Medjugorje Message: July 25, 2024
My dear children, with joy I have chosen you and am leading you, because in you, little children, I see people of faith, hope and prayer. May you, little children, be led by the pride that you are mine, and I am leading you to Him, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. And I am with you so that peace may win in you and around you, because it is with this intention God sent me to you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
August 2024
In this month’s message to the world, we might say that Our Lady is “taking ownership” of her relationship with us—how it started, what its purpose is, and what heavenly goal and intention of God motivates it. Surprisingly, Our Lady’s message does not begin with the words, “Dear children,” which we’ve heard consistently for decades—but rather with the more proprietary words, “MY dear children.” Four times in this message, Our Lady uses the pronoun “I,” saying “I have chosen you”…”in you, I see”…”I am leading you”…and “I am with you” —repeatedly voicing her maternal action and role in our life. And she boldly calls us to “be led by the pride that you are mine.” For humble Mary to invite any sort of “pride” is truly noteworthy! Yet she calls us to revel and rejoice in being “hers” —the daughters and sons of the Mother of God!
In the various “ownership” statements of “my,” “mine,” and “I” in this message, we are privileged to get a rare glimpse of Our Lady “flexing her maternal muscles” of feminine power and leadership in our world. The dictionary defines “taking ownership” as “being accountable for something and driving it to completion.” For the past 43 years in Medjugorje, Our Lady has openly revealed that she is on a mission from God, the Most High and that, being accountable to God, she needs our help and cooperation in order to complete her mission. She has told us repeatedly that her mission is violently opposed by Satan—that ancient enemy of the “Woman clothed with the sun”—with whom she (and all of her children) are locked in a cosmic battle. This mortal conflict of spirit is played out continuously, as we each wrestle with demonic ego in our everyday life.
Our Lady begins: “My dear children, with joy I have chosen you and am leading you, because in you, little children, I see people of faith, hope and prayer.” From this sentence we learn that it was up to Our Lady to CHOOSE the place of her apparitions in 1981, that she was given free reign and carte blanche to discern the best site. In praising her choice now, we might suppose that Our Lady speaks mostly about the six visionaries, and, more broadly, of the village of Medjugorje and parish of St. James—the place she has “chosen” out of all the world as the site of her “final apparitions on earth.” She has chosen this place and these people “with joy” because she sees in them “faith, hope and prayer.” Seeing this, she discerned that Medjugorje would be good “soil,” receptive to the “seeds” of her messages.
Indeed, the small, humble village of simple-living farmers “between the hills” (“Medju-gorje”) is a centuries-old community of devout Catholics who from the start responded to Our Lady’s call with utmost fidelity, support and enthusiasm. Through their openness and devotion, Medjugorje became a School of Prayer and place of pilgrimage for the whole world. Along with the local residents, we who have been touched, influenced, or converted by Medjugorje may see this opening sentence as addressed to US, as well. To us, also, Our Lady says: “My dear children, with joy I have chosen you and am leading you because in you I see people of faith, hope and prayer.” May it be so! Through our daily conversion, may we grow stronger in all three of these attributes.
Our Lady continues: “May you, little children, be led by the pride that you are mine, and I am leading you to Him, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Three times in this message, Our Lady refers to “leadership“—her “leading” us and our being “led.” It is striking that her leadership instruction tells us, directly and precisely, where to place our “pride” : “Be led by the PRIDE that you are mine, and I am leading you” to Jesus Christ— “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” We may be puzzled by Our Lady’s use of the word “pride,” which is usually seen as the capital SIN or VICE of our human nature: as demonic EGO, the complete opposite and enemy of the highest human virtue, “HUMILITY.”
Yet the Blessed Virgin Mary is the ultimate human model of humility, unsurpassed except by her Son, Jesus Christ, our God who humbled himself to become a man reviled and executed by mere human beings— “even through death on a cross.” So we must understand how Our Lady uses the word “pride.” She asks for our “pride” in being “hers” —but not “hers” for her own sake; rather, we are “hers” only because she is our mother leading us to Christ—to GOD alone, the ONLY ONE who has any rightful “ownership” or “possession” of us as the creatures He made, the work of His hands. “Proudly,” we can say with St. Paul, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal 6:14)
In this teaching, Our Lady sets straight the many warped, twisted and corrupt ways that we are “led by pride” to become the “mine” or possession of unworthy human beings and worldly enterprises, rather than slaves of Jesus and Mary alone. In our human condition, we are easily seduced through our “need to belong” to something larger—to have a group membership or identity, and to serve a “leader.” Ideologies of all kinds beckon us into their servitude, and into following their “messiahs.”
