TIME  OF  GRACE  WITH  OUR  LADY (Father Marinko Shakota, OFM)

The message of Our Lady (May 25, 2025): “Dear children! In this time of grace, I am calling you to be men of hope, peace and joy, so that every man may be a peacemaker and a lover of life. Pray, little children, to the Holy Spirit to fill you with the strength of His own Holy Spirit of courage and surrender. And this time for you will be a gift and a walk in holiness towards eternal life. I am with you and I love you. Thank you for having responded to my call”.

1 “In this time of grace, I am calling you to be men of hope, peace and joy, so that every man may be a peacemaker and a lover of life”

Our Lady reminds us that this time in which we live with Her is a time of grace. Why does She say that? As if we don’t know it. The Mother of God reminds us not to forget it because we may regret it when it passes, when we realize what we have missed. Therefore it is important to comprehend that and use that best possible.

“I am calling you”. Let’s be aware of that because we are getting used to Our Lady’s call. It is grace when Our Lady implores us to do something because it means that She counts on us as we are important for Her and we may contribute as well and help Her, Who is Our Mother, to realize Her plans. Don’t think that it is difficult and demanding! It is grace to be called! It is a privilege to be in Our Lady’s plan!

The call is in Our Lady’s desire for us to be people of hope, peace and joy. The meaning of the call is in giving. It is good for us to become people of hope, peace and joy so that we may feel good. How it is wonderful to have hope, peace and joy!

However the meaning of our lives and our efforts doesn’t end at this point but it continues. The main dynamic of Jesus’s actions is as follows: “I do for you what the Father has done for Me. Do to one another what I have done to you. Love one another as I have loved you”. Our Lady follows in Her Son’s footsteps completely: we need to become people of hope, peace and joy as it may be good not only for us but for others who may become peacemakers and lovers of life according to Jesus and Mary’s example as well.

Lately we may notice that Our Lady more often  calls us to give and help others. We have revealed the reason for this above: that is a way of Jesus’s thinking and His actions. However there may be another reason: that is to hold out against the spirit of time, especially against individualism and selfishness which reign more and more in the world today and threaten to conque us. The logic of this spirit of time is as follows: Let it be good for me and I don’t care about others. Recently I have personally heard a man say: “Kids? No, I don’t want them to spoil my happiness and pleasure”.

We can only imagine how many lonely, inconsolable, discouraged, hopeless, desperate, unhappy, poor people there would be if we followed the way of thinking of such selfish people. What would happen to the world and all of us if there weren’t people who sacrifice themselves for the sake of others and spread warmth, kindness, peace and love around them with their love and kindness? What would happen to us if there weren’t people who forgive and accept us? The ice age would reign and we would die out of sorrow.

It goes without saying that it isn’t easy to sacrifice ourselves for others and to give ourselves, our time and love to others. Certainly it’s not easy to forgive, to accept other people and our cross, to be patient with others when they don’t live up to our desires and expectations. Let’s be honest: we expect all these things from other people and they make us happy. If these things make us happy then they will make other people happy as well. It will happen if we give ourselves to others.

Although sacrifice and giving our time to others, forgiving, accepting our cross, suffering in the face of weaknesses of others sometimes seem difficult and unpopular as they forgo us the comfort. However it isn’t hard to get on with all this stuff. It depends on love. Remember Our Lady’s words: “When you don’t have love then nothing is possible for you but when you love then everything is possible for you”. Someone said: “This is a great thing when you are happy and this is a greater thing when you help others to be happy as well”. I feel good when I am a person of hope, peace and joy. This is really great for me. Would I be happy if I were the only happy person?  Am I not  happier when I help others to be happy as well? That is the meaning of real happiness.

2 “Pray, little children, to the Holy Spirit to fill you with the strength of His own Holy Spirit of courage and surrender”. 

However the question remains open: How can we achieve everything we talked about? The Virgin Mary reveals a mystery to us: Pray! Our Lady has nothing without prayer. Why? We would get tired if we set our hopes only on our human forces which often are weak. At this point we may comprehend the meaning of the prayer: to pray means to seek strength from God. Everything we do we should do with God.

This way of thinking is quite opposite to satan as he had wanted Adam and Eve to live without God, on their own, autonomously from the very beginning. There was the following promise: “They will become gods”. The consequences for those who had believed and followed that have been well known for us since the mighty Rome empire, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, communism and other ideologies until our days. All these great gods fell and perished. The same thing will happen with the ideology of modernism which seems to be powerful.

We need not only knowledge but also strength. Therefore Our Lady desires us to pray to the Holy Spirit Who gives us strength which is in courage and surrender. Courage is an inner power that helps to live without fear of the obstacles which seem to us difficult and unattainable. Surrender is a power with which we give and trust everything we have into God’s  hands. In short, to have courage means to give ourselves to God for Him to lead us.

It is clear for us why Mary encourages us to pray to the Holy Spirit  because She had experienced the Holy Spirit. But it is less clear why She wants us to pray for courage and surrender. At first sight it may seem weird for us however She talks to us again out of Her experience. Who had more courage than Mary to go on an adventure with God and accept the suggestion of conceiving the Child, the Son of God without Joseph whom She was engaged to? Who had more courage than Mary to conceive without man and live amidst people who had been ready to stone Her for that. Is there a better example of surrender than Mary’s one Who completely trusted Herself to God when She had said: “ Behold, the Servant of the Lord; let it be done to Me according to Your word!”.

She, Whom they would consider to be “weak” according to modern standards, has conquered almighties of this world because She is courageous and puts everything into God’s hand. Therefore She teaches us Her mystery so that we may be able to defeat evil.

to us

3 “And this time for you will be a gift and a walk in holiness towards eternal life”

Our Lady reveals the depth and meaning of this time of grace to us; this is an undeserved and wonderful gift for us from God and Virgin Mary. This gift is given to us not as a reward for our achievements but rather as opportunity and incentive for us to take the path of holiness towards eternal life.

Now there is a question whether this gift is a privilege for us? Are there many people who had the same grace as we have? How and to what extent do we use this gift?  How may this time of grace be a walk in holiness or to what extent does it empty our walk?

4 “I am with you and I love you”.

What simple words of Our Lady! They are so simple that we may ignore them and let them pass. It would be a great mistake. A profound message is hidden in their simplicity. “I am with you”. It means: don’t be afraid, you are not alone! Is there any greater encouragement than this one?

“I love you”. Can we find greater happiness than the happiness of knowing and feeling that Our Mother loves us, that we are not orphans or random people in this world? Even if we sometimes think that the society we live in is a selfish one which casts us out and doesn’t appreciate us or that it would be better if we didn’t exist then, anyway there is no more joy than a joy of comprehending that there is Someone Who loves and needs us, counts on us and that is Mother  Mary!

What a shame and wasted life there will be if we “walk under the stars as children” (the quotation from verse “Opomena” by Antun Branko Šimić) and don’t share this happiness with others…