Medjugorje Message: March 25, 2024
Dear children! In this time of grace, pray with me for the good to win in you and around you. In a special way, little children, pray united with Jesus on His Way of the Cross. Into your prayers put this humanity which wanders without God and without His love. Be prayer, be light, and be witnesses to all those whom you meet, little children, so that the merciful God may have mercy toward you. Thank you for having responded to my call.
Annual Message to Mirjana: March 18, 2024
Dear children, by the merciful love of God, I am with you. That is why, as a mother, I am calling you to believe in love—the love that is union with my Son. With love you help others to open their hearts to come to know my Son and to come to love Him. My children, love makes it [possible] for my Son to illuminate your hearts with His grace, to grow in you, and to give you peace. My children, if you live love, if you live my Son, you will have peace and you will be happy. In love is victory. Thank you.
River of Light
April 2024
In Our Lady’s message given at the start of Holy Week, she invites us: “In this time of grace, pray with me for the good to win in you and around you.” She reminds us that we live in a “time of grace” —a fact we often fail to acknowledge with gratitude for the blessing of Mary’s long presence in Medjugorje as a singular historic occurrence taking place in OUR lifetime. And of course, we have the special “time of grace” that is Lent, culminating in the Church’s extraordinary liturgies of Holy Week and the Triduum where we enter most fully into the Paschal Mystery of our faith: the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus that changes forever our human destiny. Let us appreciate these high holy days and the Easter season as truly a “time of grace.”
Our Lady urges us to join in her prayer “for the good to win in you and around you.” This language of “winning and losing” points to the undeniable reality of our human condition: on this earth, we inhabit daily a spiritual and psychological battleground where both “good” and “evil” sometimes “win.” The continual struggle that we experience is the age-old conflict between “the way of God-who-is-Love” and the way of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” In modern language we may call this the continual war between our “better angels” or True Self in God vs. the False Self or Satanic ego, devoted to power, prestige, and pleasure at any cost. But does everyone really fight this war? Doesn’t personal holiness render some people exempt? Scripture says “The just man falls seven times a day” (Prov 24:16), but gets up eight. This shows how pervasive and enduring the struggle is between the True and False Self in each and every person’s life.
Our Lady asks us to pray for “the good to win IN you and AROUND you.” As we lift up the violent, broken and war-torn areas of our planet, praying for “the good to win” AROUND US in Haiti, Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, etc., we must realize that peace and “good” AROUND US can only begin on the “micro” level of “the good winning” WITHIN each individual heart. Thus we must pray for the CONVERSION of our very own heart and mind. Here, each day, the egoic False Self threatens to subvert “the good” of our True Self grounded in God’s Holy Spirit, making us slaves to our own “self-made” safety/security, affection/esteem, power/control, and pleasure—which always produce misery and death in the end.
Our Lady continues: “In a special way, little children, pray united with Jesus on His Way of the Cross. Into your prayers put this humanity which wanders without God and without His love.” Here Our Lady invites us to pray the Stations of the Cross—the “Via Dolorosa” or Road to Calvary that Our Lord walked. In its fourteen stations we recapitulate the journey of suffering and sacrifice unto death that Jesus traveled, recalling His Gospel invitation: “If anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Lk 9:23) Specifically, we each must deny our FALSE Self, ruled by Satanic ego that eclipses our vision of God and others through a blind obsession with “Me, Myself, I, and Mine.” In small, daily ways we find many opportunities to “die” to this False Self, thus making our whole life journey a “Way of the Cross” in union with Jesus.
Our Lady asks us to include, in walking our Way of the Cross, prayers for “this humanity which wanders without God and without His love” —much as the children of Israel “wandered” in the desert forty years, seeking the Promised Land but delayed by their forgetfulness of God and addiction to idols. She wishes that our prayer intentions be wide, broad, universal—praying not only for ourselves, our own family, community, country, and religion, but for “this humanity“: for ALL human beings, our whole species on planet Earth, because all of us share one common HUMAN CONDITION. We are “burdened under Satan’s yoke, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears,” for “the world is too much with us,” and our modern technological civilization, throughout every culture, has lost the ancient human awareness of God or Divine Consciousness. Thus Our Lady says, “this humanity wanders without God and without His love.”
