February 20, 2018

Jesus

"Why does it benefit people to study my Passion? Why does the sacrifice of one person for the good of another inspire us and console us? My friends, when we see heroic human sacrifice, everything trivial is stripped away. We look and we understand. God created humanity for noble goals. The hopes of the Father are realised when, against all worldly thinking, one person sacrifices himself, his well-being or his wealth for the good of another person.

In families this is most common because when people know each other intimately, they do love each other and view each other as valuable and important. In families where this unconditional and full commitment to the good of each other is absent, for any reason, the individuals may be without awareness of their foundational worth. For those people who feel unloved, we must work hard to persuade them that they are crucial members of the family of God. That is our work if we serve the Father. Why was I convinced that my very life should be given over to the plans of the Father? My friends, I was in the world but I was aware of the next life for everyone I met. My cross directs the eye to the next world. My lifeless form does not prompt despair, because I overcame My death through the Resurrection. Do you see? Death is not the last thing. It is only the last thing on earth, in the human experience. I want my cross and my lifeless form on the cross to prompt people to think of their next life, their heavenly home and all of the hope that comes with those thoughts. When someone looks at the cross and me on it, lifeless, they should remember that sacrifice is temporary. Eternal life is permanent. The lesson offered from the cross is one of hope in the unconditional love of the Father, in sending Me, yes, but also allowing Me to give in totality for the well being of each person ever created by the Father. My cross should prompt one to study deep and complete conviction, along with complete trust and hope in the Father's presence and the Father's plan. Do not think when you are maligned or misunderstood that the Father also misunderstands you. The Father loves you, in every situation. You are understood. You will be safe in Heaven and every sacrifice and suffering will be rewarded and celebrated. Be deeply peaceful when you study my Passion. It is a sign of both love and determination."

Dear Friends,

During this Lent Anne recorded six locutions on the Passion.Last Thursday we sent out an excerpt from one of these locutions. We are calling these Passion locutions. We believe these new messages on The Passion have been offered by the Lord to help us gain a better understanding of His sacrifice.

"These messages on the Passion of Jesus are among the most profound, the most encouraging, the most loving and the most merciful that I have ever encountered. ~Dr. Mark Miravalle, Theologian.

And so, we will release two of these Passion locutions this week, two next week and the remaining two in Holy Week.

In addition to these locutions on the Passion, we also want you to know that Anne has received the first of another series of locutions. On Good Friday, we will send the first of these out. We get a serious feel from its tone and pray that everyone will receive this message on Good Friday in humility and willingness to be led.

As with all of our work, these writings have been initially cleared by our local authority and also by a theologian. They are consistent with our faith. When these writings are put into a book, we will applyfor a formal Imprimatur, as we always do. But you can be confident that everything we offer is consistent with our teachings and supports both personal holiness and unity in our Catholic Church.

Lay Apostles, let us dispose ourselves toward God with gratitude and a spirit of service to our Church, because it belongs to Jesus, who loves us all so much.

Below is the second of these six Passion locutions as mentioned at the beginning of this email.

With love,

The DFOT Team

 

Lady Day: If Someone Asks Why You Are All Dressed Up…

By John Horvat II

 

If someone asks why you’re dressed up, be prepared to explain that Lady Day is a special day to appreciate how God made women, and embrace their God-given role in society. That’s what thousands of ladies did on March 8 when celebrating Lady Day. You could sense a great joy in those who told their stories. It was as if they felt truly “liberated” from the political correctness that says all women should be radical feminists.

Lady Day is an initiative of the Return to Order campaign. It seeks to restore in a positive way a true image of womanhood. This image is in contrast to radical feminists who observe International Women’s Day on March 8 as a means to advocate gender parity, sexual revolution and immodesty.

Free Book: Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here, and Where We Need to Go

Her Highness Duchess Pilar von Oldenburg

This year’s Lady Day honored the sublime and sacrificial calling of motherhood, both physical and spiritual, as a most noble vocation in life. Participants were encouraged to celebrate this pure and sacrificial aspect of motherhood by visiting a shrine of the Blessed Mother and getting together with other ladies for tea at home or in a tea house. Her Highness Duchess Pilar von Oldenburg, a mother of five, agreed to act as patroness of the event.

One of the accounts of the celebration was that of a lady in Lafayette, Louisiana who summed up the special event. She writes: “The ladies and their families met at a bustling and popular restaurant…and enjoyed the conviviality and delicious food. While there, due to the noon hour, the ladies prayed the Angelus and then the meal blessing. While seated, we had a toast to our patroness Her Highness, the Duchess Pilar von Oldenburg, and toasted all the ladies for coming out to attend Lady Day and honoring motherhood, and we then made a special toast to Our Spiritual Mother and role model, Our Lady.

