Ave Maria Meditations
The Spiritual Maternity of Mary
The first basis of filial piety towards Mary is evidently her spiritual motherhood to Christians. Nothing is more common than the name of Mother given to the Blessed Virgin. And nothing is rarer, one could almost say, than a perfect understanding of the meaning of this title. How many souls, even those devoted to the Virgin, only hold erroneous or, in either case, very incomplete ideas about the spiritual maternity of Mary! It is, therefore, necessary to establish first of all the true basis of that maternity. We have tried to do this elsewhere. Here it will suffice to recall the most indispensable ideas.
Some of the faithful imagine that we call Mary by this name of Mother because she loves us with an incomparable love-every mother loves, but every person who loves is not a mother. Or because she incessantly nourishes our souls with graces, but is a simple wet-nurse a mother? Or again, because Jesus, before dying, said to each one of us in the person of John: “Behold your mother”; but if the maternity of Mary depends on that word alone, it is an adoptive maternity-not a real one.
For Mary to be truly our Mother, she must have given us our supernatural life. And that is precisely what she did. Our supernatural life is the life of Jesus within us. “For me to live is Christ,” says St. Paul. Mary has given us Christ; she gave Him to us precisely in order to enable us to live His life. She is, therefore, our Mother.
We can distinguish three principal moments in the maternal function of Mary: Nazareth, Calvary, our baptism. At Nazareth, in conceiving Jesus, she conceived us. She knew that in responding “yes” or “no” to Gabriel, she would be giving us life or leaving us in death. She said “yes” so that we might live. In consenting to give natural life to Jesus, she consented to give supernatural life to us. In becoming His Mother, she became ours. Ever since that hour, we became part of the Mystical Body of Christ according to God’s designs and her own as well.
On Calvary, Mary gave birth to us. It was· on Calvary that our redemption was accomplished and that, through His death, Jesus merited the grace for us to live His life. But it was in union with Mary that Christ accomplished His work. She had conceived Him as Victim; she had nourished and brought Him up in view of that Sacrifice and, at the supreme moment, she offered Him to the Father for our salvation; and she, ever-Virgin, who had known only joy in the birth of her First-born gave birth to us in pain and anguish.
Her maternity in our regard was consummated at that moment. And this is why Jesus chose that moment to proclaim it, in confiding Mary to John and John to Mary. His word did not create that maternity but bore witness to it, and confirmed and completed it at the most solemn hour of His life: the hour when His Mother, become fully our Mother, was best able to understand her maternal mission.
In our baptism, Mary has given us life not only de jure as at Calvary, but de facto. Our natural mothers merely brought spiritually dead children into the world. For us to obtain life, it was necessary that sanctifying grace be infused into us at the baptismal font. That sanctifying grace was obtained for us by Mary without whom no grace is ever bestowed.
When from “children of wrath” we became “children of God,” it was Mary who gave us birth into the divine life. Mary is not only truly Mother in our regard, but she is more so mother than any other in the way in which she gave us life. To accomplish this, she endured incomparably more than our earthly mothers, i.e., unspeakable sufferings and the rendering up of Him whose life was infinitely more precious to her than her own.
She continues to care for us throughout the entire course of our existence, while earthly mothers care for their children only until they reach adulthood. We are always “her little children to whom she gives birth anew until Christ be formed in us.” If, unfortunately, we lose that supernatural life, she can raise us back to life each time, in contrast with earthly mothers who weep helplessly over their deceased children.
She loves us, all imperfect and ungrateful as we may be, with an intense and pure love that surpasses the love of all other mothers for their children, for she loves us with the same love with which she loves Jesus, since we are but one with Him.
Above all, she is even more our Mother by the nature of the life she has given us. She has not given us an ephemeral life like our earthly mother has, but a life without end; not a life riddled with imperfections and anguish, but a life incomparably happy; not a participation in created life, but in uncreated life: the very life of God! What human maternity could be compared with such a maternity?
Fr. Emile Neubert SM (Devotion to Mary)