Of course, we know that God and God’s love are omnipresent—but WE are absent from this reality through our sleepwalking state of UNCONSCIOUSNESS. Today, the world over, people “wander” with devices in hand, heads down, eyes glazed and locked upon screens, like soulless “zombies,” oblivious to God or any spiritual reality. Traditional religions, seen as archaic vestiges of a superstitious past, are no longer even taught or practiced; atheism is often the norm. With God-awareness disappearing from our human landscape, vast numbers of people now “wander without His love,” meaning without the interior experience of the Divine Indwelling Presence which is LOVE itself. This felt Presence would give us an assurance of our own worth and human dignity as the Beloved of God, and the capacity to feel and express loving compassion and empathy for others. When Our Lady says that “humanity wanders without God and without His love,” it is the same chilling pronouncement Jesus made to the unbelieving, hard-hearted religious leaders of His day: “I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts.” (Jn 5:42) Our Lady urges us to PRAY for “this humanity” now inhabiting our whole earth, lost and wandering under the yoke of “the world, the flesh, and the devil“—in the grip of Satanic ego.
Our Lady concludes her message: “Be prayer, be light, and be witnesses to all those whom you meet, little children, so that the merciful God may have mercy toward you.” As always, Our Lady pulls us out of the darkness and toward the light of her Son’s life within us, pointing us toward the bright hope of our ever-merciful God’s unfailing love for us. Here, once again, she beckons us not to “DOING,” but to “BEING.” It is a more urgent and extreme injunction than to simply “say” prayers or “shine” a light; we are called to “BE prayer, BE light, and BE witnesses to all whom we meet.” Our Lady wants each of us to be a walking, talking, living example to the world in which we live of the REALITY of GOD-who-is-LOVE. She calls all of us to be consummate “INFLUENCERS” of our culture, leading others to the God of Love by attraction to the light, life, and love they experience in our presence, in our very “BEING”—through all that we think, say, and do.
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In March we were blessed to receive two messages from Our Lady—the one above, on the 25th, and also the annual message given to the visionary Mirjana on her birthday, March 18th. As often happens, the “extra” message from Our Lady compliments and elucidates her monthly message to the world. Fittingly, as these messages arrived on the threshold of the glorious Easter season which follows our high holy days of celebrating the Paschal Mystery of our redemption, the extra message for Mirjana was entirely focused on LOVE. As the message of the 25th began with Our Lady praying “for the good to WIN in you and around you,” the extra message ends by giving us the WAY and MEANS for this “WIN” to happen: Our Lady declares, “In LOVE is victory.”
Our Lady begins her message to Mirjana: “Dear children, by the merciful love of God, I am with you. That is why, as a mother, I am calling you to believe in love—the love that is union with my Son.” Here Our Lady reminds us of her motherhood—that through God’s “merciful love” expressed by her Son on Calvary, when dying He gave her to us, saying, “Behold, YOUR mother.” From that moment on, Our Lady was not only the mother of Jesus, but OUR mother—“the mother of all the living” just as Eve had once been. Mary remains the mother of the Body of Christ on earth—which is US! Let us reflect as often as possible upon this extraordinary gift of God’s “merciful love” —that the Blessed Virgin Mary is, in fact, “MY” mother, and I am her child. Realizing her maternal authority in our life, we want to listen and follow her directions with all the care and respect we would give to our birth mother.
Our Lady calls us to “believe in love—the love that is union with my Son.” Here our Mother is giving us the ultimate teaching on “LOVE”—perhaps an instruction that our biological mother never gave us. Certainly this is not the definition of “love” that our worldly culture promotes. In the poverty of our English language, we have this ONE WORD—“love” —to describe how we feel about a spouse, a child, a friend, a house, a car, a song, a book, a movie, a hamburger. Our Lady knows that we often mistake other things for “love,” like lust, codependency, emotional neediness, addiction, greed, convenience, security, ease and comfort. Many of the wiles of our egoic False Self masquerade as “love” we “fall into” —and “out of” —throughout our life. There are many “loves” in which we mistakenly “believe” and place our confidence, broken-hearted when they fail. Our Lady knows about all our misguided adventures in “love” and clearly distinguishes for us the ONE LOVE in which we must “believe”: “the love that is union with my Son.”
