My Heart Will Triumph

This work is largely an autobiographical account of one of the Medjugorje visionaries. A substantial portion of the book, perhaps two-thirds, is about Ms. Soldo's personal life history: her childhood, her time in high school, her attempts at college, her marriage, her experiences during the war. A significant theme throughout those years is the oppression of communism, particularly the sort which was terrified over the lack of control of the unfolding events of the Blessed Virgin's alleged visits. This oppression came down hard upon Mirjana, and her many persecutions as a young woman themselves offer substantial evidence that her claims are authentic. Indeed it would be quite astonishing that after seemingly endless trials by the communist regime directed against this person, who by all accounts wanted nothing more than a quiet life, it would turn out that she fabricated the entire thing or was deceived by demonic forces. That would be like Samwise Gamgee making up the entire Lord of the Rings story because he wanted a little excitement in his life - a totally honest, simple soul who wanted nothing but a little garden in the back of a quiet house. So the book proceeds with a nice organization: her youth and her close relationship with her father, her time in high school and how dramatically it changed once the apparitions started. Her inability to finish college due to communist oppression, her marriage, the war years, and the period after the war. There are also plenty of anecdotes, such as her meeting with John Paul II and receiving his shoes after his death. The final section is a glimpse into her meetings with the many pilgrims who have gone to Medjugorje over the years as well as a surprisingly intimate sharing of what her experience of Mary is like during an apparition. "Sincere, simple, authentic, genuine" are words which come to mind. I found myself thinking, "yes, of course this is how it would be if I met the Blessed Mother." Mirjana answers the question everyone wants the answer to: "why has Mary been visiting for so long, why so many messages?" After you read this book you won't ask that anymore. You'll ask what you can do today to bring God's light into this dark world. That is ALL that matters. Not whether Medjugorje is true or not, or whether the end is nigh or any of that. What is God asking of you in your life this day so you can be his disciple more effectively? Let the rest to Him. The questions and curiosities only distract us and waste our energies. Throughout the book we are treated with photographs of her life. She also skillfully weaves some of Mary's messages throughout. Given the vast trove of messages, the fact that she is so capable of selecting some to fit the context of what she is talking about is notable. There are a few things I found striking. One is her humility. She insists throughout that Mary does not have favorite children: she is no more important or loved in the Blessed Virgin's eyes than anyone else on earth. It pains her that pilgrims focus so much on her, though she understands why they might. Mirjana is always directing people's eyes upward to God. Another delight in the book is her great sense of humor. She comes across as someone like you or I - just plain, down home, no-nonsense but deeply in love with God and wanting to do His will in all things. She stresses the importance of humor and rightly points out the poison of a melancholy which destroys faith and trust in God. She also stresses the importance of conversion over a continual curiosity about the messages or what will happen in the future. "Who cares what the secrets are if your time on this earth is up before they happen?" In this we hear echoes of St. Antony of the desert, who, when asked about the secret of his intense spiritual life, stated: "When I arise I act as though I will die before bed, and when I go to bed, I act as though I won't live until the morning." He was given a grace to live each day as though it were his last. The time of our death is our own personal secret, and that is the one to focus on - conversion today, learning to love - today. Many will feel consoled by her words of complete and filial obedience to her bishop ("I would walk a hundred miles if he told me to"), as well as the Pope. In such a deeply divisive time it is refreshing to hear of her simple and confident faith that the Holy Spirit provides the Church the kind of Pope she needs for the times. Mirjana stresses throughout the book the importance of love, love, love. Never judge, never criticize, only help others come to learn the love of God by loving them. Anyone who is worried about an excessive focus on this needs to spend time with the Johannine works. Almost completely absent are any complaints about how frequently she is misrepresented by the many books written about Medjugorje. We finally get to hear it from her own mouth, and the feeling I got after finishing it was that the publication of this book may be one of the most important episodes in the history of Medjugorje in a very long time. I think it was Divine Providence that guided her to write this book at this time, and if she is reading this, I thank her very much for it. Just don't buy it to satisfy any kind of burning curiosity about the secrets or the future - you will be disappointed. The book concludes with a short section talking about the five main areas of focus: Prayer, Fasting, Confession, Mass, Scriptures. * * * I have been to Medjugorje twice: once in 1989 and again a year or two later (I returned only to see a little while later on tv the hotel where I was staying in Dubrovnik shelled by the war). I visited the houses of some of the visionaries though I can't recall who. Honestly, I treated the first trip as a kind of retreat, and resisted the urge to figure out whether anything was really happening there. I can say it was a profound experience of Church like none other on the planet. Everyone around me was there to change their heart - everyone. It was an experience of brotherhood like no other. It adds nothing whatsoever to say it, but I will. At one time I gazed up at the sun and stared at it around midday for several minutes. I clearly saw a white disk ("host," if you will) spinning around on the face of it. Whether or not it was a visual phenomenon I don't know. Don't be scandalized: I believe in the Real Presence so to me, I wanted to respect what I saw if it was from God, but it was of no importance to me, with the indwelling Christ of the Eucharist. What was the visual miracle to me when I had Christ's very own life blood coursing through me from Mass? I figured it was intended for others. The second time I went with a friend, who wanted me to accompany him. I felt very strongly in my heart that I was meant to be back home, busy about my life mission. A word was spoken to me while atop Cross mountain one evening alone, which I wrote in my journal. That was about 26 years ago and it is beginning to unfold in my life as the word said. The message is simple: change your life utterly for God, completely and totally. Set out on the journey anew each day. Live prayer, live and learn love, forgiveness, mercy. Immerse yourself in the Word of God, embrace the sacraments with frequency, take God's love everywhere He tells you to, even if it is alone in your cell each day in unceasing prayer of reparation. The word God spoke to me awhile back: "Don't be like Jonah, looking out over the city of Ninevah wondering whether I will burn it down. Be like Abraham, looking out over Sodom and praying without ceasing for my mercy, that I may spare it." That is the choice before us, my brothers and sisters: will you be like Jonah or like Abraham?