“We finished the day with a visit to a special shrine to Our Lady in the area…. We asked her to ask her Son to give us the graces we need in these times to be good mothers, wives, and children, and to become the ladies God wants us to be. We also prayed in reparation for the offenses of the International Women’s Day, which seeks to take away motherhood and the good, true and beautiful in society.”

Upon hearing of the event, one lady wrote: “Frankly, I never bonded with the up-to-now title of ‘Woman’s day’…since it heralded mostly a deviated feminism to which I never gave any allegiance whatsoever. From now on, I shall cherish this day as a gift to the real vocation of womanhood!”

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From Florida, one event organizer wrote “a group of us started our Lady’s Day with Holy Mass, followed by a holy hour of reparation, and finally brunch. Thank you for organizing this event. God bless you.”

It was thrilling to hear that this year’s celebrations attracted participants worldwide. There were celebrations in Canada, Australia and even Guatemala, as can be seen in this enthusiastic message.

“We did it! In Guatemala we celebrated Lady Day with our 4-7 year old daughters. We had a tea party and a conference about raising happy daughters, encouraging them to live according to natural law.”

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Lady Day Conference in Guatemala

From Australia came this enthusiastic support and promise for next year: “I want to let you know that I fully support Lady Day. I live in a small town in Australia and my daughter and I, as well as many of our friends, would like to know more about it, so we can celebrate it next year. God bless you for the good you are doing.”

Shouldn’t there be a day when ladies can be ladies? Hopefully, Lady Day will be the beginning of many more good actions and events to help bring out positive Christian feminine qualities in a world that seems to be promoting and pushing the contrary.

The Litany of Humility: How Can I be Freed From the Desire to be Loved?

Dear Father John, I am trying to pray the Litany of Humility [by Servant of God Cardinal Merry del Val] with special reverence and attentiveness during this Lent, and in doing so the following question keeps recurring to me: In the Litany of Humility, the second request is: “From the desire of being loved, Lord Jesus, free me!” How am I to understand this request? I had thought that to want to love and to be loved is a part of our human nature. What am I missing?

It has been argued (quite successfully, in my opinion) that Christ’s greatest virtue during his earthly sojourn was humility. That you have felt nudged to pray the Litany of Humility as a Lenten devotion, then, seems a sure sign that you are listening to the Holy Spirit. It is edifying and encouraging to hear about it!
Your dilemma is a good one. True, the deepest needs of our human nature, as designed by God, are to be loved and to love. This is because we are created in God’s image, and God is love, the infinite love of the relationship between the three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Insofar as we reflect that divine Trinitarian relation of love within the limitations of our human nature, we live out our vocation as God’s children and we discover and enjoy the fulfillment we long for at the very bottom of our souls.

Looking for Love in a Fallen World
But remember, our current condition includes both a fallen human nature and a fallen world. As a result, these deep needs of our human heart have a tendency to express themselves in distorted ways.
Think about a secular family in which the parents are trying to re-live their own youth vicariously through their children. They pressure their kids to excel at sports, the arts, academics, and everything else. And as the children grow up, they either rebel against this self-centered mode of parenting in some destructive way, or they fall into the over-achiever trap, thinking that achievements are a condition of love. In the latter case, they unconsciously form a habit of the heart in which their need to be loved is almost inextricably intertwined with a need to achieve. If they don’t get straight A’s, if they don’t get into a top college, if they don’t win this or that award, then they will let their parents down and therefore not be loved. As a result, they live in constant tension, deathly afraid of failure, because failure will disqualify them from being loved. This is an unhealthy spiritual state.
Or think about a girl who grows up in a broken home. Mom raises her all alone, because Dad abandoned the family early on. She reaches adolescence with a void in her heart, because she hasn’t grown up with the love of a faithful father. She starts dating early, and unconsciously tries to fill that void by winning the love of a boy, a boy who, naturally, is immature and full of adolescent lust. What happens? Her frustrated thirst to be loved leads her to give herself to someone who is not worthy, and only magnifies her emotional instability, maybe even leading to unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and a whole Pandora’s box of painful complications.

The Key Concept
We could multiply examples, but the core concept is very simple: it is possible, unfortunately, to aim our natural desire to be loved in the wrong direction. The unconditional love we are created to yearn for should be sought in only one place – God. St Augustine put it beautifully in a phrase quoted early on in the Catechism:

You [O Lord] have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You. [Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 30]

If we seek to fill our need for love from any other source, we will end up frustrated and confused at best, and wounded and lost at worst.

