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The Arms of Christ Outstretched this Christmas

Mary sees in the face of her child the tears of God and the joy of humanity. Hungrily having clung with unquenchable thirst to her breast in our cold darkness, in every challenge she sees Him ready to teach us how to cling to Him in faith. He at once envelops us in the abyss of his love when we see how He allowed her to wrap Him in swaddling clothes. At home with the poor and all those for whom there is no room in society, she ponders how He leads us to our true home in the bosom of the Trinity.  She has always welcomed these unfamiliar gifts with awe, adoration, and selfless acts of mercy. Her example lights the way for us to discover how to rejoice in these troubled times. 

When we consider the arms of the Virgin Mother carefully holding the Savior, we behold how our own hospitality to Him must include complete acceptance of His power to deliver us from sin and death. As she rejoiced to be redeemed by His blood in a singular way, each of us must learn to humbly lay before Him the burden of guilt that He has come to take away so that we might rejoice as well. Confessing our sins with holy sorrow and rendering to Him an act of thanksgiving, we too hold Him in our own arms. Lifting up our hearts with prayers that are right and just, we too learn to listen to his vulnerable cry. 

If we will look into his eyes, we will see that, with great joy and eagerness, He has come in poverty, like a beggar. He hopes that we might let go of our pain and trust Him with it. He wants us to be completely free to love — and He does not want us to torment ourselves over failure and inadequacy. He yearns to be welcomed and held with confidence in love and for love. His arms remain as outstretched to us this Christmas as they were to Mary that first Christmas, and the joy she knew through her devotion to Him could be ours – by this simple movement of trust, the choice to respond to His tender presence.

In Mary we know that the God who weeps as a baby is discovered by the heart who says “yes” to this gift of divine joy.  This peculiar paradox is an encounter of suffering humanity against divine humility, the doom of death against the surprise of life ever-lasting, the limits of human evil against limitlessness of God’s goodness, of earthly poverty against heavenly riches, of ignorance of men against the foolishness of God, of deserved condemnation against incalculable forgiveness, of darkness against the Light, of the Word against silence, of human emptiness against divine fullness. Because Mary pondered all these things, we know that the conflict of these extremes is only resolved by an adoration of the heart, a loving acceptance the mystery of the Word become flesh dwelling among us.This simple movement, this humble contemplation, this willingness to be inconvenienced by God who smiles at us in our neighbor, makes us like her vulnerable to angels’ voices, and heavenly signs, and shepherds’ wonder, and the homage of wisemen.
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Mary – Mother of a New Humanity

Mary is mother of a new humanity, a humanity whose state is in communion with God.  Her birth indicates an important characteristic of this divine work.  Just as her birth is historically hidden, secret, humble, so too the great work the Lord will accomplish through her faith.  So too in each of our lives individually and together in the Church.  In all its apparent powerlessness, the power of God is made perfect in this new humanity.

The old humanity was a humanity that had lost God and subject to a forgetfulness of that love from when it came.  Without God, we live with a longing for something which the limitations of our nature seem to prevent us from attaining.  Without the Word of the Father, we are constantly haunted by a peculiar dis-ease with ourselves and the world, a sense that things are not the way they ought to be.  And without the Risen Lord, even our most noble efforts to try to relieve this longing and guilt are subject to the futility of death.  

Yet even old humanity doom though it was had remnants that promised its current plight would not be the last word to its ancient story.  Something in our spirit resists accepting the purposelessness which weighs upon our existence.   Even when we are very far from God, even when we find ourselves engulfed to dehumanizing misery, something still deeper in our hearts wants to call for help, wants to ask for mercy.  This primordial prayer emanating from the heart’s core echoes even when we try to neglect, reject or renounce its goading. There is sewn deep within us, we who are fashioned in the image and likeness of Someone not of this world, an inclination to hope and to seek help.

This propensity to make an appeal to Someone beyond ourselves is evidence of the primordial origins of humanity’s nobility.   What is good, tender and beautiful about humanity is more fundamental, more true than all those liberty depriving decisions whose compound effects compromise, diminish and betray our dignity.  For the very fact that we try to cry out for help suggests that what is most true about the human condition is not our failures or voids or inadequacies — what is most true is that we are loved and awaited by Love.   In the limitlessness of this Love we find the limits of evil.

