Medjugorje Message: February 25, 2024
Dear children! Pray and renew your heart so that the good which you have sown may bear the fruit of joy and oneness with God. Darnel has seized many hearts and they have become unfruitful; that is why, you little children, be light, love and my outstretched hands in this world which yearns for God Who is love. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
March 2024
The word “Lent” means “spring,” and Our Lady’s Lenten message this month appropriately uses an image from nature at springtime: the growing season when green shoots begin to appear from the seeds that have been silently germinating in the dark earth of winter. As in past messages, Our Lady refers to our hearts as the ground in which our deeds are the “seeds” sown, intended to flower out in green plants and fruit. In Medjugorje, she has urged us to “work in your hearts as you work in the fields,” sowing seeds that will produce good fruits.
In this month’s Lenten message, Our Lady again addresses the “HEART of the matter” by reminding us that our external “good” deeds performed outwardly must be “rooted” in the fertile ground of a clean, pure, open, and loving HEART. She begins by saying: “Pray and renew your heart so that the good which you have sown may bear the fruit of joy and oneness with God.” Just as a garden or field must have its earth tilled and its soil amended, preparing it to receive the seeds that can grow into a fruitful plant—we also must “renew our heart” which is the ground and root of whatever outward deeds we perform, whatever actions that emerge from us.
How do we prepare the ground of our HEART? Our Lady says, “PRAY.” Prayer is the irrigating water, the beckoning sunlight, and the organic fertilizer that enriches the soil of our heart, opening it to the “good-deed seeds” that we sow—both in Lent and throughout the year—so that they can bear the desired fruit. And what is that fruit? Is it the pride and self-satisfaction we feel when others admire our fasting and almsgiving? Is it the affection and esteem of those who think we’re holy? Is it the soothing safety of feeling we have “fire insurance” against hell or purgatory through our penitential deeds? None of that!
Our Lady says that the good that is sown in our hearts through prayer is meant to “bear the fruit of JOY and ONENESS WITH GOD.” Lent is NOT about our own feats of strength in penance and renunciation, but about the JOY of a growing relationship with God. The “growing season” of Lent is about growing more and more intimate with our Creator, until the ultimate fruit of “ONENESS” with God appears. This contemplative ONENESS is not something exclusively reserved for cloistered religious and renowned mystics, but it is the universal invitation given to every human being. It is for anyone who is willing to PRAY. Hence Our Lady’s tireless call to PRAYER in Medjugorje, begging us to be willing to meet our loving Lord who awaits our prayer-presence every day.
Our Lady continues, using a word that we non-farming city-dwellers might not know: “Darnel has seized many hearts and they have become unfruitful.” What is “darnel“? It refers to the “weeds” or “tares” that inevitably sprout up along with the good growth in a field or garden. In Matthew 13, Jesus uses the image of “the wheat and the tares” that must grow together: “The Kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field: but while he slept, his enemy came and sowed tares [“darnel-weeds”] among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprang up and brought forth fruit, the tares [“darnel-weeds”] appeared also….The householder said, an enemy has done this.” Traditionally, the “tares” in this parable have been identified with the “darnel-weed” that grows among wheat grain in Israel—a species of bearded rye grass which closely resembles wheat in the early growth period, making it very difficult to sift and separate from the good grain. Thus it is generally left to grow up in the midst of the wheat, just as the Gospel parable indicates.
But what does Our Lady mean, that “darnel has seized many hearts and they have become unfruitful“? If the human heart is the “ground” or “soil” within which the “seeds” of our “deeds” are sown, then if “darnel has seized many hearts,” that means that destructive weeds have invaded the foundation of our actions and behavior in the world—thus an “enemy” within is sabotaging our lives! As a result, the ground of our hearts has “become unfruitful” —not bearing “the fruit of JOY and ONENESS with God.” Notice that in the parable of the wheat and tares, the weed-sowing saboteur and enemy of the landowner operates “while he is sleeping.” This presents some consciousness-raising questions for each of us:
+ Has “darnel” seized all or parts of MY heart?
+ Can I identify the “destructive weeds” that are mingled in with the good seeds of my heart?
+ Does the “good” that I sow in my outward actions bear the fruit of “joy and oneness with God” in my life?
+ Or is my “good seed” sown in a merely mechanical, detached, automatic, impersonal, and unfruitful way?
+ If “darnel” damage to my heart-ground is happening because I am “sleeping” in unawareness, how can I wake up?
Our Lady’s message presents the important Lenten teaching that we hear beginning on Ash Wednesday: the intrinsic connection that must exist between our outward, exterior acts and the inward, interior state of our HEART. The message of Lent is that these two distinct realities must join to become ONE so that our good seeds sown in action are rooted in the good soil of a HEART grounded only in Divine Love, without the “darnel” of weeds that can choke and destroy the fruit. As Teresa of Avila said, “Martha and Mary must meet” within us. Only (external) ACTION and (interior) CONTEMPLATION, joined together in the ground of a loving heart produce the fruits of genuine, authentic, sincere, lasting “GOOD” in the world.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, in clarifying the Pharisees’ confusion over external vs. internal influences that “defile,” taught that it was NOT external but internal things of the HEART that defile a person: “For from the HEART come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy.” (Mt 15:19) Are any of these things present in OUR hearts as the “darnel” that “seizes” and overtakes the ground of our Being, robbing us of its fruit? Lent is a good time to examine our conscience for these “tares” or “weeds” that may lurk within, and confess them in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Once found, we may ask, are these “weeds” in our heart being sown by our enemy, Satanic ego, “while we are sleeping“?
What keeps us “asleep” to the dark and evil influences creeping silently into our hearts? During Lent we want to WAKE UP! We seek a more sensitized awareness of the thoughts and impressions we allow into our consciousness—for example, through social media, visual entertainment, music, books, gossip and idle chatter, brooding upon resentments and past hurts under the influence of alcohol or drugs, mindless consumption of habitually unhealthy food, etc. All of these are forms of SLEEP that expose us to the sabotage of “darnel” weeds sown into the ground of our heart by the “enemy” of our soul. These heart-tares render us “unfruitful,” stealing “the fruit of JOY and ONENESS WITH GOD.” In prayer and mindfulness, let us AWAKEN!
Our Lady concludes: “That is why, you little children, be light, love and my outstretched hands in this world which yearns for God Who is love.” Here Our Lady beckons us to “BE” the good earth, the darnel-free hearts that are “fruitful” with “JOY and ONENESS WITH GOD.” Through PRAYER our hearts are “renewed” as fertile ground for the Divine Indwelling Presence of God, and thus prepared to “BE Light, Love,” and Our Lady’s “outstretched hands” to the hurting, lonely world. Through our very BEING—that is, the integrated unity of our inner heart with our outer actions—the Divine Light and Love of Jesus and Mary may be transmitted, felt, and received by “this world which yearns for God Who is love.”
Our Lady has repeatedly lamented that our world is “lost,” and indeed we are constantly distracted and sidetracked into wanting, desiring, craving, and pursuing all the wrong things—namely, our sick culture’s misleading symbols for safety/security, affection/esteem, power/control, and pleasure. Yet Our Lady calls us to reach out and “BE” ourselves the “LIGHT” and “LOVE” to “this world which yearns for God Who is love.” How can this happen? Through the simplest, most basic gestures of kindness, gentleness, care and courtesy—beginning with a mere smile and “hello”—that we offer to our fellow human beings each day. In these small and easy ways we are giving “water” to the desperately “thirsty” plants all around us—ALL of whom are “yearning for love.”
As a True Mother, Our Lady sees through all our misguided “emotional programs for happiness” that will never work. She sees that behind all the weaknesses and foibles of our addictive cravings, obsessive fixations, and compulsive misbehaviors is a bedrock, root YEARNING FOR LOVE. But in our fallen human condition we inevitably “look for love in all the wrong places“—in people, places and things that appeal to our superficial ego-needs but can never satisfy our inmost HEART’S longing. Our Lady—our True Mother who sees into our deepest depths—knows that in all of these attractions, desires, cravings and longings that drive us (often sinfully) toward lesser loves, we are ACTUALLY (and mostly unconsciously) yearning for “GOD WHO IS LOVE.” This buried interior attunement to Divine Love is our innermost core of goodness and our True Self.
Heaven’s profound understanding of what truly “makes us tick” constitutes the endless mercy and compassion of Our Lady, Our Lord, and our Creator God-Who-Is-Love. This understanding of our root, heart “yearning” fuels their infinite patience with us—we “poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” This Lent, through PRAYER, may we let God transform our UNCONSCIOUS (and often destructive) desire for “love” into the CONSCIOUS (and always fruitful) desire for “GOD Who is love.” As our “Prayer of the Heart” gradually bears the fruit of “Conversion of Heart,” we will be prepared to go forth with “outstretched hands” to “BE” love for our needy, broken, and yearning world.
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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
It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than to have words without a heart.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi
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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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Jesus’ time in the wilderness was essential to His spiritual journey—one that He invites his disciples to engage in, as well. Jesus needed the time of preparation in the desert. He needed to get His mission clear in His own heart so that He wouldn’t be captivated by the expectations of adoring fans or intimidated by the threats of furious critics. If we dare to follow Jesus and proclaim the radical dimensions of God’s good news as He did, we will face the same twin dangers of domestication and intimidation.
—Brian McLaren
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Jesus appears in the desert as the representative of the human race. He bears within himself the experience of the human predicament in its raw intensity. Hence, he is vulnerable to the temptations of Satan. “Satan” in the New Testament means the Enemy or the Adversary, a mysterious and malicious spirit that is more than a personification of our unconscious evil tendencies. The temptations of Satan are allowed by God to help us confront our own evil tendencies. If relatives and friends fail to bring out the worst in us, Satan is always around to finish the job. Self-knowledge is experiential; it tastes the full depths of human weakness. In the desert Jesus is tempted by the primitive instincts of human nature.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Jesus deliberately took upon himself the human condition—fragile, broken, alienated from God and other people. A whole program of self-centered concerns has been built up around our instinctual needs and have become energy centers—sources of motivation around which our emotions, thoughts and behavior patterns circulate like planets around the sun. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these programs for happiness influence our view of the world and our relationship with God, other people and ourselves. This is the situation that Jesus went into the desert to heal. During Lent our work is to confront these programs for happiness and to detach ourselves from them. The scriptures of Lent and the example of Jesus encourage us in this struggle for inner freedom and conversion.