For example, “The Proud Boys” —an all-male, nationalist, North American, neo-fascist militant group—were “led by the pride” of belonging to their political candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Later, as major drivers for political violence and extreme polarization in our nation, in 2020 they played a central role in the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol, a violent insurrection and disruption of the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Networking with neo-Nazi terrorist groups, “The Proud Boys” far-right hate movement is still mobilizing for future action today, and sees violence as an acceptable means to political ends. NOTHING could be further from the “pride of belonging” that Our Lady Queen of Peace asks of us in this month’s message. Indeed, Our Blessed Mother’s God-given mission to bring PEACE to our world can only lead us to “pray, pray, pray” for all such violent and hateful movements in our society—that the fear, anger, isolation, and anxiety driving their members may be healed by a personal experience of God’s love for them.
Our Lady’s instruction on the “pride of belonging” is meant to illustrate that we as her children, confident of God’s intimate love for us, belong to NO ONE on this earth. Such “belonging” to manmade cult membership is idolatry—a violation of the First Commandment that we have no gods but God. We are “in the world but not of the world,” and “belong” only to our heavenly Father, Mother, and Brother, for “our citizenship is in heaven.” (Phil 3:20) Our Lord was teaching the same truth in the Gospel when he said, “Call no one on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ.” (Mt 23:8-11)
The current popular ideology called “Christian Nationalism” is another insidious pairing of two unequal objects of devotion, with purported followers of Jesus pledging an equally fervent allegiance to the “Caesar” of worldly empire. Yet our Lord said clearly, “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36) and his Messiahship was not to be built upon an unholy alliance with earthly political power. Judas Iscariot, along with many other disciples through the ages, misunderstood the fundamental “separation of church and state” that Jesus expected in saying, “No one can serve two masters….You cannot serve both God and mammon.” (Mt 6:24)
Our Lady’s message challenges us to ask ourselves: By WHOM, or by what PRIDE of “belonging”, are we being “LED”? Her leadership takes us only toward “He Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Have we settled instead for something small, deceptive, false, worldly, and idolatrous, rooted in demonic ego? As children whom Our Lady chose as people of “faith, hope and prayer,” we must discern honestly how we are being “led” each day.
Our Lady concludes her message: “And I am with you so that peace may win in you and around you, because it is with this intention God sent me to you.” Here, once again, Our Lady reveals the divine intention behind her presence in Medjugorje these past 43 years— “so that PEACE may win in you and around you.” For this purpose, she says, “God sent me to you.” Peace in our world is elusive and greatly threatened. Last month Our Lady said, “Little children, peace is in danger.” We see this everywhere—between family members and friends, coworkers and neighbors. We see it writ large on the world stage of brutal international wars and on our national stage of internecine battles between political parties, fueling hateful culture wars that are raging in our country, often resulting in tragic gun violence and death. While the nuclear saber-rattling of despotic dictators stirs up fears of a “WW III,” in 1982 Our Lady told the Medjugorje visionaries, “The third world war will not take place.” However, extreme polarization—both in our own country and many others—weakens the fabric of national and human unity, leaving us “a house divided against itself“ (Mt 12:25) and making “civil war” a real concern.
We need a radical de-escalation of the heat and vitriol, the cruelty and incivility of our political discourse, especially in a contentious election year. The “cheap shots” and name-calling, exaggerations and distortions, pettiness, squabbling and hate speech that bombard our daily news cycle are more fitting on an elementary or junior-high schoolyard than in our national politics. But a “radical de-escalation” of this toxic and divisive negativity must indeed be “radical” —i.e. going to the ROOT of the problem, which is the Human Heart, the inner person of each one of us, the seat of our conscience and consciousness. Thus Our Lady—who introduced herself as the “Queen of Peace” in Medjugorje with the message, “Peace, peace, peace! Only peace!” —has spent the past 43 years of her apparitions focused on PRAYER with the HEART as the ultimate and only pathway to PEACE in our human condition.
Notice that she calls us—the children she has “chosen” to help her— “people of faith, hope and prayer.” Not “faith, hope and love” —the three theological virtues—but “faith, hope and PRAYER,” with the word “PRAYER” replacing “love,” which St. Paul called “the greatest of these” three. (1 Cor 13:13) For Our Lady, PRAYER is, in our human condition and capacity, synonymous with the highest LOVE, for “prayer” essentially means our RELATIONSHIP with God-Who-Is-Love. Through Prayer of the Heart we are led by Our Lady to “Him Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life” —to Jesus. And, as St. Paul tells us, “He himself is our PEACE, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh…that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing PEACE, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it. He came and preached PEACE to you who were far off and PEACE to those who were near, for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Eph 2:14-18)
This miraculous reconciling of the dualities and “enmity” of our world into a UNITY of Spirit and ONENESS of Love—whether between Gentiles and Jews, women and men, Israelis and Palestinians, conservatives and liberals, Russians and Ukrainians, white people and black people, communists and capitalists, religious and non-religious, wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, Republicans and Democrats, etc.—can truly happen! Even in our broken, ego-bound human condition, Christ himself can establish PEACE and reconcile all things, through the power of PRAYER.
In this month of keen competition (both Olympic/athletic and political), Our Lady gives us the keys to “WINNING”: they are her leadership in prayer and our being “led” to taking pride ONLY in our belonging to her and her Son (nothing else!). In life we all want to “WIN” and be “WINNERS.” Heaven’s “intention” reveals that this can only happen when “PEACE” wins— “in you and around you.” Thus our work on this earth is to cultivate peace “IN” our heart, mind, and innermost being through PRAYER. Only then will we experience peace “AROUND” us in the vast world of relationships beyond our prayer cushion.
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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
Contemplation is a wordless resting in the presence of God beyond all thoughts and images.
—James Finley
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WE CANNOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS WITH THE SAME THINKING THAT WE USED WHEN WE CREATED THEM.
—Albert Einstein
DIVISION BEGINS IN THE MIND AND CAN BE ENDED BY THE HEART.
—Robb Smith
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Political differences are real, but they are nothing in the face of our infinite capacity for expanding our minds and hearts to accommodate new and different realities, lived realities our neighbors desperately want to show us, have us listen to, and have us affirm as real and valid.
To reject this principle is to cauterize oneself from the full lifeworld, and what is a polarized society if not two groups who have retreated fully into their preferred barren demi-realities?
But there’s another way. Cultivating an integral mind and heart is a path that takes us out of this hollow wasteland, and may indeed be the only one that can. We need integral leaders who can model the language, values, behavior and citizenship that the 21st century demands. Each of us can make that commitment, and renew it every day in the face of the widening vortex ahead.
—Robb Smith
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Of what use is it to pray and do good without being transformed? Of what use is it to hear the Word of God and not make it one’s own? Life in God is meant to be transforming, changing us from virtue to virtue and glory to glory. (2 Cor 3:18)
If the Word of God is not made our own, then the Scriptures have no more meaning than reading a good novel or the Sunday paper. The Word of God is meant to be taken into one’s life, consumed and digested to stimulate growth. We should grow into the freedom of love that God is. We should grow into “another Christ,” renewing in our lives the mystery of divine love.
Perhaps we never make the Word of God our own; hence, we never really come to know the truth of Christ nor are we set free. Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Lk 12:49) As Christians we are to set the world ablaze with love that radiates from the depths of our inner lives. We are to be co-creators in Christ. All that we hope for in this world cannot be realized without our transformation and participation.
If we truly seek the will of God, then we must seek the path of love that will lead us to truth and from truth to freedom. Only when we are truly free will we hand ourselves over to the fire of love that purges our thick layers of selfishness and transforms us into another Christ. Then will we be able to call ourselves “Christian” and really mean what we say.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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What Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven or the reign of God is when we live inside of the Big Picture and not inside of the small pictures that we create and seem to prefer. Most of us live inside of our own small, self-created kingdoms: the kingdom of being American or being Catholic or being white. That’s all going to pass away. Those are not the kingdom of God. The reign of God will not pass away. It’s the eternal state of things, how things finally, fully, and freely are. To live in the reign of God is to live with that big perspective, where we move beyond the tiny, human-made boundaries that we all create. Most of us are afraid to venture out of our little comfort zone of “people just like me.”
Too few of us were taught that “catholic” simply means “universal” in Greek. From the beginning, Christians recognized that their message was not for any one ethnic group or nation, but was about how things eternally are everywhere. If we can live at that level, then we’re in the kingdom of God. When we’ve had a glimpse of this kingdom, we keep pushing out the boundaries, so we can see God everywhere. We know we’re living in God’s Big Picture when we can see God in all cultures, in all social classes, and in all religions. Would God be so small and petty to only love people like me?
Every time we pray “thy kingdom come” we’re praying that God can grant, and we can participate in, a universal, truly “catholic” world where all of us can love each other without distinction or discrimination. We still have not caught up with Jesus if we prefer to live in our smaller kingdoms instead of the universal kingdom of God.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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You should pray and meditate every day, so you know that you are loved, so you feel the presence of God’s love in your life. This is the only way you can truly help others and serve the poorest of the poor. We have to give from a full heart, one that is saturated with love, overflowing to others. Before we can give freely, we have to know that we are loved. This is why you should pray and meditate every day. So you can remember you are loved, letting it fill your heart and your body. Let it fill every cell of your being. Then give it all away….Do you see?
