Medjugorje Message: August 25, 2023
Dear children! In this time of grace, I am calling you to prayer with the heart. May your hearts, little children, be raised in prayer towards Heaven, so that your heart may feel the God of love who heals you and loves you with immeasurable love. That is why I am with you, to lead you on the way of conversion. Thank you for having responded to my call.”
River of Light
September 2023
In this short yet highly concentrated message of “Heart” and “Love,” Our Lady uses the word “HEART” four times in 3 sentences, and the word “LOVE” three times in one sentence! It is a message that hearkens back to the early days of Our Lady’s apparitions in Medjugorje, which in 1988 inspired Franciscan Fr. Slavko Barbaric (then pastor of St. James Church) to publish from the parish office a small blue, pocket-size book called Pray With the Heart! Medjugorje Manual of Prayer. This little book, highly recommended at the time by the six young visionaries, became a beloved prayer guide for millions of pilgrims to Medjugorje, and was carried home as a companion-piece in their ongoing spiritual journey of daily conversion. Its title came from Our Lady’s frequent plea in her early messages that we “pray with the heart.” Though we were given instruction on what she meant by this phrase, sadly, it seems that we have greatly undervalued its importance and our own profound need to cultivate this deeper level of “prayer with the heart.”
After a long pause and absence of this phrase from her monthly messages, today, once again, Our Lady begins by saying: “In this time of grace, I am calling you to prayer with the heart.” We are now given a fresh new opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of these words—perhaps by returning to some of Our Lady’s earlier teachings. In 1986 Our Lady said, “I invite you again to prayer with the heart. If you pray with your heart, dear children, the ice cold hearts of your brothers will melt and all obstacles will disappear. Conversion will be easy for all those who want to receive it.”
We might have asked, what does she mean by “prayer with the heart” ? She said, “Dear children, pray and open your inner self to the Lord so that He may make of you a harmonious and beautiful flower for heaven.” We might have then asked, how do we “open our inner self,” if that is “prayer with the heart”? It sounds like we have some work to do. Indeed, in 1985 Our Lady said, “I would like to tell you today to start working on your hearts like you work in your fields. Work and change your hearts that a new spirit from God may settle down in them.”
Yes, there is hard work involved in making what is called “the longest journey” : the journey from the HEAD to the HEART. Though less than 12 inches apart in physical distance, the seat of our selfish ego and the seat of our Indwelling Love-God are miles apart, spiritually! But did we pursue these questions about Our Lady’s meaning in the 1980’s? After 42 years, it seems that her teaching has fallen on much “rocky soil,” so that she largely stopped even trying to sow these precious seeds of “prayer with the heart” —until now.
So with this month’s message from Our Lady, let us begin anew to ponder and discern the meaning and significance of “praying with the heart.” Fr. Slavko wrote in his small blue prayer manual: “Every prayer can be finished hastily so that we say all our prayers to the end, without having met Jesus and Mary. If we go on like this, there is a danger of our having only wasted our time, never coming to like prayer. It is important to find time for prayer. It is just like meeting a friend. If we never have time for him or if the time we devote to him is too short, or if we speak without grace, then the friendship is bound to die. Therefore, it is important to have TIME for prayer.”
We can safely say that it is impossible to hastily or hurriedly rush through “prayer with the heart,” for this prayer that Our Lady calls for is the kind of prayer that builds INTIMACY with God—that is, a profound, eternal relationship of undying LOVE with our Creator. In the past, Our Lady often called us to “pray until prayer becomes a JOY for you.” When we rush through verbal prayers, we seldom feel “joy,” or, even, as Fr. Slavko said, “come to like prayer.” Rather, we are just “checking a box” on our “to do” list. This sort of “prayer” builds hearts of ICE and STONE.
In contrast, Our Lady’s message today invites us: “May your hearts, little children, be raised in prayer towards Heaven, so that your heart may feel the God of love who heals you and loves you with immeasurable love.” Notice that Our Lady does not call us to lift our “minds,” our “voices,” or our “words” towards Heaven, but our HEARTS. Even if we begin with verbal, spoken prayer, our goal and invitation is to engage our “HEART” in every syllable we speak or think, that we may FEEL the meaning of our God-directed words of adoration, gratitude, repentance for sins, praise, and petition. How easy it is to simply pay God “lip service” by reciting rote liturgical and devotional prayers; though beautifully written, they are USELESS if engaged only at the level of our mouths or our egoic intellect (often bent on speaking “correctly” or “eloquently” for the benefit of self-pride or the esteem of other people who might judge us “holy”).
