Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2024
Dear children! In this time of the grace of expectation, I desire to call you to prayer for Advent to be prayer of the family. In a special way, little children whom I tenderly embrace, I encourage you to prayer for peace in the world; for peace to prevail over peacelessness and hatred. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
December 2024
Our Lady’s short message was given on the threshold of two events: Thanksgiving and the first Sunday of Advent, inviting us to reflect upon its relevance to both of these seasonal celebrations. She begins: “In this time of the grace of expectation, I desire to call you to prayer for Advent to be prayer of the family.” Delivered three days before the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving, many Americans hearing this message were indeed filled with “the grace of expectation” (and perhaps some anxiety, too) surrounding the quintessential American “family” celebration—the day when all of our scattered “tribes of origin” regroup to eat a big meal together, bringing to one gathering table our many different lives and often-conflicting values and opinions (especially in an election year!). We are challenged to get through that day in harmony with each other despite differences, with the same mutual acceptance and cooperative spirit that allegedly marked the first colonial Thanksgiving feast of the pilgrims and Native Americans in New England. However awkwardly the day unfolds, the Thanksgiving spotlight is on “the family” with the hope of joyful peace prevailing.
Likewise, Our Lady desires that our Advent season of prayerful preparation for Christmas be centered on “prayer of the family.” While the Church invites each of us to an individual period of quiet reflection, silent meditation, and spiritual reading to prepare ourselves for the great feast of the Incarnation—the birth of Jesus, uniting humanity and divinity—Our Lady is also calling us to communal prayer that will include our nuclear and extended family: spouses, parents, children, siblings, cousins, friends, etc.
So, during this Advent season, how can we include our family members in prayerful preparation for Christmas? Might we possibly share a potluck supper that includes a “grace before meals” prayer? A tree-trimming party that includes a special blessing of the Christmas tree? A cookie swap or ornament exchange that incorporates a decade of the rosary prayed together? An evening Taize service or weekend Mass that we invite others to attend? There are many creative and imaginative ways to allow “prayer for Advent to be prayer of the family.” Let us make the effort to invite, surprise, and include our family—both “blood” and “non-blood” —as Our Lady asks!
She concludes her message by revealing to us an even deeper meaning of “family” and what is really at stake in her Advent message: “In a special way, little children whom I tenderly embrace, I encourage you to prayer for peace in the world; for peace to prevail over peacelessness and hatred.” Here Our Lady reminds us of the much larger “family” to which we belong, addressing us as her “little children whom I tenderly embrace.” Amazingly enough, we are TRULY the children of the Queen of Peace! Thus, MARY is our Mother, making each of us a brother or sister of JESUS CHRIST, a member of the royal household of GOD, and a “Prince or Princess of Peace” !
This reality gives a much broader meaning to Our Lady’s desire that our “prayer for Advent be prayer of the family.” Our Blessed Mother calls us as her very own daughters and sons whom she “tenderly embraces” —but do we allow ourselves to feel Our Lady’s embrace? Do we open ourselves to her maternal care and affection for us as the Mother who knows each of us intimately and loves us unconditionally and completely, as only a Mother can? Advent is the perfect season for connecting with our spiritual family: Mary our Mother, Jesus our Brother, and God our Father.
This inner connection of spirit reveals a still more profound truth: Our Lady’s call for us to recognize as “FAMILY” the ENTIRE WORLD—all living beings near and far, seen and unseen. She pleads: “In a special way, I encourage you to prayer for PEACE in the world; for PEACE to prevail over peacelessness and hatred.”
Lord knows that “peacelessness and hatred” have “prevailed” for too long already, both in terrible international wars and in our own tragically polarized country, torn apart by divisive political propaganda, media distortion and exaggeration, deliberate mis- and dis-information, and the “terrorism” of internet brainwashing and a technological mass hypnosis through which we have lost our moral compass for even discerning “truth.”
In this crushing reign of worldwide “peacelessness and hatred,” we human beings have lost our conscious connection to each other as truly being “brothers and sisters,” and also our connection to the entire non-human Creation that includes animals, plants, oceans, forests, mountains and all of Great Nature that is, in reality, our “FAMILY,” in desperate need of our care.