We should serve others and do good to others and encourage others, not in order to win their love and worship, but because they are our brothers and sisters in Christ and therefore deserve our love. We should strive to develop our talents and utilize them to make a positive impact in the world not in order to win love, esteem, and praise from others, but because we are God’s children and this is what he has created us to do.
The alarming, effervescent, energizing, and contagious freedom of the saints flows from their having learned this lesson. They no longer gauge their actions or decisions by what other people will think of them. And so they don’t live in fear, instability, and hesitancy. Rather, they have discovered that God’s love for them is as firm as the mountains (as the Psalms tell us). They don’t need to earn it; they just humbly accept it. And once they do, it propels them to echo and reflect it spontaneously and joyfully, regardless of the consequences.
When you pray that line of the Litany of the Humility, as the context of the rest of the Litany helps make clear, you are praying for that same grace:

“From the desire of being loved by others, from the thirst of winning the approval of others, from the slavery of depending on the praise and recognition of others, Lord Jesus, free me! Instead, Lord, grant me the grace to fill my infinite need for love at the only infinite fountain that exists: your Sacred Heart.”

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC, STL

Passion locutions of Anne, a Lay Apostle

During this Lent Anne recorded six locutions on the Passion. Last Thursday we sent out an excerpt from one of these locutions. We are calling these 'Passion locutions'. We believe these new messages on The Passion have been offered by the Lord to help us gain a better understanding of His sacrifice.

"These messages on the Passion of Jesus are among the most profound, the most encouraging, the most loving and the most merciful that I have ever encountered.  - Dr. Mark Miravalle, Theologian.  

And so, we will release two of these Passion locutions this week, two next week and the remaining two in Holy Week. In addition to these locutions on the Passion, we also want you to know that Anne has received the first of another series of locutions. On Good Friday, we will send the first out. We get a serious feel from its tone and pray that everyone will receive this message on Good Friday in humility and willingness to be led.

As with all of our work, these writings have been initially cleared by our local authority and also by a theologian. They are consistent with our faith. When these writings are put into a book, we will apply for a formal Imprimatur, as we always do. But you can be confident that everything we offer is consistent with our teachings and supports both personal holiness and unity in our Catholic Church.

Lay Apostles, let us dispose ourselves toward God with gratitude and a spirit of service to our Church, because it belongs to Jesus, who loves us all so much.

Below is the first of these six Passion locutions as mentioned at the beginning of this email.

With love,

The DFOT Team

---

February 19, 2018

Jesus

"My Passion was offered to the Father as an example of human love perfected. Can a person live in the world, with all that it offers, and maintain a perfect position of love toward the Creator? Yes. I proved that it could be done. I was divine, even in my humanity, but I subordinated my divinity so that mankind would see that if one will only put the Father first, love will surround him and he will live in joy. I lived in joy. Do you believe it? Can people understand that I put the Father first and still existed in perfect joy? It is true. I did.

When one is in unity with the perfect love of one's Creator, joy is not only possible, it is an unchosen state. When I say unchosen, I mean that it is so spontaneous that one finds oneself in joy unexpectedly. One chooses the Father, and one then experiences joy. One is tempted to sin, and one chooses instead the Father's way, and one then experiences joy. There seems to be a time elapsing between the temptation, the choice for righteousness, and then the joy. Children of the Father, there is no time elapsing. Time ceases to be for those who remain fixed in love and fidelity toward the Father. These temptations that come float by. To be tempted is not to be sinful and there is no method of sin attaching to an apostle who has decided completely for the Father. One can be immersed in temptation, but if one simply continues to choose the righteous path, that person remains safe in the Father's love.

Truly, if thoughts are directed to God then people will experience life as a journey through a beautiful world. Mankind is with God in the world insofar as he chooses God's ways and God's thoughts. My wounds, suffered for the sins of mankind, should be viewed as demonstrations of My love, which always reflects the Father's love. When a person says that he loves someone, it is a good thing. When a person says that he loves someone, then uses his very body to protect that someone, there is little doubt that his sentiments of love are both true and deeply held. I did that for you. My sentiments of love for each of God's children are true and deeply held. I love you, dear child of the Father. I am connected to you intimately as one who has offered one's own life for another. We have a bond, you might say, an intimate bond that will never cease to be. I look at you steadily, craving notice. When you look at my wounds, do you see how much I love you? That is what I want you to see. I want you to look at my crucified form and believe that you are worth total love, total dedication, total immolation. You are worth everything there is and everything there will be. Any sacrifice is acceptable when it comes to your eternal life. Many people will be saved through my sacrifice and I will be in intimate relationship with them for eternity. But I hope for something more. I hope that you will begin an intimate relationship with me now.

I will repeat myself. When you view my wounds, please accept them as evidence of my total personal love for you."

Tips on Prayer - Who is the Holy Spirit?

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About your prayer life video - Part 1
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