The great sign of this human hope was born when God brought the sinless virgin Mary into this world.   This flower of humanity was never without God and would become humanity’s great “yes” to his Word.  She was born humanity’s prayer, the heart of humanity that lifts up its voice to the Lord.

She anticipates the new state of life offered to us in Christ.  Her longing found rest in the longing of Lord.  In Him, she knew the harmony that humanity was meant to know with itself and the world.   By clinging to Him, even the death would be overtaken by the substance of her hope – for by obedience to the Word she forever ponders the doom of humanity through the eyes of Love stronger than death.     

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Mary, Our Queen

Blessed John Paul II’s Marian Devotion was a profound part of his life.  Part of this has to do with the Marian dimension of Polish Culture, a profoundly contemplative and family oriented culture.  Centuries ago, the people of Poland in fact entrusted their nation to Mary’s Queenship and one finds throughout Poland all kinds of wonderful shrines and miraculous images dedicated to her. 

True devotion to Mary leads us into a deeper following of Christ.  As his spiritual life and theological understanding matured, a certain mystery puzzled Karol Wojtyla in his young adulthood.  He did not question the fact that the Virgin Mother is present in the Christian life to lead us into a deeper relationship with her Son.  The Holy Scriptures witness to her own words that she magnifies the Lord and that she exhorts us “to do whatever He tells you.”  Her words echoed in his own prayerlife.  What astounded him, instead, was the fact Jesus entrusted his Mother to his disciples.  Why should Jesus give us his own Mother?

This Sunday, we will listen to the last reading from John 6, the Bread of Life discourse.  In this last part of the discourse Christ’s followers complain that His claim that He is the Bread of Life, a new kind of Bread that nourishes unto eternally life.  They balk at His command to eat His flesh and drink His blood.  Jesus responds that they could not come to Him unless the Father allowed them to do so. The passage explains that many of his followers went away and returned to their former way of lfie.  

The Gospel presents us with a defining decision about what to believe and how to live. To return to our former way of life, the way we lived before we encountered Christ, this is to step out of the story of the Gospel – so those who do so are mentioned no more, they are no more part of the Gospel, they do not live in the mystery of welcoming the mystery.   Yet even these followers who reject Christ without realizing it reveal something about the greatness of the Father’s gift to us.

The Father knew they would not accept His Son, yet He offered them a gift anyway.   In spurning His gift to them, they have rejected Him but at the same time revealed the love of the Father is not daunted by our hostility to Him.  The Father is ready, with His Son, to suffer our rejection and hostility.  Thus, even when those who do not reject Jesus at first later abandon and betray Him, the Father does not abandon them. 

In the face of our hostility to Him, why should the Father give us his Son?  The answer to the Pope’s question and the answer to the question the Gospel of John proposes coincide in the words of St. Peter,  “Lord, to whom else can we go? .. we have come to believe…” 

To believe, to have faith, this is to say “yes” to everything the Father wills to give us.  This means we must welcome Jesus as our spiritual nourishment, as the only One who can sustain us on our journey to the Father’s house.  We also must welcome everything Jesus wants to give us — His whole humanity: His Body, His Blood, even His Mother.  We must welcome the maternal role of this Queen Mother in our lives because her spiritual maternity opens us even more to the mystery of the Father’s love. 

What a remarkable love is revealed in Christ!  The divine love of the Trinity gives what is most beloved in the Father’s heart – His Son.   He gives this gift to those He knows will reject it, betray it, deny it, abandon it.  He still believes in us so much He gives His Son to us anyway.   Jesus gives his Mother with the same kind of trust He reveals the Father has in us, a trust that knows full well what we are capable of doing with his Handmaid in our weakness.  She in fact is a sign of the Church, a sign Christ has entrusted to us undaunted by our inadequacies and weaknesses.  Jesus gives us his Mother just like He has given us his Church of whom she is the living icon.

What is it to celebrate the Queenship of Mary, to say yes to the gift she is to us from Jesus?  We who believe in the Risen Savior, who accept his Lordship in our lives, not only need to accept the nourishment only He can give and the gift of his Mother whom He entrusts to us, we must also love as He has loved us — so that when the love we offer others is rejected, spurned, hated, denied, and betrayed, we do not stop loving, but we must continue to love and trust like God – yes, this is why He has given to us so generously.  Because the Mother Christ gave to us on the Cross opens our hearts to this astounding mystery, together with all of heaven how can we not call her Queen?

