Be it Unto me According to Thy Word

Mary, my patron saint, has always intrigued me. I cannot comprehend how someone can completely empty herself to be filled with grace. As we anticipate the coming of Jesus let us reflect on someone that most reflect His perfect creation. The woman he chose as His earthy host. My favorite book in 2015 was Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation and this is the first three paragraphs of his chapter on Mary.

“ALL that has been written about the Virgin Mother of God proves to me that hers is the most hidden of sanctities. What people find to say about her sometimes tells us more about their own selves than it does about Our Lady. For since God has revealed very little to us about her, men who know nothing of who and what she was tend to reveal themselves when they try to add something to what God has told us about her.

And the things we do know about her only make the true character and quality of her sanctity seem more hidden. We believe that hers was the perfect sanctity outside the sanctity of Christ her Son, Who is God. But the sanctity of God is only darkness to our minds. Yet the sanctity of the Blessed Virgin is in a way more hidden than the sanctity of God: because He has at least told us something about Himself that is objectively valid when it is put into human language. But about Our Lady He has told us only a few important things—and even then we cannot grasp the fullness of what they mean. For all He has told us about her soul amounts to this: that it was absolutely full of the most perfect created holiness. But what that means, in detail, we have no sure way of knowing. Therefore the other certain thing we know about her is that her sanctity is most hidden.

And yet I can find her if I too become hidden in God where she is hidden. To share her humility and hiddenness and poverty, her concealment and solitude is the best way to know her: but to know her thus is to find wisdom. Qui me inveniet vitam et hauriet salutem a Domino (for whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the LORD).”

Image: Denis, Maurice. The Annunciation. 1913. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing.