I — MARY AS GUIDE AND MODEL

Presence of God. — I take refuge under your patronage, O Mary; be You the guide and model of my interior life.

Meditation

1 — The month of May, the month of Mary. Spontaneously every Christian heart turns toward the heavenly Mother with the desire to live in a more intimate union with her and to strengthen the sweet bonds that bind it to her. It is a great comfort to encounter along our spiritual path — so often laborious and bristling with difficulties — the gentle figure of a mother. One is so well at a mother’s side. With her, everything becomes easier; the discouraged and weary heart, the heart tossed by storms, finds new strength and new hope and takes up the road again with renewed vigor.

“If the winds of temptation arise,” sings St. Bernard, “if you strike against the rocks of tribulation, look to the star, invoke Mary. In dangers, in anguishes, in perplexities, think of Mary; invoke Mary.” At certain moments the rugged way of nothingness dismays our misery, and then, more than ever, we need her support — the support of a mother. The Most Holy Virgin Mary, before us, walked the narrow and straitened road that leads to holiness; before us she bore the cross; before us she knew the ascents of the spirit through suffering. Sometimes perhaps we dare not fix our gaze upon Jesus, the God-Man, whom for His divine majesty we feel to be too far above us; but beside Him is Mary, His Mother and our Mother — a privileged creature, yes, but a creature like us, and therefore a model more accessible to our weakness.

In this month Mary comes to meet us, to take us by the hand, to introduce us into the secret of her interior life, and thus to become the model and the norm of our own.

2 — St. Teresa of the Child Jesus, speaking of certain sermons on the Most Blessed Virgin, said: “They present the Madonna as inaccessible — she ought to be proposed as imitable” (NV). It is true: Mary is inaccessible in the exalted privileges that crown her divine Motherhood, and it is right to contemplate these privileges in order to admire, contemplate, and praise the greatness of our Mother, and thus to fall ever more deeply in love with her; but at the same time one must consider Mary in the concrete setting of her earthly life — a humble and simple setting that does not at all depart from the framework of the ordinary life common to every mother of a family — and under this aspect Mary is truly imitable. To contemplate the greatness of Mary and to spur ourselves to the imitation of her virtues will be the program of our month of May. And above all we wish to consider the Madonna as model and ideal of souls of interior life. No one, like her, has understood the full depth of Jesus’s words: “One thing is necessary” (Lk. 10, 42), and no one more than she has lived by these words. From the very first moments of her life, Mary was entirely God’s and lived only for Him: there were the years spent in the shadow of the Temple in silence and prayer, the months passed at Nazareth in recollection, adoring the eternal Word incarnate in her womb, the thirty years spent in sweet intimacy with Jesus, her Son and her God; then her share in His apostolic life, in His Passion; and finally the last years spent at the side of John, when by her prayer Mary was the support of the newborn Church. Though the backdrop against which she moves and acts changes in aspect, though the external circumstances in which she lives are altered, the life of Mary remains immutable in its substance — in the interior seeking of the “One Thing Necessary,” in adherence to God alone. The succession of events and her own external activity do not hinder her from persevering in that attitude of continuous prayer in which St. Luke presents her to us: “Mary kept all these things [the divine mysteries] in her heart and pondered them” (Lk. 2, 19 and 51).

If, in imitation of Mary, our heart is firmly anchored in God, nothing will avail to draw it from its interior occupation: seeking, loving the Lord, and living in His intimacy.

Colloquy

“O my soul, do you fear to draw near to God? He has given you Jesus as mediator. What can such a Son not obtain for you from the Father? The Father who loves Him will hear Him for the love He bears Him. But are you afraid to approach Him as well? Yet He has made Himself your brother, your companion, and has willed to undergo all the humiliations of human nature — save sin — precisely in order to have compassion on your miseries; this brother has been given to you by Mary. But perhaps His divine majesty still frightens you, because, though man, Jesus does not cease to be God. Do you wish, then, for an advocate before Him? Have recourse to Mary. Mary is a pure creature — pure not only because exempt from sin, but also by reason of her solely human nature. O Mary, I am certain You will be heard, for the deference You merit; the Son will hear You certainly, because You are His Mother, and the Father will hear the Son. This is my unshakeable confidence, this is the entire ground of my hope! Blessed Virgin, the Angel said that You ‘have found favor with God’ (Lk. 1, 30). Therefore You will always find favor, and it is favor alone I need and favor alone I ask of You” (cf. St. Bernard).

“Draw me after you, O Virgin Mary, that I may run in the fragrance of your perfumes. Draw me, for I am held back by the weight of my sins and by the malice of your enemies. As no one goes to your Son unless the Father draws him, so, in a certain manner, I venture to say that no one goes to Him unless You draw him with your holy prayers. You teach true wisdom; You obtain grace for sinners; You are their advocate; You promise glory to those who honor you, for You are the treasurer of graces. You have found favor with God, O most sweet Virgin — You who were preserved from the stain of original sin, filled with the Holy Spirit, and conceived the Son of God. You received all these graces, O most humble Mary, not for Yourself alone but also for us, that You might assist us in all our necessities” (cf. Ven. R. Giordano).