September 18, 2023
Dear Family of Mary!
Our Lady told us in her last message that we need to “feel the God of love”. She knows how easy it is for us to fall into habits of prayer that are routine and done out of duty rather than out of love. We are human! We get used to things and do them almost mechanically. But our relationship with God cannot be routine and mechanical. It is an insult to the Lord to approach Him in any way but with our hearts wide open and ready to receive Him!
Here is the August 25, Message:
Dear children!
In this time of grace,
I am calling you to prayer with the heart.
May your hearts, little children,
be raised in prayer towards Heaven,
so that your heart may feel the God of love
who heals you and loves you with immeasurable love.
That is why I am with you,
to lead you on the way of conversion of heart.
Thank you for having responded to my call. (August 25, 2023)
So how do we pray with the heart? How do we raise our hearts towards Heaven? How do we convert continually?
Fr. Albert Shamon wrote a little pamphlet in 1988 in which he gave very good advice on prayer with the heart, according to Our Lady of Medjugorje!I would like to share a few things from it with you.
Fr. Shamon wrote:
Chapter 1, Teaching One:
In every apparition at Medjugorje, Our Lady asks for prayer. “Pray, pray, pray.” On April 25, 1987, she begged the children (and that includes each of us) to pray, pray, pray with our hearts.
To pray, we must first remove the two obstacles to prayer; sin and worry.
(a) SIN
To sin is to turn your back on God; to pray is to turn your countenance to Him. But you can’t face two directions at the same time. Therefore, to pray well, you have to get rid of sin.
On April 26, 1985, Our Lady said: “Dear children. Today…begin to cultivate your hearts in the way you cultivate your fields…” Cultivating a field not only takes time, but great effort. If what you plant is to bear fruit, you have to pull out the weeds that can choke the plant. The weeds are sin. You must root out sin.
The way to uproot sin is by confession. Confession is one of the forgotten truths in the Church today. One of the purposes of apparitions is to recall forgotten truths.
On August 2, 1981, the visionaries of Medjugorje were praying in a woods with forty or fifty other people. Our Lady appeared. At one point the seers said; “Our Lady allows those who wish to do so to come and touch her.” One after the other drew near and some really felt the presence of a being.
When Our Lady disappeared, Marija started to cry. A man asked her why. She answered, “Because people have made Our Lady dirty. When some of them touched her, they soiled her garments.” Later, Marija asked Our Lady why this had happened. She replied; “Those who live in sin have dirtied me. Tell people to go to confession and to make amends for their sins.”
In the summer of ’82, Our Lady asked that we go to monthly confession. If a person is very sick, it is often necessary to operate, to cut one open to see what is the matter inside. So it is necessary, Our Lady says, monthly to open up in confession in order to discover what is wrong inside ourselves.
Sin is a terrible ailment. And it gets inside us. In fact, the vowel in the middle of the word “sin” is “I”. Confession means to discover our egoism, our attitudes toward others, toward our problems, difficulties, crosses, happenings – and to change them.
Thus on the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation (March 24, 1985) Our Lady said: “Today I want to invite you to confession, even if you have already been only a few days ago…I invite you to be reconciled to the Lord…” The closer you come to God, the more unbearable becomes even the smallest neglect or failure that might separate you from Him. To lovers, the smallest neglect is big!
Confession helps you to know yourself. Furthermore, confession offers opportunity for spiritual guidance, increases grace, unites you more closely to God, and preserves you from sin and from Satan!
Ah if we really knew the true value of confession, we would be fighting to get into the confessional.
(From “Our Lady teaches about Prayer at Medjugorje”, by Rev. Albert J.M. Shamon)
I will share about worry tomorrow!!
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
(c) Mary TV 2023
