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November 25, 2022 – Marija speaks with Fr. Livio about Our Lady’s Message
A conversation between Marija Pavlovic Lunetti and Fr. Livio – November 25, 2022: Dear friends, we have now, live, Marija from Medjugorje reporting the message of the Queen of Peace today the 25 November 2022. Hi Marija! Hello Father Livio! I greet all listeners of Radio Maria. Today, like every 25th of the month, Our Lady gave us the following message: “Dear children!. Prayer opens hearts and gives hope, and faith is born and strengthened. Little children, with love I am calling you: return to God, because God is love and your hope. You do not have a future if you do not decide for God; and that is why I am with you to guide you to decide for conversion and life, and not for death. Thank you for having responded to my call.” F.L. Well Marjia I gather this message is extremely full of exhortations and spiritual proposals. M. Exactly Father Livio! Thank God Our Lady is still with us and is still guiding us and giving us messages. While we wait for the message we make sure that the day is surrounded and filled with prayer. During the apparition I was thinking how many people came to Medjugorje, began to pray and faith was born in their hearts, and it strengthened and many found God again. This is an invitation for all of us to pray even more and testify with our lives. In this time in which we are approaching Advent it is particularly a time of grace in which she wants to teach us to pray by opening our hearts. I begin to realize that many words are often useless and superfluous while prayer remains the most concrete thing. I therefore invite you all to pray because prayer works miracles. We have seen it through the numerous testimonies and I thank Our Lady and the Most High because even today they have not gotten tired of us. By saying: “The Most High has sent me to you to teach you prayer,” She becomes our teacher and therefore we do everything with love. I believe that without “love” there is no life, we all become poor. So I invite you above all in this time of Advent, of expectation, of grace, of mercy, of waiting for the Child Jesus, to open your hearts and try to be “prayer”. F.L. Marjia surely prayer is the thing that impresses us the most when we arrive in Medjugorje, not only in the Church, but in the open valley area, on the hills and really everywhere! It is a wonderful thing. So, I wanted to ask you this – Our Lady has emphasized the Holy Mass above all other prayer and we especially in the Western world see that many young people are completely absent from Mass. They pray personally but unless they are in a particular group, you don’t see young people at Holy Mass: how can this be overcome Marjia? M. By praying, I think we must become more and more prayer. Many words, many projects are useless, what matters is prayer – the personal relationship with God. The Lord knows that we are not experts, but we can do it with the heart anyway. We are all invited to be Love and bring to prayer all those who need it, starting with the families that are destroyed, making a corner for Sacred Reading in our homes as well as for the Nativity Scene. Where there is no prayer there is no love, there is no hope. F.L. It is also nice, Marjia, in this time period to have something that invites us as families to prayer, even as Our Lady invited us for example to read the Holy Scriptures in the family. In this time of Advent with the signs of Christmas, all of this can help us to be more prepared with open hearts. M. Yes Father Livio, we who were young during communism experienced Christmas more intensely. Today consumerism in wealthier Europe is offering us materialism through unbridled shopping, and we have forgotten the spiritual part of Christmas. This is why Our Lady is guiding us and helping us in what is lacking in many families. F.L. Once, years ago at Christmas there would be queues of people who went to confession, and so Our Lady now is inviting us to decide for conversion, and she invites us to prepare a renewal of life with a beautiful confession before Holy Christmas. M. Exactly! Here (in Medjugorje) we have the beautiful habit of going early in the morning to Holy Mass, the morning Mass that we call “zornice”! Once we used to light up many candles and place them on the altar, and today it would be nice to take it up again because it would allow us to live even more deeply our relationship with God in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, in the Eucharist, in Adoration. F.L. Even in our parishes people should be called to confession because I see that in Medjugorje everything is easier while in Italy this sacrament is somehow set aside. M. Father Livio, Our Lady wants us to take the parish of Medjugorje as an example and bring it to our cities; this is holiness, conversion, love that the Lord is giving us through the presence of Our Lady. This is the time of joy, of truth, of an encounter with the Child Jesus who transforms hearts even through a simple gesture such as offering a small flower that Mary wants to offer to her Son and transforming it into a very fragrant bouquet as a sign of us returning like children again. F.L. Marjia, I wanted to ask you: “Lately Our Lady has referred several times in the messages of the 25th, as she did in last month’s message, that without God there is no future. She repeats it to us but it is as if we do not listen, somehow believing that we can very well go on without God. M. Many times, I find myself not wanting to comment on the message right away because it’s too early. Being so demanding and at the same time profound we know that Our Lady with her presence is a gift for which we need to metabolize it and expand it with prayer so that the same Spirit that sends Her among us can also make Her be born within us. Instead of talking about it, I would like to start praying and to open our hearts as She asks us to do, so that our faith is strengthened. At the beginning of the apparitions, we didn’t know how to do many things but we certainly knew how to kneel down and pray without ceasing day and night. We have had a beautiful experience of prayer that I wish each of you to have and to experience your encounter with God. This is the right time for each of us, waiting for Christmas with confessions, forgiveness, reconciliation, it is time for novenas, special prayers, special gifts and to be a gift ourselves to others. This is why we can rediscover our family