Because “GOD is LOVE” (1 Jn 4:8), all healthy, authentic love in our life must be grounded and centered in GOD. Love is first and foremost “union with my Son,” Our Lady says, and every other love that is healthy and holy flows from that union, which is our lived experience of the Divine Indwelling Presence of God-who-is-Love within our inmost being. Unlike our confused and misguided, lesser, ego-loves, Christ-centered “love never fails.” (1 Cor 13:8) Just as Our Lord’s perfect, unfailing, sacrificial Love on the Cross was an incarnate expression of UNION with His Father—GOD-who-is-LOVE—we, too, must “believe in” and incarnate “the love that is union with God” in Jesus Christ.
Our Lady’s message to the world on the 25th ended by calling us to “be prayer, be light, and be witnesses” to all whom we meet. Her message to Mirjana shows us HOW: “With love you help others to open their hearts to come to know my Son and to come to love Him.” Thus it is through the LOVE we show to everyone—a love plain to see, hear, feel, and experience—that we can answer Our Lady’s call to “Be prayer, Be light, and Be witnesses.” We may be thinking, “Even on my best days I don’t really exude life-changing love to others!” But Our Lady explains how “the love that is union with my Son” operates within us, far beyond what we ourselves can understand or notice: “My children, love makes it [possible] for my Son to illuminate your hearts with His grace, to grow in you and to give you peace.” The Divine Indwelling Presence of Christ becomes increasingly powerful and influential within us as we spend time in PRAYER, which is the “bridal chamber” of our union with Jesus in love. The Lord’s presence and action within us during these moments will “illuminate our heart” and “give us peace.”
Our Lady concludes, “If you live love, if you live my Son, you will have peace and you will be happy. In love is victory.” Through our love, which is “union” with Christ, we will become carriers and living icons of divine peace and joy; this will form the strongest possible “witness” to our world, now filled with “humanity wandering without God and without God’s love.” Our peace and joy as persons filled with the love of Divine Union becomes for the lost and lonely ones of earth an irresistible attraction, enabling “the GOOD to win, in us and around us.” Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
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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
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What attracts and holds our attention determines how we will experience God. In the total religious experience we learn how to wait; we learn how to ready the mind and the spirit. It is in the waiting, lingering, timeless moments that…I learn to listen, to clean out the corners and crevices of my life—so that when His Presence invades, I am free to enjoy His coming to Himself in me….In coming into your center, you are coming into God as the Creator of existence because God bottoms existence. An identity grounded in mysticism, a felt oneness with God, should stir people toward love, community, and social action.
—Howard Thurman
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The way You have laid open before me is an easy way, compared to the hard ways of my own will which leads back to Egypt and to bricks without straw…Only save me from myself. Save me from my own private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement’s sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen.
—Thomas Merton
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To be trapped inside of our small ego is always to be afraid. Great religion tries its best to free individuals from the tyranny of their small and fragile selves. It always points toward a larger identity that we call the True Self, the self “hidden with Christ in God“ (Col 3:3)….Jesus came to reveal and resolve the central problem—humanity’s tendency toward fear and hate. LOVE is the totally enlightened way out of this pattern. LOVE has to be worked toward, received, and enjoyed; the first move is to recognize our deep capacity for fear and hate.
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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From Death to Resurrection: The Easter-Ascension Mystery
In his last moments on the cross Jesus was called upon by the Father to identify with the human family in all the consequences of sin. In doing so, Jesus experienced to the utmost degree the sense of alienation from God that is the result of coming to full reflective self-consciousness without the experience of divine union. This process happens to every human being; in the Christian tradition, it is called “original sin.”
