Medjugorje: The Easter greetings from the parish priest, Father Marinko Šakota…Including comments on Easter during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Dear brothers and sisters, parishioners, pilgrims, dear friends of Medjugorje who in
the whole world you are in communion with Our Lady, with what she tells us, that you are there open to you and to your calls, calls to peace and prayer, I greet you all
with my heart and I want to share some thoughts with you.


Lent has passed, Easter is coming. This is an invitation to all of us
to live Easter within us, which is particular this year. It is in this time
of the coronavirus epidemic, in which we remained without the Eucharist, without prayer
common, without the sacrament of confession, is precisely in this time, time
of silence, the time in which we are immersed in ourselves, the time in which we allow
to the Lord to transform us.

Our Lady of Medjugorje
 
This is the time of prayer when the Mother wants us to open up to God like her
nature opens to the sun, to solar heat, wants us to open up in prayer
to the Love of God, to allow Him to speak to our heart, to allow the rays
of His love to touch our being so that within it takes place
transformation. So Our Lady, the dear Mother, wants this to happen in us and there
call: Return to Jesus, return!

Return to prayer and fasting! Turn your gaze and your heart to
God, open your heart to the love of God and leave out everything that takes you away from
God, by prayer. Leave out, abandon and return to God like that son
prodigal returned to the father.

Behold, this time in which we are now is the time in which that son was
prodigal, the time of silence, the time in which we re-enter ourselves, meditate,
we reflect, we look at where we have been wrong so far, in what we are
get away from Jesus, when we got away from prayer, from fasting, from
word of God, from members of our family, from true values. Here, this is that
time, the time in which I return, I turn again to the Lord and to prayer. L’
example for us in all this, dear friends, is Maria. She is the person who opens up to
Lord, who allows Him to talk to you. “Here I am, Lord, be made of me according to
your word. ” This means allowing, opening the heart and all of this happens in her
in the silence. When the angel spoke to her, Mary entered His interiority, into the
depth of his heart, he remained silent. He kept all the events, he meditated them in
his heart, always in the interior, again in silence.

Dear friends, we can understand this situation in two ways. We can
understand it as something that has been imposed on us, that is, that we did not want.
We can complain, because we don’t have the opportunity for the Holy Mass, for the
Adoration, for the sacrament of confession, we have no chance of
go out… reminds us of what the Israelites did in the desert when they left Egypt,
when they said, “We have nothing but this miserable food, this manna
and we are sick of this food. We have nothing but this. “So
what we have is nothing. They only see what they don’t have. Likewise,
we too can now turn our gaze towards what we do not have, what there is
is missing, what we cannot do.

The other possibility is to transform this imposed time into something good.
We have the opportunity to choose and say, “I want to take this time now like
a time of grace, like a time that is given to me for inner transformation,
for the opening of my heart to the Lord, like a time when I will calm down, me
I will stop, a time that will help me not to hurry, not to run, to make myself
I realize that I have time for prayer, for the word of God, for my family members. “

Here, dear friends, it is Easter! Let’s live it like a real Easter.
The Resurrection of Jesus happened in silence, it happened, and nobody saw it.
Here, we too are in the silence of our room and our home. Jesus
he wants Easter to happen in us now and here, and it will happen if we get out of
sepulcher in which perhaps we find ourselves, from the sepulcher of negative thoughts, from the sepulcher of
negative feelings towards some people and when we will begin to desire the good
for others.

Similarly, when we decide to forgive, when we start praying for
having love for a person that we don’t love, that we don’t endure, that we don’t
like it, that hurt us, when we start praying for love in our heart
for that person, this is the exit from the sepulcher.

When we decide to see what is good, what is given to us, what surrounds us,
to see the creatures of God in nature, when we choose to see what has been given to us, it is here that the exit from the sepulcher takes place. The resurrection! The new life!

Here, dear friends, I wish you with all my heart!
Happy and blessed Easter!