Reflection on the Message of March 25, 2004

EXPRESS YOUR LOVE TO THE CRUCIFIED

"Dear children! Also today, I call you to open yourselves to prayer. Especially now, in this time of grace, open your hearts, little children, and express your love to the Crucified. Only in this way, will you discover peace, and prayer will begin to flow from your heart into the world. Be an example, little children, and an incentive for the good. I am close to you and I love you all. Thank you for having responded to my call." Message of March 25, 2004

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The Blessed Virgin Mary begins her message, also today, with a call: Dear children, open yourselves to prayer. Throughout the years of her apparitions, Mary taught us and she still teaches us to put the prayer at the first place and to pray, until prayer becomes a joy for us. There is no other way towards God but the way of prayer. This way can appear difficult and not very attractive, and yet: whatever has value, whatever is precious in our life is difficult and require an effort. By nature, human beings do not decide so easily for prayer. Our nature is wounded and we tend towards idleness, pleasures and the choice of what is rather easy. This is why we must make a decision and an effort, for prayer and for all that is good and positive.

This is why we need prayer and all the means that our Mother is giving us, in order not to become sick. If the doctor tells us to take a bitter but useful remedy, we obey to him. How much more should we obey to Mary, our Mother, who knows best what we need in our life.

Together with the Church, she calls us and tells us that this time is a time of grace. It is a time when God is in a particular way favorable to his people. This is why she tells us: Open your hearts. Pray with the heart. Express your love to the Crucified.

The heart is the place of prayer. Our prayer must go down from our head to our heart. The heart is the place into which we want to invite Jesus through prayer. The prayer with the heart gets hold of the entire person and the entire person is in prayer. The heart is the symbol of life, of love, of all that is noble in us. Inside of us, we are not poor but rich, because God dwells in us. The more we know God, the more we can believe in Him and more we can love Him.

This is why Mary, our Mother, untiringly invites us to make the experience of the love of God in which she believed and of which she is living. This desire makes her come to us, so that we also may desire and experience what she possesses by the grace of God.

It is only through love that we can know Jesus who was crucified for us and because of us. Let us learn how to know his heart with which he loved us. The heart of Jesus is meek and humble. He is not forcing us, but he wants that we came to him freely. All that God is asking from us is trust and faith. Jesus wants to give his heart only to those who come to him with trust. He comes towards us first. He said it clearly: "It is not you who have chosen me, it is I who have chosen you". (Cf.: Jn 15,16) Jesus believes that our heart - wounded and marked by sin - has the capacity to come closer his heart. He has done everything to show us his love and the love of his Father. The apparitions of Our Lady, her calls, her simple and maternal messages, are an expression of the love of Jesus towards us, his love that is not forgetting us. This is why, in this message, Mary our Mother invites us to look at the Crucified with the heart. This is the heart that knew neither hatred nor greed nor envy, but only love which embraces all the humanity, and which wants to touch your heart and my heart. God became vulnerable in order to be able to touch all our wounds, to be able to receive the love of vulnerable men and women. God wants to be loved by those that he came to save. His heart is completely open to give and to receive love.

Today still, God is crucified with all those who are abandoned, scorned and rejected in this world. He has identified himself with the smallest person of this world in order to rise it and make it enter into his glory.

As Mary is with us, let us be with her - and through her with her Son Jesus and with one another.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje, March 26, 2004