Necessity of Having a True Devotion to Mary
The Grace of God Is Absolutely Necessary
It is certain that growth in the holiness of God is your vocation. All
your thoughts, words, actions, everything you suffer or undertake must lead you
towards that end. Otherwise you are resisting God in not doing the work for
which he created you and for which he is even now keeping you in being. What a
marvellous transformation is possible! Dust into light, uncleanness into
purity, sinfulness into holiness, creature into Creator, man into God! A
marvellous work, I repeat, so difficult in itself, and even impossible for a
mere creature to bring about, for only God can accomplish it by giving his
grace abundantly and in an extraordinary manner. The very creation of the
universe is not as great an achievement as this.
Chosen soul, how will you bring this about? What steps will you take to
reach the high level to which God is calling you? The means of holiness and
salvation are known to everybody, since they are found in the gospel; the
masters of the spiritual life have explained them; the saints have practised
them and shown how essential they are for those who wish to be saved and attain
perfection. These means are: sincere humility, unceasing prayer, complete
self-denial, abandonment to divine Providence, and obedience to the will of
God.
The grace and help of God are absolutely necessary for us to practise
all these, but we are sure that grace will be given to all, though not in the
same measure. I say “not in the same measure”, because God does not give his
graces in equal measure to everyone, although in his infinite goodness he
always gives sufficient grace to each. A person who corresponds to great graces
performs great works, and one who corresponds to lesser graces performs lesser
works. The value and high standard of our actions corresponds to the value and
perfection of the grace given by God and responded to by the faithful soul. No
one can contest these principles.
To Find The Grace Of God, We Must
Discover Mary
It all comes to this, then. We must discover a simple means to obtain
from God the grace needed to become holy. It is precisely this I wish to teach
you. My contention is that you must first discover Mary if you would obtain
this grace from God.
Let me explain:
Mary alone found grace with God for herself and for every individual person.
No patriarch or prophet or any other holy person of the Old Law could manage to
find this grace.
It was Mary who gave existence and life to the author of all grace, and
because of this she is called the “Mother of Grace”.
God the Father, from whom, as from its essential source, every perfect
gift and every grace come down to us, gave her every grace when he gave her his
Son. Thus, as St Bernard says, the will of God is manifested to her in Jesus
and with Jesus.
God chose her to be the treasurer, the administrator and the dispenser
of all his graces, so that all his graces and gifts pass through her hands.
Such is the power that she has received from him that, according to St
Bernardine, she gives the graces of the eternal Father, the virtues of Jesus
Christ, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit to whom she wills, as and when she
wills, and as much as she wills.
As in the natural life a child must have a father and a mother, so in
the supernatural life of grace a true child of the Church must have God for his
Father and Mary for his mother. If he prides himself on having God for his
Father but does not give to Mary the tender affection of a true child, he is an
impostor and his father is the devil.
Since Mary produced the head of the elect, Jesus Christ, she must also
produce the members of that head, that is, all true Christians. A mother does
not conceive a head without members, nor members without a head. If anyone,
then, wishes to become a member of Jesus Christ, and consequently be filled
with grace and truth , he must be formed in Mary through the grace of Jesus
Christ, which she possesses with a fullness enabling her to communicate it
abundantly to true members of Jesus Christ, her true children.
The Holy Spirit espoused Mary and produced his greatest work, the
incarnate Word, in her, by her and through her. He has never disowned her and
so he continues to produce every day, in a mysterious but very real manner, the
souls of the elect in her and through her.
Mary received from God a unique dominion over souls enabling her to
nourish them and make them more and more godlike. St Augustine went so far as
to say that even in this world all the elect are enclosed in the womb of Mary,
and that their real birthday is when this good mother brings them forth to
eternal life. Consequently, just as an infant draws all its nourishment from
its mother, who gives according to its needs, so the elect draw their spiritual
nourishment and all their strength from Mary.
It was to Mary that God the Father said, “Dwell in Jacob”, that is,
dwell in my elect who are typified by Jacob. It was to Mary that God the Son
said, “My dear Mother, your inheritance is in Israel”, that is, in the elect.
It was to Mary that the Holy Spirit said, “Place your roots in my elect”.
Whoever, then, is of the chosen and predestinate will have the Blessed Virgin
living within him, and he will let her plant in his very soul the roots of
every virtue, but especially deep humility and ardent charity.
Mary is called by St Augustine, and is indeed, the “living mould of God”
. In her alone the God-man was formed in his human nature without losing any
feature of the Godhead. In her alone, by the grace of Jesus Christ, man is made
godlike as far as human nature is capable of it.
A sculptor can make a statue or a life-like model in two ways: By using
his skill, strength, experience and good tools to produce a statue out of hard,
shapeless matter; (ii) By making a cast of it in a mould. The first way is long
and involved and open to all sorts of accidents. It only needs a faulty stroke
of the chisel or hammer to ruin the whole work. The second is quick, easy,
straightforward, almost effortless and inexpensive, but the mould must be
perfect and true to life and the material must be easy to handle and offer no
resistance.
