Medjugorje Message: December 25, 2023
Dear children! I am carrying my Son Jesus to you to fill your hearts with peace, because He is peace. Little children, seek Jesus in the silence of your heart that He be born anew. The world needs Jesus, therefore seek Him through prayer, because He gives Himself daily to each of you.
Annual Message to Visionary Jacov Colo: December 25, 2023
Dear children, today with my Son in my arms, I desire to call all of you to pray to the little Jesus for the healing of your heart. Children, often in your hearts sin rules which destroys your life and you cannot feel God’s presence. That is why, on this day of grace, when grace is spreading throughout the whole world, surrender your life and your heart to the Lord, so that the Lord may heal them with His grace. Only with pure hearts will you be able to experience the birth of Jesus anew in you, and the light of His birth will illuminate your life. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
January 2024
In this, Our Lady’s monthly message to the world, as well as in her annual Christmas message to the visionary Jacov Colo, she conveys one common theme: that her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, must be “born anew” within each of our human hearts. In both of these apparitions on December 25th, Our Lady was holding Baby Jesus in her arms, just as she has appeared every Christmas Day since 1981 in Medjugorje.
She begins her brief monthly message to the world: “I am carrying my Son Jesus to you to fill your hearts with peace, because He is peace.” In our violent, war-torn world so desperately in need of peace, Our Lady clarifies that Jesus Himself “IS” PEACE, and that He must inhabit completely, or “fill,” our hearts if we are ever to experience the outward peace in our world for which we long, as we watch in helpless daily horror the mass slaughter that is “man’s inhumanity to man“—whether in Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, or a thousand other places. But how can the Baby Jesus who “IS PEACE” be transferred from Mary’s arms into our troubled, peaceless world?
Our Lady continues: “Little children, seek Jesus in the silence of your heart that He be born anew.” It is said that we seek God everywhere except the one, nearest and most obvious place where the Divine dwells: within our own heart, at the center of our inmost Being. Here, inside us, Our Lady says, God is waiting to be “born anew” while we are foolishly looking outward to a million external people, places and things—either for the “Big God” of our religious imagination (in adventurous attention to shrines, devotions, or pilgrimages to distant lands), or for the “small gods” of our false-self system (the culture’s many status symbols for safety/security, affection/esteem, power/control, and pleasure).
With our gaze ever fixed in an outward direction toward these things, we marvel, cluelessly, at the tragic unraveling of our civilization, the sad state of unending brutality and killing of innocents in armed conflict, and the degradation and destruction of our planet Earth. Feeling powerless to stop the unfolding tragedy “out there,” we distract ourselves with a nonstop bombardment of digital “entertainment” on our devices and screens, medicating our mounting anxiety and grief through the mind-numbing influence of social and mass media’s inane humor, petty drama, and mindless chatter.
In contrast, Our Lady tells us to “seek Jesus in the SILENCE of your heart.” Amidst all our pearl-clutching, hand-wringing, finger-pointing panic over the declining state of our world, do we ever stop to look inside, to seek “the SILENCE of our heart“? The “Silent Night/Holy Night“ WITHIN, that is the place of encounter with “peace on earth”: Jesus Christ? This Personal Peace must inhabit the individual human heart before it can ever appear on the bigger stage of “world peace.”
Our Lady ends her succinct Christmas message: “The world needs Jesus, therefore seek Him through prayer, because He gives Himself daily to each of you.” Based on her previous sentence, saying that Jesus “IS PEACE,” we could rephrase this closing line to read: “The world needs PEACE, therefore seek PEACE through prayer, because PEACE gives [itself] daily to each of you.” Our Lady is bluntly telling us that we already have all that is needed for “world peace”: it lies within the “silence of our heart” where the Divine Indwelling waits to be “born anew” each day.
But sadly, even after 42 years of the Queen of Peace repeatedly calling us to “PRAYER OF THE HEART” as the pathway to PEACE, we still insist upon focusing our attention outward, toward external influences that condition our brains to seek our “Big” and “little” gods anywhere and everywhere but in the silent center of our inmost being where Christ our Peace dwells. He dwells within us, just as an unborn child dwells in the womb, waiting to be “born anew” if only we would willingly surrender ourselves (as a mother on the birthing bed must)—through our intention and attention—to the “labor” necessary to “deliver” Divine Peace into our broken and barren world.
Unlike Our Lady’s usual Christmas messages to the world, which are typically joyful, serene, and celebratory, this message is terse, clipped, and almost abrupt, omitting her familiar closing salutation: “Thank you for having responded to my call.” In fact, the visionary Marija who received this apparition noted: “Our Lady came solemnly dressed with little Jesus in her arms. Jesus extended His hand in a sign of blessing as Our Lady prayed over us in Aramaic.” These details provide much for us to “ponder” in “the silence of our hearts,” just as Mary herself pondered the divine mysteries of her own life. Why was she “solemnly dressed” rather than festively dressed on Christmas? (Was it a black garment of mourning for all who are dying?) And why was she praying over the people in Aramaic—the ancient semitic language of Israel at the time of Jesus, the mother-tongue of the Holy Family—rather than in a language the visionaries themselves speak and understand, like Croatian or Italian?
It seems that Our Lady was giving a “live demonstration” of the truth she was teaching: As she prayed, the Indwelling Christ-child, now visibly present in her arms—just as He is present within each of our hearts that open, like a dilating womb, to His newborn emergence into fleshly manifestation—was “extending His hand in a sign of blessing.” The Divine Christ-Presence within us will also bestow the blessing of peace upon the world around us—if only we will “get out of His way” and enable Him to do so by opening our hearts to the “Silent Night/Holy Night” within, where, through PRAYER in SILENCE, Jesus our Peace is waiting and yearning to be “born anew” each day!
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In Our Lady’s annual Christmas Day message to Jacov (the youngest of the Medjugorje visionaries), she gives a similar message to Marija’s, but with gently added explanation and the warm maternal closing: “I bless you with my motherly blessing. Thank you for having responded to my call.” We can see that Our Lady always addresses her audience appropriately. With Jacov and his group, she was speaking not to “the whole world” but to those who are clearly committed to following the Queen of Peace’s “School of Prayer” at Medjugorje. And so she begins: “Dear children, today with my Son in my arms, I desire to call all of you to pray to little Jesus for the healing of your heart. Children, often in your heart sin rules which destroys your life and you cannot feel God’s presence.” Ouch. This is a hard teaching to hear, yet our Mother knows us through and through.
How many people today on our tragically injured planet have become so enslaved by sin that their lives and hearts are “destroyed” and now incapable of “feeling God’s presence“? By inviting Jacov’s group to “pray for the healing of your heart,” Our Lady acknowledges that an INJURED HEART is part of the HUMAN CONDITION—even for those of us already committed to the spiritual journey, following a religious path, and desiring daily conversion. An injured heart in need of healing is our common inheritance and universal human predicament, also known as “original sin.” Because of it, there is no one among us who is completely free of psychic pain, emotional damage, and hurtful memories that were sown into our personality through early childhood experiences.
Because of our human condition (“original sin“), ALL parents are, at best, imperfect—making conscious and unconscious mistakes with their children. Sadly, depending on the state of their own “unhealed hearts,” many parents inflict terrible damage on their children through neglect and abuse. So by the time we reach adulthood, it becomes obvious that EVERY HUMAN BEING without exception is in need of “heart healing.”
Much help can come through the healing arts like psychotherapy/ professional counseling/ 12-Step recovery; indeed, God works through all kinds of human healers to address our ailments of body, mind and spirit. But the most accessible healing help for anyone who suffers (that is, ALL of us!) is turning directly to Jesus in PRAYER. The call to “prayer of the heart” in Medjugorje has been Our Lady’s keynote message for 42 years. She knows that “often in our hearts SIN RULES which destroys our life.” How true this is!
“Sin rules” when there is any sort of addiction in our life: drugs, alcohol, sex/pornography, shopping/hoarding, gambling/gaming, screen-scrolling: cell phone/internet/television, etc. “Sin rules” when there is any sort of adulterous, disordered, compulsive, or codependent relationship in our life. “Sin rules” in our hearts when anything or anyone becomes an “idol” replacing God rather than an “icon” reflecting God in our life. If we search our hearts and examine our conscience, we know that Our Lady is correct in saying: “Often in your hearts sin rules.”
When this happens, she says, “you cannot feel God’s presence.” This is because we are filling the innate “God-sized hole” in our heart with lesser “stuff” that pushes out any God-awareness. To be unable to feel God’s presence (the Spirit of Life) is the WORST HUMAN TRAGEDY of all, for Our Lady says it means that sin has now “destroyed our life.” We are lost in a pit of deepening darkness.
Our Lady concludes her Christmas message to Jacov: “That is why, on this day of grace, when grace is spreading throughout the whole world, surrender your life and your heart to the Lord, so that the Lord may heal them with His grace. Only with pure hearts will you be able to experience the birth of Jesus anew in you, and the light of His birth will illuminate your life.” Our Lady clearly refers to Christmas as that “day of grace“—the day when children focus on Santa and his sleigh-full of gifts as “grace spreading throughout the whole world.” But the real “GRACE” of which Our Lady speaks is the grace of God poured into this small, far-flung planet in a remote galaxy of the universe when Jesus Christ took on our weak, vulnerable flesh and showed us how to be fully human in spite of our disabled human condition, hobbled by original sin.
As adults, we still fixate childishly upon the external gifts of an idolatrous culture’s materialism and consumerism. Instead, Our Lady calls us to “surrender your life and your heart to the Lord, so that the Lord may heal them with His grace.” How do we do this? By giving time each day to seeking Jesus in the silence of our hearts, emptying out our own thoughts, ideas, agendas, plans, fantasies, worries, fears, and grievances…listening only for His voice within…watching attentively for His movements in our body, mind and spirit…following our breath, heartbeat, muscle sensations—all given by Him in each moment.
Focusing only upon the Lord and what He is doing within our inmost being, here and now: this is “PRAYER OF THE HEART”—a “heart healing” practice through which Jesus purifies our heart. All the vain, deceptive, phony, useless, and toxic idols of our life are cast out in these moments of surrendering and resting in the Lord, delightfully “letting go and letting God” purify us. Our Lady says: “Only with pure hearts will you be able to experience the birth of Jesus anew in you, and the light of His birth will illuminate your life.” Indeed our illuminated life will shine as “the true light that enlightens everyone [is again] coming into the world.” (John 1:9)
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EXTRA APPARITION in Medjugorje on JANUARY 1, 2024!
At 3 pm on January 1st, the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, all the pilgrims in Medjugorje were invited to a 3-hour Prayer Meeting with the visionary Marija on Apparition Hill. As the meeting was ending at 6 pm, Our Lady appeared to Marija. She was joyful and prayed over everyone, giving the following message:
“Thank you for responding to my call and thank you for praying for my intentions. Neither you, nor your children, nor your children’s children will regret it.”
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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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Our task too is to give birth to Christ. From Mary, we get the pattern: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.
Christmas isn’t automatic. It can’t be taken for granted. It began with Mary, but each of us is asked to make our own contribution to giving flesh to faith in the world.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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The virgin birth is more, much more than a Christmas story. It’s a story of how close Christ will come to you. The first stop on his itinerary was a womb. 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,” 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. Every day you live will be a Christmas. Deliver Christ into the world—your world.
—Max Lucado
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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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Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus. Francis of Assisi realized that since God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. Christmas says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality. It’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas.
We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit hidden inside of everything material. The Incarnation manifests a universal principle—not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. This is the universal sense of the Incarnation—the Universal or Cosmic Christ that is forever being born in the human soul and into history. It is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world. We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter, for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Perhaps we received our first antiseptic views of holiness from a sterilized story of incarnation far removed from its reality. The birth of Jesus has been domesticated and dulled to make it more palatable. But there’s something subversively fleshly and carnal about Mary birthing God and her role as an active agent in the messy, material, and immanent. This matters because a broken, refugee, brown, female, naked, stretched, hormonal, marginalized body is how divinity entered this world and where divinity still makes itself known today. Our nativity scenes are far removed from the bloody, raw, very human process of birth. Both the nativity scene and our faith are made up of the naked, the primal, even the offensive—the sadness, the questions, the longing, the despair, the anger. Encompassed within the birth of Jesus is the deeply difficult and deeply beautiful, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material. Like our lives—fleshly and also holy.
