission of becoming the human Mother of God and instrument of the Incarnation: the Word being “made flesh to dwell among us.” The initiative is always God’s, not ours.
And what exactly is the purpose of this Divine Initiative in “SENDING” Our Lady to planet Earth for the last time in human history? It is “to love you and guide you on the way of conversion.” So God has sent Mary, the Mother of Jesus and our mother, for “LOVE” and “GUIDANCE”—the two primary tasks of motherhood. Maternal LOVE is the most pressing need of all human beings from our birth; without it we cannot survive physically or thrive emotionally. After infancy, without ongoing Mother-love throughout our childhood, we suffer deep inner brokenness and psychological wounds that can last a lifetime. God has sent Our Lady—the most perfectly loving Mother who ever existed—back to this earth “to love us.” Why?
Because so many human beings suffer a tragic, painful deficit or LACK of maternal love from our own biological mothers, leading to all manner of troubled lives—crime, addiction, violence, mental illness, dysfunctional and abusive relationships, etc. Scripture tells us “GOD IS LOVE,” and on earth, motherhood is considered the most fervent, strong, selfless, unconditional, and undying love that human beings can experience. Our Lady has been sent by God in this “time of grace” to “LOVE us,” reflecting to us Divine Love by showing us the ultimate degree of human love: that of a MOTHER. In truth, all of us need, yet lack, this love—for there is no “perfect” Mother-love except for that of Mary’s Immaculate Heart.
Secondly, Our Lady says she was sent to Medjugorje by “the Most High” to “guide you on the way of conversion.” GUIDANCE is the other vital task of motherhood. Scripture says, “Train up a child in the way that he should go.” But because of our human condition, by adulthood we usually find ourselves on the “wrong” road, traveling in the “wrong direction.” In childhood, a mother’s task is to constantly re-direct her children away from danger and misbehavior. In teenage and young adulthood this guidance often means redirecting them away from the peer pressures of group membership that include dangers like drug and alcohol abuse and other addictive or illegal behaviors. A mother’s guidance during this time is crucial yet often ignored or defied as our egoic self-will grows stronger or even “runs riot.”
Once we are grown and away from maternal guidance, we enter into a jungle of worldly enticements, driven by the popular dominant culture toward pursuing “emotional programs for happiness” that will never work—satisfying all our overblown cravings for safety/security, affection/esteem, power/control, and pleasure. Worst of all, we seek these things as the “world” or “society” or “culture” defines them and symbolizes them to us with “status” emblems of “success.” In scriptural terms we are now living in the realm of “the prince of this world” (satanic ego), a “life in the flesh” rather than “in the spirit.” For this reason, Our Lady has been sent by God/Love to “guide us on the way of conversion.”
“CONVERSION” means “changing the direction in which we look for happiness.” Our genuine, authentic, ultimate happiness and fulfillment are to be found only in our Source—God/Love—and in our eventual return to this Source from which we came (God’s Heaven) through our lifelong evolution toward greater conformity to and unity with the compassion, care, and selfless love of Christ. But sadly, our eyes are mostly turned in a contrary direction—toward the materialistic spoils of this earth as defined by our shallow, greedy, selfish consumerist culture in which cut-throat, dog-eat-dog competition and rivalry for worldly goods, services, and shrinking natural resources form a contentious, unloving, often hateful and heartless dystopian reality of suffering and injustice, far from the scriptural vision of our Catholic Christian spirituality. Our Lady as a loving Mother guides us instead toward LOVE and PEACE, in keeping with our “true North” ultimate goal of eternal life in heaven. But to take this other road requires “CONVERSION”: that we change the direction in which we’ve been looking for happiness!
The remainder of Our Lady’s message presupposes that we have already opened our hearts to her Medjugorje apparitions and, through prayer, have opened our hearts and minds to God’s presence and action within us which guides us, through the Holy Spirit, into a conversion of life. No longer seeking the dominant culture’s definition of “happiness” or its decadent and distorted symbols of security, esteem, power, and pleasure, we are ready to respond to the love and guidance that Heaven is offering us in this “time of grace” by DOING what Our Lady calls us to in her messages.
