REFLECTIONS ON A PILGRIMAGE TO MEDUGORJE

Fr Jim Cogley

Recently a large group of around forty-five of us enjoyed a seven-day visit to Medjugorje. Quite a few were from our Lady’s Island while almost all the others had spiritual connections with the place. Apart from a Covid interlude these trips have been happening for the past ten years and been a very enriching and spiritually awakening experience for all concerned. A place of spiritual awakening is how I can best describe Medjugorje. It is undoubtedly a place where hearts are touched and lives are changed. Generally having been there, pilgrims become like the three wise men in the Nativity story and come home by a different route. While it is associated with ongoing apparitions of our Lady, it will be by its fruits, born in the lives of its pilgrims that it will ultimately be known.

For me travelling this year was very different from others and while I went with faith that all would be well, it was also with some trepidation. With an injured knee I was in pain and hobbling along plus a kidney stone that was acting up, so my spirit was willing, but my flesh was weak and it could have been a most uncomfortable time. So, there was no climbing up Cross Mountain or Apparition Hill and there were a lot more taxi rides than usual. Yet for most and me personally it was by far the best trip ever. The Lord having slowed me down I was able to spend far more time in prayer and enjoy some remarkable and life changing encounters with people. Every day amazing things were happening usually in the form of coincidences that were truly God-incidences but then what is a co-incidence but a miracle where God chooses to remain anonymous!

One lesson I learned this year from carrying painful physical baggage was not to make it worse by engaging too much with it. Discomfort is one thing that we can’t avoid but it’s possible to greatly increase our level of suffering by becoming too identified with our ailments. We energize them when they take too much of our focus and they can draw us into the trap of self-pity, especially when we talk too much about them. Often while on the cross of pain we desperately want sympathy and there will be those who will offer it to us. What we may really need is someone to speak the truth that we don’t want to hear and say, ‘come down from there and stop feeling sorry for yourself, we need the wood for the fire’! Anything that gets us too focused on ourselves, is lethal for our spiritual wellbeing and doesn’t allow us to rise above pain. When we get too wrapped up in ourselves, we make a very small parcel!

One way Medjugorje is sometimes described is a ‘thin place’ where there is a close connection between two realities that we call this world and the next. More correctly it is a place where the essential oneness of all reality finds expression and something of Kingdom living can be experienced. We can look at the ease with which twenty thousand people attend daily events with absolutely no stewarding or policing. At times of adoration and during the daily apparitions a total silence descends on the place. This even extends to nature as I witnessed a few years ago on Apparition Hill. The dawn chorus

was in full swing, cocks were crowing and dogs were barking. Yet at the time when the apparition was happening all noise gave way to a sacred stillness and resumed just as soon as the apparition concluded. A police presence seems almost irrelevant in the area as there is an innate sense of safety afforded by divine protection.

Divine protection seems to have been afforded to Medjugorje from the earliest days of the apparitions in 1981. Not long after the Bosnian War broke out towns and villages throughout the area being reduced to ruins. There were numerous squadrons that took off from nearby Mostar with orders to bomb Medjugorje but on each occasion the pilots reported that a thick cloud had covered the target and they had to return to base. The church of St James that had taken forty years to build would have been the main target and this is now by far the busiest church in the world. Unlikely many holy sites where commercialism extends to the shrine entrance, in Medjugorje it is obvious that most if not all of the traders have been touched by the message and so there isn’t the greed or heavy sell that is so obvious in other such places.

For many years I turned down offers to go on trips to Medjugorje. Why I am not sure, but it may have been because of skepticism at the idea of Our Lady appearing daily and for over forty-fiveyears. Now the more I visit, the greater is my conviction that something truly supernatural is happening there and that it is the greatest center for faith renewal in the Catholic Church. Just to see the sincerity of devotion from 20,000 gathering for Adoration most evenings is a sight to behold that brings newcomers to tears when they first witness it. How can one knock the phenomenon of 70,000 young people being drawn together for worship in the sweltering heat every August. Nor is it possible to criticize the many humanitarian organizations that have their origins there. Ultimately as Christ says a good tree can always be recognized by its fruit and that is evident in abundance.