Medjugorje Message: March 25, 2018
Dear children! I am calling you to be with me in prayer in this time of grace when darkness is fighting against the light. Pray, little children, confess and begin a new life in grace. Decide for God and He will lead you towards holiness; and the cross will be a sign of victory and hope for you. Be proud that you are baptized and grateful in your heart that you are a part of God’s plan. Thank you for having responded to my call.
Annual Message to Mirjana: March 18, 2018
Dear children! My earthly life was simple. I loved and I rejoiced in small things. I loved life—the gift from God—even though pain and sufferings pierced my heart. My children, I had the strength of faith and boundless trust in God’s love. All those who have the strength of faith are stronger. Faith makes you live according to what is good and then the light of God’s love always comes at the desired moment. That is the strength which sustains in pain and suffering. My children, pray for the strength of faith, trust in the Heavenly Father, and do not be afraid. Know that not a single creature who belongs to God will be lost but will live forever. Every pain has its end and then life in freedom begins there where all of my children come—where everything is returned. My children, your battle is difficult. It will be even more difficult, but you follow my example. Pray for the strength of faith; trust in the love of the Heavenly Father. I am with you. I am manifesting myself to you. I am encouraging you. With immeasurable motherly love I am caressing your souls. Thank you.
River of Light
April 2018
In these two beautiful messages from Our Lady, the triumphant joy of Easter glory shines through brilliantly. While frankly acknowledging the sad reality of darkness and sin that surrounds us in these troubled times of scandalous corruption, social unrest, and moral depravity even at the highest levels, Our Lady inspires us to live in the light and peace of God’s victorious love that conquers all evil, darkness and death. Indeed, as Our Lady says, she is “caressing our souls” with her motherly love and encouragement in these messages.
Beginning with the annual message to Mirjana on March 18, Our Lady describes the “boundless trust in God’s love” with which she lived her own life. She says, “My earthly life was simple. I loved and rejoiced in small things. I loved life—the gift from God—even though pain and sufferings pierced my heart. My children, I had the STRENGTH OF FAITH and boundless TRUST IN GOD’S LOVE.” In this personal testimony about her own life on earth, Our Lady gives us an intimate glimpse and generous insight into her own lived, everyday approach to our human condition. It was a concrete lifestyle marked by SIMPLICITY, LOVE, AWARENESS/ ATTENTIVENESS, APPRECIATION for the “small things” (seeing the beautiful details of Creation), and most importantly, a perspective on life filled with “STRONG FAITH” and “BOUNDLESS TRUST in God’s love” that neither prevented pain nor wavered in times of suffering.
She continues to elaborate on these two key elements of FAITH and TRUST: “All those who have the strength of faith are stronger. Faith makes you live according to what is good and then the light of God’s love always comes at the desired moment. That is the strength which sustains in pain and suffering. My children, pray for the strength of faith, trust in the Heavenly Father, and do not be afraid. Know that not a single creature who belongs to God will be lost but will live forever. Every pain has its end and then life in freedom begins, there where all of my children come—where everything is returned.” What consoling words these are for we who are “slogging it out” in the trenches of today’s jungle warfare between the forces of light and darkness in our deeply polarized, contentious world filled with tragic violence, murderous self-serving corruption, and multiplying outrageous injustices.
The state of our nation and our world has brought many people to the point of deep depression, despair, or seething, angry frustration, leading to conflict and division within families and throughout society. Our Lady teaches and models for us the antidote to this distress and a path through the present darkness: FAITH is our greatest strength in life and TRUST in God’s love is our greatest hope. With the strength of faith, we are “stronger” than the forces of sin and evil that assail us, and this “faith-strength” sustains us in pain and suffering. Our TRUST in God’s love banishes all fear, so that, unafraid, we can “know” with assurance that every loss of God’s beloved which we experience will be restored to us, that “every pain has its end and life in freedom begins” where “everything [lost] is returned.” What wondrous Love is this! We await a new earth in faith and trust.
Our Lady concludes, “My children, your battle is difficult. It will be even more difficult, but you follow my example. Pray for the strength of faith; trust in the love of the Heavenly Father.” This “battle” of which Our Lady speaks at the end of Mirjana’s message is mentioned again at the start of her March 25th message to the world: “I am calling you to be with me in prayer in this time of grace when darkness is fighting against the light.” Notice that in spite of the “difficult battle” between light and darkness that “will be even more difficult” before it’s over, Our Lady still calls our present earthly situation “THIS TIME OF GRACE.” How can she do that, when so much is “wrong“?!
Remember that “FAITH MAKES YOU LIVE ACCORDING TO WHAT IS GOOD“—that is, to focus our attention at all times upon GOD/GOOD, the POSITIVE rather than the negative of every moment and situation. St. Paul explains it this way: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is anything excellent or praiseworthy, THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS.” (Phil 4:8) Our thoughts matter: What we focus on expands!
Thus the Queen of Peace leads us in serenity to be calmly grounded in her example of “strong faith” and “boundless trust” in God’s love. In the midst of this difficult battle between light and darkness, she calls us, not to a pity-party or to raging retaliation, but to these TOTALLY POSITIVE and PROACTIVE responses: 1) PRAYER: “Be with me in prayer….Pray, little children.” 2) CONFESSION: “Confess and begin a new life in grace”; 3) DECISION: “Decide for God and He will lead you toward holiness“; 4) GAZE UPON THE CROSS: See it as “a sign of victory and hope for you“; 5) GRATITUDE: “Be proud that you are baptized and grateful in your heart that you are part of God’s plan.”
