Consecration to
Mary: PART I
Mary as Model: the Mystery of Human Participation and
Self-Donating Receptivity
Sr. Sara Marie Kowal, sctjm
The Holy Father Pope
Benedict XVI wrote, “The Church neglects one of the
duties enjoined upon her when she does not praise
Mary…When this happens, in fact, the Church no longer
even glorifies God as she ought” (Mary: the Church as
the Source, p.62). In the following reflections, we
will come to understand more deeply the truth of this
statement. We will come to see more deeply the beauty of
the Mary. And in knowing, loving, and praising her, we
will come to more fully know, love and praise the Lord.
At the foot of the Cross,
Jesus gave his beloved disciple the gift of His own
Mother. “Woman, behold your son…Son, behold your
mother” (Jn 19:26-27). John was given this gift of
the Blessed Mother as his own Mother as a representative
of humanity. In other words, at that moment at the foot
of the Cross, Mary become the Mother of the Church and
of each one of us individually. This was the last gift
of Jesus upon this earth. If we think to our own
experience, we will see that if we are giving a series
of gifts, we “save the best for last.” This last gift of
Christ could also be called His “best.” And we too like
John, wish to receive this “best” gift of from the Heart
of Christ. As Venerable John Paul II explained, we
desire, like John, to take her “into our home” to “bring
her into everything that makes up [our] inner life…This
filial relationship, this self-entrusting of a child to
its mother, not only has its beginning in Christ but can
also be said to be definitively directed towards him.
Mary can be said to continue to say to each individual
the words which she spoke at Cana in Galilee: ‘Do
whatever he tells you.’… It is well known that the more
her children persevere and progress in this attitude,
the nearer Mary leads them to the ‘unsearchable riches
of Christ’” (Redemptoris Mater 45-46).
The first question that
we must first address is, “Why consecrate ourselves?”
What is the meaning of this consecration? Before we get
into detail, it would be useful to set forth in simple
terms what it means to consecrate ourselves to Our Lady.
The first thing to understand is that everything,
truly everything, in Our Lady brings us to her
Son. To consecrate ourselves to Mary is to be brought to
Jesus through her hands. The way to salvation, to heaven
and union with the Trinity, is a difficult and narrow
path. Our Lady, when we place ourselves under her
maternal care and guidance, takes our hands and leads us
down this path in a surer manner than if we tried to go
on our own. In reality, we cannot go on our own.
She has traversed they way herself and knows how to get
there. Like Noah who placed himself and his family in
the Ark in order to survive the flood, we place
ourselves in the womb of Our Lady, the New Ark, in order
to reach the new Heaven and New Earth.
In the womb of Mary, the
human and divine meet and are eternally united.
Therefore, we too must enter into the womb of Mary in
order to encounter the divine. In the womb of the Virgin
Mary divinity meets with humanity and humanity meets
perfectly the divinity. It is in her that we can find
and go back to God, because she is “full of grace”, full
of God. This is why we consecrate ourselves to her, to
her womb, to her person – because we need to live
mystically in her womb where God and man meet and live
in perpetual union. If we desire Jesus, we must find Him
the womb and in the Heart of Mary.
Rightly so, therefore, the Saints
advocate, and demand as essential, the role of Our Lady
and consecration to her. The basic premise for this is
the fact that God Himself ordained to be this way. For
example, St. Louis de Montfort explains, in union with
the Saints and the Fathers of the Church, that
if God has made Mary a necessity unto Himself in order
to fulfill His plan of Redemption, then Mary is even
more necessary to us in order to attain our salvation
(cf. St. Louis de Montfort,True
Devotion to Mary, no. 39-40). Venerable John Paul II
agreed, and he taught that Mary is not a particular
element of some spiritualities; Mary is the way through
which God made man came to the world and through Her the
world has to go to Christ. Not to include the Blessed
Virgin Mary in our spiritual life means to deny what God
Himself has done in history. We then necessarily ask
why the Lord has chosen to do this.
First, let us read what
the Second Vatican Council wrote on this subject: “There
is but one Mediator, ‘the man Christ Jesus.’ …The
maternal duty of Mary toward men in no wise obscures or
diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather
shows His power. For all the salvific influence of the
Blessed Virgin on men originates, not from some inner
necessity, but from the divine pleasure.
It flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of
Christ, rests on His mediation, depends entirely on it
and draws all its power from it. In no way does it
impede, but rather does it foster the immediate union of
the faithful with Christ” (Lumen Gentium, 60).
