Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
Today, I finish up a Marian consecration exercise, courtesy of Father Michael E. Gaitley, MIC’s 33 Days to Morning Glory. The readings have been short, couple of pages most days, with wisdom from Sts. Louis de Montfort, Maximilian Kolbe, and John Paul II and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. While you can start the “retreat” any time you like, Father Gaitley recommends beginning so that you conclude on one of seventeen Marian feast days. I went with this one because a friend gave me the book in late September. Coincidentally, the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of the days I knew the least about.
Mary and I have become closer in the past two or three years, and I’ve grown to greatly admire her “yes” to God; her Magnificat; her presence on her son’s walk to Calvary; and all that pondering in her heart of all that was going on. But I’d never really considered her as a child. That facet of her life doesn’t appear in the New Testament. Legend and tradition tell us she was born to the aged, childless Joachim and Anne, and that she was taken to the temple when she was three or so, perhaps remaining to study until she was twelve. There are reports that both her parents died while she was there.
Today’s first lectory reading from Revelation 10:8-11 tells us of a small scroll that tastes sweet in the narrator’s mouth, then sour in his stomach, sweet because it told of God’s people’s victories, sour because it also told of the people’s sufferings. In some ways, Mary’s life was a series of sweet and sour: her intelligence and opportunity to learn at the temple at the same time she might have been mourning her parents’ deaths. Her yes to being the Mother of God while sitting with Joseph’s initial concerns. Hearing Simeon’s words that her son was the Christ but that both would suffer greatly. Her message to the servants at Cana of obedience, and then demonstrating that same obedience by being present as Jesus carried his cross.
How to take in the profundity of Mary? How to consecrate ourselves to her, and through her, to the Lord? I find wisdom in a passage from Maximilian Kolbe in 33 Days:
I don’t know anything, either in theory and still less in practice, about how one can serve the Immaculata … She alone must instruct each one of us at every moment, (and) lead us…
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