(c)Mary TV 2013
J.M.J.
November 6, 2013
Dear Family of Mary!
"Dear Children! Today, more than ever, I am calling you to pray. May your life become a continuous prayer. Without love you cannot pray. That is why I am calling you to love God, the Creator of your lives, above everything else. Then you will come to know God and will love Him in everything as He loves you. Dear children, it is a grace that I am with you. That is why you should accept and live my messages for your own good. I love you and that is why I am with you, in order to teach you and to lead you to a new life of conversion and renunciation. Only in this way will you discover God and all that which now seems so far away from you. Therefore, my dear children, pray. Thank you for having responded to my call." (November 25, 1992)
"Live my messages for your own good."
That is the point. Nothing Our Lady says to us can be contrary to our
good. She is our Mother, and she only wants our good. So her messages
are designed for our good. Here is part 2 of Fr. Benny McHale's homily
of October 24, 2013:
That leads
on to the next one, the one of prayer, because again, "Happy the man who
ponders his law day and night." That is prayer. We are pondering our
relationship with God. And Our Lady asks that we set time aside each day
to spend time with her Son in prayer. Because as we quoted at the
beginning, "You've made us for you, Oh Lord, and our hearts will never
find rest until they rest in You." It's amazing how much junk food has
been introduced into our souls and we wonder why we are not happy. We
watch programs on television that are full of violence and then we
wonder then why we are disturbed. If we take the kingdom of God
seriously we have to open our hearts to the source of truth, Jesus
Christ Himself, the Son of Mary.
And above
all she asks us to pray the Rosary, that powerful weapon. Because the
Rosary is looking at Jesus through the eyes of His Mother, the one who
loved Him the most, who was with Him at the critical moments of His
life, and as we do that, she shares them with us so that we will want,
like the lovely prayer children say at confession, "Help me to live like
Jesus."
The fourth
one is Confession. And again, St. Paul mentions in his first reading
today that now that you've been set free from sin, by the work of Jesus
on the Cross, but now the important thing is to stay free. Because if we
don't, as the old Catechism used to say, "He that contemneth small
things, shall fall little by little." We've been set free, Confession
once a month keeps us free. It doesn't allow the corrosion of sin to
seep into our hearts and it keeps us aware of how far we have to go.
And the
last one of all is the Eucharist. And maybe that's why today I split up
the Gospel today to split up the two messages. Jesus said, "I came to
bring fire to the earth." It is the Eucharist that brings that fire to
us. Did you ever hear the word, "enthusiasm"? It comes from the lovely
Greek word. The Greek word for God is "Theos" and "enTheos" is to have
God inside you. And if you have God inside you, you are enthusiastic.
And that is what people want to see. I'm sure you have come across
people of other faiths, especially the Muslim people, who are so
enthusiastic about their faith. And they want you to convert to their
faith. I often wonder if that is why the Church is the way it is,
because we are so lukewarm in our faith. The Lord is challenging us to
get that fire into our bellies. To believe. He brought you here so that
you would play your part in the conversion.
The
Eucharist is God in us. In a few moments, Jesus Christ, the Lord of the
Universe, is going to come into your soul. And if that doesn't produce
fire, then I don't know what will. Really, He wants to fire us up.
And the
last message you will hear at the Mass today is "Go in Peace to love and
serve the Lord." We are sent out as ambassadors to go preach to the
world the richness, the fire of Christ. We are sent to set the world on
fire. But it can only happen if each one of us becomes fire.
The problem
is, the Gospel tells us, that you may pay a price for that, mother
against daughter, brother against brother, father against son, because
people in your very own family may be the people who are opposed to what
you are doing. The may say things to you like, "What are you doing
going off to Medjugorje? Why don't you go to a nice seaside resort and
have a good time? If they only knew the good time we are having
here....They may have a sun tan, but we have an inner sun tan, the sun
tan of God's love shining in our hearts. You can't buy that, it's a
gift.
The way we
participate in the Eucharist is by offering the self-sacrifice of our
lives with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. That is what the
Eucharist is about, and I often ask myself what sacrifice have I brought
today? What denials have I done so that I can unite them with the
self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross? The Lord gave up his life for me.
It's a bit like the wife who was reading the Bible, and she came upon a
passage while her husband was sleeping, "There is no greater love than
this, that you lay down your life for your friends." So about three o'clock
in the morning she woke her husband up and said, "Pat I want to ask you
a question. Do you love me?" Now what do you think he is going to say
at 3 o'clock
in the morning? He said, "Of course I love you, now go back to sleep."
"No," she said, "it says here that the greatest love you could have is
to lay down your life for your friend. Would you die for me?" "I would
not," he said, "Mine is an undying love."
Well the
kind of love that Jesus has for us is a "dying love". And in doing so He
challenges us to die to sin so we can live for Christ, and that is what
our Mass is all about. You will find a lot of opposition, because the
Kingdom of Darkness is powerful. It is the fire of love that you get
here at the Eucharist that enables us to keep going. But sadly for a lot
of people, the fire has gone out. They have lost their faith, they have
lost their way. And we are challenged to not only light the fire in
ourselves, but to use the Lord to ignite that fire in their hearts. And
as I said, the opposition will often come from your own families.
I remember
once doing a Lexio Divino on this Gospel, and everybody was saying that
it didn't apply to us. And then somebody said, "Yes, but look at all the
families that fall out over wills, when the will is read! And there was
one man who prevented that. When the family gathered to hear the will,
they all thought they were going to get a big sum of money, because
they knew he had money. And in the will there was just one line which
said, "Being of sound mind, I spent all my money before I died." Wasn't
he a wise man!
And another
lady told me she was a chaplain in a mining community over in England
during the miners' strike. And she literally saw fathers and sons
fighting because the fathers wanted to go to work in the mines, and the
sons were on strike. She saw them boxing each other, father against son.
Lots of things can divide us.
But the
great divide is those in the Kingdom of Light and those in the Kingdom
of Darkness. And I just hope you can all take home a little candle with
you, for yourselves, and leave it on your little altar. And let that
candle ask you every day with your morning offering, "Lord what light am
I going to bring into my world today?" We were created to reflect the
light of Christ. It's like the argument between the sun and the moon
about which is the most important. The moon said, "I am more important
because when you go to bed at night, I am still shining." And the sun
said, "Yes, but you have no light of your own. All you do is reflect my
light." Each one of us is called to reflect the light of Christ into our
world. And so I would ask you to get the book of messages, read them
and apply them, and ask the Lord to set you on fire with the enthusiasm
of His love so you can play your part in the building up of God's
kingdom.
I hope you all have a happy journey, and that when you come back you can say "My church is more alive! Why? Because I'm alive."
Thank you, Fr. McHale. We
want to live Our Lady's messages, for our own good and the good of the
whole church and the whole world!
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
© Mary TV 2013
"Medjugorje is the spiritual center of the world!"
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