Jesus won for us our salvation and effects it for us
today. However, He chooses to do this through the
hands of His beloved Mother. Why?
The Mystery of Human
Participation
The full mystery of this
decision will never be fully understood by the human
mind, but we can come to understand it at least
partially. To begin, Marian participation in the
divine plan shows how much the Lord wants to exalt the
human race. We are not mere spectators in this great
and magnificent plan of salvation, but we actually
participate in it. Mary does so to the fullest
extent, and she shows us what perfect openness to the
Holy Spirit and the Father’s will does in us – makes a
perfect channel of grace for others and participants in
our own salvation and the salvation of others.
In Our Blessed Mother,
the Lord is exalting human participation in the divine
plan. He tells us through her that what we do
actually matters, actually has consequences.
What a beautiful gift and grace. Therefore, when we get
to heaven, the Lord may truly say to us, “Well done my
good and faithful servant. Enter into your reward of
heavenly rest” (cf. Matt 25:21). This reward is real,
for real merit will have been earned. It is not like
being handed a championship ring for a championship we
never worked towards or never won. Instead, it is like
receiving a championship ring after many hard years of
sweat and toil, of failures and successes to finally
arrive at the beloved goal. Is this not precisely what
St. Paul means when he writes, “I have competed well; I
have finished the race; I have kept the faith. From now
on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord,
the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not
only to me, but to all who have longed for his
appearance” (2 Tim 4:7-8)? The Lord provides the grace,
and it is “His power working in us,” but we must
cooperate with the grace and “labor and struggle” in
order to do so (cf. Col 1:29).
Through Mary, God entered
the world, and through Mary, the world returns to God.
We are to do the same. God enters the world through the
human heart, by our love. When we allow grace to
flow in and through us, God becomes enfleshed again in
the world. God is Love, and when we choose to love, God
enters the world. And what is love? It is doing the will
of the Father (Jn 6:38), obeying His commands (Jn
14:15), and loving as He loved – unto the death (cf. Jn
13:1). When we and others allow love to enter us, we
again come into union with God. So we act as a channel,
a mediatrix, through which the human and divine “touch.”
This is the essence of Mary’s necessity. All of
God came through her, continues to come through her, and
will always come through her, into the world. As St.
Louis de Montfort explained, God is eternal and does not
change His ways (True Devotion, no. 14).
Love and Responsibility
Furthermore, Our Lady shows us the real
and actual consequences of our choices of love and
responsibility – or our lack of it. For love
constitutes a responsibility: “Love and Responsibility
can never be separated, for Love is enfleshed in the
responsible choices of the human heart” (Mother Adela
Galindo, Foundress SCTJM). As John Paul II wrote in his
book Love and Responsibility, “Love is
never…something merely ‘given’ to the human person, it
is always at the same time a ‘task’…Love divorced from a
feeling a responsibility for the other is a negation of
itself, is always and necessarily egoism. The greater
the feeling of responsibility…the more true love there
is” (p. 129, 131). We have a responsibility to love; we
are called to it. When we do choose to act in union with
the Lord’s will by saying “Fiat, let it be done unto
me,” we, like Our Lady, truly do bring Christ into the
world. But every time we deny love, deny God, act
contrary to His will – when we act according to our
selfishness, egoism, fears, distrust – we block the Lord
from entering into the world. And this blockage is
real. There are real consequences to our actions, to
our choices for or against love. It is necessary to
understand that if a good act brings about a good
consequence, the opposite is also true – all evil
acts have evil and bad consequences. Our Lady is exalted
and praised as Queen of Heaven and Earth as a
consequence for her great and total and eternal choice
of love on the behalf of God. We will participate in the
good effects and their rewards as much as we cooperate.
But we will also participate in evil, in sin and its
equally terrible consequences, as much as we do
not cooperate. There are consequences to
each every one of our actions and choices for or against
love. This includes acts that are seemingly
hidden from the world. The important thing is that God
sees – He sees the measure with which our acts are
motivated by love. And this love (or lack of love)
behind the act is what gives the act its merit and
value. The 30 years of ‘hidden life’ in which Jesus
simply lived in worked in the home of Nazareth are a
beautiful testament of this truth. Those years, despite
being ‘hidden’ from the world were immensely salvific
and value. For us, they give us hope that all our
actions – from the most mundane tasks of ordinary, daily
life, are saving and valuable. Nothing done in the name
of love and responsibility is worthless.
