...Mary and Living Truth...

(from a May 4, 1986 conference)

The truths of Faith that we receive into our heads . . . must then enter our hearts as life, and the beautiful truth about Our Lady as Mother of God has to enter our hearts if we are to be deeply related with Jesus in our love.  The living relationship we have with Mary is especially needed in times of crisis, especially when the truths of faith are being questioned or attacked.  Times of crisis in the Church or in our private lives are times of Mary, and we ought to have Her consciously with us.  It was on the Cross that Jesus committed us to Mary and Her to us in a Mother-child relationship.  I think that when St. John says that Mary stood by the Cross he probably hints at the fact that She was holding him up. We need Her to hold us up.

. . . Our love for Mary will ensure that we retain a reverence for holy things and a sense of the supernatural, awe-inspiring presence of God in our lives. . . I know of no quicker and deeper way of finding Jesus in our hearts than by consecrating ourselves to the Immaculate and Motherly Heart of Mary and in this fulfilling Our Lord’s instruction as He left our sight on earth, “Behold your Mother.”  Long before that, the shepherds at Christmas had found Jesus in His Mother’s arms, and She had shown Him to them.  The Magi, the Three Wise Men, had found Jesus with Mary His Mother, and the hesitant Apostles at Cana first believed when Mary told Her Son, “They have no wine,” and they saw what He did, out of season as it were, at Her prayers. . .

One reason why our relationship with Our Lady as Mother of the Church and our individual Mother is so important in times of spiritual crisis in the world or Church or our own soul is that She had a the most remarkably deep and strong faith and can teach us to have something similar. 

When Mary made Her Visitation to St. Elizabeth, they were both filled with the Holy Spirit, as St. Luke tells us; so they spoke and acted as God desired.  Elizabeth, after expressing surprise that she should be visited by the Mother of her Lord, was moved to praise Our Lady, but she did not praise Her precisely because She was Mother of the Messiah or of God; she said, “Blessed is She who believed that the promise made Her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”  The Holy Spirit moved Elizabeth to call Mary blessed because of Her faith. . .

God, by His grace, has convinced us that the truth He gave in His Son made Man, in whom He crystallized the whole of revealed truth, is preserved for us in the Catholic Church with its authoritative teaching, and this truth becomes life in us through Mary’s help.  She humanizes the revelation of God, rather as She gave human nature to Christ who is God . . .

The truths of faith, which bring Christ’s life to us, for He lives in us by faith, could remain in us as intellectual knowledge only, as they do to some intellectually proud academics.  They could produce a false rigidity, which we observe in some religious fundamentalists, whose convictions, though very strong, are based on their own private interpretation of Scripture and their personal opinions as to its implications in life.

If we keep close to Mary, She will see to it that Her Son’s words, His truth, enters our hearts as well as our heads and becomes real, warm life within us. . .  Let us find Jesus with Mary His Mother and become caught up in the love that flows between them.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.

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