Ave Maria Meditations
Blessed Mary was no chance place in the divine dispensation. The word of God did not merely come to her and go from her. He did not pass through her, as He visits us and Holy Communion. It was no heavenly body which is the eternal Son assumed, fashion by the Angels and brought down to this lower world. No, He absorbed into His divine Person her blood and the substance of her flesh; by becoming man of her, He received her liniments and features, as the appropriate character in which He was to manifest Himself to mankind.
The child is like the parent, and we may well suppose that by His likeness to her was manifested her relationship to Him. Her sanctity comes, not only of her being His mother, but also of His being her Son…and hence the titles which we are accustomed to give to her… He is the wisdom of God; therefore she is the Seat of Wisdom. His presence is Heaven; she therefore is the Gate of Heaven. He is infinite mercy; then she is the Mother of Mercy. She is the mother of “fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.” (Sir 24:24)…
If the Mother of Emmanual ought to be the first of creatures and sanctity and beauty; if it became her to be free of all sin from the very first, and from the moment she received her first grace to begin to merit more; and if such was her beginning, such was her end, her conception immaculate and her death an assumption; if she died, but revived, and is exalted on high: what is befitting in the children of such a mother, but an imitation, in their measure, of her devotion Ocean, her meekness, her simplicity, her modesty, and her sweetness?
Her glories are not only for the sake of her Son, they are for our sakes also. Let us copy her faith, who received God’s message by the angel without a doubt; her patience, who endured Saint Joseph’s surprise without a word; her obedience, who went up to Bethlehem in the winter and bore our Lord in a stable; her meditative spirit, who pondered in her heart what she saw and heard about Him; her fortitude, whose heart the sword went through; her self-surrender, who gave Him up during His ministry and consulted to His death…
She will comfort us in our discouragement, solace us in our fatigues, raise us after our falls, reward us for our successes. She will show us her Son, our God and are all…what will bring us to our self, to peace and to health, but the cool breath of the Immaculate and the fragrance of the Rose of Sharon? It is the boast of the Catholic religion, that it has the gift of making the heart chaste; and why is this, but that it gives us Jesus Christ for our food, and Mary for a nursing mother? Go to her for the royal heart of innocence. She has a beautiful gift of God, which outshines the fascinations of a bad world, and which no one ever saw in sincerity and was disappointed. She is the personal type and representative image of that spiritual life and renovation and grace without which no one shall see God.
Saint John Henry Newman (Waiting for Christ)
