(c) Mateo Ivankovic 2017
J.M.J.
February 6, 2017
St. Paul Miki and Companions
Dear Family of Mary!
“Dear children! Today I am calling you to pray for peace: peace in human hearts, peace in the families and peace in the world. Satan is strong and wants to turn all of you against God, and to return you to everything that is human, and to destroy in the heart all feelings towards God and the things of God. You, little children, pray and fight against materialism, modernism and egoism, which the world offers to you. Little children, you decide for holiness and I, with my Son Jesus, intercede for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.”(January 25, 2017)
Last week we discussed this challenging message together, by investigating the three “isms”, materialism, modernism and egoism. Our shipmate, Reuben, sent us a great synthesis of our discussion! I share it with you today with joy!
Dear Cathy,
Thank you so much for your beautiful reflections on our enemies – modernism, materialism, and egoism. They have stirred some thoughts within me.
I think we are reaching a key and maybe decisive point of the battle between a culture of life and a culture of death. I think the greatest threat to peace within our hearts, families, and the world, is abortion and all the culture of death associated with it. This is what Saint Theresa of Calcutta said, since if a mother can think it a freedom to kill her child, what peace is possible? That got me to thinking about the enemies of modernism, materialism and egoism: how by the first, we can’t even decide on what constitutes human life, and by the second, we can’t see human life as having a soul in the image and likeness of God, such that by the third, in egoism, we easily choose the death of weak babies over powerful adults. What a triple cord of dishonesty these three perversions of human thought are!
I was thinking about how to battle them. I was feeling rather surrounded and overwhelmed by them. We are all culpable, and caught up in some way, yet mustn’t lose hope. That’s it! It’s hope, that’s what our Lady brings us in such abundance! In fact, she brings us her own living embodiment of all three theological virtues. By her faith, she destroys modernism. Faith knows God, even when God is invisible, while modernism barely knows even the things it can see. By Mary’s hope, she and we can destroy materialism. Materialism has no hope, since eventually, all the matter in the world and universe simply dies away and cannot mean anything without spirit. By Mary’s love, she and we can destroy egoism. Love is the deepest meaning and source of all things, and must, by necessity, die to its own agenda of mind and heart.
Mary’s presence is the destroyer of heresies. Our adhering to her is our sharing in that destruction. We are now what the church has prepared: her lay soldiers, in Mary’s army, to crush the lie. Life is God’s, and God’s life has meaning, order, beauty and a destiny in heaven. The poor world is parched, and barely even knows its own thirst to drink from this well-spring of the Woman who listens, asks, ponders and keeps the simple and victorious truth of God’s existence., I think the enlightenment is expiring. I think the light of all men is about to shine brightly once more.
Blessings on us all, Reuben
Thank you, Reuben!! That’s it! Hope! Didn’t Our Lady tell us in the February 2 message exactly that?
” …Therefore, you, apostles of my love, pray with the heart and with your works show the love of my Son. This is the only hope for you, and this is also the only way to eternal life. I, as a mother, I am here with you. Your prayers directed to me are the most beautiful roses of love for me. I cannot but be where I sense the scent of roses. There is hope. Thank you.” (February 2, 2017)
As Reuben exclaimed when he read the Feb.2 message: “And then Our Lady’s message – “there is hope” – it’s really a conversation between us all, isn’t it?! How blessed we are…”
How blessed we are!! Indeed. The love of Jesus is the antidote to all the “isms” in the world. Jesus himself is the cure for all “isms” which try to draw us away from our call as men and women of God. But there is hope, because Our Lady and Jesus are with us to lead us into the Kingdom.
Peace, everyone! There is hope!
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
©Mary TV 2017
