"Mary kept all these things in her heart.""Mary kept all these things in her heart."
That we may judge well of the interior of Mary, let us see what God did for her, and what she did for God.
God, Who had predestinated her from all eternity to be the Mother of Jesus Christ, bestowed on her all these marvellous graces: 1st, He preserved her from the stain of original sin; 2nd, He enriched her with the greatest grace from the moment of her Immaculate Conception; 3rd, He gave her very soon, perhaps even in her mother's womb, the full use of reason; 4th, He raised her to the dignity of the Divine Maternity, and gave her a special and sole share, first in the cross and sufferings, and afterwards in the glory of the Son of God.
Mary corresponded with these graces of God, 1st, by living in such strict watchfulness over herself, so continually maintained, that it was as if she, who was immaculate, had everything to fear from the attacks of the flesh and all the sad consequences of original sin. What then ought to be our watchfulness, we who are born in sin, and have experienced so often the terrible effects of concupiscence!
2nd. By applying herself to follow every motion of Divine grace with so much fidelity that she never committed the slightest actual sin, that she merited every moment of her life a fresh increase of grace, that she never made a single interior act, or performed a single exterior action, which had not for its sole end to unite her more closely to God. What a model for a soul that has given herself entirely to God!
3rd. She corresponded with the grace of God by constantly making the most perfect use of her reason. And what use did she make of it? She submitted it continually to the light of faith; she made of it a perpetual sacrifice to the Supreme Reason, which is God; she never allowed herself one single reasoning about the designs of God or His conduct with regard to her, although this conduct was full of mysteries and of apparent contradictions. We shall never make any advance in the spiritual life unless we make the same use of our reason. God often guides souls by ways that are opposed to all human views; He takes pleasure in upsetting all our judgments, in disconcerting all our foresight, in disappointing all our efforts. We have only one thing to do, which is not to think about ourselves at all, not to reason about what God is doing with us, and being content to walk in blind faith and implicit obedience.
4th. Our Blessed Lady corresponded with the grace of God by preparing herself for the Divine Maternity without knowing it, by the very means, which, humanly speaking, must have deprived her of that honour. All the virgins of Judea were anxious to marry, in hopes of becoming the mother of the Messiah. To be a barren wife was for them the greatest opprobrium. Mary thought herself quite unworthy of aspiring to the dignity of Mother of God. In her most tender years she presented herself in the Temple; there she consecrated her virginity to God for ever, and by so doing, according to the ideas of her nation, she renounced for ever the highest hope of her sex and her tribe. It is not by aspiring after great things, or having grand ideas and magnificent designs, that we attain to sanctity, or dispose ourselves for the designs of God for us, which are very different to our own. It is by humbling ourselves, by burying ourselves in our own lowliness and nothingness, by acknowledging ourselves unworthy of all grace, and dreading all thoughts of elevation, rejecting them as suggestions from the spirit of pride.
As to the cross of Jesus Christ, Mary had in it such a share that, from the birth of her Divine Son until His death, she felt the very same blows that He suffered, not only from men but also from God. To form some idea of this, it is enough for us to consider that she loved her Son with a love as great as any creature could possibly have; that she loved Him infinitely more than herself; that she was closely united to Him, in such a union that God Himself could not conceive anything closer; that she did not live in herself, but in her Son; that all the feelings which the heart of Jesus experienced were communicated to the heart of His Mother with all the strength and extent of which a pure creature was capable. Let us raise ourselves then to the consideration of all that passed in the soul of Jesus Christ with regard to the glory of His Father, outraged by men, the holiness of His Father, dishonoured by sin, the justice of His Father, of which He Himself was the Victim; with regard to so many millions of souls to whom His Blood and His Sacrifice would be useless, and even fatal, by the abuse they would make of them. Let us consider all this, and think what the sufferings of Mary must also have been, when we boldly say that she experienced in proportion the same impressions.
Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself upon the cross by giving Himself up to all the severity of the Divine justice. Mary sacrificed herself, and more than herself, by sacrificing Jesus Christ, and consenting to the accomplishment of the designs of God for the redemption of the human race, in such a manner that the greatest sacrifices of the spiritual life are incomparably less than hers both in extent and in depth, and on account of the incomprehensible sorrow which she felt. When we have passed through the last trials of our love, if God grants us this grace, we shall have some faint idea of the dolours of Mary. As for the generality of Christians, they only see in the passion of Jesus Christ, in His bodily torments, and in the sorrows of Mary, the compassion she had for the torments of her Son.
The interior of Mary was then a copy, and the very closest copy, of the interior of Jesus Christ. As Jesus sacrificed Himself continually to His Father during the whole course of His life, Mary also continually sacrificed Jesus in her heart, and herself with Him, to the Eternal Father in Heaven.
As Jesus humbled Himself and annihilated Himself to such a degree that He looked upon Himself as loaded with the iniquity of the universe, so Mary humbled herself and annihilated herself, as the mother of Him Who bore the sins of the world, and made Himself the object of the Divine malediction; and she herself entered, as far as was possible, into the dispositions of her Son.
As Jesus loved men so much that He gave them not only the life of His body, but in some sense the life of His soul, so Mary loved men so much that she gave them, in Jesus Christ, what was dearer to her than her own life and her own soul.
What shall I say now of the prayer of Mary? Who can speak of it worthily? Jesus Christ was the sole object of her thoughts, the sole object of her love; after His resurrection and ascension into Heaven it was only her body that remained on earth; her soul followed Him into Heaven. From that time she only languished for her Son, and desired His presence with an intensity which we can neither understand or express. Her only distraction, if we may call it by that name, her only consolation, was to pray for the new-born Church of Christ, and to interest herself in its progress.
With such a high elevation of soul and such exalted feelings, what was the Blessed Virgin in her exterior? A woman of the people, a poor woman, living by the work of her own hands, occupied for thirty years at Nazareth with the cares of her little household, cared for afterwards by Saint John, to whom Jesus had confided her, and who shared with her the offerings of the faithful. What noise did she make in the world? By what great deeds was she distinguished in the eyes of men? What did she do outwardly for the propagation of the Gospel? And yet all the time she was the Mother of God; she was the holiest and purest of creatures; it was she who had the greatest share in the redemption of mankind, and in the establishment of the Christian religion. Oh how different are the ideas of God from our ideas! Oh how far removed from our ways are the ways He takes to attain His ends! How pleasing in His eyes are obscurity, humility, retirement, solitude, and silent prayer! a thousand times greater in His sight are they than all sorts of brilliant exterior works! Oh how true it is that to be anything in the sight of God we must be nothing, we must pretend to nothing; we must only desire to be ignored, forgotten, despised, and considered as the most vile and abject thing in the world. If the life of the Blessed Virgin does not teach us this great truth, if it does not make us love it and embrace it, if it does not stifle in us the desire of appearing as something of importance, if it does not convince us that to find ourselves in God we must first lose ourselves entirely, what more touching example, what more powerful lesson, could ever be able to persuade us? Jesus and Mary demonstrate to every Christian that God finds His greatest glory in this world in our annihilation. And they also demonstrate to us that the more we are annihilated on earth, the greater, the happier, and the more powerful shall we be in Heaven.
How shall we then show our solid devotion to the Blessed Virgin? By striving to imitate her interior life, her lowly opinion of herself, her love of obscurity, of silence, and of retirement; her attraction to little things, her fidelity to grace, the beautiful simplicity of her recollection and prayer, the only object of which was God and His holy will, Jesus Christ and His love, her continual sacrifice of herself and of all she loved most dearly and had the greatest reason to love. Let us ask her every day that she may serve us as our guide and model in the interior life, and let us beg of her to obtain for us the graces which are necessary for us, that we may correspond to the designs of God upon us. And these designs are most certainly our death to ourselves and the destruction of our self-love.
- taken from Manual for Interior Souls, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou