“Over the coming year, I will be talking to you a great deal about prayer: what prayer is, how to pray, and what to pray for. People today believe that prayer is a forgotten art, but to believe that is the close your eyes, stop up your ears, and shut the door of your heart against the world. For the Earth and all that is in it – the plants, the animals, the weather, the elements themselves, even those things that you do not think of as possessing life force or volition – all of these without exception are deeply and continuously engaged in prayer.
“Your lungs work, even when you are sleeping. Your heart beats from the moment that you are born. The mists cover the valleys. The rain falls, and the rivers flow. Prayer is the one ceaseless, universal activity. When you pray consciously, taking up the beads of the rosary in your hands and moving them through your fingers, you are joining with that activity as surely as the sun rises and sets, the moon moves through her phases, and the stars turn in their great wheel around the sky.
“You must know that there are no limits on prayer because there was no beginning to prayer. Nor will there ever be an end to it. At birth you come in somewhere in the middle of a great story of prayer that, because it forms a circle like the beads of the rosary, is without beginning or end.”
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Last night’s meeting marked the first day of the new novena, so Our Lady offered guidance to those who asked for help. Here are the exchanges…
SM: For the past two years You have offered advice on finding more joy in my life. I stumbled with that in 2017, but I want to get there in 2018.
OL: Joy is there already, before you seek it, just as the ground is there already below your feet. Joy seems remote and unattainable for so many people, but that is only because of their habit of rejecting the joy that they already have.
It is important to find the joy that exists in your life now in order to have more of it in the future. You would never seek joy in the first place where it not for the fact that you already have joy in your heart.
Seeking joy can easily become a way of delaying joy – of deferring it into the future. The person who truly wants to find joy, must find it first in her own heart. Seeking joy beginning with the joy already in your heart is like the foot behind that aids the foot before in walking. It is only by pushing off with your back foot that you are able to move forward with the other. Find the joy that you already have if you want to have more of it, even if that joy is somewhat modest. Don’t just seek joy. Cultivate joy.
* * *
AW: In praying for another’s healing, my own hip started to hurt. Is that empathic? Was I praying wrong? Is there a better way to pray for someone else?
OL: You’ve flown on a plane. Have you listened to the flight attendant’s instructions?
AW: Put on your own oxygen mask first, before putting one on your child.
OL: In the same way, if you remain centered in praying for your own heart’s desire, you will have a more authentic, more grounded and more powerful place from which to pray for others. It isn’t selfish to pray for yourself. In fact, when you pray for yourself, you call forth blessings to flow through you into the lives of others.
But no, you were not praying wrong. Think of what happened as a reminder to take care of yourself.
* * *
TW: I am often divided between the extroverted and introverted parts of myself. The showman part of me sometimes leads me to be untrue to my core, while the introvert creates works that are true to it. At the same time, to succeed in the marketplace requires the showman to manifest. I’d prefer to work in secret. What should I do?
OL: This problem is very easily solved. You just have to work for me! This will all sort itself out naturally if you do that, and you won’t have to worry. When you need to be a showman, I will make you a showman, and still keep you true to yourself. I offer great benefits, and the position comes with healthcare, bonuses, and vacations.
The truth is, I am the only employer there is on planet Earth, but nobody understands this. Nature is a moneyless economy. All of humanity could disappear tomorrow, and the Earth would go on functioning without commerce of any kind. So enter My employ and work for Me, and I’ll take care of the rest.
* * *
PN: What about the state of the country? Should I worry, or is it all going to work out?
OL: “Work out” is a complicated idea. If by “work out” you mean that everything will go on as it has up until now, the answer is no. It won’t. If, however, you mean to ask if I will care for you and guide you, then yes. I will.
No one alive by the end of this century will have escaped the massive changes that are coming to your way of life. So place your hand in Mine, and We will dance our way through this. There is no way forward through what is coming but to dance.
* * *
AW: How do I prepare my child to live in such a drastically different world?
OL: That is exactly what you are doing right here in praying the rosary together. This is how you prepare. Everything else is an illusion. Stockpiling food, antibiotics, money – you could do all of these and it wouldn’t make any difference in the end.
* * *
PF: My novena is about my mission to share the rosary with as many other people as I can. Do You have any advice on how best to do that?
OL: The way one grass blade helps another to grow is by remaining firmly rooted in its place. To put down roots in your own prayer life, that is the best way to share the rosary. The more you do that, the more you will encourage others to do the same. You pray and your life changes, and that changed life gives you the courage to encourage others. To encourage others is to support them in pursuing their own hopes and dreams. There is no agenda in spreading the rosary apart from that.
If, in praying the rosary, you draw forth the blessings of the Earth from within your life, you will encourage others to do the same.
* * *
TW: Holy Mother, I may as well just throw this out there. I’ve reached the point in my journey through this life (the point which, by the way, as a man I never saw coming) when I only want to pray to You. Not to the Father. Not to the tortured “Cross Man” dangling from my rosary. Only You.
OL: What do you mean by “only Me”?
TW: Divine Mother of God.
OL: If you pray to “only Me” you should know that comes with the Father and the Dangly Cross Man, too. I will have more to say about this in the coming year.
Naturally, down here with the grass blades, it’s mostly a Mother’s game. On Earth, it’s roughly the same 10:1 ratio that you find in the rosary: ten Hail Marys to every one Our Father.
It finally comes down to dirt and sunlight, maters and paters. The Hail Marys are the dirt of the rosary, the Our Fathers are its light. The sun is up high in the sky as the Great Regulator and Father of All Life, just as the dirt is its Matrix and its Mother.
You are brought forth from the seed of the Father, without which life could not exist, but you belong with your Mother. She IS your life. She is where you live.
Life originates from the union of Father and Mother, the mix of light and matter, but it belongs with the dirt of the planet. It is the same for all life-bearing planets in the cosmos. Life always belongs to a planet. Life IS a planet. No one lives in the sky.
Sunlight and dirt combine endlessly to make you and remake you over and over again. It’s really that simple. I am the union of those two forces. That is why I am called “Mother of God.”