Reflection on the Message of January 25, 2002

Look Deeply Into Your Heart

“Dear children! At this time, while you are still looking back to the past year I call you, little children, to look deeply into your heart and to decide to be closer to God and to prayer. Little children, you are still attached to earthly things and little to spiritual life. May my call today also be an encouragement to you to decide for God and for daily conversion. You cannot be converted, little children, if you do not abandon sins and do not decide for love towards God and neighbour. Thank you for having responded to my call.” Message of January 25, 2002

Mary, our Mother, calls us to turn our eyes away from the past, from the past year, and to look into our own heart where God dwells. The past has passed, the future is not yet here, all that exists is today, now, this moment, which will never be repeated. It is from our “now” that depends our future. It is now that I decide or do not decide for God. It is now that I can decide for prayer, now I can open or close my heart to God. In her messages, Mary has often spoken about the heart. “Pray with the heart, fast with the heart, adore my Son with the heart, follow me with the heart…” We have physical organs: eyes to see, ears to hear, and we have a heart with which to pray. We can recite prayers without the heart; we can do so many things without the heart. Cooks can prepare meals without the heart, doctors can treat patients without heart, sellers can work in shops without the heart, employees in a bad mood can wait for their clients in their offices. All of this is like food without salt, and so everything becomes insipid and lifeless. This is why Mary, our Mother, wants to awaken our sleeping hearts.

The Little Prince tells in the tale: “Only with the heart one can see well. The essential remains hidden to our eyes.” Sometimes, it is necessary even to close our eyes to see better. It is with our heart that we can feel God, not with our intellect.

We can also approach God with our heart, not only with our intellect. When the Bible and Our Lady speak about the heart, they think neither of a bodily organ, nor of emotions, feelings of joy or sorrow, but of a spirit, which – although we do not see it with our eyes – we feel that it is at work. It is just like seeing a tree: We do not see the roots, but we know that they exist, because the tree lives from it.

Why is it so difficult to detach ourselves from the earthly things that do not satiate us, but cheat us? Saint Paul said: I do know what is good, but I do not have the strength to realise it. Poor man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body submitted to death? Praise be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! (Cf: Rm 7:14-25)

Our Lady puts the means into our hands, and it depends on us whether we will listen to her or not. We are like a drowning man to whom someone has thrown a life raft. It depends on him, if he will catch it or not. Our Lady’s hand is extended to each one of us. Let us take it today, not tomorrow! Let us clasp at least the fringe of her robe, so that she may take us from darkness, from lack of trust, doubts and disappointments into a new life with Christ.

Our Lady’s hand is outstretched to each one of us. Let us take it today, not tomorrow! Let us catch at least the fringe of her robe, so that she may save us from darkness, from distrust and deception and take us into a new life with Christ. It is therefore necessary to reject every sin: lying, egoism, hatred, pride, blaspheme, licentiousness, drunkenness, wickedness… Without this, we cannot go forward, just as we cannot navigate on the sea in a boat, which is tied to the shore. We can row in vain. It is necessary to untie the boat. We also have to untie ourselves from all that makes us captive and trapped, so that Mary, our Mother, may take us to Christ.

Peace and good to you!

Medjugorje, January 26th, 2002
Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic, OFM

Reflection on the Message of February 25, 2002

PRAYER IS A NEED

“Dear children! In this time of grace, I call you to become friends of Jesus. Pray for peace in your hearts and work for your personal conversion. Little children, only in this way will you be able to become witnesses of peace and of the love of Jesus in the world. Open yourselves to prayer so that prayer becomes a need for you. Be converted, little children, and work so that as many souls as possible may come to know Jesus and His love. I am close to you and I bless you all Thank you for having responded to my call.” Message of February 25, 2002

The time of Lent we now go through is a time of grace, the Blessed Virgin Mary tells us in her message. The time of grace began with the coming of Jesus Christ. In many preceding messages, Our Lady attracted our attention to this reality within us and around us. Her presence here is a grace and a gift for those who receive Her as the Mother of their lives and the Mother of their peace. Each word of hers and each message is a call of a motherly heart addressing the heart of men.

Also through this message, Mary, our Mother, wants us to become the friends of Jesus: to be strangers no longer, but friends who come to know Him better each day. Also amongst ourselves, we can become true friends for one another only if we are the friends of Jesus. We can be considered believers and Christians, we can go for Sunday Mass, we can go for confession regularly, we can live our faith more or less exteriorly without knowing Jesus and without being His friends. We can never say that we know Jesus enough. We can only seek Him and find Him, because He went first to seek us. According to St John the Apostle: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.”(1 Jn 4:10)

A most beautiful experience of the love of God and of His closeness, obtained through prayer by Saint Monica for her son, can be found in St. Augustine’s “Confessions”:

“Late have I loved You, beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. You were in me and I was outside of myself. You were with me, and I was not with You. You called and you shouted, and You broke my deafness. You sent a lightning, you enlightened and dispersed my blindness. You spread your perfume, I breathed it in, and now I languish after You. I tasted, and I am hungry and thirsty. You touched me and I burn for Your peace. When I shall cling to You with all my being, there will be no more pain nor suffering for me, and my life shall be alive, full of You. Behold, I do not hide my wounds. You are the doctor, I am the ill one. You are merciful, I am miserable. And all my hope is only in Your great mercy, o Lord my God.” We need such experiences of the nearness of God, and Our Lady wants to lead us to these experiences, this nearness and this friendship.

It is necessary to work for conversion. But the conversion is so immense, it is not only depending on us. It is much beyond human power. Evil is stronger than man and wants to paralyse him. This is why we need God. Only Jesus Christ can save us from sin, laziness, selfishness, lies and evil. But it is expected from us to do the decisive step. We can neither change nor convert ourselves, but we can say “yes” to God. We can do a turn around in our lives, we can take the words of Jesus as Gods’ words and not human words. These words have the power to heal, to convert, to save man. Only then will we be able to say with St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”(Ga 2:20).

Thank you, Mary, our Mother, for giving us the means which can lead us to Jesus. May, through your intercession, our hearts discover more and more prayer as a need. May there be more and more of those who will, out of love of God and themselves, discover prayer not as something that has to be done but as something they can do.

Medjugorje, February 26th, 2002
Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic, OFM

Reflection on the Message of March 25, 2002

UNITE WITH JESUS

“Dear children! Today I call you to unite with Jesus in prayer. Open your heart to Him and give Him everything that is in it: joys, sorrows and illnesses. May this be a time of grace for you. Pray, little children, and may every moment belong to Jesus. I am with you and I intercede for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.” Message of March 25, 2002

The Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Peace, calls us to unite with Jesus, and a means that She puts into our hands is prayer. Long ago, we learned in the catechism that prayer was a dialogue with God. To dialogue, you need someone, another person. You may converse with someone without grasping life itself, but remaining simply at its surface. There are conversations, which bring about movement, lift up and heal. Prayer is such a conversation, held not with just anyone, but with the God almighty. Man has the capacity to converse with God, with Jesus, because he has the spirit, as God is spirit. As God became man in Jesus, we can talk to Him humanly, because we have the Holy Spirit, because we are baptised and confirmed, because we have received these capacities, these gifts which enable us to be as close to Jesus as possible. If we ask ourselves where is Jesus, I would say: Where is He not? Wherever you look, you can meet Him. His look and His eyes watch every person with love. It is important to be conscious of this fact, in order to be able even to start our walk towards Him. He is with us always, but we have to make an effort to be with Him.

Our Mother calls us: “Open your heart to Him and give Him everything that is in it”. To share bread, property, money, even time with someone, is much easier then to receive someone under one´s roof, to introduce someone into one´s own house, to open one´s heart to someone. To allow someone to enter into the most hidden parts of one´s soul is much more difficult. Most difficult is to share the deepest depths of one´s joy, one´s sufferings, wounds and crosses of one´s life. It is possible with those who are closest to us, if it is possible at all to really do it with human beings. We are an enigma and a mystery for ourselves, we do not know ourselves until the end and completely, and other people know us even less than that. Only the One from whose hand we have come knows us and can heal us, make us well and fill the void of our soul and heart.