BOOK REVIEW OF My Heart Will Triumph by Mirjana Soldo Cocoa, Florida, Catholic Shop Publishers, 2016, 369 pages by Samuel A. Nigro, MD, retired psychiatrist, copyright c 2018, open access. A beloved high school sweetheart of the 1950s asked me to review this book. It is the story of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six children in Medugorje, Yugoslavia (now Sarajevo) which began June 24, 1981. The author lived it and describes it. It is a startling peek of Eternity and life outside of space-time. I find it provides the basis for contemporary parables of basic physics and science which help in understanding the universe consistent with ancient parables helping people know there is more than all the entropy and synthesis of our daily lives in space/time. Similar are current scientific theories of multiple universes seeming to confirm the Church's ancient proposed multiverses of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. My Heart Will Triumph is another glimpse of Spirituality proving the pre-Big Bang Statimuum, which is the word in basic physics for "Eternity with God"--or "Heaven." Mirjana stated, "Scientists, I later learned, categorized our experience as being in a state of ecstasy. I called it being in Heaven" (page 29). This is confirmed by wide-eyed onlookers repeatedly viewing the children ascending, gliding in less than two minutes to the top of the hill to see the Virgin, a walking distance adults said would take them "at least 12 minutes to get there (page 28)." What Soldo details is amazing. Who knows why these kids got apparitions so vividly. Maybe because one can find no hint of fabrication, division, evil, degradation or exploitation in anything in the book about these kids. Indeed, these kids bland acceptance of intimidating and demanding abuse by ubiquitous Communist authorities evokes the relaxed sainthood imagery of St. Thomas More facing his decapitation by King Henry VIII because of infallible-knowledge providing immunity and total undisturbed solace. As always, Communists, Pharisees, scribes, Herodians, atheists, secularists, and other jealous angry editors have not the faintest idea of the reality that there is more to life than their short-sighted arrogance. It was rough on the kids--peers and adults avoided and openly rejected them and their families for the most part because there were unpleasant consequences for those who were accepting and nice to them. What childhoods: ignored, bullied and threatened with murder...but all accepted with benign revering composure because they witnessed real Spirituality (As the Virgin told them "For those who will live the word of my Son and who will love, death will be life" page 59). "During those days, I was ready to die at any moment. I expected it was all leading to a point where they would kill me; I would vanish overnight...I wasn't afraid of dying, though, because then I could be with the Blessed Mother forever" (page 117). The book details "the visionaries" as they were called. What they heard from the Virgin must be read directly; a reviewer cannot do them justice. Most chapters begin with a quote from the Virgin as a title for the chapter. Many more quotes in each chapter from the Virgin offer a touch of the Divine throughout the book enabling many minutes of supernatural reflection and Spirit as events of the children are described. The best summary is that, after a full reading, it is a "prayer book" deserving at least a few pages every morning or bedtime--to start your day off with some contemporary words of the Virgin. Back to physics, apparitions are glimpses of what basic physics has to call the pre-BigBang: "the Immediacy of the non-time, non-space Statimuum", necessary for the Big Bang to have occurred about 15 billion years ago containing all the universe we know and have lived in. The Big Bang had to come from the pre-BigBang--Eternity--the Statimuum-- which contains the all of the All of the Universe Immediately--the Unrestrained Infinite Immediacy beyond our understanding and perception--except by brief glimpses which My Heart Will Triumph describes, as do the apparition experiences of others over the centuries. Stimulated by Soldo, I find myself confirmed in proposing that there are several human phenomena which give glimpses of the Statimuum of a more generalized superficial Spirituality and are usually not even recognized as a touch of Eternity. All are "super-nature"--beyond the limitations of the animal kingdom, because only humans have "conscious of consciousness",i.e., the soul enables functioning beyond nature. To be listed are complex human-only events requiring interactions leading to "spirit" which is felt as an exhilarating surge of transcendence no doubt a glimpse of the joyful Immediacy of the All in the pre-Big Bang. The listed, infra, are not "apparitions" but mini-glimpses of Spirit. They are not "perfect" because nature has it's errors and pollution; and humans have the freedom for entropy as well as synthesis. A few routinely overlooked mini-glimpses, not apparitions, of Spirit: (1) Human Art--Matter in nature creates Spirit--Love from the Creator is even evident in molecular attractions which fill the universe. Just before receiving My Heart Will Triumph, I visited the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. It is an artful collection of many plants with molecules provoking humans to imitate their natural transcendent organizing into more visible exhibition of transcendence provoking in humans even more genuine Spirit beyond the Universe. Suddenly, you see and feel love everywhere there is real Art, including in nature, as the Virgin told these kids: "Today I invite you to observe nature because there you will meet God...I call you to give glory to God the Creator in the colors of nature. Through even the smallest flower, He speaks to you about His beauty and the depth of His love" (page 81)--If you can see clearly, matter creates Spirit, because there is even "love" between molecules attracted to each other in nature. (2) Sports--Sports are spirit-filled interaction events--contestants and spectators pray alot. (3) Music--Music with words of transcendence-being, matter, identity, truth, oneness, good, and beauty(1). (4) Words--Words and language cannot be understood by evolutionists, scientists, philosophers, or academics because "words are angels"(2)--Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary and find their birth and personhood. (5) Theogeocalculus--Natural Law (3)--If you do not follow it, you are pollution. (6) The Mass--with its ultimate human purposes of Life, Sacrifice, Virtue, Love, Humanity, Peace, Freedom, and Natural Death Without Fear (4,5,6). These human events all pale to the apparitions by the Virgin to the children, but genuine pre-BigBang Spirit is glimpsed and felt by involvement in these six human-only C2 (Conscious-of-Consciousness) categories beyond nature but not beyond Nature's God and super-nature. My Heart Will Triumph is a must read consistent with the God given Lovelution of the Church and full humanbeingness. Thank you, Karen, for alerting me to this book! References: (1) "On Listening To Music"[email protected] (2) "Words Angels Language"[email protected] (3) "The Theogeocalculus of Life"...theogeocalculus.pdf - Adobe Reader (4) "Deplorable Pamphleteer"...Sam @DocNigro.com (5) "The Church"...Samuel A. Nigro, MD, J Psychol Clin Psychiatry 2015, 4(3): 00216 (6) "Does Anyone Know How To Go To Mass Anymore?"[email protected]

