The Mother of Mercy and the Abyss of Love

The Mother of Mercy spoke through Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity. As death approached the young Carmelite, she addressed Mary's words to her Prioress as well as to every soul who longs for the coming of the Lord.  The Mother of Mercy because the mercy of the Father is revealed in her Son, Jesus, Saint Elizabeth presents Mary's mission of mercy. The Carmelite reveals, through Mary's words, the generosity of the Lord who does not even withhold his own mother to help us and to affirm our faith. Just as Mary helped Jesus make his very first offering to the Father as his mother, the Virgin has come to help us make an offering of our lives too.

Out from between my arms, entering into the world, Jesus made his first oblation to the Father, and He sent me to receive yours! I brought you a scapular as a pledge of my protection and of my love, and also as a "sign" of the mystery that will be worked in you.  My daughter, I come "to cloth you in Jesus-Christ" until you "walk in Him," with the Father and the Spirit of love, into the very depths of the Abyss. I come until you are built up in Him who is your Rock, your Fortress. I come until you are "affirmed in your faith." I come until your faith is affirmed in the immense Love who plunges the very ground of your soul into the great Furnace. My daughter, this all powerful Love will accomplish great things in you. Believe in my word, the word of a Mother. This Mother thrills in seeing with what particular tenderness you are loved.  Oh, remain in the deepest core of your being and behold Him who comes fully armed with gifts. The abyss of his love surrounds Him like a cloak: the Bridegroom!
Silence!
Silence!
Silence!

Letter 316, 24 Sept. 1906

The truth of our humanity is revealed only when we encounter the Bridegroom who gives Himself to us. In meeting Him, we discover how to offer ourselves as a gift of love for others and for God. He helps us realize that to make such a gift of self can only be learned from Him - for He not only exemplifies this gift, but enables it, the deeper our faith in Him becomes.

Indeed, we must suffer the immensity of His love and overcome our tendency to promote ourselves rather than give ourselves. As long as self-promotion and self-occupation reign within, we lack the freedom to give, to offer our lives for the glory of God and the good of our neighbor. To arrive at the freedom required to offer our lives as something beautiful for God, as a living sacrifice, as a pleasing offering, the Lord must accomplish a great mystery in us. It is a mystery of holiness, a mystery of love. This mystery that God brings about in us also encompasses our own effort too.

This is why Mary is sent, to teach us how to love in the way the Jesus loved. She can do this because she knows in a singular way the particular tenderness of Jesus' love. Indeed, love never rises to anything if it fails to demand all our effort, all our strength, the endurance of hardships, many difficult renunciations, the humble acceptance of our own inadequacies and perseverance through many painful failures. Saint Elizabeth knew that this would be impossible but for the fact that the Lord Himself accomplishes all this and so much more in us - the more we believe in Him. So, she received the gift of the Mother of Mercy - and she wants us to experience how Mary can affirm our faith in the immensity of Mercy too.

The Holy Family and Contemplative Prayer

The Holy Family is the first school of contemplative prayer.  One way to know the truth of this is to visit the Holy Family in prayer. St. Francis brought the manger scene into the churches that he rebuilt precisely to build up such prayer. St. Ignatius also invites us to use our imagination to ponder this same mystery. Christmas carols also take us to this same contemplation if we let them.

This spiritual exercise best begins by visiting a manger scene, making the sign of the Cross and calling to mind the presence of God. Sometimes we can be too mechanical about this, taking too much for granted, and this is a mistake. His presence is remarkable. He is closer to us than we are to ourselves, holding us in existence, and at the same time, waiting for us to hold Him. Calling to mind His presence then is always in the form of a person encounter, a heart to heart, a mystery that deserves the complete attention of all the powers of our being. The Lord who relied on Joseph and Mary in His infancy also relies on us, entrusts Himself to us.

As we allow this truth to sanctify our minds, if we prayerfully turn to the Gospels, our imagination can begin to probe the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. The power of our imagination can search for Mary and Joseph on their flight to Egypt. Or else, we can imagine them on their frantic search for Jesus in Jerusalem. The revealed drama that they endured puts Jesus at the center - everything is always in relation to Him, bringing them into a deeper relation to one another. We might take in the surroundings, sounds and smells that live in the silences of the Gospels; and then the search the faces of Mary and Joseph to discern the paradoxes of tension and peace, prayer and practicality, anxious concern and mutual confidence. When we carefully search the devotion of their hearts revealed in the Scriptures, without realizing how, our own heart can suddenly be revealed.

In the Biblical images, each verse invites us more deeply into the vast horizons of empathy born in contemplative prayer. Here, with the Holy Family, we discover and can even feel that this empathy has a poignantly familial tenderness to it and a fierce dedication driving it. Yet the Bible allows us to share this tenderness with them - their own fierce solicitude for Jesus and familial devotion is passed on to us through the Church.

Ripples on the surface of a deep mystery follow from this. If the concern that Joseph and Mary shared for the Christ-child can rouse our hearts to deeper devotion, then the drama of other hearts in relation to Jesus also belong to us in prayer in some way. And, the anxious concerns and peace that we ourselves know in prayer are also not meant to be carried by ourselves alone, but through the ministry of the Church, by the whole Family of God together in communion. This mystery of communion is why we must never forget the heart of the Church - that place were tenderness and dedication spring just as it sprung in the heart of Mary and Joseph as they drew ever closer to Emmanuel. The familial empathy that impacts contemplation of the Holy Family is ultimately ecclesial. What we behold in the Holy Family is what should live in our own domestic churches, our families, our parishes.

Beautiful silences in mental prayer and the mystery of communion in the Church coincide in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph shared a devotion that was not individualistic but always in relation and bringing all things into relation in them and between them. The silences they knew were filled with this very fullness of encounter and recognition. If we consider their shared devotion to the Christ-child, they teach us how to protect the gentle awareness of God's presence that has begun in each other too. The concern-in-common that we ponder in the stillness of their hearts is meant to become the concern that lives in our hearts as we strive for a deeper communion in the Church. Such love implicates us in each other's life of faith with all the tension and concern that flows from this -- a mystery that defined the very life of the Holy Family.