It is much easier to enumerate prayers then to open one´s heart. This is why it is not prayer that will help us, because prayer does not help and does not bring rest, but God in prayer. However, He cannot come into a prayer done without heart, as you cannot enter into a house whose door is locked.

The greatest suffering of man is the mistrust towards God, which provokes fear, anguish and worries about one´s own life, about the future. If I am afraid that someone will steal my property or kill me, I will try to defend myself, to protect myself, I will close and lock the door. I feel the opposite if I trust. It is the same in our relationship to God: If I trust Him, if I believe that my life with Jesus will be happy and fulfilled, if I take His words as divine and not human, if I believe that His word is truth, that He has the words of the eternal life – I will open to Him the door of my house, of my home and of my heart.

This is “a time of grace”, tells us Mary, our Mother. She motivates us not to allow our hours and days to pass without Jesus. With Jesus everything can be realised. The fundamental problem of man is that he is far away from God, that he works without Him, without contact with Him. It can often happen that we forget Him, push Him aside, or call Him maybe as an ambulance when life´s distress oppresses us. Maybe we pray five minutes or half an hour, and then we push Him aside instead of permanently being nourished with Him. Hence, God is not a fireman; He would like to become our companion on the road, our friend and saviour, yours and mine.

Let us take seriously the words conceived in the heart of our Mother, so that our days do not pass without meaning and without goal. Let us allow Jesus to rise in us also this Easter. Peace and good to you.

Medjugorje, March 26th, 2002
Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic, OFM

Reflection on the Message of April 25, 2002

SEEK FROM GOD THE CONVERSION OF YOUR HEARTS

“Dear children! Rejoice with me in this time of spring when all nature is awakening and your hearts long for change. Open yourselves, little children, and pray. Do not forget that I am with you and I desire to take you all to my Son that He may give you the gift of sincere love towards God and everything that is from Him. Open yourselves to prayer and seek a conversion of your hearts from God; everything else He sees and provides. Thank you for having responded to my call.” April 25, 2002

The Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Peace, walks with us on our way through life, accompanying us with her short motherly words every month. Throughout these almost 21 years, she unceasingly confirms to us the certitude that She is with us.

We approach the month that is consecrated to the Mother of Jesus Christ. The month of May is overflowing with the springtime awakening of life in the nature which is given to us. This is why Mary, our Mother, calls us to learn from this nature, to awaken our hearts together with the awakening of nature. She already told us that our souls were like flowers. Every sin takes away the beauty of our soul, steals its smile, brings dark and negative thoughts, burdens our life, poisons human relationships, destroys love and takes away joy from the heart. Each sin is a violence against the human soul and life. Nature also does not tolerate violence. If man tries to violently change natural laws incorporated by the Creator, nature takes revenge in the form of various unknown illnesses that are escalating from day to day.

It is in the nature of man to love, to live in peace. If man does not love, he cannot be happy. When he withdraws from God, he becomes a danger to himself and to others. He starts to wither and to die spiritually. When our body becomes physically ill, it tries to get well again with all its forces and powers, and we want to help it with various medications. God has put into our spirit a desire for happiness, for peace and for love. Nobody has invented love. We discover it as a need to survive. Man can seek love in various ways and on various paths, but only God, who created the heart of man, can fill it completely and heal it. Our Lady shows us the way: Pray. She promises us her presence, companionship, collaboration – today, at the present moment.

All big things are very simple, almost incredibly simple. Jesus was born in such a simple and incredible way, in an ordinary manger. He grew up in a simple manner, and in a very simple way he chose his disciples, who were in no way extraordinary men. Our Lady comes here in a simple way through simple visionaries and talks to us in human, comprehensible, simple words. Without noise or clamour. In this message, she wants us to learn from nature. Natural beauties exist that make one marvel and be filled with something magnificent, as if he was already in front of the Most High. However, in its essence, nature is very simple. There aren’t any big factories to produce the polychromy of flowers and of meadows, the beauty of mountains and of the sea. All this is the work of the Creator. Mary also is great, but not by works done by human power, but by the hand of the Creator. This is why she cries out: “The Lord has done great things for me, holy is His Name.” (Lk 1:49)

All that happens in the souls of numerous pilgrims who visit this holy place is the work of the Creator who does not forget his children. Our Lady’s apparitions are today a confirmation of this certitude.

