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  

By Jakob Marschner in Bosnia-Hercegovina

 

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”: “The word ‘love’ often hangs from our lips; it seems so familiar, even though we have to admit that we do not know its face. In our days, the word ‘love’ is connected to a state of being which is rich in emotive energy and strong experiences; but in the end the person is put down and left with a greater void than ever. Despite this, some still say that it is better than not loving at all,” writes Jelena.  

“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: “The nostalgia which remains in our heart even after we have satisfied our desires indicates that the problem with modern man isn’t not wanting to love, but not knowing who to love. Under these conditions, man is without a ‘homeland’ and is destined to drift from one experience to another. Love is like a light; whenever we try to catch it, it escapes,” Jelena reflects in Echo of Mary.  

“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.  

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