Christian Prayer and the Incarnation

With the Word of the Father, the words of Christian prayer are born from the Virgin's Womb. Such was the mystery of prayer learned first by the One who Believed as she felt Him ready to enter the world. It is not seized by force or mastered by practice. The result always exceeds expectation but can never be calculated. This prayer can only be welcomed as a gift and requires that humble reverence without which no love is ever possible. There is no other prayer that the human heart can offer that is given to us as this prayer has been given.

Just as she carried the Lord in her womb before His birth, every prayer offered in Christian faith also carries Him. Since her "fiat", the Word of the Father has never stopped coming and with each advent, He prepares a new theophany whenever a heart says "yes" to Him. Each new word of prayer offered by faith in Him makes space for Him to be born, and opens unseen human poverties and miseries to Divine Peace and Glory.

As she waited for that first Christmas, filled with wonder, the humble Handmaid knew the mystery first conceived in her heart by obedience would soon be heard and seen in the shadow of the Almighty. She must have been amazed that the very vulnerability of His prayer, even when only an infant's cry, would pierce the heart of the Father and unveil the deep things of God. Her mind must have bathed in astonishment over how His prayer would echo at the center of human history and in every human heart. Did she guess by the way it drew her that His prayer had the power to draw all men back to all that is noble and true about humanity, and to all that is good and tender about God?

She must have wondered over that mysterious silent love by which He raised His Heart. If she felt this in her womb, could she see with her heart that His canticle of love would not be dimmed even when He suffered death? She nonetheless believed that the humble glory of his unvanquished petition would make powerful knees bend and haughty heads bow down. By the invincible hope of His cry, she still rejoices that the prayers of those who believe stand in the midst of hardship and shine bright against the darkness.

It is possible to learn such prayer in these finals days before Christmas. These are words that are learned by an obedience that suffers, progresses and dies in love just as He did.  The Man of Sorrows is the Way that prayer must walk if Christian faith is to attain what it seeks. The Just One is the Truth who makes true the desires of the Christian heart. The One Crucified by Love is the life for all those who, by prayer, die to themselves and live no more this earthly life. A wondrous gift is offered in the simple surrender that would turn again from sin, persevere in love and invoke His Name; and that prayer that amazed the Mother of God becomes also the prayer coming to birth in the heart. 

Rejoice, Daughter Zion

The joy of the Mother of God, in these days drawing close to the nativity, opens up new depths of the Advent Mystery. She personifies the New Jerusalem, and the title Daughter of Zion applies to her in astonishing ways.  She is an icon of the Church, the Bride for whom the Bridegroom comes. Mighty divine relations of Father, Son and Spirit impact frail human relations in her, not to destroy or diminish, but to renew in love. And in her womb, the Word made flesh is become her joy, and Her soul, in response, declares infinite magnitudes that this world cannot hold.

How can any frail human words proclaim the Almighty Word? How can this finite creature express infinite meaning and communion? Even still, something in her maternal heart explodes into action and no power in heaven or hell can hold her back. And because she personifies the Church, we who are members of Christ's Body are part of this very jubilation. We are, each of us, words of the Word made flesh. Because God draws close to us, our lives in their very particularity and limits are implicated in the joy of magnifying the infinities of Divine love.

Who could have guessed that the Lord's promises would be fulfilled in this way? The prophet Zephaniah commands the Daughter of Zion to shout for joy, and the Handmaid of the Lord exclaims, "My spirit rejoices in God my savior." He declares that the Lord, the mighty Savior, is in her midst, and she foresees that "all generations shall call me blessed."  He foretells that the Mighty God "will rejoice" over her and "sing joyfully" because of her, and she exclaims, "My soul magnifies the Lord."

To magnify the Lord, we must welcome Him with the surrender of our whole existence. We must make ourselves vulnerable as He has become vulnerable to us. This means whole mountains of sluggishness must come down and valleys of indifference filled with empathy for others.

John the Baptist's message help us make the crooked ways of our hearts straight. He knows that the Lord is close at hand and answers the anxious questions of those who know they were not yet prepared. If even he once asked "Are you the One?", do we have any hope of responding to the truth and light of the Word who comes to us?

The Daughter Zion is not discouraged or afraid of such anxieties, and she know the assurance that we need as the Word is conceived in our hearts. For she knows the question of the Baptist and the questions in our hearts have an answer. She knows this answer is not a puzzling proverb to quiet our minds or any clever technique by which we surmount anxieties. The answer is her Son, the Word of the Father who speaks into the whole earthly existence of our very being. She knows a simple act of trust in Him is greater than all fears no matter the threat we face. Her hope is grounded in the Word's triumph over evil and lives in the Holy Humanity that He has won on the Cross. This means Mary's hope lives in the Body of Christ, the Church.

The Daughter of Zion knows that the Lord has come to forgive sin and to defeat the enemies of holy humanity.  She ponders the words of the Word that live in His Body as His members These same words echo the Word made flesh in the world. Each saint is a new expression of the Word who has come, not to condemn, but to save. And we, the members of His Body are born as was He, not into a welcoming world, but into one in which we are not received. The Virgin is not dismayed by this and Advent invites us to see what she sees.

Mary ponders the greatness of the Lord in the hearts of those who are obedient to the Word. Betrayal, denial and abandonment in the Church are no more than the stammered syllables through which the Father whispers His mysterious love into our pain. The story that He entrusts to us does not end in misfortune. In the limits of time and space and in the brokenness of human misery, new joy fills the Virgin as the words of the Eternal Word are born anew in our midst.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

This mysterious Woman came to the poorest of the poor with a mysterious word of hope when hope was most needed. She did not declare it to the powerful. She did not entrust it to those comfortable with life. She did not go to someone highly regarded in the world. Instead, she put her hopes in a simple and hidden heart of a humble man in a very broken time.