The final words of this message from Our Lady are evangelical; they are the words of Jesus: “seek a conversion of your hearts from God; everything else He sees and provides”. Jesus said: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and all the rest shall be given to you” (Lk 12:31).

Mary, our Mother, thank you for these words of God, for your motherly words. Thank you for all those who believed in your words and opened their hearts for an encounter with God, the source of life, of love and of peace. Obtain for us the grace to discern what is precious from what is useless in our lives.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje April 26, 2002

Reflection on the Message of May 25, 2002

MAY YOUR LIFE WITH ME BE JOY

“Dear children! Today I call you to put prayer in the first place in your life. Pray and may prayer, little children, be a joy for you. I am with you and intercede for all of you, and you, little children, be joyful carriers of my messages. May your life with me be joy. Thank you for having responded to my call.” Message of May 25, 2002

Mary, our heavenly Mother, walks with us and accompanies us by her motherly words and messages, through her apparitions, for almost 21 years now. She accompanies our paths through the liturgical time of the Church and through the time in which we live. As Mother of the Church, the travelling Church, she walks with her children. Like ancient Israel, the Church is on its way out of Egyptian slavery – the slavery to devil. It crosses the Red Sea and the desert of trials and sufferings to enter into the Promised Land. Mary, our Mother, was a believer – a traveller; she was progressing on her journey of faith. She was progressing because she knew how to keep all the words and memories in her heart, as a treasure of her life. St. Luke, the Evangelist, writes about this: “But his mother treasured all these things in her heart.” (Lk 2:51b) Mary, our Mother, our leading star and our precursor, draws today from these souvenirs and from these treasures. In his Encyclical “Redemptoris Mater”, the Holy Father wrote: “Strengthened by the presence of Christ (cf. Mt. 28:20), the Church journeys through time towards the consummation of the ages and goes to meet the Lord who comes. But on this journey… she proceeds along the path already trodden by the Virgin Mary, who ‘advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and loyally persevered in her union with her Son unto the cross’.”(Redemptoris Mater 2.4) Like all of us, Mary herself had to reflect on what happened around her, what she had to face. “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Lk 2:19), and she discovered their meaning only at the Resurrection. To us, like to Mary, the effort of reflecting is not spared, of treasuring and of meditating on the Word of God addressed to us through the Holy Scripture and through people, through events and all that happens in us and around us.

As we did not know that she would appear, we do not know how long she is going to appear, how long she will continue to address her motherly calls to us. Many think that these apparitions have lasted too long. The visionaries usually answer: “For us, it is not long”. It cannot be long, when you are in the presence of a loving person, the one you love. It is difficult indeed to be with someone you do not love, as it is difficult to do a work we do not love. In 1985, the visionaries asked Our Lady: “Why are you with us for such a long time?” She answered with a question: “Are you bored?” Since then, they never asked this question any more. Her motherly love for her children gives her the strength to speak for such a long time and to repeat with such a perseverance almost the same words as St. Paul to the Philippians: “My brothers, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you.” (Phil 3:1)

It is much safer and easier to live and to grow in faith in Her presence, she who talks to us and comes to us today. Our Mother comes today, God loves us through her today, not yesterday or tomorrow. Today, I can be closer to God through the Virgin Mary, as I can go away from Him. If I do not grow every day in faith, I will step back, and the coming back to God will become much more difficult.

“Today I call you to put prayer in the first place in your life.” There are signs, which show me that God and prayer are not at the first place in my life: difficulties to take time for prayer, distractions, a thousand reasons and excuses (which I find so easily) to postpone the meeting with God in prayer… Prayer is a source of joy and a way to joy, repeats Our Lady today also. On this path, we are not alone. With Her, Loved by God, we can and we have to be joyful on our journey of faith towards the final moment, when we shall comprehend fully the sufferings, the seeking, the crosses and the joys of our life.

As a prayer says: “Mary, people will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how they felt because of you. There are no considerations or doubts that can wipe away the experience of the presence of God.”

Mary, our Mother, I implore you: may your words find a place in the hearts of all those who receive you as their Mother, so that you may lead us to Jesus, the Saviour.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje May 26, 2002