In the Gospel, our Lord’s only angry impatience was for the falsely-pious religious leaders whose prayer was just “lip-deep.” Jesus said: “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” (Mt 15:7-9) In line with her Son’s teaching, Our Lady of Medjugorje has never focused her messages on “doctrinal orthodoxy,” through which many have learned only a God of harsh justice, punishment, retribution, chastisement, and fear. Instead, Our Lady’s focus is always upon PRAYER through which we come to know and experience “the GOD of LOVE.”
The Trappist abbot and author, Fr. Thomas Keating, said, “In Medjugorje, Mary is inviting us to the contemplative dimension of the Gospel.” Indeed, it is above all in the SILENCE of Eucharistic adoration, Christian meditation, Centering Prayer, or contemplation that we are most gifted with the experience of our hearts “raised in prayer towards Heaven” so that “our heart may FEEL the God of love.” As the 14th century spiritual classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, stated: “By LOVE God can be caught and held, but by thinking, never.” Prayer that begins and remains only in our thinking mind, our intellect (and our lips, voices, mouth) cannot penetrate our HEART, where LOVE is experienced—both God’s love for us, and our love for God.
“Prayer with the Heart” is the PRAYER OF LOVE that can reach and encounter our “God of Love.” It transcends all thoughts, words, concepts, images, and merely “emotional” reactions (which actually arise from our thoughts). Thus real “FEELING” is infinitely deeper than our ego- or thought-based “emotions.” Because SILENT PRAYER surrenders and abandons all our egoic “earthbound” agendas expressed in thoughts and words, we are untethered from our own “performance” fixation and free to float upwards “towards Heaven” in our HEART, thus “FEELING the GOD of LOVE” whom we can never grasp with our minds alone.
Returning to the wise counsel on “Prayer of the Heart” from The Cloud of Unknowing: “God may well be loved, but not thought….In the work now before us THINKING must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you are to step over it resolutely and eagerly, with a devout and kindling LOVE. Strike that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp dart of longing love. A naked INTENTION directed to God alone is wholly sufficient. Take a short word, preferably of one syllable…a word like ‘God‘ or ‘Love‘…and fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there. So lift up your heart to that cloud. Or, more accurately, let God draw your love up to that cloud….Never give up your firm intention: beat away at the cloud of unknowing between you and God with that sharp dart of longing love…and let nothing distract you from this purpose. It is only thus that you can destroy the ground and root of sin….Though in the beginning, when your devotion is negligible, it is hard, later, when devotion has come, what previously was very hard becomes much lighter, and you can relax. You may have little effort to make, or none. For sometimes God will do it all himself.”
Here we glimpse Our Lady’s meaning when she says, “Your heart may feel the God of love who heals you and loves you with immeasurable love.” The HEALING that comes to us through silent contemplative prayer is God’s own Presence and action in the depths of our being when we have “opened our inner self to the Lord” through “prayer with the heart” that LETS GO of our mind’s own thoughts, words, and feelings, “stepping over” them with our “naked intention” of Love Alone as our “sharp dart” directed at God.
We practice this throughout our daily silent prayer period—ideally 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening—but gradually, this single-hearted Intention of Love for God carries over and seeps in to our whole day and our whole life. This loving INTENTION toward God is reciprocated in God’s constant love for us that “HEALS” us by “destroying the ground and root of sin” within us: the Satanic ego lodged primarily in our thinking mind—which we now faithfully “step over.” We naturally begin to see the fruits of sin’s uprooting in our relationships, as Fr. Keating says: “If one completes the journey to one’s own HEART, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.” Thus heartfelt, sincere lovingkindness will become the norm of all our relationships as we continually “feel the God of love” at the core of our being.
In 1986, Our Lady said, “So, dear children, help me, that your prayer may come from the heart.” Today, she concludes her message by saying: “That is why I am with you, to lead you on the way of conversion of heart.” Without “conversion of heart” there will never be a lasting conversion of life or of sinful behavior. And since the “ground and root of sin” within us can only be destroyed by experiencing the LOVE OF GOD (also within us), Our Lady’s aim for the past 42 years in Medjugorje has been to “lead us on the way” —the Spiritual Journey from an Ego- / “Doing”- / Head-centered life . . . to a God- / “Being”- / Heart-centered life.
