this good Mother

With Mary, we make more progress in the love of Jesus in one month than we make in years while living less united to this good Mother.--Mother Teresa, citing St. Louis de Montfort

 

If someone had told me 5 years ago that being devoted to Mary would bring me closer to Jesus, I would have been suspicious of that person's christianity. For 35 years as a non-catholic christian, I saw Mary as someone who God used for one purpose and nothing more. For me, she appeared every Christmas and then dissapeared into the dust of the past. I did not know about the early Church Father's devotion to the Mother of God as the best way to know and follow Jesus. The more I study the scripture through their eyes, the more I see how vital she is to our understanding of God's plan of salvation, especially our daily carrying of the cross. Her example of obediance, from her Fiat to the angel Gabriel to that moment with the disciples at Pentecost, she is the greatest example of how to follow Jesus in humility. Her prayers for us are incredibly powerful, for they are perfect in love. She is full of grace, the bible makes this clear. She has never not been full of grace, and will forever be so, and this is because of the work of God through Jesus. This gives me, a simple human being like her, great hope in what God can do. Everything Mary did, does, or will do is always about bringing Jesus to us. No one has ever, or will ever, glorify the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the way Mary does. This is her vocation. Our vocation is the same, to bring Jesus to the world. Since I have begun to know her as my very own spritual Mother, I find an intimacy with Jesus growing in my life that I never knew before. (and I thought Jesus and I were pretty tight.) I am thankful that Jesus shares her with us, so that we might truly learn deeply how to trust, love, and walk in humility. I need all the help I can get.

 

wkm