In Mary’s Presence
Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM
Share the Wealth
If you like The Queen, and the spiritual media on this website, why not become a promoter? Your friends and neighbors will thank you for introducing them to this totally Marian magazine and Marian website. And you’ll be sharing your spiritual wealth with them!
In Mary’s Presence
I recall visiting a parish primary school on the day after Our Lady of Lourdes. A statue of Our Lady, around which ostensibly the school was built, stood without even a twig or petal before it. It suggested willingness to help, loneliness and neglect if not irrelevance.
I would have thought it easy to encourage small children to bring flowers, even out of the growing season. More to the point, 1 would have thought that an adult Catholic would like them to do that. A live relationship to Mary is so encouraging for child or adult, especially as a Christian life is far from easy.
Mary is wholly positive. The Word became flesh and is with us now because of her initial act of faith. The mother of Jesus is our mother too and much more. The lovely immediacy of Mary stems from who she is in God in Christ. Child and teacher are invited to live that relationship, one person in Christ with her through baptism. Glimpsing this the adult would want to introduce her to the child.
At Risk
In a world where children can be so hurt and adults so challenged, not the least of the blessings of devotion to Mary is simply her reassuring presence. If this realization begins when we are young, and deepens as we grow, she may become as much part of the world we live in as is the air we breathe.
Inevitably, allowing for individual taste, it will be given external expression. Conventions are established, a framework develops within which we honor her. We celebrate her festivals, reverence her icons, carry her rosary, wear her medals . . . Above all, we try to absorb her gospel portrait and the insights of the centuries of the Church, both East and West, which reveal her.
To live in that environment is to share what we glimpse. It is part of who we are. Viewing the school from that perspective, suggests that perhaps Mary is marginal there. The adults appear to be unaware of what they are missing. Yet Mary was not peripheral to her Son nor to countless numbers who have found her in his company.
In this world children can be so hurt and adults so challenged. However, not the least of the blessings of devotion to Mary is simply her reassuring presence. If only this realization begins when we are young, and deepens as we grow. Mary may become as much part of the world we live in as is the air we breathe.
Return to THE QUEEN: Articles
Personal Experience
G.K. Chesterton gave celebrated expression to this, speaking of the time before he became a catholic; “Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely. . .
“I never doubted that this figure (Mary) was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing (Catholicism) had to say to humanity.
“The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing I would do if I returned to my own land” (Mary and the Convert).
There Chesterton celebrates his faith as expressed in Our Lady. He is aware of her. She signifies the authentic, incarnational Church. Came the day when Chesterton knew the path God was inviting him to follow, and so “in front of a . . . very gaudy little image of her . . . I promised . . . ”
If teachers and children were to grow into a like awareness of who she is, they might glimpse what Chesterton saw. She drew him to the heart of the Church. In her company the school could be similarly led.
The Center of Their Hearts
It is of interest too, to see how this attraction to Our Lady made him more ready to accept her Son and herself AND THE PEOPLE among whom they are found. The ‘very gaudy little image’ would not have the aesthetic appeal or grace of an icon or superlatively fine painting, but it represented the community of faith among whom she is a treasured member.
Those who produced that image were on the inside, enjoying as a present reality the relationship that he now wanted to be his. Mary, graced by God, is lovelier than any manufactured image. Not the least of her attractions is her appeal to people lacking status, wealth, access to beauty and so much that can cushion them from the bleakness of life – ‘she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this (Church) had to say to humanity.’
Those who are well can go elsewhere perhaps, but Chesterton came to Jesus in the Church in the company of his mother and the people among whom he is to be found.
Conversion is both personal and a lifelong maturing process. Ideally, the Spirit is free to turn us habitually towards God giving himself to us in Christ. And so away from self and self-seeking and all that might come between.
The children and teachers are engaged on that same journey of conversion. If they stay on that path they will have a fight on their hands, against powers stronger than flesh and blood who never give up. While Mary was seen at the heart of their school in a fine statue, how much better for all of them if she was invited to make a home for her Son at the center of their hearts.