While theological study, brilliant preaching, erudite scholarly writings, and sensational supernatural phenomena can spark a dramatic “outward” conversion—by which one may maintain a superficial religiosity for a little or a long time, even “checking the boxes” of church membership, etc.—only LOVE brings “CONVERSION OF HEART.” And only Conversion of Heart brings Conversion of Life! Our Lady’s “School of Prayer” in Medjugorje is at the service of teaching us to pray in a way that enables our experience of LOVE: that way is “Prayer with the Heart.” When this happens, we grow continually in a daily adventure of intimacy with God—the Divine Indwelling Presence that animates all Being from moment to moment, seducing us further and further into the mystery of the Trinitarian dance of Love at the Heart of all creation—forming us into Lovers and Peacemakers.
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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
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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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This is why you cultivate contemplative practice. The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the Holy Mystery you call God, the Mystery follows you back out into the world. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle.
So you sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved, but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up.
—Mirabai Starr
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We must bring our conscious presence to the Divine Presence…our nothingness to the Creator of all….all that we are—body, soul, and spirit—to all that God is.
Who is God? When we use this term, it always has a “super” meaning. So, when you say “God,” you don’t really mean God. You mean your idea of God, or, to put it another way, you mean God as not-God—because whatever we say about God is more unlike who God is than saying nothing. All that words do, all that dogmas do, all that doctrines and rituals can do for us is to point in the direction of the mystery, of the “super-meaning” of God. It is a mystery and a reality at the same time, and so this warns us that we have to be prepared to expand our idea of God in ways that are more and more inclusive but less and less articulate.
—Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
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The great task of religion is to keep us fully awake, alert, and conscious. When we are present, we will know the Presence. It is that simple and that hard. Too much religion has encouraged us to be unconscious, but God respects us too much for that. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last words Jesus spoke to his apostles were, “Stay awake.” The Buddha offered the same wisdom; “Buddha,” in fact means, “the Awake One.”
Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment as it is. If we can be present, we will experience what we mean by “God.” It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or to quit clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now. It will be the task of our whole lives. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of us—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean Pierre de Caussade called the “sacrament of the present moment.”
—Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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It’s like God forever comes to visit, but we’re rarely at home. We’re probably out buying a spiritual book or something, or getting into an argument with somebody about God. How can you learn to move with the God-given Godly nature of the primordial unfolding rhythms of your life and your passage through time from birth to death?
To contemplate means to observe carefully, to pay close attention. Most of the things we notice, we notice in passing, on our way to something else; then, every so often, something gives us reason to pause…and we’re drawn for a moment to ponder or reflect on that which awakened us in this way. Nothing beyond the ordinary is present. It is just the primal stuff of life that has unexpectedly broken through the mesh of opinions and concerns that all too often hold us in their spell….here is granted the contemplative experience.
When you start understanding your life in the light of these moments, you realize that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life—it’s unfortunate because God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we’re skimming. We choose a contemplative way of life when we recognize and return to these moments of awakening and begin to cultivate them.
A contemplative practice incarnates a sincere stance of awakening and surrendering to the Godly nature of the present moment. If we are faithful to our contemplative practices—to a commitment that nobody sees—they faithfully lead us to a more daily, abiding awareness of the divinity of the life we are living. Without knowing how, you are led along the path of your transformation.
—James Finley
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In the miracle of adoration we are already with God, entirely with God, and the boundary between time and eternity is removed. We cannot now comprehend that adoring God will be endless bliss. We always want to be doing something. We want to criticize, intervene, change, improve, shape. And rightly so! But in death, when we come to God, that all ceases. Then our existence will be pure astonishment, pure looking, pure praise, pure adoration—and unimaginable happiness.
That is why there is a form of adoration that uses no words. In it I hold out my own life to God, in silence, and with it the whole world, knowing God as Creator, as Lord, as the one to whom belongs all honor and praise. Adoration is the oblation of one’s life to God. Adoration is surrender. Adoration means entrusting oneself entirely to God. As we dwell in adoration, eternity begins—an eternity that does not withdraw from the world but opens to it utterly.
—Fr. Gerhard Lohfink
Lament, petition, and thanksgiving are good forms of prayer; but, in praying them, we’re still focused in some manner on ourselves, on our needs and our joys. However, in adoration we look to God so strongly that everything else drops away…leaving us standing “outside of ourselves”—the very definition of “ecstasy“ (from the Greek “ek stasis“).
Time can stand still! And it stands still when we’re in pure adoration. In those moments we stand outside of ourselves, in the purest form of love that exists. At that moment too, we are in heaven. Eternity will be like that, one moment like a thousand years and a thousand years like one moment. When we adore, time stands still—and we’re in heaven!
—Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
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September 8: Our Lady’s Birthday!
It was in the plans of providence that the Word be made flesh…and this Word needed a BACKGROUND. The heavenly harmonies longed, out of love for us, to transfer their concert within our tents; and for this they needed a SILENCE. The Protagonist of all humanity, who gave meaning to centuries past and to come, had to appear on the world’s stage, but needed a BACKDROP OF WHITE to make him alone stand out. This white background so immense, that contains the Word which is Christ, this scene majestic and fair as nature, a little universe for the Son of God; this creature, first thought of in the Trinity and given to us, was MARY. The greatest geniuses of the world have put brush and pen at her service: masterpiece of the Creator, Mary on whom the Holy Spirit delighted to bestow all he invented. Beautiful Mary! About her we can never say enough.
—Chiara Lubich
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September 14: Exaltation of the CROSS
The history of our salvation is the history of a supreme abasement: the divine becomes human, the celestial becomes terrestrial, the eternal becomes temporal, the absolute becomes fragile, the wisdom of God becomes madness, and his strength becomes weakness—because Life, the true Life, is humbled to death, death on a cross. To follow Jesus is to follow his abasement—to come, as he did, to the bottom of humanity, of our weakness, and there to become a servant. In the same way that the Lord wanted to put true happiness and joy in the baseness of the cross, you also should find your fullness and joy in the daily abasement among the poorest and needy. You have not been founded for another greatness than that of smallness, which dresses you with the feelings of Christ and leads you to be cooperators of divine truth.
—Pope Francis
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September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows
Mary, all her life, kept her love of reticence, of self-effacement, of the hidden life, under the veil of simplicity, like a marvelous treasure. At Nazareth, the wife of a carpenter, keeping the household…she, the Queen of heaven. Appearing later as if lost in the midst of the holy women, having nothing to distinguish her. Not fainting in the arms of St. John or Mary Magdalene, but standing—“stabat Mater”—in the immense sorrow and divine peace at the foot of the cross. After burying Jesus, brought back to St. John’s own home, where she was to live, until the Assumption, the same life she had led at Nazareth. During the discourse of St. Peter on Pentecost, no one in the crowd of hearers had any idea that the Mother of God, the spouse of the Holy Spirit who enflamed their hearts, was there, silent, in their midst.
—Fr. Jean du Coeur de Jesus d’Elbee
When Mary holds the lifeless body in her arms, in her heart she keeps the immense sorrow of her Son, which he left her as a precious bequest. The chain of love and suffering which formed his mortal life will continue upon earth. The final link of his soul will intertwine itself mysteriously with that first link which is the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Upon leaving her as a bequest to John, he left her the sorrow of his soul. At the foot of the blood-stained, solitary cross, around the sacred, despoiled body that Mary holds in her maternal arms, the cross-bearers are born. They will be perpetuated in the world by preserving the divine inheritance of suffering and of love.
—Servant of God Luis Maria Martinez
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
In the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally. I would like to remind those people that indietrismo (being backward-looking) is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals as long as we follow the three criteria that St. Vincent of Lerins already indicated in the fifth century: doctrine evolves….Doctrine progresses, expands, and consolidates with time and becomes firmer, but is always progressing. Change develops from the roots upwards.
Let us get to specifics. Today it is a sin to possess atomic bombs; the death penalty is a sin. You cannot employ it, but it was not so before. As for slavery, some pontiffs before me tolerated it, but things are different today. So you change, you change, but with the criteria just mentioned…. Always on the path, starting from the root with sap that flows up and up, and that is why change is necessary.
St. Vincent of Lerins makes the comparison between human biological development and the transmission from one age to another of the depositum fidei (deposit of faith), which grows and is consolidated with the passage of time. Here, our understanding of the human person changes with time, and our consciousness also deepens. The other sciences and their evolution also help the Church in this growth in understanding. The view of Church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.
But some people opt out, they go backward; they are what I call indiestristi (“backward-looking”). When you go backward, you form something closed, disconnected from the roots of the Church, and you lose the sap of revelation. If you don’t change upward, you go backward, and then you take on criteria for change other than those our faith gives for growth and change. And the effects on morality are devastating. The problems that moralists have to examine today are very serious, and to deal with them they have to take the risk of making changes, but in the direction I was saying.
In the United States you have felt a climate of closure. And there you can lose the true tradition and turn to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership in a sector of the Church replaces membership in the Church….Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves. Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies. When you abandon doctrine in life to replace it with an ideology, you have lost.
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