The alienation that Jesus experienced in his passion caused him to die without the experience of the personal union with the Father that he had enjoyed throughout his earthly life. His holy soul, bearing our sins, descended into the waters of the Great Abyss in order that our sinfulness might be utterly destroyed. Because of Christ’s divine power, at the moment that sin was destroyed, the waters of the Great Abyss instantly became the waters of eternal life. Christ gave to this water the capacity to flow forever in superabundant mercy and to bring forth creatures capable of sharing his divine light, life, and love.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Let us consider the Resurrection of Christ: indeed, just as his Passion stood for our old life, his Resurrection is a sacrament of new life. You have believed, you have been baptized; the old life is dead, killed on the cross, buried in baptism. The old life in which you lived is buried: the new life emerges. Live well: live life in such a way that when death comes you will not die.
—St. Augustine
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The Resurrection of Christ bought us the new life which we received on the day of our baptism….Jesus Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a Passover into the kingdom of God. “In baptism we died with Christ.” Having imitated his death, we will be able to imitate his Resurrection….His Resurrection opens the tombs of our hearts. Can you hear the stone of doubts, fears, expectation, loneliness, roll away from your heart as it rolled away from his tomb? You and I are transfigured and resurrected, too, in an inner resurrection.
If we have given ourselves to Jesus Christ, we can give him to others who are in quest of God, the sea of people who move about seeking, not knowing what to seek. People who hunger for him today, but are confused by a thousand voices. We can assuage their hunger because we have been baptized in the death and Resurrection of our Lord. We can give them Jesus Christ if we are in love with him, the Christ who is in our midst.
—Catherine de Hueck Doherty
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The resurrection of Jesus is not the resuscitation of a corpse or the mere vindication of a just man. It is a totally new way of being. As Jesus’ soul is reunited with his glorified body—baked, so to speak, in the limitless energy of the Spirit—he moves triumphantly into the heart of all creation. God bestows upon him complete and unlimited participation in the Father’s glory. Creation is totally new in the light of the resurrection. The Sabbath belongs to the old world of sin that has passed away in the destruction of Christ’s body on the cross. The New Creation, the eighth day, the day after the Sabbath, is the first day of eternal life in union with Christ, a day that will never end.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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This is the mission of the Lord’s disciples in every epoch and also in our time: “If, then, you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above….Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” (Col 3:1-2) This does not mean cutting oneself off from one’s daily commitments, neglecting earthly realities; rather, it means reviving every human activity with a supernatural breath. It means making ourselves joyful proclaimers and witnesses of the Resurrection of Christ, living for eternity.
—Pope Benedict XVI
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Mary is the Mother of Mercy because it is to her that Jesus entrusts his Church and all humanity. At the foot of the cross, when she accepts John as her son…Mary experiences, in perfect docility to the Spirit, the richness and the universality of God’s love, which opens her heart and enables it to embrace the entire human race. Thus Mary becomes the Mother of each and every one of us, the Mother who obtains for us divine mercy. Mary shares our human condition, but in complete openness to the grace of God. She is able to have compassion on every kind of weakness. She understands us and loves us with a Mother’s love.
—St. John Paul II
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The Alleluia is the song of ecstatic love, joy, praise, adoration and gratitude all rolled into one. It proclaims the triumph of God over death in every form. As Christ passes to his glorification, he incorporates us into his own glorified body and shares with us his own happiness, the joy of eternal life. The Alleluia is the song of resurrection. It is the cry of those in whom the inner resurrection is taking place. Faith and confidence in Christ explode into the experience of divine union.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
Easter is the Pasch, a word that means “passage,” for in Jesus the decisive passage of humanity has been made: the passage from death to life, from sin to grace, from fear to confidence, from desolation to communion with him. We are not alone: Jesus, the Living One, is with us forever. Let the Church and the world rejoice, for our hopes no longer come up against the wall of death, for the Lord has built us a bridge to life. Yes, brothers and sisters, at Easter the destiny of the world was changed, and on this day we can rejoice to celebrate, by pure grace, the most important and beautiful day in history.
“Christ is risen; he is truly risen!”
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