We are privileged to live in a time when the advances of science (especially in the field of quantum physics) are revealing to us in Creation the living proof of the “Cosmic Christ” taught by St. Paul, St. John, and many mystics throughout the centuries. This “Mystical Body of Christ” that the Church proclaims is indeed the “family” to which Our Lady refers in her messages—the Ultimate Reality that the Gospel identifies as “God” and “Love,” and which exists as an infinite Trinitarian Relationship (of affirming, denying, and reconciling energies) flowing endlessly through time, space, mind and matter.
In this continual self-emptying flow, all forms of life—from atomic to cosmic, microscopic to astronomical—are interconnected, interwoven, interrelated, and interdependent. This immense LOVE among the forces of what we know in Christianity as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is working “over all, through all, and in all” (Eph 4:6) at every moment, as St. Paul said. This God/ Love/ Goodness is perfect PEACE in its operation throughout the self, the planet, and the cosmos. But humans present an obstacle.
The human “peacelessness and hatred” which currently prevails on earth is the product of our ignorance and blindness to the truth of God/Love and our false belief in the LIE of SEPARATION (sown in Eden), through which we fall into fear of the “Other” and act out our fear in hatred and violence—not realizing that THERE IS NO “OTHER” in the Trinitarian reality of Divine Oneness and Unity. Rather, we are all “holons of the Whole” that is God/Trinity/Love, inextricably entangled and related to All That Is—to every “part” or person in Creation, with whom we share a common flow of Divine Life surging through our being. We must replace the “Lie of Separation” with the “Grace of Expectation” !
In Advent we celebrate “the grace of expectation” —the coming of the One who uniquely manifested Divine Life, Light, and Love on our small planet Earth 2,000 years ago: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. And we continue, this year, to prayerfully expect this unfathomable grace of God’s “coming” —perhaps more powerfully than ever before—“birthed” into our awareness ever-increasingly as “Christ Consciousness” through Our Lady’s message. This new birth which is “conversion of heart” will change our life and transform our way of seeing and treating all living beings.
“For prayer of Advent to be prayer of the family,” let us build a big tent for the countless levels and meanings of “FAMILY” to be held and “tenderly embraced.” In this way our prayer beckons the all-inclusive LOVE that we, too, must incarnate as “holons of the Whole,” as “the many parts of One Body” (Rom 12:4, 1 Cor 12:12)— “until we reach the unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God and to mature adulthood, attaining the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Eph 4:13) This Advent, joined with our small families, let us remember to pray for our Big Common Family at every opportunity: for PEACE on Earth, goodwill toward ALL.
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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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It is Christmas every time you let God love others through you.
—Mother Teresa
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December 8: Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the Americas
Owing to her Immaculate Conception, Mary was born into Unitive Consciousness, free from sin and from the False Self emotional programs for happiness with which we all struggle.
—Mary Leah McAnally
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We can use other “A” words for Advent: AWARE, ALIVE, ATTENTIVE, ALERT. Advent is a call to full consciousness. Step away from your preparations this holiday season and sit in the contemplative community of meditation—if only for a few moments—in a place of stillness and grace.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Everything is whole. There is really only one life, one being, one truth, one love, and one beauty which multiplies itself throughout eternity in an endless number of ways. Only the guardians of a good attention can fulfill the duty of gathering this beauty, love and wholeness unto itself and concentrate it. This falls to us as human beings, and all of our parts are designed in one way or another to collect truth and beauty, love and goodness, which have been spread throughout the cosmos into every single manifestation of creation.
We are here to behave like bees and gather this nectar of life experience and energy back into ourselves, to concentrate it and to bring it forward into the next moment with respect for others…with care…with attention…with being. This is a strange enterprise, nothing like what human beings think we are here for.