He thought he could avoid her impossible task, but she found him. He thought he was not worthy, but she told him not to be afraid.  In the end, while it was neither convenient nor comfortable, he obeyed her maternal request, and his obedience allowed her to awaken faith in those whose dignity was on the line.

This mysterious Woman comes again. Entrusted to us as our Mother, she is a gift from Jesus who has given us everything. Holding nothing back, He hopes that we will take her into our homes. Are we simple and hidden enough for her to find us? Are we meek enough for her to rely on us?

For many have forgotten hope and many more long for peace, and she cannot be indifferent to their plight. She wants them to know her Son. If we welcome it in prayer, her maternal love gives us courage to witness to the Savior of the World.

Our Lady in this Time for Prayer

Prayer is needed in these difficult days. The darkness and cold we feel are not merely physical realities related to the time of year and weather conditions. People have forgotten the Lord and they do not have time for God. Prayer can change all of this ... but we have not yet welcomed the Word of God and answered this call to prayer.

Homeless, the Word made flesh travels this world now as He did while in his Mother's womb. Crowded out of the lives of those He loves and having the doors of their hearts shut on Him, there is no room for Him to stay. He would be conceived in the minds of those to whom He has drawn close and born in their actions, but His own would not receive Him. He has no where to lay His head.

Our Lady is just as much part of this story now as she ever was. For she tirelessly journeys forward determine that Her Son shall come into the world anew. She is not discouraged by rejection, but has confidence in the goodness of every heart she meets. She is not afraid to accept whatever space we give her Son, no matter how lowly ... for she sees it as a gift from the Father above. Even the most humble stable in our hearts will suffice for her - for she already knows manger in which her Son. might be safely kept.

Thus, the Mother of the Lord comes to us in the dark cold of these heartless times. She is not discouraged by our failures but she hopes in us instead. She who gave her "fiat" to the angel understands the greatness of the human vocation.

She knows the courage that a prayerful life demands of us. She also knows the joy of trusting in what the Lord has said. She knows that this humble trust can change our lives and the world. Most of all, she longs for us to know the presence of Her Son as she knows Him, and with maternal solicitude she prays for us. 

The Rosary - Ladder to Heaven

A ladder of contemplation, the whole saving mystery of the Heart of Christ is given to us in this humble prayer called the Rosary. When we attend to the Scriptural prayers we repeat, the very mystery of the Word made flesh is given to us.  When we attend to the Biblical stories from which these prayers are drawn, we suddenly become part of the drama of salvation that God Himself has revealed. When we offer the intentions and heartache that often drives us to pray, without realizing it we are freed from our self-occupation and self-reliance. When we consider the immensity of Love to which this prayer points, we are moved to repent over our sluggishness and indifference. When we ponder the Woman whom we call blessed in this prayer, our hearts are plunged into wonder over this Mother who Christ so generously gave us from the Cross. When we ponder the same secrets that she pondered in her heart, without knowing how it happened, we find ourselves in solidarity with all the angels and saints of heaven, crying out "holy, holy, holy..."

The Tears of Mary

The tears of Mary, treasured by God, are poured out for those who are powerless and vulnerable. She stands with all those who have been abused by the powerful. She takes her stand with those who have no one to take their side. She listens patiently to their grief and anger, and she hears the heart of her Son on the Cross.  She suffers their indignity until the pain dissolves into tears. She lets her heart be pierced by the wounds that that have pierced their innocence and goodness.  She never fails to see in the forgotten and the lowly, in the abused and humiliated, in the marginalized and the oppressed, in the suffering and the poor an image of her own Son.

Of all the closest friends of Christ, only one stood with His Mother when it most counted. Today, also there are shepherds who stand on this holy ground, where hearts are pierced. As when the Church was born from the side of Christ, they are too few who have the courage not to abandon Him.  The Lord invites us to stand with them - to allow our own hearts to be pierced with them just as His Mother's heart was pierced.

Let our own tears fall as these good shepherds make reparation for the evil wrought, not only by thieves and marauders, but by His unfaithful friends. These good shepherds see the heartache of the people of God and we should not fear to see this with them.  Their hearts break because of the confusion caused by the Lord's own disciples and we should let our own hearts break too.

It is painful to live in the light of this truth, yet this is a healing pain.  To stand in this place with the Beloved Disciple and His Mother, this is to stand at the epicenter of a new creation no human evil can circumscribe. Here, in this sacred place, is where integrity is born and wholesomeness reclaimed.

For the faithful of the Lord, those who cling to Him night and day, and those who suffer the loss of all things for His sake - the Living God takes your side. As you weep for those who have been abused and for their abusers, as you beg for the Holy Spirit to reveal to us our sins and to lead us all to deeper conversion, He bends over you like a mother her child. The Father has covered you with His mighty shadow, and His Holy Spirit is renewing the mystery of Christ in you.

Just as are treasured the tears of Mary, your prayers are heard.  Those who most need healing today are being blessed by your intercession and your hidden sacrifices. Your cries, that Mary knows with you, are accepted by the Vindicator. Structures of sin are falling down. The Gates of Hell will not prevail. Those holy feelings and noble thoughts that lead to courageous acts of mercy testify to this new work in you. Hidden in His tenderness, hidden in the tears of His Mother, He is unleashing a beautiful new work in you and through you, He is making all things new.

Advent of that Mysterious Joy

Broods the cosmos in painful rending

Beyond infinity’s gentle bending

Over misery’s edge, in galaxy far,

Cries the lost, under lonely star,

While glory, in virgin womb, abides

Superintelligences cannot fathom

The hidden secret’s tender anthem

For they from above all time and space charge hastening

To the garden, to guard, to wield swords in chastening

Where envy’s deceit resides

Until heaven, song and peace bestowing

On lowly shepherds with their flocks and cattle lowing,

Beheld revolving all hearts, and stars, and years, and land

Around what humble Godhead offers man,

And that mysterious joy besides.

