This month, Our Lady continues instruction from her “School of Prayer” in Medjugorje. As we read her message we notice a series of key-word repetitions: “Call” x 2, “Joy” x 2, “Open” x 2, “Prayer” x 2, “Faith” x 2, “Hearts” x 2, “Become” x 2, and “Peace” x 2. If we could do a word-search on all of Our Lady’s messages over the past 30 years, indeed we would find these key-words used hundreds of times. This month, she begins, “With joy…” How can the Blessed Mother approach us and our troubled world “with joy”? So much is wrong, sad, unjust, tragic, dangerous and violent. But she soon reveals the secret to joy, saying, “Open yourselves to prayer, until it becomes a joy for you.” The Blessed Virgin Mary is the world’s most prayerful human being, and if prayer “becomes joy,” then this is how Our Lady—and we—can be joyful under any circumstances! When we pray from the heart, our hearts are in a state of joy or bliss, no matter what external conditions exist.

 

Over and over, Our Lady teaches that the ability to pray depends upon our openness, repeatedly telling us to “open our hearts” and “open our selves.” In the early years of the Medjugorje apparitions Our Lady often cried, “Pray, pray, pray!” But, aware that we didn’t know how to pray in depth or where to begin, she started to dwell more upon the precursor to prayer, inviting us to “open” ourselves in heart and mind—to her call, to God’s loving Presence, to the experience of prayer.  Without an open heart and open mind, we will never get further than a superficial “lip-syncing” level of prayer that engages only the intellectual faculties of reading, memorizing, and repeating words, with or without some accompanying pious postures and gestures. This is not transformative prayer that results in conversion of life or evolution of consciousness into the “mind of Christ,” as St. Paul said. Yet such transformative, life-changing prayer is what Our Lady wants for us. Let us ask today, in the silence of true listening to the Spirit: Is my heart open? Is my mind open? In what ways am I closed or shut down to communication, not open to hearing?

 

Our Lady’s message is filled with images of gradual growth and change. Her language exudes the movement of evolution: “also today I call you…listen to my call. Anew, I desire to draw you….where you will find….until it becomes a joy for you….the Most High will give you….and you will become….that faith may grow day by day in your hearts.” Her entire message conveys the daily forward movement of our spiritual journey into a future of Divine Providence, a path of continual listening and responding anew, of becoming, receiving and growing. Just as Jesus Christ brought the Good News of God indwelling our human nature, we are all on the evolutionary journey to become other Christs, to grow into the “full stature of Christ Jesus himself,” as St. Paul said: “Living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ.” (Eph 4:15)

 

Finally, Our Lady’s message affirms the intimate connection we have with her as our Mother. She says: “Anew, I desire to draw you closer to my Immaculate Heart, where you will find refuge and peace.” In Buddhist teaching, “taking refuge” is extremely important, and one “takes refuge” in the “Three Jewels”—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha; that is, in the teacher, the teaching, and the community of disciples. What does it mean for us to find “refuge” in Our Lady’s “Immaculate Heart”? Because her Heart is Immaculate—clean and purely God-centered, with no stain of ego or selfishness—we find there a safe harbor or shelter from all that threatens us in the world, both externally and internally, through the destructive forces of our own ego or false self. How often she saves us from our “self”! We also  find refuge in her teachings—both her Gospel directives of “Let it be done to me according to God’s word” and “Do whatever He tells you,” as well as her messages in Medjugorje,Tepeyac, Lourdes, Fatima, and other apparition sites throughout history. We find refuge in the community of Mary’s “dear children,” too—those who listen to her call and try to live her messages by praying for peace, meditating with the Rosary, celebrating Eucharist, sitting together in silent contemplation, and taking action for peace and justice.

 

Our Lady says that our communion with her in prayer is so powerful that we enter into her own experience of being “full of grace,” for “the Most High will give you an abundance of grace and you will become my extended hands in this restless world which longs for peace.” Like her, we are called to “witness faith” and thereby bring peace to this world at war with itself. As Our Lady asks, we pray that, with openness on our part, “faith may grow day by day in our hearts,” so that, like her, we can show the world that “nothing is impossible with God.”(Lk 1:37) Even PEACE—Bring it! Even cooperation and collaboration between our political parties—Bring it! Even mutual understanding and compassion between differing religions and cultures—Bring it! Even economic justice between the 1% and the 99%—Bring it! Even a consistent ethic of Life as Sacred for all humans, unborn or born—Bring it!  Even a “Civilization of Love”—Bring it! Our Lady says, “I am with you.”

