The Queen: Articles:
Consecration Aids: 4: An Aid When We Don’t Remember Our Total Consecration
An Aid When We Don’t Do Everything Through Mary, With Mary, In Mary, and For Mary
Author: Fr. Lucien Ledoux, SMM
This is the fourth of a series of articles covering Consecration Aids.
THE COMING of Christmas forcefully brings home to all devoted clients of Mary the deep spiritual reality that surrounds this fundamental mystery of Our Faith. Only too often the spiritual import of Christmastide is lost or forgotten in the maze of more tangible joys custom has sown into this holy season. Throughout our nation a veritable flood of cheerful messages cripples our postal facilities. Brilliant window displays whip up a mad shopping rush unheard of in other countries or at any other time of the year. Now this Christmas cheer is a blessed thing. However, it should not have you lose sight of the true meaning of this great feast for you.
As one consecrated to Our Lady, the de Montfort way, your gaze must pierce the mere externals of this celebration and seek out its deep, hidden meaning.
Dependence on Mary
If you do, you will find abundant energy, sparkling vitality for living your consecration in the thought that the Christ Child wished to depend on His Mother for His very life. In the words of St. Louis de Montfort, Christ “glorified His independence and His majesty in depending on that sweet Virgin . . . in His birth.” (T.D. no, 18)
Doubtless, you really meant it when you submitted yourself to Mary, when you consecrated yourself with all that is yours. You also understood that yours would have to be a life of total dependence on her; that you were to decide nothing important in your life without first acquainting yourself with her wishes on the matter. Nevertheless, as you look back at the way you have lived your total dependence on Mary, is there no room for improvement? Have you never noticed that, often enough, you acted too quickly and under mere natural impulse, losing sight all the while of your consecration?
To be sure you have welded your life to a sublime ideal, that of performing all your actions in close dependence on Mary. When you first entered upon this new way of life you were convinced that the graces needed to do good must come from her, the Mother of Grace, the Mediatrix of all graces; convinced likewise that, in order to put those graces to good use, you would have to depend on Mary as your model to imitate in everything.
Danger of routine
The difficulty arose when you endeavored to live and act in the light of this total dependence on Mary. Being human, well … you forgot, and so often! At night, as you questioned your soul concerning this dependence, how often your net result was that you had once or twice only given it a hurried thought. Such a hurried thought that it had had little or no effect on your actions. In other words, repeating your short formula of consecration once or twice a day had already become a routine affair. It had lost its fire, its driving forces.
At this stage it becomes imperative to do something about it, to inject into your consecration the vitalizing energy it should carry. At all cost, your declaration of dependence on Our Lady must be kept alive and purposeful if any real progress and perseverance are to be achieved, if it is to be effective in any way.
A practical help
Here is how some devoted clients of Our Lady have solved this problem of a soulless, routine repetition of their consecration formula. On awakening they renew their total consecration (short formula). On four occasions during the day, for instance, in the middle of the morning, at noon, in the midafternoon and at bedtime they devote about one minute of their time to checking up on their actions.
They begin this one-rninute exercise by kneeling in spirit before Our Lady and (1) begging her for the grace to see and to want; (2) then they examine their actions from the viewpoint of complete dependence on Mary; (3) they express gratitude for the Mary-like actions they have performed, and sorrow for disregarding her wishes in this or that action, and finally, purpose to amend; (4) they end this short exercise by slowly, fervently renewing their consecration (short formula).
Note well that this get-together with Our Lady is not meant to do away with the frequent turning of your mind and heart to her outside of those set moments. That would be fatal to your consecration! It is merely one way of making them more fervent, more energizing, more effective, by doing away with precipitation and meaningless routine which too often creep into the frequent repetition of a formula.
Another thing to keep in mind is that this one-minute-stop to check up on yourself is not essential to the practice of de Montfort’s True Devotion. It is simply one of the ways which may prove helpful to you, as it has to many others, to keep alive and fervent your complete-
dependence-attitude towards Mary.
With Christmas in sight and the total submission to Our Lady taught us by the tiny Babe of Bethlehem, it might be worth while looking into this simple suggestion.