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The Immaculate Conception

We Catholic Christians believe that the Mother of God was conceived without sin because it deepens our confidence that all things are possible for God. This is a luminous feast in the midst of the dark days of winter.  In what should be a season of hope, so many are weighed down by discouragement.  The heart needs reason to hope.  Here, what we believe about the Immaculate Conception contains the substance of our hope and helps us find encouragement to persevere in our conversion to Christ.

At the moment of Mary’s conception, in the primordial sacrament of married love, the grace of Christ reached into history to preserve his Mother from the law of sin.  In that instant of love and life, an ancient curse was lifted, the futility under which all of creation struggled was relieved, and the original splendor of humanity peaked out.

Marriage is part of this mystery.  The sacred character of this primordial institution is revealed in this proposition of our faith.  No mere legal arrangement, marriage  – so maligned and so betrayed in our culture – is holy and so is the conjugal love it safeguards.  The vowed indissoluble friendship of married love lived faithfully out of devotion to God and to one another is a wellspring from which God flows into humanity.  In the case of Mary’s parents, in their exchange of hearts, in the kiss and embrace their friendship knew, carried by grace and sustained by the Almighty Hand of God, new life was permitted to enter into our dying world.  In that moment, the tender affections of marriage attained their greatest accomplishment.  The inestimable gift of self which marriage originally enjoyed but rejected was given another chance, and in that gift a new life was conceived with the fullness of life.   A beatitude that had been lost to human experience was restored – and exceeded.  In Mary, the Immaculate Conception,  we have a sign of the victory of Christ over the power of sin, a sign raised up on high from the fruit of married love’s conjugal embrace, a sign of the culture of life and civilization of love which lies open if we will return again to God.

This mystery of new life at work in the conception of Mary is a singular instance of God accomplishing his hidden purpose with unanticipated power.  In her, the weary world received the first inkling of the splendor of the Lords’ faithfulness to his promises.  Where no eye could see, a hidden foretaste of a deliverance about to dawn in the world began to unfold.   For the first time, we experienced – unknowingly – the first glimmer of the  fullness of grace Christ’s death on the Cross won for us.   The result? Humanity on fire with the obedient love of the Holy Spirit in a mother’s womb.  In the conception of Mary there is a disclosure of God’s unfathomable love for humanity, the greatness of married love, and the renewal of the gift of life.  The mystery of the Immaculate Conception is meant to capture the heart in this radiant beauty, a hidden glory accessible only to the eyes of faith.

Since it is good for us to be bathed in the splendors of this radiance, the Church proposes the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, inviting us to go deep into the hiddeness of our faith, deep in to the divine secret entrusted to us at baptism, deep into the abyss of God’s mercy. To say yes to this sacred truth, to choose to live by it, we open ourselves to the gift of Mary — her prayers, her purity, her love wait to fill our faith in Jesus. Accordingly, when we dare to believe that the salvific power of Christ saved his own Mother from sin at the moment of her conception, she shines for us like a star in this sea of life, giving us even deeper reasons to be confident as we sail for the safe-harbor of the Lord’s infinite love.

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Mary Draws us up to Christ

In my last post about Il Duomo in Milan, I mentioned how Mary and all the saints sit atop the Gothic Cathedral there.  They are witnesses to the power of the Risen Lord – who raises us up in such a way that we can raise one another up too.  The way Mary and the saints are positioned on the top of spires it is as if they are pulling the whole structure to heaven.  This is exactly what the holiness of Christ does in the Church.  It pulls everyone up to the things of heaven.

Although the holiness of Christ totally exceeds that of every creature, there is one creature who is blessed above all others by Him.  Mary was assumed into heaven because of the holiness with which her son Jesus blessed her.  The Archangel Gabriel said she was full of grace.   Her cousin Elisabeth said she is blessed among women, and that she is blessed because she believed in what the Lord said to her.  Mary said that all generations would call her blessed.

Like a good mother, she wants to share these blessings with us.  She wants to share her holiness with us. When our devotion to Christ is genuine, she is always there lifting up our efforts at prayer, at love, at self-discipline – helping us realize the communion with the Lord we so deeply desire.  In fact, the greater our desire for the Lord, the more she is able to raise us to Him – just like the artists and architects believed when they place Mary on top of Il Duomo.

