Way of Life: How Devotion to Mary Fits into Christian Living
The original article title: Way of Life
Fr. James McMillian, SMM
This article is a transcript of a lecture Father McMillian, SMM made to a group of Sisters.
T he topic that I was given to discuss with you this morning is that St. Louis de Montfort’s consecration to the Blessed Mother is and should be considered as a way of spiritual life. I am aware, of course, that you are all rather familiar with Montfort’s total consecration; but what I’ve been asked to explain is how this consecration fits into the integral pattern of Christian living, or in other words, that it truly is a way of spiritual life rather than a series of particular practices of devotion.
Devotion to Our Lady is often, too often in fact, considered as something which has been added on to the Christian life. It is sometimes looked upon as an accessory, a very helpful accessory to be sure, but one that we could, strictly speaking, do without. While it is true that we have many excellent manifestations of devotion to Our Lady, novenas and triduums and all types of special prayers, nevertheless the fact remains that too few of our Catholic people realize the immense importance of devotion to Mary, mainly because they have never been told of the necessary part that she has to play in the salvation of souls.
Precisely because she does have a necessary role in the salvation of man-kind, devotion to Mary must be distinguished from devotion to the saints. Not only that, but devotion in its true and proper sense must be clearly distinguished from practices or manifestations of devotion. The difference between the two lies in the fact that devotion to Mary is a state of mind and will, the promptitude of the will with regard to those things that pertain to her honor and glory. Whereas a practice of devotion, the recitation of the rosary, for instance, is an action that follows from that state of the will.
Devotion in its true and proper sense is much more comprehensive than practices or manifestations of devotion. Perhaps a comparison will help to make the difference more apparent. A mother, for example, has love for her children. And we always distinguish carefully between her love and the manifestations of that love. The care that she lavishes upon her children, feeding them, dressing them, protecting them from harm, are manifestations or proofs of her love. They are transitory actions, whereas love itself is something permanent, and not to be identified with any particular sign of love. It is much the same with devotion and practices of devotion. Devotion itself is permanent; the practices are transitory and are nothing more than signs that devotion is present.
Thus when we say that Montfort’s consecration is a way of life, or a true and perfect devotion, we mean to say that it is not something transient, in the manner of a particular practice of devotion, but something permanent, that is, a state of mind and will. It is not a series of interior and exterior actions, but a state of complete and total dependence upon Mary. It is not precisely an act of consecration to Mary, but more properly a state of being consecrated entirely to her, a state which endures and characterizes each and every thought, word and action that we perform.
Madonna and Child or Madonna of Bruges: sculpture by Michelangelo: 1504
The sculpture is unique for several reasons, including it is the only Michelangelo sculpture to be created for someone outside Italy. This piece was finished after the more famous Pieta. Note the similar drape effect of Mary’s clothing and her face. This piece is also unique in that it was stolen in WWII. It was found in a salt mine. This stolen/find is represented in the movie: The Monument Men.
Montfort’s consecration is a way of spiritual life because it is the Christian life itself pushed to its logical ultimate conclusion. By it, we do not make ourselves the slaves of Jesus and Mary; we merely recognize their domination over us and our dependence upon them in the most fitting and practical manner.
I mentioned before that this consecration is a way of spiritual life, because it fits perfectly into the integral pattern of Christian living. Now when you want to know what a particular piece of cloth is doing in a new design, you take a good look at the pattern of the dress or suit or habit or whatever it is, in order to find out exactly where this particular piece fits. In like manner, to ascertain whether or not devotion to Mary is a way of life, it would be helpful to take a brief look at God’s plan for the salvation of mankind, and see how devotion to Mary and Montfort’s devotion in particular fit into it.
The purpose of this procedure is not, of course, to present you with anything new or startling, but simply to enable us to have the entire pattern before our eyes. Once we see the complete plan of our return to God, we shall be able to judge our Blessed Lady’s place in it, and consequently why it is that we claim that devotion to Mary, and Montfort’s devotion in particular, is a way of spiritual life, rather than a series of actions which are more or less connected and related.
Christian Life
The Christian life as we all know is a life of union with God, a union of charity or love which is effected or brought about through grace. In a very true sense, the grace of God is the life of the soul, for it is that particular gift of God which makes us one with Him. Through grace we share in His life, and are made partakers of His nature. In the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, we read that ”He gave them power to be the Sons of God.” St. Augustine, commenting on this passage of the gospel and on the closeness of our union with God, remarks: ”If we have been made the children of God, then we have been made gods . . . by the grace of God adopting us.”
Undoubtedly the closeness of this union with God is something extremely difficult for the human mind to grasp. For hundreds of years, theologians have been racking their brains to find some way of understanding and penetrating this notion of man’s sharing in the nature of God while still remaining a creature. But although the question as to how we share in God’s nature must be given an inadequate and unsatisfying answer, nevertheless the fact of this union with God through grace is very clear. We know from the teaching of our Divine Lord that grace unites us to God in some marvelous fashion, makes us His children by lifting us up beyond our natural state and giving us a share of God’s own life.
Now one of the striking characteristics of this life of union with God is that from our point of view it is a union of strict and absolute dependence upon God. We simply cannot be holy and pleasing to Him, nor can we perform even one supernaturally good action without the help of His grace. This grace is so necessary that our Divine Lord tells us: ”I am the vine and you are the branches … and without me, you can do nothing.”
