Ave Maria Meditations
The special obligation which God puts on you to honor the life of Jesus in Mary is that you grow each day in the desire to consecrate yourself to this divine mystery, to adore Him, and to return to Him all the duties of your religion. What our Lord is to His Church, He is, par excellence to His holy Mother.
[Our Lord] is her interior and divine fullness; and as He has sacrificed himself more especially for her than for the whole Church, He gives her God’s life more abundantly than to the whole Church. He gives it to her out of gratitude, and in acknowledgement of the life He has received from her. […] Jesus is now in her, giving her all the fullness and superabundance of life proportionate to such a vast subject of love, to such great capacity of his love and divine life.
We must then consider Jesus Christ as our all, living in the Most Holy Virgin in the fullness of God’s life: inasmuch as He has received from His Father as that which He has acquired and merited for mankind through the ministry of His Mother’s life. It is in her that He shows all the treasures of His riches, the fullness of His beauty and the delights of His divine nature. It is there [in her] that one sees an abridgement of His glory (which our ignominies have drawn down on the Church), all the joy and bliss which He acquired by His sufferings and all the riches which He merited for us through the poverty and abjection of the cross.
It is there Jesus Christ triumphs in His gifts.
It is there He is glorious in His masterpiece.
It is there He is in joy and delight at what He has acquired and prepared.
O adorable sojourn of Jesus in Mary!
O secret, worthy of silence!
O deep mystery worthy of adoration!
O incomprehensible commerce!
+Fr. Jean-Jacques Olier