Mary is the great mould of God, fashioned by the Holy Spirit to give
human nature to a Man who is God by the hypostatic union, and to fashion
through grace men who are like to God. No godly feature is missing from this
mould. Everyone who casts himself into it and allows himself to be moulded will
acquire every feature of Jesus Christ, true God, with little pain or effort, as
befits his weak human condition. He will take on a faithful likeness to Jesus
with no possibility of distortion, for the devil has never had and never will
have any access to Mary, the holy and immaculate Virgin, in whom there is not
the least suspicion of a stain of sin.
Dear friend, what a difference there is between a soul brought up in the
ordinary way to resemble Jesus Christ by people who, like sculptors, rely on
their own skill and industry, and a soul thoroughly tractable, entirely
detached, most ready to be moulded in her by the working of the Holy Spirit.
What blemishes and defects, what shadows and distortions, what natural and
human imperfections are found in the first soul, and what a faithful and divine
likeness to Jesus is found in the second!
There is not and there will never be, either in God’s creation or in his
mind, a creature in whom he is so honoured as in the most Blessed Virgin Mary,
not excepting even the saints, the cherubim or the highest seraphim in heaven.
Mary is God’s garden of Paradise, his own unspeakable world, into which
his Son entered to do wonderful things, to tend it and to take his delight in
it. He created a world for the wayfarer, that is, the one we are living in. He
created a second world – Paradise – for the Blessed. He created a third for
himself, which he named Mary. She is a world unknown to most mortals here on
earth. Even the angels and saints in heaven find her incomprehensible, and are
lost in admiration of a God who is so exalted and so far above them, so distant
from them, and so enclosed in Mary, his chosen world, that they exclaim: “Holy,
holy, holy” unceasingly.
Happy, indeed sublimely happy, is the person to whom the Holy Spirit
reveals the secret of Mary, thus imparting to him true knowledge of her. Happy
the person to whom the Holy Spirit opens this enclosed garden for him to enter,
and to whom the Holy Spirit gives access to this sealed fountain where he can
draw water and drink deep draughts of the living waters of grace. That person
will find only grace and no creature in the most lovable Virgin Mary. But he
will find that the infinitely holy and exalted God is at the same time
infinitely solicitous for him and understands his weaknesses. Since God is
everywhere, he can be found everywhere, even in hell. But there is no place
where God can be more present to his creature and more sympathetic to human
weakness than in Mary. It was indeed for this very purpose that he came down
from heaven. Everywhere else he is the Bread of the strong and the Bread of
angels, but living in Mary he is the Bread of children.
Let us not imagine, then, as some misguided teachers do, that Mary being
simply a creature would be a hindrance to union with the Creator. Far from it,
for it is no longer Mary who lives but Jesus Christ himself, God alone, who
lives in her. Her transformation into God far surpasses that experienced by St
Paul and other saints, more than heaven surpasses the earth.
Mary was created only for God, and it is unthinkable that she should
reserve even one soul for herself. On the contrary she leads every soul to God
and to union with him. Mary is the wonderful echo of God. The more a person
joins himself to her, the more effectively she unites him to God. When we say
“Mary”, she re-echoes “God”.
When, like Saint Elizabeth, we call her blessed, she gives the honour to
God. If those misguided ones who were so sadly led astray by the devil, even in
their prayer-life, had known how to discover Mary, and Jesus through her, and
God through Jesus, they would not have had such terrible falls. The saints tell
us that when we have once found Mary, and through Mary Jesus, and through Jesus
God the Father, then we have discovered every good. When we say “every good”,
we except nothing. “Every good” includes every grace, continuous friendship
with God, every protection against the enemies of God, possession of truth to
counter every falsehood, endless benefits and unfailing headway against the
hazards we meet on the way to salvation, and finally every consolation and joy
amid the bitter afflictions of life.
This does not mean that one who has discovered Mary through a genuine devotion
is exempt from crosses and sufferings. Far from it! One is tried even more than
others, because Mary, as Mother of the living, gives to all her children
splinters of the tree of life, which is the Cross of Jesus. But while meting
out crosses to them she gives the grace to bear them with patience, and even
with joy. In this way, the crosses she sends to those who trust themselves to
her are rather like sweetmeats, i.e. “sweetened” crosses rather than “bitter”
ones. If from time to time they do taste the bitterness of the chalice from
which we must drink to become proven friends of God, the consolation and joy
which their Mother sends in the wake of their sorrows creates in them a strong
desire to carry even heavier and still more bitter crosses.
True Devotion to the Blessed
Virgin Is Indispensable
The difficulty, then, is how to arrive at the true knowledge of the most
holy Virgin and so find grace in abundance through her. God, as the absolute
Master, can give directly what he ordinarily dispenses only through Mary, and
it would be rash to deny that he sometimes does so. However, St Thomas assures
us that, following the order established by his divine Wisdom, God ordinarily
imparts his graces to men through Mary. Therefore, if we wish to go to him,
seeking union with him, we must use the same means which he used in coming down
from heaven to assume our human nature and to impart his graces to us. That
means was a complete dependence on Mary his Mother, which is true devotion to
her.
Photo taken from Wikimedia Commons
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