Medjugorje
locutionist: Failure in love
stems
from lack of knowledge of God
Man’s
use of the word “love” has little to do with what love really is, and if
human love is not founded on God it is bound to end up in idolization and
failure, says Jelena Vasilj who started receiving interior locutions of the
Virgin Mary when she was 10 years old. Highlighting purity as a most important
virtue she further seeks to rectify a false worldly notion.
©
Spirit Daily
MEDJUGORJE,
April 21st – Everybody talks about it, everybody wants it, but only
too few know the nature of love. From modern-day man’s distorted and limited
concept of love springs only disappointment and failure, and man will never get
what he seeks and talks about if he does not acknowledge that the love he is
seeking originates from and therefore has to be founded in God.
This
clear message to her contemporaries, broken-heartedly drifting from affair to
affair, comes from 28 years old Medjugorje locutionist Jelena Vasilj who started
to see the Virgin Mary with the heart in December 1982. Today a student of
Church history at Gregorian University in Rome, she invites the world to deepen
its notion of love in the latest issue of the newsletter Echo
of Mary Queen of Peace.
Here
she has started a series of reflections on the messages she has received from
the Virgin over the years. Her words on the nature of love, profoundly
contrasting the views of the world, are inspired by a message
from February 27th 1988: “My dear children, recognize Jesus
who suffers in every person. He needs your love. Love your brothers and sisters;
out of love, however, and not by force. Earnestly try to find Jesus in them,”
the Virgin Mary told Jelena Vasilj that day.
13
years later the locutionist concludes that part of the suffering stems from the
fact that man seeks the love of man without an initial experience of the true
love found in God. Ultimately man does not know what he is seeking, she states:
“When
we speak of love, or when we love, we are drawing from the source of love –
i.e. the image of the Holy Trinity – which is carved into the heart of each
man. Any other love, if it is not founded on this image, very quickly ends up
being idolization of the others or of self,” Jelena Vasilj writes in Echo of
Mary.
By
degrading love to a merely human affair, man lays the foundation for
disappointment and lack of satisfaction, she continues. What is needed is no
less than a new definition of the word and concept of “love”:
“Given
that our passions are so invasive, experiences of this type occur because one
clearly ignores the project conceived before time even existed, when the Father
generated the Son in His eternal plan of love which is the Holy Spirit. The
Father breathed love on the Son, and the Son on the Father, and in so doing they
created the world in their eternal dance of love.”
Sensing
nothing or only too little of this, humanity’s hurtful relationship
experiences ultimately stem from a lack of basic knowledge of who we are to love
in the first place. At least on an unconscious level it is the love of God that
humanity is striving and aiming for – but as long man does not see this, the
blind and aimless wandering is bound to continue, she writes:
“If
only we Christians were a sign of hope for the world which wanders aimlessly! In
Medjugorje Our Lady says that non-Christians are those who do not know God’s
love, which is the real object of all their desires. It is up to us to be like
Mary: pure and transparent so God’s love may shine through,” she writes.
Much
to humanity’s detriment, however, this raises another imminent problem. Purity
being crucial for the love of God to burst forward transmitted by man, he now
counteracts his own best interests by seeing purity as contrasting with love,
the Medjugorje locutionist goes on in her essay:
“Only
the pure see God. It seems these days that the virtue of purity is in contrast
with love. It is called a consequence of the much-talked-about inhibitions which
one should be freed of. Often, even amongst Christians, purity is seen as an
‘optional’ as though the body were not a shrine in which we live, or is seen
as a house which does not need tidying up,” writes Jelena before
attempting to set the world straight on where the real inhibition occurs – and
why purity is more than just an option:
“To
the former I would say that the inhibition they talk of is the original sin
which our first forefathers handed down to us. Even if Jesus of Nazareth took
this burden unto His own shoulders and burnt it in the fire of His love on the
cross, we still suffer the effects.”
“To
the latter I would add that only the virtues can cleanse our hearts, and that a
Christian cannot live two sides to his faith, as if the body belonged to one
reality and the spirit to another. It is clear, then, that love is based on an
eternal truth, and when it is reduced to an obscure maze of human emotions it is
untruthful and confusing,” Jelena states in Echo of Mary.