—St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
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The spiritual traditions of the various religions are designed to be paths to the experience of Ultimate Reality. Why not be open to them all, and thus complement the practical wisdom provided by one’s own spiritual tradition?
Spiritual evolution is a process of liberation. It completes biological evolution, which has brought us to the relative freedom of rational consciousness. Beyond this, the path to interior freedom expands to become a union of wills with Freedom itself.
God initially hides behind words that sometimes sound commanding, limiting or threatening. By these admonitions he awakens a sense of responsibility for our actions. He draws us along the path of liberation from the false self, our emotional programs for happiness, our over-identification with and excessive dependence on the various groups to which we belong, and from the separate self sense—from attachment to any self at all. What remains when the process is completed is the divine Self manifesting in us. We lose ourselves in the love that rushes with boundless delight between the Trinitarian relationships.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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When most people think of church, they think of a building, cathedral, shrine, temple, synagogue, mosque, or holy site. But there’s a second kind of church that Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel….The real temple, sacred place, and privileged place where a ladder runs between heaven and earth, upon which angels ascend and descend, is inside her.
The real church is not always a building or holy site, but a place of conscience and spirit inside a person. The ladder between heaven and earth can be found everywhere. Nature itself is a cathedral and inside each of us there’s a church. God gave us both kinds of churches and both are vital. Both need to learn from each other, and grasp more deeply the interrelationship of the two churches we’ve been given.
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we need to have three spaces opened within us—and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality. Those who can be present with head, heart, and body at the same time will always encounter the Presence, whether they call it God or use another word. Those skills are learned by letting life come at us on its own terms, without resisting the wonderful underlying Mystery that is everywhere, all the time, offered.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be…and the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it. We are all addicted to control.
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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As long as we’re rejecting ourselves and causing harm to our bodies and minds, there’s no point in talking about loving and accepting others.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
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When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it: always.
—Mahatma Gandhi
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HATE has 4 letters, but so does LOVE.
ENEMIES has 7 letters, but so does FRIENDS.
LYING has 5 letters, but so does TRUTH.
CRY has 3 letters, but so does JOY.
NEGATIVITY has 10 letters, but so does POSITIVITY.
Life is two-sided….Choose wisely.
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The inclination to hiddenness is a quiet mark of holiness. It corresponds to the secrecy of relations between a soul and God. We can surmise that the saints came to know well this divine preference for concealment. It added intensity to their seeking after God in his many disguises. Rather than frustrating them, the divine hiding provoked them with intense longings. And it aroused in them a desire for their own concealment, not from God but from the eyes of others, so that they might remain among the unknown and the unrecognized. If we want to find holiness, the first place to search is in the shadows and corners. The chance to savor God’s hidden presence in the Eucharist for the quiet privilege alone…kneeling in the shadows before the tabernacle—the sudden desire to be near God in an empty church may be an anticipation of deeper longings in prayer.
—Fr. Donald Haggerty
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AUGUST 15th: THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
Mary’s longing for her Son must have been so intense during those years on earth after his death and Ascension. For the time being, she was needed to mother the Church he had founded, to console the apostles in their trials, to do the things that only she could do to make life on earth endurable for the first Christians. Yet, busy as she was on earth, her heart was with her Son. The goal of love is union. What we love we want to be near, always. Love must last beyond the bounds of space and time, throughout eternity. The love of Christ for us is that way: timeless, spaceless.
The Assumption is a feast of pure joy, as the first Assumption day must have been in heaven. All heaven awaited its Queen—Queen of Angels, of Patriarchs, of Prophets, of Apostles, of Martyrs, of Confessors, of Virgins, of All Saints. In a doubting and unhappy world this feast day stands as a perpetual reminder of one who was not bound to this earth even while she lived upon it. It recalls to us that, busy though we be with this world, we have here no lasting city.
—Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy, O.P.
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
AUGUST 6: The Feast of the Transfiguration
There are two significant elements in the Transfiguration event that can be summed up in two words: “ascent” and “descent.”
We all need to go apart, to ascend the mountain in a space of silence, to find ourselves and better perceive the voice of the Lord. This we do in prayer.
But we cannot stay there! Encounter with God in prayer inspires us anew to “descend the mountain” and return to the plain where we meet many persons weighed down by fatigue, sickness, injustice, ignorance, grief, poverty both material and spiritual. To these brothers and sisters in difficulty we are called to bear the fruit of that experience with God, by sharing the grace we have received.
When we listen to the Word of Jesus and carry it in our heart, this Word grows. Do you know how it grows? By giving it to the other! The Word of Christ grows when we proclaim it, when we give it to others! And this is what Christian life is. It is a mission for the whole Church, for all the baptized, for us all: “Ascend and descend“—listen to Jesus, then offer Him to others.
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