The Assumption of our Lady and Elisabeth of the Trinity

Soon to be canonized Elisabeth believed that with the help of Mary, our lives can become a great hymn of praise. She held this as true for her married sister, a young mother, as she did for her fellow Carmelite nuns.  In fact, on the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, she went on retreat and during this retreat began to commit some of her convictions about becoming the praise of God's glorious grace to paper.

In her wisdom, the very source of our existence is in the mysterious canticle of praise offered by the Son to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. This great canticle is revealed on the Cross and the whole Christian existence is taken up by its  mystery.  By the Cross of Christ, we have the opportunity to be in harmony with ourselves and to reverberate with divine melodies that echoed before the foundation of the world. Mary, Elisabeth contends, knew this secret more than any other created soul.  She stood at the foot of the Cross and heard the melodies echoing in her Son's heart more than anyone else ever could.  Assumed into heaven, she is ready to teach us her secrets. In this way, she is the Gate of Heaven -- because to have the hymn in Christ's heart echo in our own is to know the whole life of heaven already by faith. Today it is very important to allow this teaching to wash over us and baptize the way we see the gift of life.

In opposition to Blessed Elisabeth's view of life, the most powerful people of our time believe that individuals exist as no more than purely functional cogs for the machinery of the world. There is no real music -- for the most beautiful music surprises us.  But among the powerful, there can be no room for surprise.  In this vision of industrialized and commercialized humanity, government and other societal institutions compete for an absolute claim over one's own person.  Probability and predictable human behavior replace authentic freedom and virtue.  Everything is about better technology so that human behavior can be better controlled and manipulated.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary challenges this industrialized vision of humanity. It is, in itself, a total surprise for before the resurrection of Christ, the witness of humanity caught up in heaven was the rarest of human experiences. No other woman was ever raised up from this world below before.  The fact that a poor, humble and uneducated woman was raised above this world is a sign that humanity is made for heaven, above this world, above the visible, above the produceable, above the consumable, above the measurable, and above even the probable. This "above" is not a spacial reality but a reality of power, essence and beauty.  Not the slave of material and visible existence, but above it, the uniqueness of each human person, the unrepeatable splendor of this particular enfleshed soul, precisely as an embodied spirit, is a wonderful wholeness known and desired by God. Here, if we let it, the Assumption of the Mother of God and our Mother in Grace can confirm in the most tender and human way that God is the beginning and end of each human heart, that we are only pilgrims in this world below, that our true homeland awaits us in the dawning of a new heavens and new earth -- the likes of which no one has ever fathomed or even remotely conceived.

For Blessed Elisabeth, Mary teaches our hearts the secret songs that Jesus offered the Father from the Cross. These are songs of obedient love, a hidden music so subtle and gentle that it is at work changing everything even now. In every hardship and renunciation for love, in every trial and sacrifice for what is good and true, space is made for this music to resound anew.  It is the music of an obedient and freely given love, a salvific music that instills hope in the hearts of men and women. With patient kindness, the Lord wants the whole of humanity to know the unspeakable harmonies of his unvanquished love. Created in His Image and Likeness, we are capable of saying "yes" to Him and to allowing Him to radiate our whole existence with these harmonies and even to raise us up to His very life. This is heaven, a state of existence into which we can be assumed by His love at work in us. What He has realized perfectly in Mary, He yearns also to realize in us too.

Because of the "yes" of Mary, His desire to implicate Himself in our plight was realized.  Because one heart was completely open to the eternal melodies of God's heart, all hearts now have the possibility of allowing these same strands to echo within.  And assumed into heaven, this Heart beating with maternal love is not remote from us but very close. Indeed, Christ has given us His Mother's heart as a great gift. For in Christ, the heavens and the earth have embraced - and the praise of His glory is resounding on earth.

The Arms of Christ Outstretched this Christmas

Mary sees in the face of her child the tears of God and the joy of humanity. Hungrily having clung with unquenchable thirst to her breast in our cold darkness, in every challenge she sees Him ready to teach us how to cling to Him in faith. He at once envelops us in the abyss of his love when we see how He allowed her to wrap Him in swaddling clothes. At home with the poor and all those for whom there is no room in society, she ponders how He leads us to our true home in the bosom of the Trinity.  She has always welcomed these unfamiliar gifts with awe, adoration, and selfless acts of mercy. Her example lights the way for us to discover how to rejoice in these troubled times. 

When we consider the arms of the Virgin Mother carefully holding the Savior, we behold how our own hospitality to Him must include complete acceptance of His power to deliver us from sin and death. As she rejoiced to be redeemed by His blood in a singular way, each of us must learn to humbly lay before Him the burden of guilt that He has come to take away so that we might rejoice as well. Confessing our sins with holy sorrow and rendering to Him an act of thanksgiving, we too hold Him in our own arms. Lifting up our hearts with prayers that are right and just, we too learn to listen to his vulnerable cry. 

If we will look into his eyes, we will see that, with great joy and eagerness, He has come in poverty, like a beggar. He hopes that we might let go of our pain and trust Him with it. He wants us to be completely free to love -- and He does not want us to torment ourselves over failure and inadequacy. He yearns to be welcomed and held with confidence in love and for love. His arms remain as outstretched to us this Christmas as they were to Mary that first Christmas, and the joy she knew through her devotion to Him could be ours - by this simple movement of trust, the choice to respond to His tender presence.