—Lee van Laer
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Quantum physics revolutionized nature by turning measurable entities into descriptive processes. Atomic particles are now seen to be a constellation of quarks, bosons, gluons and leptons dancing around each other and fields of endless energy. “Matter” is nothing like it seems. Quantum physics disrupted “nature” and its naive appearance, without ever intending to do so.
Talk about “nature” as a thing in itself has been left to poets, artists, and theologians. Scientists instead talk about spin, motion, charge, and entanglement, and the essential but elusive role of the mind. Instead of the conceptual categories of matter in form, nature is seen to be open, chaotic, and emergent. Given enough time in the right environment, nature will do new things.
Hence, talk about “nature” must begin with humility, reverence, openness, and wonder. Any nature-talk of finality is likely not to be talking about nature at all. How can we talk about God? If nature is a constellation of relationships, what is God?
Carl Jung lamented that Christianity had induced a “religious schizophrenia” because it separates God from the rest of nature and insists on talking about God and the world as two separate entities. Religious language, like religious myth, is meant to animate and inspire us to see meaning and purpose in the whole cosmic order. Adhering to religious language and concepts based on old, outdated philosophical ideas and terms confuses people and enervates their desire for wholeness, because it separates the mind from the reality of nature. This can only result in planetary failure. If we seek religion only to govern and save our “selves,” we will lose everything.
—Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF
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A lot of Christians assume that the Kingdom of Heaven means the place you go when you die—if you’ve been good. But Jesus himself specifically contradicts this interpretation when he says, “the Kingdom of God is within you” …and “at hand.” So it’s not something later, but lighter—some more subtle quality or dimension of experience accessible to you right in the moment. You don’t die into it; you awaken into it.
The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place: a state we would now call “nondual consciousness” or “unitive consciousness.”
The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. A complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of Divine Love.
—Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault
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Faith in God is not just to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in Love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is revealed in all things, even through the tragic and sad, as the cross reveals! God is never absent. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God’s love is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. We have nothing to attain or learn, but things to unlearn.
To become aware of God’s loving presence in our life, we must accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re sleepwalkers. All great religious teachers have recognized that we humans do not naturally “see” ; we have to be taught how. Religion is meant to teach us how to be present to reality. The Buddha and Jesus say with one voice, “Be awake.”
All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be more fully present to what is. What IS is LOVE—so much so that even the tragic will be used for transformation into love. It is God who is Love, giving away God at every moment. What is happening is God living in us, with us, and through us as our unique manifestation of love…each of us a bit different because the forms of Love (God) are infinite.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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In non-duality the separate-self sense is greatly reduced and even disappears. Everything that happens is the direct experience of reality. It is being able to lead ordinary life without thinking of oneself. When you look at a tree, it is a tree and not you looking at a tree.
How do we grow in this new consciousness? Christ became a human being in order to show us how to do this. This was his way of manifesting the love of God: becoming one with us in order that human beings might become one with God.
In the Christian tradition LOVE is the bottom line. The same God is in all others as in us.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Focus on Love itself. That is the royal road—and one that is everywhere present and available to everyone. In the beginning, love is seen as dualistic: i.e. the one who loves and that which is loved. Love starts out as a conditional feeling state, but it progresses. It becomes apparent that love is a way of seeing, experiencing, and interpreting life. Later, it becomes apparent that love is a state of being.
Life itself becomes the expression of love, and we realize that our life IS love. In the final realization, the divinity of love transforms perception into spiritual vision, and the presence of God as All That Is is revealed. All existence radiates forth the divinity of its essence, which is the manifestation of the Love of God.
—Dr. David Hawkins
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That sublime utterance of Jesus from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is love at its best. The oceans of history suffer the ever-rising tides of revenge. Humanity has never risen above the injunction: “Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” Though the law of revenge solves no social problems, people continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.
Jesus affirmed from the cross a higher law. He did not seek to overcome evil with evil. He overcame evil with good. Although crucified by hate, he responded with love. What a magnificent lesson! Generations will rise and fall; people will continue to worship the god of revenge and bow before the altar of retaliation; but forever the noble lesson of Calvary will be a nagging reminder that only goodness can drive out evil and only love can conquer hate.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“I am the vine, and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me, you can do nothing.” (Jn 15:4-5) We are meant to be tangled up together. We are meant to live lives of profound interdependence, growing into, around, and out of each other. We cause pain and loss when we hold ourselves apart, because the fate of each individual branch affects the vine as a whole. Dependence is not a matter of personal preference; it’s a matter of life and death.
We have only one task: to abide. To stay, remain, depend, rely, persevere, commit. To hang in there for the long haul. To make ourselves at home. But if we abide, we’ll get pruned. If we abide, we’ll bear fruit that others will see and taste. If we abide, we’ll have to accept nourishment not of our own making. If we abide, we’ll have to coexist with our fellow branches.
The metaphor of the vine has probably never been easy for Jesus’s followers to apply to daily life. It’s especially challenging now, in our bitterly divided times. We are cautious and self-protective; it’s hard to confess that our glory lies in self-surrender, not self-sufficiency. But whether we like it or not, our lives are bound up in God’s and each other’s. The only true life we will live in this world is the life we consent to live in relationship, messy though it might be.
—Debie Thomas
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“Ubuntu” tells us we are only who we are thanks to other people. Beyond our parents, there are hundreds or thousands of relationships, big and small, along the way, which teach us something about life, and every interaction brings us to where we are today. Ubuntu is a difficult worldview for many Westerners who tend to understand self as in competition with others. Thus interdependence may be confused with codependence, a pathological condition. Ubuntu, however, is about symbiotic and cooperative relationships—not the parasitic, destructive relationships of codependence nor the draining, alienating relationships of competition.
Our planet cannot survive if we define our identity only through competition—knowing one’s strength only because someone else is weak, or one’s race, gender, or religion only as a conflicting rival of someone else’s different race, gender or religion. Rather than reinforcing competitive ways of knowing self, Ubuntu offers a way of discovering self-identity through interdependence. One has the self-assurance of belonging to a greater whole and is diminished when others are diminished. Thus my very salvation is dependent on yours.
—Dr. Michael Battle
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Traditional Native Americans feel a sense of interconnectedness at a deep level. We connect the physical to the emotional to the spiritual, and ourselves to one another and the natural world. We connect the whole community of creation to our civic responsibilities. In Indigenous thinking, there is no such thing as separation of one part of our life from another.
An example of the interconnectedness is found in the warrior societies such as the Lakota, where there remains a lifeway of harmony and belief in the interrelatedness of all things, including the rival Sioux tribe, all other tribes, humans, animals, birds, insects, plants, and the rest of creation. They express this through the two-word common prayer: “Mitakuye oyasin” –“All my relations.” It is this understanding of interrelatedness, of balance and mutual respect of the different species in the world that characterizes Indian peoples’ greatest gift to Amer-Europeans at this time of world ecological crisis.
An Iroquoi chief explains, “The most important thing is that each individual must treat all others, all the people who walk on Mother Earth, including every nationality, with kindness. I must treat everyone I meet the same. When people turn their thoughts to the Creator, they give the Creator power to enter their minds and bring good thoughts. The Creator desired that there be no bloodshed among human beings and that there be peace, good relations, and always a good mind.”
—Randy and Edith Woodley
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
I like the image of a PROCESS, where the drive to sow, to water seeds which others will see sprout, replaces the ambition to occupy every available position of power and see immediate results….that is, to bring about processes and not to occupy positions. Each of us is just one part of a complex and differentiated whole, interacting in time: peoples who struggle to find meaning, a destiny, and to live well and worthily….
The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us towards a common point of arrival which is God….The Trinity has left its mark on all creation. The reflection of the Trinity was there to be recognized in nature when that book was open to man and our eyes had not yet become darkened. Each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile. The divine Persons are relations, and the world, created according to the divine model, is a web of relationships.
Creatures tend towards God and throughout the universe we can find any number of constant and secretly interwoven relationships. This is a key to our own fulfillment. The human person grows more and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships. In this way, they make their own that trinitarian dynamism which God imprinted in them when they were created. Everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity.
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