now that it is cold here in Europe and this weather also helps us to stay warm in our homes where we make a space by placing a candle, the Holy Scriptures where we can read and meditate together and have a dialogue. Today unfortunately many families no longer speak to each other, they do not speak of God because they consider Him in Heaven while Our Lady is telling us that instead He is here with us on Earth. FL In fact Marjia this is a terrible thing – that in the family between parents, children, husband and wife one is afraid to talk about God and religious things. We talk about everything but not about this, it’s as if it were a personal thing and that’s it. But this is a very bad thing. M. Very bad, but the Lord sent our Mother among us to tell us: “Convert, return to God” and for this we thank Her with all our heart. She changed our lives and brought us to Her Son, Jesus! This is an immense gift. My life is a continuous thanksgiving not only for the grace of being able to see Her but also for having received Her teachings. I also thank the Good Lord for every moment we shared with Our Lady, in prayer on Apparition Hill, during Adoration, in front of the Church, behind the Church, on the altar in the open space, late at night when we were tired, when we went before Jesus and we found the strength to say: “Lord you know, you know our lives, our situations and you know very well what we need.” When we open this heart of ours to God which is so often wounded, and when we are in communion with Him, He works through prayer. This is my personal experience; I have offered my collaboration a thousand times to be an instrument, to praise God for the gift of life and for the example we can be for all those who are far away, who have not yet known God’s love. FL Marjia, reading Our Lady’s messages, especially those of the 25th of the month, they are of an extraordinary beauty, they truly come from Heaven, but they have reached us through you. As you said, how do you feel? M. I feel in a crisis, Father Livio, because every time Our Lady comes to me, I don’t feel adequate to it and in need of more time. Therefore, I try to be as brief as possible after the apparition, because I wish I could remain in prayer and I would like to be silent immediately after each apparition, to meditate on all that the Lord is bestowing on us through His Mother. I recognize it as an immense free gift for my life, for the parish of Medjugorje, but also for all mankind. The Lord works through us and many people have embraced the messages of Our Lady, who brings us back to her Son, Jesus, with so much patience and with a unique love. We returned to the sacraments especially in the early years and Our Lady advised us to choose a spiritual guide to undertake a path of holiness and undertake the school of prayer. Even today we feel incapable, but we try with all of ourselves and with all our hearts. F.L. Marjia as we go towards the conclusion as you said it well, it will take me the whole month to meditate on this message and that won’t even be enough! But it seems to me there is one fundamental point, that the first word Our Lady says is the one that sets the tone for the message. That word was to return to prayer! I understood that this is the most important thing in a person’s life. Here I would like to say, in this season of Advent, that it will be a time in which we dedicate all the time necessary to prayer to prepare our hearts for Jesus, a strong invitation to prayer that is the first thing we must learn this evening. M. Yes I have already divided the message in my heart and in my mind into different parts because I see that there is a lot of work to do, Father Livio, having to decide for the life of the Risen Jesus. We realize that so many people have died internally and are walking skeletons and we have to “yearn for Heaven” and think of Eternal Life as She told us numerous times. If we listen to Her advice, I’m sure that each of us will become better and this is the right time to seize this invitation. FL Yes, she told us many times “yearn for Heaven, your life is like a flower, in the morning it is beautiful and in the evening it dies out”. We must return to this vision of faith. M. Of simple faith because often we don’t want to lose ourselves chatting but rather we want to pray more. This is a need of mine that I believe is growing in awareness. I am cognizant of this enormous gift we are experiencing, that the Lord is giving us. F.L. However, Marjia, I am experiencing that Our Lady invites us to pray and many times She also says to pray day and night; so, when we have filled the day and night with prayer it is almost impossible to live without praying. There is this beautiful thing – to be able to testify that when one has done one’s duty in life it means that it is no longer an effort but a need and a joy. M. And then we will discover that through those things Our Lady is telling us to do, our faith will be born and strengthened. That’s exactly where we have come to; one who prays opens his heart, faith grows and is strengthened! F.L. Yes it is just as Our Lady said: “Prayer is like the rain that wets the flower of faith. Without prayer (the rain), the flower withers and dies.” M. Exactly, exactly, and for this reason: “courage”, “let us pray” and “trust” in the Lord because He knows our needs. In a special way in this time of Advent we have to trust in the Lord who is merciful, generous and is sending us our and His Mother to guide us not only for our good but for the good of all humanity as you said Father Livio. Yesterday we also celebrated the 22nd anniversary of the death of Father Slavko who, having come to Medjugorje, took Our Lady’s messages and put them into practice, lived them by renouncing many personal things, putting God and Our Lady first. Prayer was very important to him every morning on the hill of the Cross. F.L. Yes, Father Slavko was also a great example of prayer as well as a teacher of the spiritual life! Here then Marjia with your reflections we are preparing to live the time of Advent as a time of prayer but also of self-examination to make a beautiful confession before Christmas! And then, as a gift of Peace, Our Lady will bring us the Child Jesus, King of Peace at Christmas. M. Exactly, while waiting for the Child Jesus we remain united in prayer and in the Communion of Saints because let’s say it, we also can become saints! F.L. Of course, with this we conclude with the prayer of the Magnificat: In the Name of the Father…