In Mary we know that the God who weeps as a baby is discovered by the heart who says "yes" to this gift of divine joy.  This peculiar paradox is an encounter of suffering humanity against divine humility, the doom of death against the surprise of life ever-lasting, the limits of human evil against limitlessness of God's goodness, of earthly poverty against heavenly riches, of ignorance of men against the foolishness of God, of deserved condemnation against incalculable forgiveness, of darkness against the Light, of the Word against silence, of human emptiness against divine fullness. Because Mary pondered all these things, we know that the conflict of these extremes is only resolved by an adoration of the heart, a loving acceptance the mystery of the Word become flesh dwelling among us.This simple movement, this humble contemplation, this willingness to be inconvenienced by God who smiles at us in our neighbor, makes us like her vulnerable to angels' voices, and heavenly signs, and shepherds' wonder, and the homage of wisemen.

Mary - Mother of a New Humanity

Mary is mother of a new humanity, a humanity whose state is in communion with God.  Her birth indicates an important characteristic of this divine work.  Just as her birth is historically hidden, secret, humble, so too the great work the Lord will accomplish through her faith.  So too in each of our lives individually and together in the Church.  In all its apparent powerlessness, the power of God is made perfect in this new humanity.

The old humanity was a humanity that had lost God and subject to a forgetfulness of that love from when it came.  Without God, we live with a longing for something which the limitations of our nature seem to prevent us from attaining.  Without the Word of the Father, we are constantly haunted by a peculiar dis-ease with ourselves and the world, a sense that things are not the way they ought to be.  And without the Risen Lord, even our most noble efforts to try to relieve this longing and guilt are subject to the futility of death.  

Yet even old humanity doom though it was had remnants that promised its current plight would not be the last word to its ancient story.  Something in our spirit resists accepting the purposelessness which weighs upon our existence.   Even when we are very far from God, even when we find ourselves engulfed to dehumanizing misery, something still deeper in our hearts wants to call for help, wants to ask for mercy.  This primordial prayer emanating from the heart's core echoes even when we try to neglect, reject or renounce its goading. There is sewn deep within us, we who are fashioned in the image and likeness of Someone not of this world, an inclination to hope and to seek help.

This propensity to make an appeal to Someone beyond ourselves is evidence of the primordial origins of humanity's nobility.   What is good, tender and beautiful about humanity is more fundamental, more true than all those liberty depriving decisions whose compound effects compromise, diminish and betray our dignity.  For the very fact that we try to cry out for help suggests that what is most true about the human condition is not our failures or voids or inadequacies -- what is most true is that we are loved and awaited by Love.   In the limitlessness of this Love we find the limits of evil.

The great sign of this human hope was born when God brought the sinless virgin Mary into this world.   This flower of humanity was never without God and would become humanity's great "yes" to his Word.  She was born humanity's prayer, the heart of humanity that lifts up its voice to the Lord.

She anticipates the new state of life offered to us in Christ.  Her longing found rest in the longing of Lord.  In Him, she knew the harmony that humanity was meant to know with itself and the world.   By clinging to Him, even the death would be overtaken by the substance of her hope - for by obedience to the Word she forever ponders the doom of humanity through the eyes of Love stronger than death.     

Mary, Our Queen

Blessed John Paul II's Marian Devotion was a profound part of his life.  Part of this has to do with the Marian dimension of Polish Culture, a profoundly contemplative and family oriented culture.  Centuries ago, the people of Poland in fact entrusted their nation to Mary's Queenship and one finds throughout Poland all kinds of wonderful shrines and miraculous images dedicated to her. 

True devotion to Mary leads us into a deeper following of Christ.  As his spiritual life and theological understanding matured, a certain mystery puzzled Karol Wojtyla in his young adulthood.  He did not question the fact that the Virgin Mother is present in the Christian life to lead us into a deeper relationship with her Son.  The Holy Scriptures witness to her own words that she magnifies the Lord and that she exhorts us "to do whatever He tells you."  Her words echoed in his own prayerlife.  What astounded him, instead, was the fact Jesus entrusted his Mother to his disciples.  Why should Jesus give us his own Mother?

This Sunday, we will listen to the last reading from John 6, the Bread of Life discourse.  In this last part of the discourse Christ's followers complain that His claim that He is the Bread of Life, a new kind of Bread that nourishes unto eternally life.  They balk at His command to eat His flesh and drink His blood.  Jesus responds that they could not come to Him unless the Father allowed them to do so. The passage explains that many of his followers went away and returned to their former way of lfie.  

The Gospel presents us with a defining decision about what to believe and how to live. To return to our former way of life, the way we lived before we encountered Christ, this is to step out of the story of the Gospel - so those who do so are mentioned no more, they are no more part of the Gospel, they do not live in the mystery of welcoming the mystery.   Yet even these followers who reject Christ without realizing it reveal something about the greatness of the Father's gift to us.

The Father knew they would not accept His Son, yet He offered them a gift anyway.   In spurning His gift to them, they have rejected Him but at the same time revealed the love of the Father is not daunted by our hostility to Him.  The Father is ready, with His Son, to suffer our rejection and hostility.  Thus, even when those who do not reject Jesus at first later abandon and betray Him, the Father does not abandon them. 

In the face of our hostility to Him, why should the Father give us his Son?  The answer to the Pope's question and the answer to the question the Gospel of John proposes coincide in the words of St. Peter,  "Lord, to whom else can we go? .. we have come to believe..." 

To believe, to have faith, this is to say "yes" to everything the Father wills to give us.  This means we must welcome Jesus as our spiritual nourishment, as the only One who can sustain us on our journey to the Father's house.  We also must welcome everything Jesus wants to give us -- His whole humanity: His Body, His Blood, even His Mother.  We must welcome the maternal role of this Queen Mother in our lives because her spiritual maternity opens us even more to the mystery of the Father's love. 

What a remarkable love is revealed in Christ!  The divine love of the Trinity gives what is most beloved in the Father's heart - His Son.   He gives this gift to those He knows will reject it, betray it, deny it, abandon it.  He still believes in us so much He gives His Son to us anyway.   Jesus gives his Mother with the same kind of trust He reveals the Father has in us, a trust that knows full well what we are capable of doing with his Handmaid in our weakness.  She in fact is a sign of the Church, a sign Christ has entrusted to us undaunted by our inadequacies and weaknesses.  Jesus gives us his Mother just like He has given us his Church of whom she is the living icon.

