The Kingdom is in our midst.
(c)Mateo Ivankovic 2017 November 17, 2017 St. Elizabeth of Hungary Dear Family of Mary! March 25, 2008 “Dear children! I call you to work on your personal conversion. You are still far from meeting with God in your heart. Therefore, spend all the more time in prayer and Adoration of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, for Him to change you and to put into your hearts a living faith and a desire for eternal life. Everything is passing, little children, only God is not passing. I am with you and I encourage you with love. Thank you for having responded to my call.” A Homily by Fr. Max (November 16, 2017, Medjugorje) “For behold the Kingdom of God is among you.” Another translation would say it is in our midst. It is in your midst. In the midst of the Pharisees, in the midst of our congregation, in the midst of the Church, of humanity. Christ is the source and the center of all being, everything exists in Him, St. Paul exclaimed in the Letter to the Colossians. Christ is also in the midst of our hearts, although we are not aware of it. Therefore, how important it is that we enter into the silence of our hearts, enter into the stillness to listen to His presence, who expresses Himself without words. In our search for God, many times we remain on the intellectual level. We look for new ideas about God. But God is not just a thought. He is Wisdom Incarnate. He became flesh, so He wants us to encounter Him fully, as a friend. The Book of Wisdom speaks about the friendship of God. God wants to create in each of us a friend! And Mary has said, “You forget that Jesus is your greatest friend!” So in our depths dwells God. And so our prayer life should bring us into interiority, but true interiority. Pope Benedict wrote, quoting a great mind of our times, “This time, this moment, this age cannot be understood as a world of any kind of interiority, we live an external life.” It is very superficial. Like a branch who won’t find a reason for his being in himself without looking at the tree. Even our prayer becomes a self-reflection. But we have to go beyond, enter the stillness, and let God reveal Himself to us. It is not so much that we find God, but that we let ourselves be found by Him. In prayer, that is the first step. Prayer is not our doing; it is a gift of God. And so Mary, in many messages says, “Open yourselves up to prayer.” We cannot find in our hearts only here and now. We have a great ability to escape from the present moment. As Jesus said, “You look here and your look there…” We escape into time and space. These are the main dimensions in which we escape. And there we think of the “old days”, the glorious days, the golden days of the past. Or we look forward to the springtime, when it finally comes, the Triumph. Or we go here or there looking at all sorts of places. Yes, of course, grace follows the principle of incarnation. It has a specific time and a specific place. Medjugorje is truly a place of grace in this, our time. Mary speaks about a time of grace. But where grace mostly reveals itself is in our hearts. And therefore instead of looking outside for that springtime when it finally comes, we should look interiorly, and look at today. Jesus wants to create that springtime in you together with Him. The task is of daily conversion. Mary is called “The Seat of Wisdom”. Today, these days, we read the Book of Wisdom. Yes, she is the Seat of Wisdom, and so she is capable of expressing the highest truth in very simple words. That is a sign of great wisdom. Because normally, we, when we express great truths, we get very complicated. Some books you can understand nothing, yet we think it is great wisdom. There are different types of wisdom. But Mary, in her messages, since she is the Seat of Wisdom, expresses the highest truth in simple words. And those who say that she says always the same thing have obviously understood nothing of true wisdom. So in one of the messages she says, “You can’t say that you are converted, for your conversion has to become a daily one.” So she introduces us to the “here and now”. “Now is the time of salvation.” “Today salvation has entered into your house,” Jesus says to Zacchaeus. This essential aspect of conversion is expressed beautifully in the words of a great soul, Louis Bosio (?) in Italy. Now is the process of his beatification. He was the spiritual father to many people. So he said in one of his writings, “From the great things run to the little ones. From the little ones go to the smallest. From the smallest, go to nothing. Therein is God. He will let himself be found at any time if we just look gently in ourselves. And don’t stop at ourselves but go beyond. “In the stillness of your hearts,” Mary says, “be with Jesus.” But how can we receive this wisdom? Louis de Montfort gives us several ways to gain this wisdom. He says first of all you need a great desire. If we don’t desire holiness, if we don’t desire to proceed forward in our spiritual life, we will stand still. But there is another very important point. The spiritual life is not like holidays. You know when we stand still for a while and then we go on. If we try to stand still, we go backward. Because it is life, not a doctrine. It is not something we can acquire and put in our pocket. It is continuous living. And to live this continuous life, you have to enter as He has opened wide His Heart wide on the Cross. So there are different wisdoms. St. Louis de Montfort tells us about earthly wisdom. That is the wisdom of those who live for the things of this earth. There is fleshly wisdom for those who look for wisdom in the desires and pleasures of this life. And there is a diabolic wisdom for those who look for wisdom in honors, in being admired and being counted as important. There are three kinds of wisdom, all present in us, I think so. We have to be honest with ourselves. The Divine Wisdom is the Wisdom of the Cross. The Friends of the Cross are the friends of Christ. There is no Christ without the Cross, and there is no Cross without Christ. And we should not forget both of those truths. Because if we try to carry the Cross all by ourselves, we are just miserable. We get angry, nervous. But if we find in our daily cross, our union with Jesus, and carry it together with Him, then we realize it is He who carries it, in us and with us, the greater part, and gives us just a little share. And you will have the merits which we receive in heaven. St. Gertrude the Great, the saint for today, speaks about meeting Jesus in our hearts. She said, “One evening as I knelt down in prayer, in my mind afterwards came the words in Jesus’ Gospel where He said, ‘If somebody loves me, he will be loved by My Father, and we will come to Him and make Our dwelling, Our home, in Him.’ And then I realized that You have come and You are with me and in me.” Now Jesus again will be born and die on this Altar. He dies for you and me to come and dwell in our hearts. Let’s truly receive Him. Let us continuously after we go out of the church, return to Him. That is more important than looking left or right, or up or down, to yesterday or tomorrow. Let us stay in His presence, in this blessed present moment with Him. Let’s return to Him continuously, for He is the Kingdom of God in our midst. (English Homily, Medjugorje, November 16, 2017 https://marytv.tv/?page_id=192 ) In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan ©Mary TV 2017 PS. Any mistakes in this transcript are my fault! But I feel that His words are very important for us all! You can listen to him at the link above!!