Jesus redeemed us from the consequences of our emotional programs for happiness by experiencing them himself. As a human being, he passed through the pre-rational stages of developing human consciousness: immersion in matter; the emergence of a body-self; and the development of conformity consciousness—over-identification with one’s family, nation, ethnic group and religion. He had to deal with the limited values of each level of human development formed in infancy to the age of reason, without, of course, ever ratifying with his will their illusory projects for happiness.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Lenten ashes as a symbol are blunt, primal, archetypal, and speak the language of the soul. Something inside of us knows why we take the ashes. Ashes are dust, soil, humus; “humanity” and “humility” come from these. To put on ashes, to sit in ashes, is to say publicly and to yourself that you are in a penitential mode, that this is not “ordinary time” for you. Smudging oneself with ashes says that this is not a season of celebration, that some important work is going on inside you, and that you are, metaphorically and really, in the cinders of a dead fire, waiting for something fuller in your life. There’s something innate in the human soul that understands that every so often one must descend, be smudged, lose one’s luster, and wait for ashes to do their silent work. All ancient traditions abound with stories of sitting in the ashes. You sit in the ashes for healing. Lent is a time to be still and silent so that the ashes can do their work.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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The struggle between the old and the new self is a constant theme in the New Testament. The false self easily adjusts to the circumstances of the spiritual journey as long as it does not have to change itself. Thus it manifests its radical self-centeredness in various expressions: in material pursuits such as wealth and power; in emotional satisfactions such as relationships; in intellectual goals such as Ph.D.’s; in social goals such as status and prestige; in religious aspirations such as fasting and acts of piety, prayer, practicing virtue, and any form of ministry.
The Gospel calls us forth to full responsibility for our emotional life. We tend to blame other people or situations for the turmoil we experience. In actual fact, upsetting emotions prove beyond doubt that the problem is in us. If we do not assume responsibility for our emotional programs in the unconscious level and take measures to change them, we will be influenced by them to the end of our lives. As long as these programs are in place, we cannot hear other people and their cries for help; their problems must first be filtered through our own emotional needs, reactions, and prepackaged values. No amount of theological study can heal the false self system, because as long as our emotional programs for happiness are firmly in place, such studies are easily co-opted by them.
The heart of the Christian ascesis—and the work of Lent—is to face the unconscious values that underlie the emotional programs for happiness and to change them. (Conversion, or repentance, or “metanoia” literally means to change the direction in which we are looking for happiness.) Hence the need of a discipline of contemplative prayer and action.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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The Lenten liturgy begins with the temptations of Jesus in the desert, which deal with the three areas of instinctual need that every human being experiences in growing up. Jesus was tempted to satisfy his bodily hunger by seeking security in magic rather than in God; to jump off the pinnacle of the temple in order to make a name for himself as a wonderworker; and to fall down and worship Satan in order to receive absolute power over the nations of the world. Security, esteem, power—these are three classic areas where temptation works on our false programs for happiness.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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There is something in God and something in us that correspond. We come from, have our being in, and return to GOD. In the tradition of the HEART, that correspondence is LOVE. Love, not mere sentiment or feeling, but love as the inner dynamism of God. Love as the generative power that overcomes death. Love as self-donation. Love as the welcome of the “other” as another self. Love as the gravitational force that binds all disparate things together. Love as the fire that burns clean and as the balm that heals. Love as the vision that sees integrity of both parts and whole. Love as source and end, and the path between. The tradition of the HEART does not say that God loves us “because,” or that God’s love can be seen “in,” but that God IS LOVE. And that this very essence of God might truly be encountered in some small way, here and now.
—Wendy Wright
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EASTER, with its grace of interior resurrection, is the radical healing of the human condition.
LENT which prepares us for this grace, is about what needs to be healed.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
It is time to act, and in Lent, to act also means to pause. To pause in prayer, in order to receive the word of God, to pause like the Samaritan in the presence of a wounded brother or sister. Love of God and love of neighbor are ONE LOVE. Not to have other gods is to pause in the presence of God beside the flesh of our neighbor. For this reason, prayer, almsgiving and fasting are not three unrelated acts, but a single movement of openness and self-emptying, in which we cast out the idols that weigh us down, the attachments that imprison us. Then the atrophied and isolated heart will revive. Slow down, then, and pause!
The contemplative dimension of life that Lent helps us to rediscover will release new energies. In the presence of God, we become brothers and sisters, more sensitive to one another: in place of threats and enemies, we discover companions and fellow travelers. This is God’s dream, the Promised Land to which we journey once we have left our slavery behind.
Woe to us if our Christian penance were to resemble the kind of penance that so dismayed Jesus. Instead, let others see our joyful faces, catch the scent of freedom and experience the love that makes all things new, beginning with the smallest and those nearest to us. This can happen in every one of our Christian communities.
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