These five actions empower us to fight the Chief Difficult Battle we face: the INTERIOR battle between the forces of darkness and light WITHIN OURSELVES—between the satanic ego of self-will run riot and the Indwelling Divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. The sick and obscene horror of the EXTERNAL battle of light and darkness now being fought in our political and culture wars is but a projection of this one INTERNAL conflict of the True Self vs. the False Self that each one of us must address on our spiritual journey. If the “Light” can win the battle within an individual, it can one day win the battle on the larger scale of national and world events, for we are each a “microcosm” of the “macrocosm”—a “holon” of the “whole” of creation. Peace on earth must begin with peace in ME.
Our Lady’s message to the world was given on Palm Sunday, leading us into Holy Week and the celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Our Lord’s suffering-death-resurrection, which is to be the cruciform pattern for all of Creation—all beings brought by Love into life and incarnate form, only to return, ultimately, to the bosom of the Heavenly Father, “where everything is returned.” These Easter teachings from Our Lady affirm her perennial Medjugorje message of PRAYER, as well as the glorious Easter Sacraments of Reconciliation (where in humility we start afresh with a personal inventory and our sins absolved and behind us); Baptism (where we take on our full human identity as Christ’s Body in the world); and Eucharist (our “Thanksgiving Dinner” of gratitude for the sacred mystery of God’s sacrificial love on the cross). May we continue to live Our Lady’s glorious teachings of Light throughout the Easter season as we celebrate Christ Truly Risen, alleluia, alleluia!
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We use holy thoughts to drive out the evil thoughts the devil would like to put into our heart. And the devil, finding that our heart is ablaze in the fire of divine charity, doesn’t come around much, any more than a fly comes around a boiling cauldron. But if the devil were to find our heart fearful and lukewarm, he would come in right away with all his ugly thoughts and imaginings. So we must keep active so that we will be found not lukewarm or empty but filled with God in holy desire, remembering and meditating on the wonderful blessings we have received from him. —St. Catherine of Siena
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“God so loved the world,” John writes, “that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” That is to say that God so loved the world that he gave his only son even to this obscene horror; so loved the world that in some ultimately indescribable way and at some immeasurable cost he gave the world himself. Out of this terrible death came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live it is to stand with one foot already in eternity. To participate in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ is to live already in his kingdom. This is the essence of the Christian message, the heart of the Good News, and it is why the cross has become the chief Christian symbol. A cross of all things—a guillotine, a gallows—but the cross at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the place where such a mighty heart was broken that the healing power of God himself could flow through it into a sick and broken world. It was for this reason that of all the possible words they could have used to describe the day of his death, the word they settled on was “good.” Good Friday. —from The Faces of Jesus
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Jesus is apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but at supper time, or walking along a road. This is the element that all the stories of Christ’s return to life have in common: Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there—someone she thought at first was the gardener; all the disciples except Thomas hiding out in a locked house, and then his coming and standing in the midst; Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?“; the two men at Emmaus who knew him in the breaking of the bread. He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions real life asks.
—Frederick Buechner
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The Resurrection is not a one-time miracle that proved Jesus was God. Jesus’ death and resurrection name and reveal what is happening everywhere and all the time in God and everything God creates. Reality is always moving toward resurrection. As prayers of the Catholic funeral Mass affirm, “Life is not ended but merely changed.” This is the divine mystery of transformation, fully evident in the entire physical universe.
Resurrection is not an isolated miracle as much as it is an enduring relationship. The best way to speak about the Resurrection is not to say “Jesus rose from the dead“—as if it was self-generated—but to say “Jesus was raised from the dead.” The Eternal Christ is thus revealed as the map, the blueprint, the “promise,” “pledge,” “guarantee” (Paul’s metaphors) of what is happening everywhere, all summed up in one person so we can see it in personified, singular form.
This is why Jesus usually called himself “the Son of Man,” as in the Archetypal Human. His resurrection is not so much a miracle that we can argue about, believe, or disbelieve, but an invitation to look deeper at the pattern of death and rising in all that is human. Jesus, or any member of the Body of Christ, cannot really die because we are all participating in something eternal—the Universal Christ that has existed “from the beginning.”
Death is not just the death of the physical body, but all the times we hit bottom and must let go of how we thought life should be and surrender to a Larger Power. In that sense, we all go through many deaths in our lifetime. These deaths to the small self are tipping points, opportunities to choose transformation early. Unfortunately, most people turn bitter and look for someone to blame. So their death is indeed death for them, because they close down to growth and new life.
But if you choose to walk through the depths of your own sin and mistakes, you will come out the other side, knowing you’ve been taken there by a Source larger than yourself. Surely this is what it means to be saved. Being saved means you’ve allowed and accepted the mystery of transformation here and now. And as now, so later! The most miraculous thing of all is that God uses the very thing that would normally destroy you—the tragic, sorrowful, painful, or unjust—to transform and enlighten you. Now you are indestructible; we are “saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.” This is not a one-time cosmic transaction, but the constant pattern of all growth and change. Jesus is saving the world by guiding us through all would-be deaths to a life that is always bigger than death. —Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In every age, the Risen Shepherd tirelessly seeks us, his brothers and sisters, wandering in the deserts of this world. With the marks of his passion—the wounds of his merciful love—he draws us to follow him on his way, the way of life. God our shepherd has come in search of us.
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Mark Your Calendar
Jan 25 Sat 
PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
Feb 22 Sat PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
Mar 29 Sat PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
Apr 26 Sat PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
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PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
PEACE MASS: 12 pm, St. Mary’s Church, 202 N. St. Mary’s; 11:30 am Peace Rosary
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
