Reflection on the Message of May 25, 2003

PRAY TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

“Dear children! Also today I call you to prayer. Renew your personal prayer, and in a special way pray to the Holy Spirit to help you pray with the heart. I intercede for all of you, little children, and call all of you to conversion. If you convert, all those around you will also be renewed and prayer will be a joy for them. Thank you for having responded to my call.” Message of May 25, 2003

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All along these years of apparitions, the Blessed Virgin Mary tells us with the same love and with the same exigency (or better insistence?): “Today I call you to prayer.” Into these few words, she has put her heart and all her love for us, her children. She aspires after our conversion; she desires it, so that we may be happy. She is neither predicting the future nor satisfying our human curiosity; she distinctly tells us what God wants of us today. Through her, God tells us what is most important – he tells us everything - because she gave birth to Christ, the Word of God.

“Renew your personal prayer.” Mary speaks to each heart individually. She does not address herself to the crowds, but to the individual, to the person, by name and first name. To you and to me. She knows well that the world can be changed only while beginning with the individual. Nothing will happen if we wait until the others change, until they become better, until they start to pray, to forgive, and to live their life and their faith more consciously and with more responsibility. It is much easier to change and to overcome others then oneself.

Prayer is a means that helps us to change ourselves. If our prayer does not change us, we should change our prayer and our manner to pray. The prayer has no meaning in itself if it does not transform us, if - through prayer - our heart is not growing, is not coming closer to God. This is why Our Lady tells us: “Pray to the Holy Spirit.” In the Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul tells us: “Likewise the Spirit also helps our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Rm 8,26)

A prayer says: “Come, Holy Spirit, come in our cities, in our homes, in our families, in our glances, in our hearts. Without you, we read books and do not become wise. Without you, we dialogue much and do not come closer to one another. Without you, reality consists in dry events, facts and numbers. Without you, our life falls apart into a succession of meaningless days. Without you, there is no fidelity. Without you, our thoughts become delirious. Without you, technology destroys us. Without you, churches become museums. Without you, prayer is just babbling. Without you, our smile becomes petrified. Without you, our environment becomes a desert. Come, Holy Spirit, our emptiness cries after your fullness! Come, Spirit Creator, make your dwelling in our world!”

We could and should continue to pray and to invoke the Holy Spirit to come, to descend on all the spaces of our life where He has not come yet. We need Him to come down and enter into our families, where there is incomprehension, ill treatment, exploitation and accusation. We need Him to come where there is hatred, blasphemy, drunkenness and immorality, where people are captive, bound by sin and despaired.

“If you convert, all those around you will also be renewed.” It is impossible that those around us remain unchanged, if we are on the way of conversion. This is why Gospa told us in the message of the last month: “Decide for God, that in you and through you He may change the hearts of people.”

For all these reasons, God sends us Mary, our Mother. Wherever she appears, the presence of the Holy Spirit ignites and flowers. Many people made this experience in Medjugorje, coming on pilgrimage with an open and contrite heart, with the desire to come closer to Jesus through Mary. Where there is Mary, there also is the Holy Spirit. She is the spouse of the Holy Spirit. We know it with certainty through the word of the angel Gabriel: “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Almighty will overshadow you.” (Lk 1,35) We also know it through the word of Jesus to the apostles, namely to remain in town waiting for the descent of the Spirit that was promised. Indeed, they received the Spirit, in the Last Supper room, united in prayer with Mary.

May the Pentecost that is approaching be not spiritless – without the Spirit of God whom God wants to give us through Mary.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje May 26, 2003