 

 

 

When Life is Chaotic, Remember . . .

 

 

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.      – Carl Jung

 

God loves chaos! Chaos Theory in science teaches that a new order is always emerging out of old order. Being an open system is the key: is a system open to new possibilities?  In the universe there is what scientists call “strange attraction” pulling life slowly into a new way of being. Suffering, death, new life---the Paschal Mystery---is at the heart of the evolutionary universe. Death is the starting point of life. The universe is 72% “dark energy” which originates the expanding of the universe. So to align ourselves with this larger reality, we need to own our chaos, pain and incompleteness, give up false messianic expectations, go inward, accept incompleteness as a constant movement toward peace, and let God be our future. Gospel life is not a fixed entity! We are created to be creative. St. Francis and all the mystics had a wild imagination for new possibility. Unfortunately, “consumer religion” that promotes a “feel-good” God dissipates our passion, giving us a “feeling” of religion without commitment. But Christianity is a committed life, committed to Love. Inertia---resistance to change in an evolutionary universe where Christ is the center and goal---is resistance to Christ!  We see resistance to the Gospel life in our narcissism, our pragmatism, our greed for experience, our impatience, our lack of chastity (a purified heart full of innocence and wonder); our loss of interiority, our workaholism; our lack of empathy or compassion for others, being too numb and self-preoccupied to care; and our simultaneous “busy-ness” and boredom. But the fact is, we live in a participatory universe. We are the Body of Christ. The life of Christ will not happen without us, but because of us.      -- Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF

 

These “problems” are no more a mistake than a baby’s growth in the womb at the ninth month is a mistake. The very pain caused by these conditions is vital to our birth. Without the pressure of this pain, we would never wake up to our full potential. Our crises are leading to our evolution. They are signs of the next stage of our evolutionary life. They are forcing us towards conscious evolution—or devolution and self-destruction. It makes a huge difference which meta-code we choose to evaluate our current condition.          

                                                                                                                                -- B.M. Hubbard

 

Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God’s goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright.      – Albert Schweitzer

 

Any kind of expectation creates a problem. We should accept, but not expect. Whatever comes, accept it. Whatever goes, accept it. The immediate benefit is that your mind is always peaceful.          – Sri Swami Satchidananda

 

LET IT BE done to me according to your word.    – Mary of Nazareth, the Mother of Jesus

 

See everything that happens in your life as being for your best interest. Anything that annoys you is for teaching you patience. Anyone who abandons you is for teaching you how to stand on your own two feet. Anything that angers you is for teaching you forgiveness and compassion. Anything that has unjust power over you is for teaching you how to take that power back. Anything you hate is for teaching you unconditional love. Anything you fear is for teaching you courage to overcome your fear. Anything you can’t control is for teaching you how to let go and trust the universe.     – Jackson Kiddard

 

Tell us, Poet, what do you do?

I praise. But the deadly and the monstrous things, how can you bear them?

I praise. But what is nameless, what is anonymous, how can you call upon it?

I praise. What right have you to be true in every disguise, behind every mask?

I praise. How is it that the calm and the violent things like star and storm know you for their own?  Because I praise.        – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

We must not try to reduce evil to good by seeking justifications for evil. We must love God through the evil that occurs, solely because everything that actually occurs is real and behind all reality stands God. Some realities are more or less transparent; others are completely opaque; but God is behind all of them, without distinction. It is for us simply to keep our eyes turned toward the point where God is, whether we can see God or not.            – Simone Weil

 

Why do you take pleasure in tormenting yourself over the future? Have you forgotten that everything that happens is directed by the orders of divine Providence? But if we know this how can we hesitate to remain in a state of humble submission, in the most trifling as in the greatest events, to all that God wishes or permits? How blind we are when we desire anything other than what God wishes….I am firmly convinced that we should all be lost if God gave us all our desires, and that is why…he sometimes gives us the contrary of what we ask as being in reality better for us. Nearly all of us in this world have to be refused out of pure charity and enlightened pity….What peace and tranquility of heart we should enjoy in every circumstance. The whole of spirituality can be expressed in this maxim: we should abandon ourselves purely and entirely to God’s design, and thus, with a complete self-forgetfulness, be eternally busied with loving and obeying him, without all these fears, reflections, twistings and turnings and disquietudes which sometimes result from the care of our own salvation and perfection….Let us pass this labyrinth of our own self-love by vaulting over it and not by following it out in all its interminable details.…Let us fly like the eagle above all these clouds, our gaze ever fixed on the sun and on its rays, which are our duties.    – Fr. Jean Pierrre de Caussaude, SJ