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The Mystery of Motherhood and Mary the Mother of the Lord

Motherhood is a great gift to the world, and God raised this gift to a whole new level when Mary said “yes” to his invitation to be his mother.  Mothers help us find our humanity even as babies – they are our human connection even from the moment of conception.  Because of a mother’s love, a baby gradually becomes aware of a whole network of loving relationships into which he or she is born.  Enveloped in a mother’s love, a baby learns to love, learns what it means to thrive as a human being – mothers are the first ones who show us that we are most truly ourselves when we give ourselves in love.   
When the Word became flesh, He made it possible for God to rely on a mother’s love.  He allowed her to comfort Him in his tears, to nurse Him in his hunger, to soothe Him in his loneliness, and to clothe his nakedness.  From her, as is written in the love of all good mothers, He glimpsed the secret of what it means to love until the end.  In all these ways and many more, He allowed Mary’s maternal love to “teach” Him the secret of being fully human so that He would be like us in all things but sin.     
There are two corollaries that come out of this reflection.  The first is that by faith, the experience of motherhood is transformed.  Christ hides himself in our children, all our children, especially the poor, the sick and the abandoned.  Mothers who search for Jesus in the children entrusted to them discover that like Mary they are also comforting, nursing, soothing, and clothing God himself.  On the other hand, by faith, Jesus gives every Christian the gift of his Mother.  Those who welcome her into their homes discover she continues to teach her Son’s love that we might ponder with her “all these things” in our hearts.
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The Mother of God and the Mystery of Prayer

Christians have called Mary the Mother of God since ancient times.  ‘Mother of God’ is how the Church in the West understood the title Theotokos (God-bearer) attributed to Mary by the Eastern Churches.  This title protects the great mystery of our faith.  The Word became flesh: this means a total recapitulation of true, historical, concrete, human reality – raising our life, our dignity, our family and our motherhood far above merely natural purposes, to a greater unimaginable end.  Mary is the first sign of this.  This truth, at the heart of the Gospel, was safeguarded at the Council of Ephesus in 431 which affirmed the title Mother of God used in the prayer of the Church as definitive for the Christian faith.

When we affirm Mary is the Mother of God, we are proclaiming all at once that Jesus, begotten of the Father from all eternity, is the Son who “emptied Himself” to be become man “born of a woman” in “the fullness of time” (Phil. 2:6, Gal. 4:4).  By this affirmation we bind ourselves to the truth that the incarnation was no mere appearance or myth, but rather a living reality transforming all of human history and each one’s personal life story.  This is the form and pattern of our prayer.  It too must become a real, living reality in our lives.  This mystery of God entrusting himself to a mother contains the truth about all that is good, true and beautiful in humanity and the truth about the Father’s wisdom, love and goodness.

Affirming this helps us ponder the radical confidence God has in us when He entrusts his Mystery to us, and when we see this we can begin to learn to have the same kind of confidence in Him.   We have hope because the Eternal Son of God entered so fully into our humanity that He delighted to be conceived in the womb of a woman and dwelling in her to be born as her vulnerable baby, yearning to be totally reliant on her maternal love for his life so that He could be like us in all things but sin.  He humbly let her form his human heart with her maternal love.  What drew God to subject himself to such love was not our mighty achievements or self-sufficiency or worldly cleverness.  It was the humility and trust of a woman pure of heart who generously responded with intense faith and confidence in Him who had even more confidence in her.  What unlocks this capacity in the human but prayerful contemplation of the ever surpassing love of God?

According to Augustine, Mary bore Christ in her heart before she bore him in her womb.  This means her physical motherhood is first and foremost a spiritual reality, the fruit of loving obedience, the masterpiece of profound contemplation.  Conformed to Him whose body was formed in his mother’s womb, Christian prayer continues to reach for fruition in flesh and blood, the here and now: that determined, obedient and humble effort to love God and all those God entrusts to us, come what come may, because what He did for us was so much more.  It means that our faith, our prayer, goes way beyond nice ideas, happy wishes and comfortable feelings.  As Pope Benedict teaches, our faith is above all performative, it makes real love possible.  Here is the greatness of the mystery of our piety, the devotion that flows from Christ!  Our faith can offer itself in true sacrifice because it bleeds with the love of a real man, the True Man, who was bloodied for our sakes, and we know He is the True Man because his mother’s faith permitted Him to become flesh and blood.