We realize that we are so totally and completely dependent upon God by reason of the fact that to be pleasing to Him we need grace, and grace is something which is entirely gratuitous. It is a free gift of God, a result or His infinite bounty. It is never something that we can demand by right. A workman is dependent upon his employer because the workman needs money in order to live. But that dependence is not absolute. His salary is due to him in justice. Our dependence upon God is absolute, because we have no claim to grace. As St. Paul puts it: ”For by grace you are saved through faith: for it is a free gift of God, not of works, that no man may glorify” (Eph. 2, 8) . We cannot even have a supernatural thought without this help from God, or a supernatural desire, or even, says St. Paul, piously invoke the name of Jesus without God’s grace coming to our aid. In sum and substance, we are utterly powerless of ourselves to be holy and pleasing to God, for without His grace we can do nothing worthy of salvation.
Dependence on Mary
This life of union with God, and of strict dependence of God, is also one of strict dependence upon our Blessed Lady. For just as we depend upon God as the author of grace, we like-wise depend upon Mary as the distributor of grace. The Church teaches us that God is the author of all grace. But it also teaches that no grace comes to us except through the intercession of Mary.
It is hardly necessary to prove to you that our Blessed Mother is the mediatrix in the distribution of all grace. You are already convinced of the truth that our dependence upon her comes from the fact that she is the one who distributes each and every single individual grace that comes from God to us. However, simply for the sake of emphasis, let me quote just two passages from the encyclicals of the Popes. Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical on the Rosary, ”Octobri Mense, ” has this to say: ‘Nothing of the great treasury of grace which the Lord has stored up comes to us except through Mary, for such is the will of God.” And Pope Pius X in the encyclical ”Ad Diem Illum” says the same thing : ”Through her all spiritual goods are communicated to Christ’s Mystical Body.” St. Louis de Montfort uses the well known passage of St. Bernardine of Siena to show us how completely we depend upon Mary for grace: “God has chosen her,” he says, to be the dispenser of all that He possesses, in such manner that she distributes all His graces and gifts to whom she wills, as much as she wills, as she wills, and when she wills.”
St. Louis uses a comparison which illustrates rather well the extent of our dependence upon Mary. Referring to St. Augustine, he states that “all the predestinate … are hidden in the womb of the most holy Virgin: where they are guarded, nourished, . . . and made to grow by that good mother until she has brought them forth to glory after death” (T.D. 33).
Now regardless of whether or not the passage Montfort refers to is authentically that of St. Augustine, the fact remains that we have here a beautiful and fairly exact illustration of our dependence upon Mary. Like the unborn child, we depend upon our heavenly Mother for our supernatural life of grace, and keeping a just proportion in mind, we can apply to her the words of Christ: ”without me you can do nothing.”
Perfect Consecration
The consequence that follows from this is that the Christian life is based on the practical recognition of our dependence upon God and our Blessed Lady. And in the final analysis, it was this point that prompted St. Louis de Montfort to propose his total consecration to Mary as the best but not the only way of acknowledging her dominion over us. The reason we say the best practical way is because the Montfort consecration is the form of devotion to Mary that puts us most completely under her rule. For this consecration is not simply a prayer or a series of practices of devotion, it does not consist of invoking the help of our Blessed Mother now and then, but as we have mentioned already, it is a state of life: a state of continual dependence upon her. As a result of this consecration, we recognize that we belong to Jesus and Mary, and we strive to the best of our ability to live up to this supreme truth in all our thoughts, words and actions.
We give to her everything that we possess, all our goods of body and soul. As far as our material possessions are concerned, we give them to Mary, and consider ourselves as merely the administrators of her property. We dedicate ourselves to her service by trying to use our senses, our intellect and will as powers which belong to her. We give her without reserve our most precious supernatural possessions: our merits to guard, and the value of our good actions to dispose of as she sees fit.
As a result of this consecration, our main preoccupation is to live a life of interior dependence upon our Blessed Mother, so that our lives will be in conformity with the words of the act of consecration. St. Louis summarized this life of interior dependence by means of the well-known formula: through, with, in and for Mary. These terms are used to designate, not so much separate, individual practices of devotion, as the general global aspect of an interior spirit of dependence upon Mary. We perform our actions through Mary by fusing our intentions with hers so as to obey her in all things; with Mary by taking her as the model of everything we do; in Mary by striving to accept her sentiments and dispositions; and for Mary by considering her as the immediate purpose and end of all our actions.
Needless to say, there are varying degrees of perfection in this life of total consecration to our Blessed Mother. As Montfort explains : ”Some … will enter into its interior spirit, but they will mount only one step. Who will mount to the second step ? Who will get as far as the third? Lastly, who will so advance as to make this devotion his habitual state? He alone to whom the spirit of Jesus Christ shall have revealed this secret, the faultlessly faithful soul whom He shall conduct there Himself. ”
What we must insist upon, however, is that this is not a life reserved only to sisters and brothers and priests. There is no reason in the world why it should be limited to a few chosen souls. For it is so intimately connected with, and so solidly established upon the Christian life itself, that, as Montfort says: ”we cannot see how it can be condemned without overturning the foundations of Christianity” (T.D. No. 163).
In conclusion, let me summarize briefly. Montfort’s consecration is a way of spiritual life because it is the Christian life itself pushed to its logical ultimate conclusion. By it, we do not make ourselves the slaves of Jesus and Mary; we merely recognize their domination over us and our dependence upon them in the most fitting and practical manner. We are already their slaves because they have redeemed us, and because, in the supernatural order we can do nothing without them. Our dependence upon Jesus and Mary is in exact correlation of our dependence upon grace, and hence they are as necessary to us as grace itself. This total consecration to our Blessed Mother is a life which can be lived by any Catholic. It is our task, and I know that you … will gladly assist us, to make this devotion known and loved as much as we can, so that those with whom we come in contact may attain, in the words of St. Louis de Montfort, ”to the age of the fulness of Jesus Christ on earth, and of His glory in heaven.”