Today her call is: “Offer your prayers and sacrifices for all those who are far away and have not come to know God’s love. You, little children, be witnesses of love and peace for all peaceless hearts.” In Medjugorje, Our Lady has consistently referred to unbelievers simply as “those who have not come to know God’s love.” This is an important point: in Our Lady’s view, our identity as Christians is based solely on LOVE, for “GOD IS LOVE.” It is not based on book knowledge of beliefs, dogmas, or doctrines of orthodoxy, but on experientially “knowing God’s love” in our HEARTS. Similarly, as the song says, “they will know we are Christians by our LOVE” —not by our theological correctness or mastery of apologetics. After all, those who don’t know God’s love have access to millions of books, but have perhaps never yet accessed a truly loving heart in a Christian person who authentically witnesses to them “love and peace.” That is on US!
As Our Lady guides her children (that is, every human being on earth) “on the way of conversion,” she is most concerned about “all those who are far away“—i.e. far down the road on the wrong path, in the worldly jungle of vain, counterfeit goals, moving toward dead-end destinations. These “lost sheep” are on this hopelessly lost, deadly path of destructive values because “they have not come to know God’s love.” Our Lady calls us to “offer our prayers and sacrifices” for these many people. Why? Because due to the holistic, interconnected web of all created Reality, each one of our small, individual prayers or sacrifices can have an unbelievably powerful impact on the life of another human being—a suffering brother or sister who is “far away,” a great distance down the wrong road, and “has not yet come to know God’s love.”
It may be someone we know personally, or someone we’ve never heard of, across the world from us. Prayer and sacrifice offered with a sincerely LOVING HEART and compassionate intention are boundless in the hands of Our Lady and our Lord! Let us offer these prayers for “unbelievers” daily, along with small sacrifices as simple as a headache or bodily ailment, a frustrating delay, a missed meal, a forfeited purchase, or a treat that we decide we can do without. All of these things, joined to a mere whispered, “Lord, have mercy,” can be taken and used, gratefully and fruitfully, by Our Lady for the conversion of the world. The quantum connectedness of creation gives even our smallest loving action global impact.
Her final request is that we “be witnesses of love and peace for all peaceless hearts.” This can be a tall order because “peaceless hearts” create “peaceless people” who are often very difficult to deal with. Troubled and problematic relationships characterize those with “peaceless hearts,” and if we get caught up in one, it is very challenging to continue being “witnesses of love and peace.” It becomes easy and tempting to fall into the outward “peacelessness” of those who suffer it internally—even though we ourselves know that “God is love.” To remain calmly steadfast in witnessing “love and peace” toward those with “peaceless hearts” can feel like a bloodless living martyrdom at times. But keeping our attention upon GOD/LOVE—rather than the ongoing emotional and interpersonal dramas of the “peaceless hearts” —will make all things possible as we are given the grace to help Our Lady guide souls “on the way of conversion.”
We see throughout scripture and the 2,000-year history of our Christian faith a “Call & Response” pattern of conversion leading to mission. It is recapitulated here, in our time, through the Medjugorje apparitions. Once again, God reaches out to Our Lady. Once again, Our Lady responds to this Divine Initiative by reaching out to us. And once again, as at the dawn of the Church, we respond to Our Lady’s call by reaching out to our fellow humans through serving as “witnesses of LOVE and PEACE for all peaceless hearts.” Emulating, replicating, repeating—as microcosmic cells in the macrocosmic DNA of GOD/LOVE—we follow the eternal, universal pattern of Divine Outreach from the Heart of Love and an open, receptive RESPONDING. Thus Our Lady ends every Medjugorje message with the gracious words, “Thank you for having responded to my call.”
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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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Holy meditation greatly benefits the one who meditates. It stirs up his spirit. “I meditated in the night with my own heart: and I was exercised.” (Ps 77:7) Now the exercising of the spirit is of much greater value than the exercising of the body. Such meditation purifies the soul: “And I swept my spirit.” Again, it enflames the heart. Psalm 39:4 says: “In my meditation a fire shall flame out.” And it subjugates the flesh. It helps in countless ways to bring about a well-ordered life.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux says this: [Meditation] first of all purifies the mind in which it arises. It then governs the feelings, directs actions, corrects excesses, controls our behavior, makes our life orderly, resolves doubts, strengthens what is slack, gathers together what is scattered, scrutinizes what is hidden, investigates the truth, tests what is plausible, determines what is false and illusory, plans our actions, and considers what we have done, that there may remain nothing uncorrected. [Meditation] foresees trouble in peaceful times, but heeds not the troubles when they come, thus showing both prudence and courage.”
—Bl. Humbert of Romans
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To love God is to love the cosmos, the earth, the body, materiality—the stuff of life—which is one with God without being identical to God.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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During our work and other activities, even during our reading and writing, no matter how spiritual, and even during our external devotions and vocal prayers, we must stop for a brief moment, as often as we can, to love God deep in our heart, to savor God, even though this is brief and in secret. Since you are aware that God is present before you during your actions, that God is in the deep center of your soul, why not stop your activities, and even your vocal prayers, at least from time to time, to love God, to praise God, ask for God’s help, offer God your heart, and thank God?
Ultimately, we can offer God no greater evidence of our faithfulness than by frequently detaching and turning from all things created so we can enjoy their Creator for a single moment. All this reverence must be done by faith, believing God is really living in our hearts….All our thoughts, words, and actions belong rightly to God. Let’s put this into practice.
—Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, OCD
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When there are no real strangers in your life, when everyone looks like you do, believes what you do, and speaks like you do, when your world is made up of only your own kind, it’s going to take some painful stretching of your soul to accept, and be comfortable with the fact, that people who are very different from you, who have different skin colors, speak different languages, live in different countries, have different religions, and have a different way of understanding things are just as precious to God as you are….Our natural narcissism and tendency to tribalism block us from seeing others’ lives as being as real and precious as our own.
We need to look at our false patriotism. We aren’t special as a nation, no more special than any other nation. Our dreams, heartaches, joys, pains, deaths, do not count more before God than other persons and places in the world. The lives of hundreds of thousands of present-day refugees are just as precious as those of our own children.
The God whom Jesus revealed and incarnated may never be turned into a God of our own, who considers us more precious than other peoples or blesses us above others. Sadly, we are prone to turn God into our own tribal deity, in the name of family, blood, church, and country. But true faith doesn’t allow for that. Rather, a healthy, orthodox Christian theology teaches that God is especially present in the other, in the poor and in the stranger. God’s revelation comes to us through the outsider, what’s foreign to us, what stretches us beyond our comfort zone. God is everyone’s God equally, and far too great to be reduced to serving the interests of family, ethnicity, church and patriotism.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Jesus says, “But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.” (Mt 6:6) The inner room is a figure of speech for your innermost self, your deepest self where you are alone with God. We believe that God dwells within us. At the Last Supper, Jesus said that he and the Father will come and make their home with us.
God is everywhere. We can find God in the vast array of colors in a sunset, the smile of a baby, the majesty of a cascading waterfall, the graceful flight and song of birds. We can find God in human love and friendship. But we see God not only outside us, but also within us—in our inner room.
When people are “drawn to think about their real selves,” a Vatican II document says, “they turn to those deep recesses of their being where God who probes the heart awaits them.” God is there awaiting us. The same document describes conscience as “the most secret core and the sanctuary of the human person. There they are alone with God whose voice echoes in their depths.” The inner room?
There are many kinds of prayer: kneeling before a crucifix, worshiping with others at Mass, or in Holy Communion when Jesus is present sacramentally within us. In a variety of ways, the Holy Spirit helps us to pray. One way is in our inner room: talking to our Father in secret. “Contemplation is a mystery in which God reveals himself to us at the very Center of our most intimate self,” Thomas Merton wrote. Some may think that type of prayer is only for monks or nuns. But talking to God in your heart is for everyone.
God takes the initiative and is there before us. We need only to show up and listen. How we open ourselves may be different for each person. For example, some turn off all external stimuli, to quiet down and concentrate. Some need to be alone and undisturbed, in silence. There are different methods: asking the help of the Holy Spirit, prayerfully reading the Scriptures, repeating the Jesus prayer, following the breath as one is breathing.
This is not a selfish prayer. We emerge from our inner room full of love, ready to reach out to others. Have you found your inner room? What steps do you take to get there? God is always waiting.
—Friar Jeremy Harrington, OFM
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People often seem to start with this premise: “If I behave correctly, I will one day see God clearly.” Yet the biblical tradition says the exact opposite: If we see God clearly, we will behave in a good and human way. Our right behavior does not cumulatively lead to our true being; our true being leads to eventual right behavior.
Many of us think that good morality will lead to mystical union, but in fact, mystical union produces correct morality—along with a lot of joy. The greatest surprise is that sometimes a bad moral response results in the very collapsing of the ego that leads to our falling into the hands of the living God. (Heb 10:31)
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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August 15th: The Assumption of the B.V.M.
We believe that God is present in his entirety in every least particle of the universe, and in every fleeting moment. So it is not absurd to believe that the eternal Son might by his will be made man. The wonder is that he would, and he did. We can marvel with the poet John Donne that the God whom the universe cannot contain would permit himself to be shut up in the virginal cloister of the womb of Mary.
All that we believe about Mary is of a piece—its integrity is manifest in the prayers for Mass on the joyful feast of the Assumption. For the Assumption is not an afterthought. The angel Gabriel said that Mary was filled with grace, and therefore full of God, as full as any human being can be. This filling was God’s gift to her from the moment of her conception, and why, then should she suffer the fundamental curse of Adam, that is, the death we know and fear?
Mary worked in this hard dry world, she suffered from the sins of others, she suffered with those who suffered in body or in soul, and she, because she was pure, suffered more keenly than any mother when she saw her beloved Son nailed to the cross. So much did she share with all the daughters of Eve. But when she “fell asleep,” as the ancient Christians taught, the resurrection of the flesh was accomplished in her, just as her redemption by her Son already had been when she first came into the family of humankind.
—Anthony Esolen
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The birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God into the world, is the paradigmatic act of SOLIDARITY. God so loved the world that God took human form. It was total identification with the human condition, total solidarity with human history. God embodied love in a stable in the midst of the most imperialistic empire in the world, and from the beginning Jesus had to flee the excesses of power. From the beginning he was a threat to the established order. Jesus began life not as one of the elite but as a refugee, homeless, living on the run. Thus, the love of God for the world meant solidarity with the persecuted, the fugitive, the outcast.
—Renny Golden
God became flesh and launched his movement among those who were despised and rejected. Jesus didn’t go to the big city and seek recruits among the religious, political, and economic elite. He started in what today would be East L.A. or Spanish Harlem. To change the system, Jesus had to start with those who were excluded from the system. Although the good news of Jesus is for the whole human family, it goes first to the poor and all who are marginalized. He went first to those “outside the gate” of institutional power and authority.
—Robert Romero
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In Mary’s Assumption into heaven, we celebrate an infinitely greater conquest than the “giant step for mankind” when man first set foot on the moon. When the lowly Virgin of Nazareth set foot in paradise, body and spirit, it was the huge leap forward for humanity. This gives us hope that we are precious, destined to rise again. God does not allow our bodies to vanish into nothing. With God, nothing is lost!
Mary’s advice to us lies in her song, the “Magnificat”—“My soul magnifies the Lord.” Mary “aggrandizes” the Lord, not problems, which she did not lack at the time. She does not allow herself to be overwhelmed by difficulties and absorbed by fears. Rather, she puts God as the first greatness of life. Her joy is born not from the absence of problems, which come sooner or later, but from God’s presence.
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