To affirm Mary as Mother of God is an affirmation of a great truth concerning human life, dignity, family, and motherhood – there is something divine in these most holy human things which must be honored, cherished and protected.    Today these most sacred things are trampled on to such an extent our world is fast forgetting its humanity, and we are at the very brink of disaster, not for the first time.  What a great gift that our calendar year begins in the middle of the Christmas Season with the Solemnity of  the Mother of God.  Against forces that hate what is truly human, we remember the woman who bore the Son of the Most High, who prays for us even now, even when we stand in the face of great evil and personal weakness.  And, we join our prayers together with hers that all the most holy human things of this present life might not perish, but instead, by the blood of her Son, be saved for the glory of God the Father.

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Our Lady of the New Advent and Contemplation

As an advocate for contemplative prayer, Elisabeth of the Trinity invites us to identify with Mary, the Virgin Mother.  Mary, in fact, becomes a dominate figure in the liturgies of the Church in this part of Advent as we draw near to Christmas.  In Denver, there is even devotion to Our Lady of the New Advent – because we believe she continues to prepare the Church and the world for the coming of the Lord.
In the Gospels, Mary is identified as the one who fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah to King Ahaz (Matthew 1:23 and Isaiah 7:14).  In a desperate attempt to gain mastery over nature and history, Ahaz had sacrificed his son to Baal only to discover that what he believed about the world was a dehumanizing myth (2 Kings 16:2-4).  (Some of the stories out there make it difficult not to see abortion in this same light.)  He despaired of having more children until Isaiah reassured him that despite his rash unfaithfulness and distrust of the one true God, the living God would be faithful to him and his dynasty.  
As a sign of God’s faithfulness to the Sons of David, Isaiah foretold a virgin maiden would be with child, and he child’s name would be “Emmanuel – God is with us”.  At the time, many might have thought that this prophecy was fulfilled with the birth of Hezekiah, who was a good king (2 Kings 18:1-6).  In fact, his birth and reign foreshadowed the coming of a messiah who would surpass all expectation, who is “God is with us” in a manner that no one could have anticipated.   
Yet this is exactly the way the Lord works with us in faith – always surpassing our limited understanding and imagination, always opening us to something greater beyond our feeble expectations.  To do this, the Lord needs our obedience and trust.  But so often we are like Ahaz, trying to grasp for control by any means, even if it destroys those we most love.  This is why the prophecy to Ahaz is also a prophecy for us, especially in this time of Advent, a time of making straight our pathways and preparing the way of the Lord. 
On this point, the message of Elisabeth of the Trinity is helpful.  She advocates that there is another way, a pathway to hope.  To travel down this pathway, the pathway of our Advent journey, we must identify with Mary.  Mary, by her example, teaches how to pray and this prayerfulness is the source of her generous obedience to God.  Her prayer is so simple, so straightforward, so trusting.  When we pray like her, we find ourselves freed from our limited expectations and  imagination. Enchanting myths have no power over us for we are freed from our own big fat ego, free for Someone greater:
When I read the Gospel “that Mary went in haste to the hill country of Judea” to perform her loving service for her cousin Elisabeth, I imagine her passing by so beautiful, so calm and so majestic, so absorbed in recollection of the Word of God within her.  Like Him, her prayer was always this: “Ecce, here I am!”  Who? “The servant of the Lord,” the lowliest of His creatures: she, His Mother!  Her humility was so real for she was always forgetful, unaware, freed from self.  And she could sing: “The Almighty has done great things for me, henceforth all peoples will call me blessed.”  Elisabeth of the Trinity, Last Retreat #40 as translated by Aletheia Kane, O.C.D. in Complete Works, vol. I, Washington D.C.: ICS (1984) p. 160.
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Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Mystical Rose

The famous image and story of  Our Lady of Guadalupe is an important part of the history of the Evangelization of the America – a continent evangelized more quickly than any other in all of Church history.  Mary appeared to a poor Indian with a message for the local bishop – that a church should be built.  As a sign, he collected beautiful rare roses which she pointed out to him.  When he brought these gifts to the bishop, a miraculous image of Our Lady appeared on his tilma (a kind of poncho) in which the roses were carried.  She became a sign of hope for a demoralized people in the midst of the trials and tribulations of being colonized by Europe.  Interestingly enough, her image is honored in many Churches around the world today, even throughout Europe, during a time when many believers feel demoralized and under attack.