—Kat Armas
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Jesus’ family tree contains as many sinners as saints and his origins are rooted in liars, betrayers, adulterers, and murderers. Jesus was pure, but his origins were not. In his genealogy were fourteen kings, only two of whom were considered faithful to God. The rest were adulterers, murderers, incompetents, power-seekers, and harem-wastrels. There are women who are significant in Jesus’ lineage…Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, Mary. Each of these women had marital issues that contained elements of irregularity or scandal, yet each was able to be an instrument in God’s birth on this planet. This birth throws light on our own lives. Grace is pure, but we who mediate it often aren’t. Still, God’s love and plan are not derailed by our infidelities, sin and scheming. God’s designs for grace still somehow work—a lesson in encouragement.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. We cannot know this mystery of Christ as a doctrine or an idea; it is the root reality of all existence. Hence, we must travel inward, into the interior depth of the soul where the field of divine love is expressed in the “thisness” of our own, particular life. Each of us is a little word of the Word of God, a mini-incarnation of divine love. The journey inward requires surrender to this mystery in our lives, which means letting go of our “control buttons.” It means dying to the untethered selves that occupy us daily; it means embracing the sufferings of our lives, little and big. It means allowing God’s grace to heal us and empower us for life; it means entering into and learning to trust the darkness, for divine love is already there. It means to let God’s love heal us of the opposing tensions within us.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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Let Us Sit with Our Breathing: Taking Conscious Breaths
Every time you take a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking Spirit into matter, and thus repeating God’s creation of humankind. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning Spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a “little dying” as we pay the price of inspiriting the world. Your very breathing models your entire vocation as a human being: you are an incarnation, like Christ, of matter and spirit operating as one. This is how we continue the mystery of incarnation in space and time.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Christ is always with us, asking for room in our hearts….And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks or needs it, is giving it to Christ.
—Dorothy Day
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Jesus did not merely assume a human body and soul; He assumed the actual human condition in its entirety, including the instinctual needs of human nature and the cultural conditioning of His time. “The Word was made flesh” signifies that by taking the human condition upon Himself with all its consequences, Jesus introduced into the entire human family the principle of transcendence, giving the evolutionary process a decisive thrust toward God-consciousness. “To everyone who received Him, He gave power to become the children of God,” that is, to know their Divine Source.
The joy of Christmas is the intuition that all limitations to growth into higher states of consciousness have been overcome. The Divine Light cuts across all darkness, prejudice, preconceived ideas, prepackaged values, false expectations, phoniness and hypocrisy. It presents us with the truth. To act out of the truth is to make Christ grow not only in ourselves, but in others. The humdrum duties of daily life become sacramental, shot through with eternal implications. “Now is the time of salvation.”
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Our Lady stands before us in all her glory to show what marvels God will accomplish in us, what heights, if we but give ourselves to him as she did, and allow him to work in us. She submitted herself without reserve to God’s action, carried out with unswerving fidelity all those things he had prepared beforehand for her life, little or great. From moment to moment Mary looked for God’s guidance and followed one step at a time. She embraced with all her heart whatever he willed or permitted. Her life was a continual fiat to his operations. In fact, all was sweet because it was Love’s will. Mary passed from one duty to another with the same tranquility and singleness of purpose: ever hand-in-hand with the Beloved, her eyes upon him. She did not seek to know what torments were in store. That was God’s affair, not hers.
Every Christian life must be a contemplative life overflowing in loving service. A Christian knows, loves, and serves. Let us learn from Our Lady how to cooperate with divine action. Let us discern it too in the condition of our bodies: in weariness, aches, pains, as well as in wellbeing. God’s action is always there. He is always carrying out his purpose of deifying us.
—Sr. Ruth Burrows, OCD
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Faith allows Christians to live this hour differently than in a worldly mentality. Faith in Jesus Christ, God incarnate, born of the Virgin Mary, gives a new way of feeling time. It is a perspective of gratitude and hope. Christian gratitude and hope are different from the worldly versions of these virtues, which are only apparent and lack a deeper connection with God and all of humanity. They are focused on the ego, on its interests, and so they are short of breath, they cannot go beyond satisfaction and optimism. But the Christian perspective is marked by praise, amazement, and gratitude, grounded in the mystery of the Incarnation, as the liturgy expresses it: “We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
The Church learns true Christian gratitude and hope best from the Virgin Mary, as she contemplated the newborn Savior. The hope of Mary and the Church is not optimism, it is something else: It is faith in God, faithful to his promises. This faith takes the form of hope in the dimension of time, as we are “on the way.” The Christian, like Mary, is a pilgrim of hope. Go to the school of Mary. Could we have a better teacher of prayer than our Holy Mother? Let’s learn from her to live every day, every moment, every occupation with an interior gaze turned to Jesus.
—New Year’s Eve Vatican liturgy, Dec. 31, 2023
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