So fantastic. Read in 2 days. Went there in 89. Brought it all back!!!

The book is written with passion and very deep feelings. It's a sweet autobiography with strong messages and facts about the apparition of our Lady in Medjugorje. I encourage everybody to read it.

This is such a lovely book. The hardship and torture she went through and still manages to smile, pure inspiration! A++

Thank you Mirjana for sharing your heart with us and for showing us a glimpse of our Mother's heart and love for us. I came to know about Medjugorje relatively recently(2 years), but Mama had prepared me to know Her even when I was still a Catholic atheist . Our parish priest had given me a small prayer card of Queen of Peace and Medjugorje prayer behind it. I discovered it after almost 8 years im a book priest gave it to me. Surely it was Mother who brought me back to Her Son. I always had felt sadness that I do not have enough money for travelling Holy Land or Shrines like Medjugorje, but with this book I felt like I witnessed an apparition on the hill.. Thank you for now I am stronger in my spirit and I will be better than before for my Mother. Thank you from India.

I loved this book and didn’t want it to finish. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of this most important message of love and peace and trusting and having a relationship with God, Jesus and how love for the Mother can lead us to this. Makes me want to go there and experience the transformation many have spoken about however reading this book made you feel like you went on a journey too.

This book came to me „out of the blue“… I started to read the book and always was drawn back to read more. It changes your thoughts, your perspective on life and your daily routines. It needs time to integrate these impulses, but you are definitely on the right path, to open your heart more and more to the visionaries messages, to the shared lovely and direct honest messages from divine, from Mary, Queen of peace. Read, listen, pray, open your heart and practice love… this is a great way to peace within .