Reflection on the Message of September 25, 2004

OPEN YOUR HEART TO GOD’S LOVE

"Dear children! Also today, I call you to be love where there is hatred and food where there is hunger. Open your hearts, little children, and let your hands be extended and generous so that, through you, every creature may thank God the Creator. Pray, little children, and open your heart to God’s love, but you cannot if you do not pray. Therefore, pray, pray, pray. Thank you for having responded to my call." Message of September 25, 2004

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As our Mother, Mary can only call us, speak to us, love us and suffer with us, for us and because of us. She is coming to us and she is speaking to our hearts in a motherly way. She wants us to feel that God exists, and to make the experience of God in spite of evil, hatred, wounds, doubts and sufferings that we know in our human life. The Mother is coming to tell us that God has the last word. She is telling us that it is worthwhile to believe, to love, to forgive and to be honest in spite of passing sufferings that we experience because of our choice of what is good, honest, just and true. Mary knows well who we are and how we are. She knows our seeking and our falls. She lived in the body, she lived in our world, but she was clothed in grace in which she wants also to clothe us, by inviting us to walk on the path that she took. She is the best mistress because she kept in her heart the words of Jesus, she contemplated these words and all the events that she lived with him in this world. She did all that, while believing and trusting in God, and hoping against any hope in the most difficult moments.

Saint Bernard compares Mary with a channel, which leads the spring water in all the directions, the channel, which "receiving from the heart of the Father the fullness of the source, offers this water to us". This water is clear and pure, because it is coming from the Heart of Jesus Christ, her Son, our Lord and our Brother.

Mary, our Mother, is inviting us to be love, to spread love, especially where there is hatred. In his book "In the school of love", Fr. Slavko Barbaric reports the testimony of the visionary Marija who asked Our Lady: "Do you have anything concrete to tell me?" The answer was: "I give you my love so that you give it to the others." According to Marija, it was for her the most beautiful and the most difficult message. The most beautiful thing that can arrive to a human heart is to make the experience of the love of a mother who loves you. It is always difficult to transmit and to offer to others this experience of love. It is not easy to love the others as Mary loves us. We feel our own powerlessness. According to the teaching of the Virgin Mary, we can obtain the daily victory over our powerlessness through prayer. It is the way, which enables us to make the experience of what is most beautiful, and to realize what is most difficult.

The love that Mary, our Mother, is giving us, the love to which she is leading us, is the remedy against our tiredness, our impatience and our despair. Those ho know that they are loved cannot be threatened by crosses or illnesses, not even by death. Success does not make them haughty, failure does not lead them to despair.

Let us listen to Mary, our Mother, in order to learn wisdom and maturity. Let us follow the words of the Mother, in order to learn that it is worth to spend our time with God, to "lose" something in order to receive much more from God. Today still, we need courage to believe in the words of the Mother. Only thus will we be able to enter into the mentality of the Gospel, this Gospel that – through her apparitions - the Virgin Mary is making alive here in the hearts that open themselves and that believe in the love of God.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje, September 26, 2004