What is it to celebrate the Queenship of Mary, to say yes to the gift she is to us from Jesus?  We who believe in the Risen Savior, who accept his Lordship in our lives, not only need to accept the nourishment only He can give and the gift of his Mother whom He entrusts to us, we must also love as He has loved us --- so that when the love we offer others is rejected, spurned, hated, denied, and betrayed, we do not stop loving, but we must continue to love and trust like God - yes, this is why He has given to us so generously.  Because the Mother Christ gave to us on the Cross opens our hearts to this astounding mystery, together with all of heaven how can we not call her Queen?

The Immaculate Conception

We Catholic Christians believe that the Mother of God was conceived without sin because it deepens our confidence that all things are possible for God. This is a luminous feast in the midst of the dark days of winter.  In what should be a season of hope, so many are weighed down by discouragement.  The heart needs reason to hope.  Here, what we believe about the Immaculate Conception contains the substance of our hope and helps us find encouragement to persevere in our conversion to Christ.

At the moment of Mary’s conception, in the primordial sacrament of married love, the grace of Christ reached into history to preserve his Mother from the law of sin.  In that instant of love and life, an ancient curse was lifted, the futility under which all of creation struggled was relieved, and the original splendor of humanity peaked out.

Marriage is part of this mystery.  The sacred character of this primordial institution is revealed in this proposition of our faith.  No mere legal arrangement, marriage  - so maligned and so betrayed in our culture - is holy and so is the conjugal love it safeguards.  The vowed indissoluble friendship of married love lived faithfully out of devotion to God and to one another is a wellspring from which God flows into humanity.  In the case of Mary's parents, in their exchange of hearts, in the kiss and embrace their friendship knew, carried by grace and sustained by the Almighty Hand of God, new life was permitted to enter into our dying world.  In that moment, the tender affections of marriage attained their greatest accomplishment.  The inestimable gift of self which marriage originally enjoyed but rejected was given another chance, and in that gift a new life was conceived with the fullness of life.   A beatitude that had been lost to human experience was restored - and exceeded.  In Mary, the Immaculate Conception,  we have a sign of the victory of Christ over the power of sin, a sign raised up on high from the fruit of married love's conjugal embrace, a sign of the culture of life and civilization of love which lies open if we will return again to God.

This mystery of new life at work in the conception of Mary is a singular instance of God accomplishing his hidden purpose with unanticipated power.  In her, the weary world received the first inkling of the splendor of the Lords' faithfulness to his promises.  Where no eye could see, a hidden foretaste of a deliverance about to dawn in the world began to unfold.   For the first time, we experienced - unknowingly - the first glimmer of the  fullness of grace Christ's death on the Cross won for us.   The result? Humanity on fire with the obedient love of the Holy Spirit in a mother's womb.  In the conception of Mary there is a disclosure of God's unfathomable love for humanity, the greatness of married love, and the renewal of the gift of life.  The mystery of the Immaculate Conception is meant to capture the heart in this radiant beauty, a hidden glory accessible only to the eyes of faith.

Since it is good for us to be bathed in the splendors of this radiance, the Church proposes the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, inviting us to go deep into the hiddeness of our faith, deep in to the divine secret entrusted to us at baptism, deep into the abyss of God’s mercy. To say yes to this sacred truth, to choose to live by it, we open ourselves to the gift of Mary -- her prayers, her purity, her love wait to fill our faith in Jesus. Accordingly, when we dare to believe that the salvific power of Christ saved his own Mother from sin at the moment of her conception, she shines for us like a star in this sea of life, giving us even deeper reasons to be confident as we sail for the safe-harbor of the Lord's infinite love.

Mary Draws us up to Christ

In my last post about Il Duomo in Milan, I mentioned how Mary and all the saints sit atop the Gothic Cathedral there.  They are witnesses to the power of the Risen Lord - who raises us up in such a way that we can raise one another up too.  The way Mary and the saints are positioned on the top of spires it is as if they are pulling the whole structure to heaven.  This is exactly what the holiness of Christ does in the Church.  It pulls everyone up to the things of heaven.

Although the holiness of Christ totally exceeds that of every creature, there is one creature who is blessed above all others by Him.  Mary was assumed into heaven because of the holiness with which her son Jesus blessed her.  The Archangel Gabriel said she was full of grace.   Her cousin Elisabeth said she is blessed among women, and that she is blessed because she believed in what the Lord said to her.  Mary said that all generations would call her blessed.

Like a good mother, she wants to share these blessings with us.  She wants to share her holiness with us. When our devotion to Christ is genuine, she is always there lifting up our efforts at prayer, at love, at self-discipline - helping us realize the communion with the Lord we so deeply desire.  In fact, the greater our desire for the Lord, the more she is able to raise us to Him - just like the artists and architects believed when they place Mary on top of Il Duomo.

The Mystery of Motherhood and Mary the Mother of the Lord

Motherhood is a great gift to the world, and God raised this gift to a whole new level when Mary said “yes” to his invitation to be his mother.  Mothers help us find our humanity even as babies – they are our human connection even from the moment of conception.  Because of a mother’s love, a baby gradually becomes aware of a whole network of loving relationships into which he or she is born.  Enveloped in a mother’s love, a baby learns to love, learns what it means to thrive as a human being – mothers are the first ones who show us that we are most truly ourselves when we give ourselves in love.   

When the Word became flesh, He made it possible for God to rely on a mother’s love.  He allowed her to comfort Him in his tears, to nurse Him in his hunger, to soothe Him in his loneliness, and to clothe his nakedness.  From her, as is written in the love of all good mothers, He glimpsed the secret of what it means to love until the end.  In all these ways and many more, He allowed Mary’s maternal love to “teach” Him the secret of being fully human so that He would be like us in all things but sin.     

There are two corollaries that come out of this reflection.  The first is that by faith, the experience of motherhood is transformed.  Christ hides himself in our children, all our children, especially the poor, the sick and the abandoned.  Mothers who search for Jesus in the children entrusted to them discover that like Mary they are also comforting, nursing, soothing, and clothing God himself.  On the other hand, by faith, Jesus gives every Christian the gift of his Mother.  Those who welcome her into their homes discover she continues to teach her Son’s love that we might ponder with her “all these things” in our hearts.

The Mother of God and the Mystery of Prayer

Christians have called Mary the Mother of God since ancient times.  'Mother of God' is how the Church in the West understood the title Theotokos (God-bearer) attributed to Mary by the Eastern Churches.  This title protects the great mystery of our faith.  The Word became flesh: this means a total recapitulation of true, historical, concrete, human reality - raising our life, our dignity, our family and our motherhood far above merely natural purposes, to a greater unimaginable end.  Mary is the first sign of this.  This truth, at the heart of the Gospel, was safeguarded at the Council of Ephesus in 431 which affirmed the title Mother of God used in the prayer of the Church as definitive for the Christian faith.

When we affirm Mary is the Mother of God, we are proclaiming all at once that Jesus, begotten of the Father from all eternity, is the Son who "emptied Himself" to be become man "born of a woman" in "the fullness of time" (Phil. 2:6, Gal. 4:4).  By this affirmation we bind ourselves to the truth that the incarnation was no mere appearance or myth, but rather a living reality transforming all of human history and each one's personal life story.  This is the form and pattern of our prayer.  It too must become a real, living reality in our lives.  This mystery of God entrusting himself to a mother contains the truth about all that is good, true and beautiful in humanity and the truth about the Father's wisdom, love and goodness.

Affirming this helps us ponder the radical confidence God has in us when He entrusts his Mystery to us, and when we see this we can begin to learn to have the same kind of confidence in Him.   We have hope because the Eternal Son of God entered so fully into our humanity that He delighted to be conceived in the womb of a woman and dwelling in her to be born as her vulnerable baby, yearning to be totally reliant on her maternal love for his life so that He could be like us in all things but sin.  He humbly let her form his human heart with her maternal love.  What drew God to subject himself to such love was not our mighty achievements or self-sufficiency or worldly cleverness.  It was the humility and trust of a woman pure of heart who generously responded with intense faith and confidence in Him who had even more confidence in her.  What unlocks this capacity in the human but prayerful contemplation of the ever surpassing love of God?

According to Augustine, Mary bore Christ in her heart before she bore him in her womb.  This means her physical motherhood is first and foremost a spiritual reality, the fruit of loving obedience, the masterpiece of profound contemplation.  Conformed to Him whose body was formed in his mother's womb, Christian prayer continues to reach for fruition in flesh and blood, the here and now: that determined, obedient and humble effort to love God and all those God entrusts to us, come what come may, because what He did for us was so much more.  It means that our faith, our prayer, goes way beyond nice ideas, happy wishes and comfortable feelings.  As Pope Benedict teaches, our faith is above all performative, it makes real love possible.  Here is the greatness of the mystery of our piety, the devotion that flows from Christ!  Our faith can offer itself in true sacrifice because it bleeds with the love of a real man, the True Man, who was bloodied for our sakes, and we know He is the True Man because his mother's faith permitted Him to become flesh and blood.

To affirm Mary as Mother of God is an affirmation of a great truth concerning human life, dignity, family, and motherhood - there is something divine in these most holy human things which must be honored, cherished and protected.    Today these most sacred things are trampled on to such an extent our world is fast forgetting its humanity, and we are at the very brink of disaster, not for the first time.  What a great gift that our calendar year begins in the middle of the Christmas Season with the Solemnity of  the Mother of God.  Against forces that hate what is truly human, we remember the woman who bore the Son of the Most High, who prays for us even now, even when we stand in the face of great evil and personal weakness.  And, we join our prayers together with hers that all the most holy human things of this present life might not perish, but instead, by the blood of her Son, be saved for the glory of God the Father.

Our Lady of the New Advent and Contemplation

As an advocate for contemplative prayer, Elisabeth of the Trinity invites us to identify with Mary, the Virgin Mother.  Mary, in fact, becomes a dominate figure in the liturgies of the Church in this part of Advent as we draw near to Christmas.  In Denver, there is even devotion to Our Lady of the New Advent - because we believe she continues to prepare the Church and the world for the coming of the Lord.

In the Gospels, Mary is identified as the one who fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah to King Ahaz (Matthew 1:23 and Isaiah 7:14).  In a desperate attempt to gain mastery over nature and history, Ahaz had sacrificed his son to Baal only to discover that what he believed about the world was a dehumanizing myth (2 Kings 16:2-4).  (Some of the stories out there make it difficult not to see abortion in this same light.)  He despaired of having more children until Isaiah reassured him that despite his rash unfaithfulness and distrust of the one true God, the living God would be faithful to him and his dynasty.  

As a sign of God's faithfulness to the Sons of David, Isaiah foretold a virgin maiden would be with child, and he child's name would be "Emmanuel - God is with us".  At the time, many might have thought that this prophecy was fulfilled with the birth of Hezekiah, who was a good king (2 Kings 18:1-6).  In fact, his birth and reign foreshadowed the coming of a messiah who would surpass all expectation, who is "God is with us" in a manner that no one could have anticipated.   

Yet this is exactly the way the Lord works with us in faith - always surpassing our limited understanding and imagination, always opening us to something greater beyond our feeble expectations.  To do this, the Lord needs our obedience and trust.  But so often we are like Ahaz, trying to grasp for control by any means, even if it destroys those we most love.  This is why the prophecy to Ahaz is also a prophecy for us, especially in this time of Advent, a time of making straight our pathways and preparing the way of the Lord. 

