Reflection on the Message of May 25, 2004

LET US CONSECRATE OURSELVES TO THE HEART OF JESUS AND TO THE HEART OF MARY

"Dear children! Also today, I urge you to consecrate yourselves to my Heart and to the Heart of my Son Jesus. Only in this way will you be mine more each day and you will inspire each other all the more to holiness. In this way joy will rule your hearts and you will be carriers of peace and love. Thank you for having responded to my call." Message of May 25, 2004

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Also today, Gospa, our Mother and Queen of Peace, opens her motherly heart to us. Through these simple words, she is leading us towards the source of life and she is showing us the way towards this source.

Mary urges us to consecrate ourselves to her Heart and to the Heart of Jesus. As a Mother, she invites us to enter into these two Hearts that are united, in order to be able to feel at which point they care for us, and what they are ready to do for us. In one of her messages, Mary told us: "Dear children, I desire that the Heart of Jesus, my Heart and your heart are one heart of love and of peace. I desire that this place is not only a place of prayer but a place of meeting of the hearts". It is only in the encounter with the Heart of Jesus and the Heart of Mary that our hearts can be healed and set free.

Mary, our Mother, knows well, which is the greatest, and the most serious illness of the contemporary world. It is not cancer or AIDS, but the feeling of being undesired, useless, unloved, without somebody who cares for you. Physical diseases can be cured with medications, but the only medication against loneliness, despair and hopelessness is the love of God. Many are starving for bread, but many more are starving for love and finally for God Himself. People are poor today, not because they have no money, but because they don’t have God. People are poor because they have no love, and God is love. This hunger of God can be felt at each step. Human beings seek to satisfy their hunger with food and drink, things, possessions, pleasures, and they fall more and more into addiction and slavery, from which Jesus alone can deliver us. Jesus does not only call us free, He alone makes us free.

We can give to the others only what we have. We must first feel the love of God, and only after, we can give this love to the others. Throughout all these years, God invites us through Mary to holiness, i.e. to health, to freedom and to peace. When we feel all that, and when we make the experience of it, we cannot enjoy it egoistically, but we are pushed towards the others, so that all can feel and experience what God wants to give to each one in his infinite love. When we start to love God deeply, we can love all that he has created. It is only then that we become missionaries in our surroundings, in our families, wherever God put to us to live.

It is only through total abandonment to God that we can feel secure. This abandonment can be a form of death, death to oneself, according to the example of Mary who died to herself and to her own will, Mary who emptied herself so that God can live in her and through her. Jesus teaches us this abandonment when he prays: "Father, may your will be done, not mine!" (Lc 22,42) Let us renounce to our own desires so that God can do according to his will and his good pleasure, because the will of God is our peace.

Let us allow Mary, our Mother, to lead us and to guide us on the path of joy, so that we can carry God, his peace and his joy around us!

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje, May 26, 2004