Guadalupe may be the transliteration of a Nahuatl word which means “who crushes the serpent.”   This makes a wonderful connection with Genesis 3:15.  Ancient liturgical texts have celebrated the Mother of  the Lord with the one who crushes the serpent’s head.  Along these same lines, asking Mary to pray for us during times of spiritual battle, especially at the hour of death, may have always been part of the Christian tradition of prayer – just as the Scriptures say that all generations will call her blessed.   Whatever the meaning of the name Guadalupe, it would be difficult to dispute that under this title, Mary has helped many come to believe in her Son, giving hope in sometimes the most hopeless situations.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has also been associated with the title Mystical Rose – a title associated with the words of the beloved in Canticle of Canticles 2:1, “I am the Rose of Sharon.  I am the Lily of the valleys.”  Tradition has understood the beloved of this biblical love poem to be not only an image of Israel, but also of the Church, the new Israel.  Mary, because she signifies the Church by her very person, has also been associated with these words as has every soul that is generous in responding to the love of God.  For Saint Bernard, the delicate beauty of a rose is in contrast to its thorns and signifies the spiritual passion and purity of charity friendship love of God.  He teaches that in contrast with Eve’s disobedience by which we lost access to God, Mary’s obedience gave us Christ Jesus – the image of the invisible God, the One who is our total access to all true worship of the Lord.

The mystical life – beautiful, passionate and pure – is a participation in the life of Christ by faith.  This life progresses by way of the Cross – by following our crucified God.  The inexhaustible mystery of his risen life not only purifies us of sin but fills us with certain truth, deep holy desires and great confidence.   Mary is part of this mystical life, the rose of this mystical life, because the Virgin Mother Mary is an inseparable part of the life of her Son.

“Let it be done to me according to your word.”  These words of Mary to Gabriel betray a holy audacity which informs the Christian faith.  The mission of the Mystical Rose – to be part of our life of faith in Christ Jesus, and the mission of Guadalupe – to crush the head of the serpent, coincide in the life of prayer.  Mary not only exemplifies the kind of faith we must have in the Lord, she also prays for our life of faith – and through her mysterious maternity, helps us realize the victory of good over evil so that we might not lose hope in the face of trials and tribulation.

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Mary, True Freedom and Prayer

Today we celebrate the Immaculate Conception – Mary through the redemption of Christ and a special outpouring of the Spirit at the moment she was concieved is the first human person to have perfect freedom.  We thank God for the most beautiful realization of our humanity.  She, like all the wonderful gifts given to us by Him, is completely unmerited, a wonderful sign to us of his unfathomable love.  By sheer grace, she was completely free to thrive in the face of God, to be fully alive.  And because she lived life to the full, she shows us what it means to be fully ourselves, to really live, to be truly free.    

The Virgin shows us that the freedom we have in the grace of God allows us to tread a pathway beyond anything our limited imagination could possibly anticipate or our feeble intellects calculate or even of which our intuition might provide some remote suggestion.  Such freedom goes beyond feeling and instinct.  For it is the essence of humanity to go beyond its self and all its natural capicities in giving itself in love – in love to God and in love for one another. 

Mary, the Mother of God, needed this freedom in order to fully respond to God and we can even say this beautiful freedom drew the Lord to her.   There is a hidden greatness in the authenticity of the truly human – the Lord actually delights in the innocent vulnerability, endless trust and undaunted determination manifest in this particular work of his Hand.  This is why through the words of Gabriel He declared her “full of grace.”  And, what He sees in her, He sees also in us when we turn to Him in living faith, faith guided by love — he makes us free and in this freedom, authentically our true self. 

The freedom given her at her conception was just the beginning.  It is like the freedom we have when we first believe.  Such freedom still needs to mature – it is only the beginning.  How did she grow in this freedom?  How did it come into maturity in her?  If we consider this question carefully, we will understand what St. Augustine meant when he said she concieved Christ first in her heart before she concieved Him in her womb.  We must use our freedom like she did – opening our hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit – ready to obey Him in everything and in this loving obedience and trust, ponder all these things in our heart.  Prayer – silence before the mystery of God who makes us free – this is where Mary, concieved without sin, always leads.

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