Consecration Aids: 6: Upon Awakening!

Sorry to say, I have not always been of the opinion that the man who invented the alarm clock has rendered a great service to humanity. I must confess that there was a time when the alarm clock was one of my most bitter enemies. Oh, I didn’t mind looking at it straight in the face in the evening before retiring; but, on hearing it in the morning, at 6 A.M., my first impulse was to ”push its face in” or to dash its brains out” and to stifle its voice forever.

But that was before I found out that an alarm clock could be one of my best friends, if only I would come to my senses and discover for myself the purpose of this harmless invertebrate in my life. That was before I realized that it could be the voice of Mary summoning me to another day in God’s service. That was before my Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary, the de Montfort Way.

Permit me to relate briefly how this change of heart came about. I don’t know if you’ll go with me all the way, but if you do, you’re in for a pleasant surprise because you’ll soon experience that what, for most people, is the most dreaded moment of the day can become one of its most exciting. Remember how you felt on awakening the morning of your first Holy Communion? or of your “first date”? or on your wedding day? (if indeed you slept at all!). You just woke up “with a song in your heart,” and a prayer on your lips.

Well—if you think those are the only mornings in a man’s life when he can experience joy in getting up, you mustn’t be familiar with the True Devotion way of life. At least I wasn’t.

After reading de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary and making my total consecration to her, I secretly said to myself: From now on everything’s going to be easy, even getting up in the morning!” For the first couple of weeks, I was almost literally walking on air, inhaling lusty whiffs of divine grace at every turn and exuding (so I believed) a veritable odor of sanctity all about me. All imagination aside, Our Lady’s presence was almost tangible during those unforgettable first few weeks … until …

Well – until Our Blessed Mother, solicitous mother that she is, decided that I had had enough of spiritual milk … that I must now be ready to eat the solid meat of self-denial and mortification. She had held me in her arms long enough. She now wanted me to stand on my own feet, and, like the Child taking its first steps, she wanted me to advance towards her and throw myself into her arms.

So she put me down and left me, so to speak, to myself. It was then that I began to feel that it was still hard to get up in the morning and the old urge “to dash the brains out” of my alarm clock recurred. What was I to do? What was wrong with my consecration? Hadn’t de Montfort assured me this consecration would be an easy way to holiness.

That very same day I decided to re-read my True Devotion. Perhaps there was something I hadn’t quite understood any too well.

Sure enough. My eyes lighted upon TD No. 259, and these words stared me in the face, with all the brazenness of an infuriated alarm clock: “In order that the soul may let itself be led by Mary’s spirit it must first of all renounce its own spirit, its own lights, its own wills before it does anything. Secondly, we must deliver ourselves to the spirit of Mary to be moved and influenced by it in the manner she chooses”.