St. Therese of Lisieux is
another beautiful example of this. Seemingly, she did
nothing great or extraordinary in her life – she entered
the cloister at 15 years old and died at 24. However,
there she made continual choices for love – small and
seemingly ordinary as they appeared. Done, however, with
great love, they had great and everlasting consequences.
This same truth is
manifested in a powerful way in the Wedding at Cana.
After presenting Jesus with her request, “They have no
wine,” Mary tells the servants to “Do whatever he tells
you” (Jn 2:5). What is often over-looked is the response
of the servants. They not only fulfilled Mary’s request
by ‘doing whatever he told them,’ but they “filled [the
jars] to the brim” (2:7). They held nothing back in
their response to Jesus and Mary. And because of this,
the miracle was done in its fullness. Here we see the
great mystery of human participation. Certainly Jesus
performed the miracle, but if they had refused to
comply, the miracle would not have been done. If they
had simply filled the jugs halfway, the miracle would
have been done, but not in the plentitude that God
originally desired. The same is true for us today. We
are to listen to the voice of Our Blessed Mother: “Do
whatever he tells you.” And we are to do it with our
whole being, heart, and soul, holding nothing back,
leaving nothing undone. The Lord desires to do great
miracles of grace and healing through our hands, but the
accomplishment of it and the extent of its greatness
depends on us, on our participation. The extent
to which we responsibly and maturely cooperate with the
Lord’s plan is the extent to which He acts in the world.
Our choices have consequences – real, eternal, and
everlasting consequences. Our choices bring God to
souls, or they block God in souls – our own and others.
Look at the “admirable and incomprehensible dependence
of God” (True Devotion, no.18). He humbled
Himself to be completely dependent on the human person
to come into the world – for the first time through Mary
and each and every time through us. We see that his
first miracle of grace – the sanctification of John –
came through the hands of through Mary because she chose
to respond to the angel, going “in haste” to Elizabeth
with God in her womb. And now in Cana, Jesus’ first
miracle of nature is accomplished though the
intercession of Mary and the obedience of the servants.
We this same mystery present in every celebration of the
Mass – Jesus depends on the priest to make Himself
present to us in the Eucharist. What a great mystery of
Love that longs for us to participate in His work and
glory!
In Mary, we see the power
of a “yes.” One ‘yes’ brought salvation to the world.
Our ‘yes’ does the same. Our ‘yes’s’ save the world. God
saves the world through the ‘yes’ of the human heart.
What a responsibility! What great dignity He has given
us!
From the moment of the
Annunciation, the Lord chose Mary to be a channel of His
whole and entire self – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.
She was the mediatrix of God and His grace then and will
be for eternity. When we consecrate ourselves to Our
Lady, we first consecrate ourselves to the grace that
she mediates. We live in her womb where the fullness of
God, grace, and Love reside, and “from his fullness we
have all received” (Jn 1:16). Second, we consecrate
ourselves to her responsible love, which receives all
from God and responds fully to it. We consecrate
ourselves to a love that does not reject anything from
the hands of our Loving Father, that passes on without
any selfishness, envy, or egocentrism, a love that
obediently and perfectly fulfills His will at every
moment. We consecrate ourselves to a love that fulfills
its duties, that cherishes the gifts it has receives,
and cares for them with utmost love and responsibility.
We consecrate ourselves to the power of the human fiat,
to human cooperation. We consecrate ourselves to her,
whose yes, whose fiat, was so perfect, total and
responsible that God was made man and salvation was
brought to the world. We consecrate ourselves to this
fiat, this cooperation, this obedience by which we too
allow God to become flesh through our lives and our
choices of love. Enfleshing God means acting on what we
have received because true love acts. And by this,
souls are saved and God is glorified.
We have seen one of the
reasons that the Lord has chosen Mary to be an
instrument of salvation, rather than simply doing it
Himself. However, the depth of her role, the reason we
consecrate ourselves to her, lies beyond this. The power
of the consecration to Our Lady lies actually in who
she is, rather than what she does for us. This
being leads to action, to what she does.
Therefore, first, when we consecrate ourselves to her,
we consecrate ourselves to who she is; in a sense
we receive part of her heart in order to be like her.
What makes this fundamentally important? In order to
begin to answer this question, we must first understand
who she is. Then, we will continue to understand
her greatness and our need to consecrate ourselves to
her.