On this point, the message of Elisabeth of the Trinity is helpful.  She advocates that there is another way, a pathway to hope.  To travel down this pathway, the pathway of our Advent journey, we must identify with Mary.  Mary, by her example, teaches how to pray and this prayerfulness is the source of her generous obedience to God.  Her prayer is so simple, so straightforward, so trusting.  When we pray like her, we find ourselves freed from our limited expectations and  imagination. Enchanting myths have no power over us for we are freed from our own big fat ego, free for Someone greater:

When I read the Gospel "that Mary went in haste to the hill country of Judea" to perform her loving service for her cousin Elisabeth, I imagine her passing by so beautiful, so calm and so majestic, so absorbed in recollection of the Word of God within her.  Like Him, her prayer was always this: "Ecce, here I am!"  Who? "The servant of the Lord," the lowliest of His creatures: she, His Mother!  Her humility was so real for she was always forgetful, unaware, freed from self.  And she could sing: "The Almighty has done great things for me, henceforth all peoples will call me blessed."  Elisabeth of the Trinity, Last Retreat #40 as translated by Aletheia Kane, O.C.D. in Complete Works, vol. I, Washington D.C.: ICS (1984) p. 160.

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Mystical Rose

The famous image and story of  Our Lady of Guadalupe is an important part of the history of the Evangelization of the America - a continent evangelized more quickly than any other in all of Church history.  Mary appeared to a poor Indian with a message for the local bishop - that a church should be built.  As a sign, he collected beautiful rare roses which she pointed out to him.  When he brought these gifts to the bishop, a miraculous image of Our Lady appeared on his tilma (a kind of poncho) in which the roses were carried.  She became a sign of hope for a demoralized people in the midst of the trials and tribulations of being colonized by Europe.  Interestingly enough, her image is honored in many Churches around the world today, even throughout Europe, during a time when many believers feel demoralized and under attack.

Guadalupe may be the transliteration of a Nahuatl word which means "who crushes the serpent."   This makes a wonderful connection with Genesis 3:15.  Ancient liturgical texts have celebrated the Mother of  the Lord with the one who crushes the serpent's head.  Along these same lines, asking Mary to pray for us during times of spiritual battle, especially at the hour of death, may have always been part of the Christian tradition of prayer - just as the Scriptures say that all generations will call her blessed.   Whatever the meaning of the name Guadalupe, it would be difficult to dispute that under this title, Mary has helped many come to believe in her Son, giving hope in sometimes the most hopeless situations.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has also been associated with the title Mystical Rose - a title associated with the words of the beloved in Canticle of Canticles 2:1, "I am the Rose of Sharon.  I am the Lily of the valleys."  Tradition has understood the beloved of this biblical love poem to be not only an image of Israel, but also of the Church, the new Israel.  Mary, because she signifies the Church by her very person, has also been associated with these words as has every soul that is generous in responding to the love of God.  For Saint Bernard, the delicate beauty of a rose is in contrast to its thorns and signifies the spiritual passion and purity of charity friendship love of God.  He teaches that in contrast with Eve's disobedience by which we lost access to God, Mary's obedience gave us Christ Jesus - the image of the invisible God, the One who is our total access to all true worship of the Lord.

The mystical life - beautiful, passionate and pure - is a participation in the life of Christ by faith.  This life progresses by way of the Cross - by following our crucified God.  The inexhaustible mystery of his risen life not only purifies us of sin but fills us with certain truth, deep holy desires and great confidence.   Mary is part of this mystical life, the rose of this mystical life, because the Virgin Mother Mary is an inseparable part of the life of her Son.

"Let it be done to me according to your word."  These words of Mary to Gabriel betray a holy audacity which informs the Christian faith.  The mission of the Mystical Rose - to be part of our life of faith in Christ Jesus, and the mission of Guadalupe - to crush the head of the serpent, coincide in the life of prayer.  Mary not only exemplifies the kind of faith we must have in the Lord, she also prays for our life of faith - and through her mysterious maternity, helps us realize the victory of good over evil so that we might not lose hope in the face of trials and tribulation.

Mary, True Freedom and Prayer

Today we celebrate the Immaculate Conception - Mary through the redemption of Christ and a special outpouring of the Spirit at the moment she was concieved is the first human person to have perfect freedom.  We thank God for the most beautiful realization of our humanity.  She, like all the wonderful gifts given to us by Him, is completely unmerited, a wonderful sign to us of his unfathomable love.  By sheer grace, she was completely free to thrive in the face of God, to be fully alive.  And because she lived life to the full, she shows us what it means to be fully ourselves, to really live, to be truly free.    

The Virgin shows us that the freedom we have in the grace of God allows us to tread a pathway beyond anything our limited imagination could possibly anticipate or our feeble intellects calculate or even of which our intuition might provide some remote suggestion.  Such freedom goes beyond feeling and instinct.  For it is the essence of humanity to go beyond its self and all its natural capicities in giving itself in love - in love to God and in love for one another. 

Mary, the Mother of God, needed this freedom in order to fully respond to God and we can even say this beautiful freedom drew the Lord to her.   There is a hidden greatness in the authenticity of the truly human - the Lord actually delights in the innocent vulnerability, endless trust and undaunted determination manifest in this particular work of his Hand.  This is why through the words of Gabriel He declared her "full of grace."  And, what He sees in her, He sees also in us when we turn to Him in living faith, faith guided by love -- he makes us free and in this freedom, authentically our true self. 

The freedom given her at her conception was just the beginning.  It is like the freedom we have when we first believe.  Such freedom still needs to mature - it is only the beginning.  How did she grow in this freedom?  How did it come into maturity in her?  If we consider this question carefully, we will understand what St. Augustine meant when he said she concieved Christ first in her heart before she concieved Him in her womb.  We must use our freedom like she did - opening our hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit - ready to obey Him in everything and in this loving obedience and trust, ponder all these things in our heart.  Prayer - silence before the mystery of God who makes us free - this is where Mary, concieved without sin, always leads.