Model of the Church
“The truth is that only
in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of
man take on light…Christ…fully reveals man to man
himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium
et Spes, 22). Only Christ effects salvation and
brings light to man, to his calling and his destiny. He
is the source and summit of everything. Without Him,
nothing is. However, the nature of Christ is divine – He
is both fully God and fully man. In the
sense of His divinity, we will be like Him and share in
it to the fullest extent possible – but we will never,
in our nature, be divine; we are adopted children
not natural children.
However, Mary is fully
human, fully like us – but without sin, spot or wrinkle.
Therefore, in her humanity, she shows us how the human
person is called to be in relationship with God – in a
perfect way. “In the most holy Virgin the Church has
already reached that perfection whereby she is without
spot or wrinkle…And so [we] turn [our] eyes to Mary” (Lumem
Gentium, 65). She is the model of each individual
and the Church – in Our Lady we see God’s desire for us
and our destiny. Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI
writes, “The Church learns concretely what she is and is
meant to be by looking at Mary. Mary is her mirror, the
pure measure of her being” (Mary: the Church at the
Source, p.66). Therefore, we look to her to see how
we are supposed to be and act because Mary is
humanity’s perfect response to God. She is the model
of all we are called to be.
The Apostle St. John
writes, “We love God because he first loved us” (1 Jn
4:19). This tells us that we are not the initiators of
love; instead our love is a response to a
Love already given. This is Our Lady’s first “greatness”
– her perfect response. She responded to Love with all
her own love. She did this completely and fully, with
the totality of her whole person, holding nothing back
in her response. Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “In our name,
Mary said ‘yes’” (Angelus Message, July 19, 2008). We
consecrate ourselves to this ‘yes’, this fiat. She has
already uttered a ‘yes’ in the name of all humanity, and
this fiat was so powerful that God became man and dwelt
among us. We need to take a moment to reflect of the
power of that fiat. Venerable John Paul II wrote in his
encyclical Redemptoris Mater, “This fiat of
Mary…was decisive…for the accomplishment of the divine
mystery…The mystery of the Incarnation was accomplished
when Mary uttered her fiat: ‘Let it be to me according
to your word,’ which made possible, as far as it
depended upon her in the divine plan, the granting of
her Son's desire” (no.13). When we too say ‘yes’ to God
we are participating in the fiat that Mary
already gave, and our consecration unites us to her and
her fiat, with all its efficacy and power. Our
Lady always and perfectly responded to the Love of God.
Therefore, we look to her in order that we may also
perfectly respond with love to Love who first loved us.
Every aspect of the life
of Our Lady is a model for us. As Venerable John Paul II
explained in his encyclical, Mary “precedes” the pilgrim
Church, for she, in her life, already walked the path
that the Church as a Body and we as individuals members
are called to walk (RM, 28). And she did so in a
perfect manner. Therefore, we look to her to understand
what our path and response should be, and what our
destiny is.
In the Heart of the
Trinity
Before we continue
further, we want to see how the mystery of Our Lady has
its very foundation in the Heart of the Trinity. The
Trinity is Love, and Love is an eternal communication of
three divine Persons who eternally and fully give
and receive love (Catechism Catholic Church,
221). We are created in the “image and likeness” of God
who is Love. That is why the Church tells us that “this
likeness reveals that man…cannot fully find himself
except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium
et Spes, 24). The essence of our humanity then is to
give ourselves totally as a gift to God in order that we
can receive Him. Our fundamental identity is to be
God-bearer. Then, with the very life of God within
us, we give ourselves as a gift to others. Our
giving ourselves as gift is two-fold: first to God so He
can fill us with Himself, then to others in order to be
the gift and presence of God for them. We are to live
our lives in complete self-donation to the other. Mary
is the perfect example of this – she gave herself fully
to the Lord and was filled with His presence. Then she
gave Him to the world. We see this from the very first
moment. After the Annunciation, her first act was to
bring Christ to Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist in
her womb. As well, upon the birth of Christ, the Blessed
Mother’s first act was to “lay him in a manger” (Lk 2:7)
– totally contrary to the natural inclination of a
mother to hold her child to her. Our Blessed Mother
fully understood from the very beginning the nature of
her instrumentality; she understood that her Son was
meant for the world and that she was one to give Him.
The Church: Woman and
Bride
In the Trinity, we are
then able to understand the mystery of “the other.” In
other words, we cannot love unless we have someone else
to whom to give our love. We cannot be in a relationship
of love unless there is “another” to receive our love
and to give us love in return. “The Lord God said: ‘It
is not good for man to be alone’” (Gen 2:18). Therefore,
to be created “in the image and likeness of God” is
precisely to be created “male and female” (Gen 1:27).
Man and woman together comprise the image and
likeness of God. This is why the spousal bond, marriage,
is the most primordial sacrament that images the Trinity
itself. Marriage is not a man-made institution, but in
fact it was, “from the very beginning,” instituted by
God to be a sign of the Trinity. Marriage reveals the
very essence of Love, the essence of God.
Not only is the spousal
bond between man and woman meant to be the image of God
who is Love, but it is also meant to be a sign of our
future destiny: we are all called to “marry” God in
heaven. Our union with one another here on earth is
meant to be a foreshadowing of union with God in heaven.
God wants to marry us. He wants to have an intimate
spousal union, in which the “two become one,” with each
of us. This is our eternal destiny. This is what we were
created for from the beginning – perfect spousal union
with Love Himself for all eternity. The whole of
salvation history shows us this mystery: man and
woman as the image and likeness of God; Israel as
the faithless bride that the Lord constantly tries to
seduce back from her false lovers (Is 54:5, Hos
2:18-19); the Incarnation and the Eucharist in which the
“two become one flesh”; the Church as the Bride of
Christ (Eph 5:32); heaven as the wedding banquet of the
Lamb and His Bride the Church (Rev 21:2), as portrayed
in the book of Revelation.
This is why John Paul II
can write,
“Christ has entered this history and remains in it as
the Bridegroom who ‘has given himself.’ ‘To give’ means
‘to become a sincere gift’ in the most complete and
radical way: ‘Greater love has no man than this’ (Jn
15:13). According to this conception, all human beings -
both women and men - are called through the Church, to
be the ‘Bride’ of Christ, the Redeemer of the world. In
this way ‘being the bride,’ and thus the ‘feminine’
element, becomes a symbol of all that is ‘human’…In the
Church every human being - male and female - is the
‘Bride’, in that he or she accepts the gift of the love
of Christ the Redeemer, and seeks to respond to it with
the gift of his or her own person. Christ is the
Bridegroom. This expresses the truth about the love
of God who ‘first loved us’” (Mulieris Dignitatem,
25).
Here again we see Mary
rise in the midst of this as the preeminent figure of
this spousal mystery. She is the perfect woman,
the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the Bride of the Most
High God. She is the perfect representation of the human
race and our relationship to God. Therefore, we the
Church, must look to Mary in order to respond to He who
“first loved us.” We must become a Marian Church that
looks to Jesus as the Bridegroom. We are called to live
in perfect union with the Trinity. In consecrating
ourselves to Mary, we consecrate ourselves to this
mystery of spousal love, to being “one flesh” with Jesus
– one in mind and heart and soul. We consecrate
ourselves to being in union with God.
We will close with a
quote of our Holy Father Benedict XVI:
“The connection between
the mystery of Christ and the mystery of Mary…is very
important in our age of activism…the Western
mentality…[where] only the masculine principle counts.
And that means doing, achieving results, actively
planning and producing…This is why the Church needs the
Marian mystery; this is why the Church herself is a
Marian mystery. There can be fruitfulness in the
Church only when she has this character, what she
becomes holy soil for the Word…We must once more
become waiting, inwardly recollected people who in the
depth of prayer, longing, and faith give the Word room
to grow” (Homily as quoted in Mary: The Church at the
Source, p.17).
Therefore, we must become
a Marian Church, a Marian soul, that waits and longs for
the Word of God to come to us. We, like the perfect and
fertile soil, must receive the Word and allow it to grow
in us. We must, like the soil, allow ourselves to be
used, to be used up by the Seed so that this
Seed can grow and bear great fruit. This is the measure
of our holiness: allowing God to come to us, without
setting up any walls or boundaries; and then responding
to this Presence by bringing Him to others. Each one of
us – male and female – must look to Mary to understand
how to receive Love. Therefore, we consecrate ourselves
to her who has done this perfectly, in order that we may
do the same.
We pray that we, like the
Apostle John, have the grace to bring Our Lady into the
home of our hearts, so that her heart may reign there as
queen. We pray that she teaches and instructs us in our
“home” so that we may have a Marian heart that allows
Jesus to reign as King.
Marian Consecration: Part II >>>
